Courts flooded with cases based on slim or falsified evidence
Looks like mortgage foreclosures aren't the only things banks "robo-signed." A glut of credit card lawsuits is revealing that card issuers have the same tendency to use shoddy, incomplete, or erroneous documents against clients, the New York Times reports. Companies like American Express, Citigroup, and Discover have been filing lawsuits against clients to recoup unpaid bills, but dozens of judges, regulators, and lawyers say their evidence is atrocious, and includes mass-produced documents or flat-out falsified ones. (In one case, a document Discover says was from 2004 featured ads dated 2010 on it.)
In many cases, lenders sue after piling on erroneous fees. "I would say that roughly 90% of the credit card lawsuits are flawed, and can't prove the person owes the debt," says one Brooklyn judge, who sees as many as 100 such cases a day. He recalls one witness giving identical testimony in a slew of cases—or, as he termed it, "robo-testimony." The Times notes that some credit card holders say they don't owe anything, but most don't agree with the amount the card issuers claim is outstanding.
But because borrowers rarely show up to defend themselves, lenders win 95% of the time, their errors unnoticed.
Billions wrongly paid out as scammers find agency an easy target
Rashia Wilson bought a $92,000 Audi, proclaimed herself a millionaire, and announced on her Facebook page that she was “the queen of IRS tax fraud,” as prosecutors told the story.
But even more than her flamboyance, it was the seeming ease of her crime that was most stunning: She and an accomplice were alleged to have hijacked the identities of other taxpayers to get fraudulent refunds. They used stolen Social Security numbers, a computer, and basic knowledge of how to file a tax return, according to the government.
After the Florida mother of three was caught and pleaded guilty last year to crimes totaling at least $3 million, her defense attorney, Mark O’Brien, made his own plea. He said in court that he hoped the “IRS will figure out a way to prevent this from happening in the future, so someone with a sixth-grade education can’t defraud them so easily.”
Across the country, the theft of taxpayer identities has taken off, while receiving far less attention than the loss of credit card information. Even some drug dealers, always with an eye out for easy profits, have turned to taxpayer identity theft after hearing how uncomplicated it was to scam the IRS. A medical assistant at a nursing home stole the identities of hundreds of patients. A prison guard stole the identities of inmates and filed false returns under their names.
All told, in just the first six months of last year, 1.6 million taxpayers were affected by identity theft, compared with 271,000 for all of 2010, according to a recent audit by the Treasury Department’s inspector general. While the IRS said it discovered many of the incidents, the cumulative thefts have resulted in billions of dollars in potentially fraudulent refunds, according to an array of government reports.
According to The Salt Lake Tribune, “It’s time for Western states to take control of federal lands within their borders, lawmakers and county commissioners from Western states said at Utah’s Capitol on Friday.
“More than 50 political leaders from nine states convened for the first time to talk about their joint goal: wresting control of oil-,timber-and mineral-rich lands away from the feds.
“‘It’s simply time,’ said Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, who organized the Legislative Summit on the Transfer for Public Lands along with Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder. ‘The urgency is now.’
“Utah House Speaker Becky Lockhart, R-Provo, was flanked by a dozen participants, including her counterparts from Idaho and Montana, during a press conference after the daylong closed-door summit. U.S. Sen. Mike Lee addressed the group over lunch, Ivory said. New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington also were represented.
“The summit was in the works before this month’s tense standoff between Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management over cattle grazing, Lockhart said.
“‘What’s happened in Nevada is really just a symptom of a much larger problem,’ Lockhart said.”
The western states have been used as both playground and sugar stick for big-government politicians since before most of the western states became states. Compare the percentage of State land owned by the federal government in the western states to that of the eastern states. More at:
The rate at which this administration is arming federal agencies is quite alarming. Case in point–the recent standoff against Cliven Bundy in Nevada. In recent years, armed federal government agents have stormed against citizens in Ruby Ridge, Miami (the Elian Gonzalez case), and Waco, Texas (the Branch Davidians). Each of these assaults occurred under a Democrat presidential administration. Enabled by lies and deceit, could it be that liberal progressive socialism only works by fear, intimidation, and coercion? Or is Obama more afraid of the American people than our enemies abroad?
I find it humorous that liberal progressives accuse their opponents of being fascists, but the liberals are actually the most intolerant and oppressive when it comes to free speech, expression, and petition of redress of grievances by the American citizenry.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) now have armed agents. The Department of Justice is heavily partisan — and that assertion has nothing to do with racism. I support our law enforcement agencies having the proper resources and equipment to fulfill their mission of keeping us safe from criminals and enemies who have penetrated our sovereign borders. However, we do not need to become a “police state” where our government agencies start to resemble special operation strike troops of the U.S. mlitary.
Well-funded Greens, bureaucrats sought to kill this landmark legislation
In a hard-fought and stunning victory for family farmers and property rights throughout the Commonwealth, Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) ON March 5 signed into law legislation solidifying Virginia’s status as a right-to-farm state by limiting local officials’ ability to interfere with normal agricultural operations.
The governor’s signature marks the latest chapter in a swirling controversy that attracted nationwide attention in 2012 when the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors forced family farmer Martha Boneta to cease selling produce from her own 64-acre farm. No longer allowed to sell the vegetables she had harvested, Boneta donated the food to local charities lest it go to waste.
Fauquier County officials threatened Boneta with $5,000 per-day fines for hosting a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls without a permit, and advertising pumpkin carvings. Seeing in the county’s action against Boneta as a brazen effort to drive her off her land, Virginians from all walks of life rallied to her defense. Supporters gathered in Warrenton, the county seat, for a peaceful “pitchfork protest” to vent their anger over what an out-of-control local government had done to a law-abiding citizen.
Cliven Bundy marched into my life one Friday morning in January 1992 in a protest bound for a federal courthouse in Las Vegas. He held up one side of a street-width banner that asked, “Has the West been won or has the fight just begun?”
To my great relief, just as Bundy promised, nearly 200 ranchers from all over the state marched behind him, yelling “Property rights!” Nearly a mile later, the marchers fell silent and filed into the courtroom where Wayne Hage of Pine Creek Ranch faced arraignment for the felony of cleaning brush out of his ditches without a U.S. Forest Service permit.
The Forest Service had already confiscated Hage’s cattle and left him bankrupt, just as the Bureau of Land Management would try with Bundy 22 years later.
Hage had already filed a lawsuit against the Forest Service in the U.S. Court of Claims, just as Bundy now has cause to do against the BLM – last week, during their failed attempt to confiscate Bundy’s cattle, agents wantonly bulldozed his water supply into oblivion without court authority.
Wayne Hage did not stand in that courtroom alone because I was honor bound to prevent it – I had published his 1989 book, Storm Over Rangelands: Private Rights in Federal Lands, which unleashed the federal fury.
The message terrified abusive bureaucrats: There are private rights in federal
lands – vested rights, not privileges.
His book, the product of three intensive, grueling years consulting with dozens of experts and sifting through many archives, found the dirty little secret that could destroy the abusive power of all federal Western land agencies – by making them obey their own laws.
It was so stunning that a sitting Supreme Court justice secretly sent Wayne a message marveling at his shining intellect – burnished with a masters degree in animal science and honed by academic colloquies as a trustee of the University of Nevada Foundation – and warning of the titanic battle to come.
I was standing next to a premier missionary and linguist, who had been teaching us the science of language at the University of Washington, during the first of three summers with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), the "primary partner organization" of Wycliffe Bible Translators. I had gone that day up to the mountains with him, his wife and children to see Mt. Rainier and have some "delicious berry pie" at their favorite diner.
But something he had just said disturbed me. Did he mean what it sounded like he meant? I had to word my question carefully. I wanted my teacher to reveal what he believed, but not let my motives or beliefs get in the way of him telling me the truth.
"Do you believe the story of Noah and the ark, the great flood and all that?" I asked.
What he said next floored me.
"No, but David, look: don't let that bother you. When you go to all those churches to raise your missionary support, they have these Statements of Faith for you to sign. It doesn't matter what you believe. Just sign them. When you get to the [mission] field, you can do whatever you want."
So here was this veteran missionary, advising me to lie to the congregations that would support me. Then somehow I would have to go to the mission field and translate God's holy word, the Bible, regardless of whether I believed it or not, into another language. Then I would be charged with teaching the Bible to those people. And I would do all this with a clean conscience? How would I be able to sleep at night? Could I live a lie like that, as a Bible translator? Could that be what God wanted me to do?
No way! I could never do that as a faithful Christian.
On top of that, this guy had married and raised a family on the mission field, without even believing the Bible he was translating. How could he do that? It turned out the guy liked to "do" linguistics, and this was a job that paid him to spend years doing just that. How did he become a Wycliffe Bible Translator? He lied about the Bible! Did he lie about everything? Was he even a Christian?
That wonder-filled day, which started with such open-hearted feelings of devotion to my God, crashed down with such disappointment in this man. Now I couldn't share with him the wonderful realization of my newfound need to honor God and thank Him daily. From now on I would have to treat this man as an unbeliever.
