Alexandra Swann's Blog, page 13
September 20, 2013
Stand up to Bullies--Defund Obamacare
Just 9 days ago we all remembered the losses our nation suffered on 09/11/2001. A couple of years after that event, I had the privilege of hearing "America's mayor", Rudy Giuliani, speak in El Paso about the lessons of 09/11. The main lesson Giuliani reminded us that night was the most important one, the importance of standing up to bullies.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Stand up to Bullies--Defund Obamacare
Just 9 days ago we all remembered the losses our nation suffered on 09/11/2001. A couple of years after that event, I had the privilege of hearing "America's mayor", Rudy Giuliani, speak in El Paso about the lessons of 09/11. The main lesson Giuliani reminded us that night was the most important one, the importance of standing up to bullies.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Stand up to Bullies--Defund Obamacare
Just 9 days ago we all remembered the losses our nation suffered on 09/11/2001. A couple of years after that event, I had the privilege of hearing "America's mayor", Rudy Giuliani, speak in El Paso about the lessons of 09/11. The main lesson Giuliani reminded us that night was the most important one, the importance of standing up to bullies.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Stand up to Bullies--Defund Obamacare
Just 9 days ago we all remembered the losses our nation suffered on 09/11/2001. A couple of years after that event, I had the privilege of hearing "America's mayor", Rudy Giuliani, speak in El Paso about the lessons of 09/11. The main lesson Giuliani reminded us that night was the most important one, the importance of standing up to bullies.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Read The Planner Free on Kindle through September 28th.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Stand up to Bullies--Defund Obamacare
Just 9 days ago we all remembered the losses our nation suffered on 09/11/2001. A couple of years after that event, I had the privilege of hearing "America's mayor", Rudy Giuliani, speak in El Paso about the lessons of 09/11. The main lesson Giuliani reminded us that night was the most important one, the importance of standing up to bullies.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Stand up to Bullies--Defund Obamacare
Just 9 days ago we all remembered the losses our nation suffered on 09/11/2001. A couple of years after that event, I had the privilege of hearing "America's mayor", Rudy Giuliani, speak in El Paso about the lessons of 09/11. The main lesson Giuliani reminded us that night was the most important one, the importance of standing up to bullies.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
It seems very appropriate that just a week and a half after commemorating the 09/11 anniversary, the House GOP voted today to defund Obamacare. Already, the vote has been met with shock and disbelief on the part of the left. Harry Reid was engaged in his very own meltdown from the Senate floor this week as he vented that the Republican party is destroying itself from within. (Reid's speech begs the question: if Harry really believed that to be the case would he be so angry about it?)
Right now the media is trying to sell the defunding of Obamacare as a move by the mean GOP, which has been hijacked by the "hard right" TeaParty led by Ted Cruz, to destroy a popular and loved bill. The truth is quite different. Obamacare has always faced stiff opposition. Many people have already forgotten that when Obama was trying to get Congress to pass this mess of a bill three years ago, he and speaker Nancy Pelosi faced obstacle after obstacle. A wiser woman would have retreated in the face of so much public backlash, but not Pelosi. She vowed to get Obamacare passed no matter what she had to do--if there were walls blocking its passage she would "pole vault" over those walls. And through a series of late night dirty deals and special incentives, she did, indeed, force the bill through. This was not the triumph of populism--it was plain old simple bullying. The very idea that Pelosi would tell us that we had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it illustrated this bullying technique--we did not need to know what the law said or what it would do. She and her elitist comrades were making the decision for us and when the legislation had passed we would like what they gave us--not so much because it was good but because we would acknowledge that our masters had decided this for us, and we had no choice but to accept it.
The progressive socialists of Pelosi and Co. have been bullying America for years. Obamacare, Dodd Frank, the intrusive TSA, the intrusive NSA, the out of control EPA, HUD and its new definition of Fair Housing--all are designed to remind Americans that we have a new generation of government--one run by special elites who tell us what we can have and when we can have it. And they are used to a compliant GOP who bows its collective head and runs scared at the sign of any type of confrontation. The Grand Old Party is so afraid of being criticized that they have failed to do anything useful for almost five years and through cowardice and inaction have earned the universal scorn which belongs only to those who repeatedly shrink before their tormentors. We have become the party that gives up our lunch money as soon as we see the school yard toughs approaching in the vain hopes that they will not beat us up.
But now we have a new brand of Republican--Ted Cruz. Cruz doesn't mind fighting to protect his lunch money or ours. He has weathered all the beatings from the left and from his own party who whine that he will be the death of the GOP. Together with Jim DeMint, another man who's not afraid of bullies, he has taken his case directly to the American people and reminded us that we don't have "masters"; we have elected officials who work for us. If our laws are bad and intolerable it is our own fault because we elected those people who passed bad and intolerable laws on our behalf and we refused to stand up to the very people whose salaries we pay when they decide to kick us around.
The elites in the GOP complain that Ted Cruz is destroying the party, and he might well be. The GOP in its present form--a party of spoiled rich kids who would rather go without lunch everyday than risk a fight with the school yard bully--may not be worth saving. But he is protecting conservatism, the Constitution and the values that built this nation--and upon those values we can built a Grand New Party which is capable of earning the respect of all Americans because it's not afraid to fight for what it values.
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
September 13, 2013
Eminent Domain in Richmond, CA--The Slippery Slope to Agenda 21
In my novel The Planner, published last year, local municipalities use eminent domain to take the homes of families so that these families can be forcibly removed to new Smart Growth-style, sustainable housing as a part of a coordinated plan to implement Agenda 21 nationwide. Unfortunately, we may be about to see something similar take place in our country.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
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Eminent Domain in Richmond, CA--The Slippery Slope to Agenda 21
In my novel The Planner, published last year, local municipalities use eminent domain to take the homes of families so that these families can be forcibly removed to new Smart Growth-style, sustainable housing as a part of a coordinated plan to implement Agenda 21 nationwide. Unfortunately, we may be about to see something similar take place in our country.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Eminent Domain in Richmond, CA--The Slippery Slope to Agenda 21
In my novel The Planner, published last year, local municipalities use eminent domain to take the homes of families so that these families can be forcibly removed to new Smart Growth-style, sustainable housing as a part of a coordinated plan to implement Agenda 21 nationwide. Unfortunately, we may be about to see something similar take place in our country.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
Eminent Domain in Richmond, CA--The Slippery Slope to Agenda 21
In my novel The Planner, published last year, local municipalities use eminent domain to take the homes of families so that these families can be forcibly removed to new Smart Growth-style, sustainable housing as a part of a coordinated plan to implement Agenda 21 nationwide. Unfortunately, we may be about to see something similar take place in our country.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.
Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.
As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.
I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.
As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."
MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils. Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.
So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern. Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.
CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.
John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.
In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges. Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.
Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.
Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.
The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.
The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.
So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.
Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.
Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner , about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013
Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:
Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
