The Rise and Fall of a Fox News Fraud Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-fox-news-fraud-20160126#ixzz3yqFjPxM9 Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Wayne Simmons' mug shot for his arrest in Annapolis
in 2007. Annapolis Police Department

By the time Wayne Simmons went on Fox News last March for what would end up being his final appearance, viewers knew what to expect. "This president clearly has absolutely no idea what he is talking about," Simmons said of President Obama's handling of ISIS. Simmons had made guest appearances on Fox more than a hundred times as a "former CIA operative," and certainly looked the part: white mustache, neck bulging out of his dress shirt, a handshake "so hard, he can crush you with it," as one Fox host put it. Beyond offering his expertise as an intelligence officer, he had become particularly adept at serving up hawkish red meat to the network's audience. "We could end this in a week," he went on, suggesting that the United States run "thousands of sorties" against ISIS. "They would all be dead."

Simmons was largely anonymous when he first appeared on Fox, in 2002, but he soon became a regular face on the network, alongside a cast of retired military officers who, like Simmons, had been recruited into the Pentagon's "military-analysts program." The initiative invited retired officers who had made names for themselves as television-news commentators to attend regular briefings from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and to make trips to Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. In 2009, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its report on how the Pentagon used the analysts to build public support for the war in Iraq. The program disbanded, and many of those involved tried to distance themselves from it. But Simmons boasted of his connection as a way to bolster his bona fides, even mentioning it in his Amazon author biography. In 2012, Simmons co-wrote The Natanz Directive, a novel about a retired CIA agent called back for one last op. When the book was published, Rumsfeld contributed a blurb: "Wayne Simmons doesn't just write it. He's lived it."
But according to prosecutors, Simmons was living a lie.  READ MORE

Koch Brothers Flout Law Getting Richer With Secret Iran Sales

Koch Industries Executive Vice President David H. Koch,
left, poses for a photo with Julia Koch during the opening
night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on
Sept. 26, 2011.

By Asjylyn Loder and David Evans - Oct 3, 2011 1:28 PM ET

Bloomberg Markets Magazine

In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”

She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.

By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.

“Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,” Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media.

Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination.
Obsessed with Secrecy

Study: Scientific research fraud on the rise

Fraud in scientific research, while still rare, is growing at a troubling pace, a new study finds. A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. 

In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007. The study authors aren't quite sure why this is happening. But they and outside experts point to pressure to hit it big in science, both for funding and attention, and to what seems to be a subtle increase in deception in overall society that science may simply be mirroring. 

Fraud in life sciences research is still minuscule and committed by only a few dozen scientific scofflaws. However, it causes big problems, said Arturo Casadevall, a professor of microbiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. 

Casadevall is the lead author of the study which looked at the reasons for 2,047 retractions among many millions of studies published in journals and kept in a government database. Fraud was the No. 1 cause of retractions, accounting for 43 percent of them. 

When fraud was combined with other areas of misconduct, such as plagiarism, it explained about 2 out of 3 retractions, the study found. "Very few people are doing it, but when they do it, they are doing it in areas that are very important," Casadevall said. "And when these things come out, society loses faith in science."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corruption in science, click here.

Homeowners deserve protections afforded businesses

Earl Blumenauer

Friday, February 17, 2012

It's a curious and unfair system that homeowners face, with those in debt expected to meet the original terms of their mortgage loan even as we're seeing a cavalcade of misdeeds, shortcuts and in some cases outright fraud by their lenders. Nowhere is this pattern clearer than in Thursday's report from San Francisco auditors that 84 percent of foreclosures examined contained at least one violation of the law by the foreclosing party.

The report is only the latest in a series of incidents involving bad actors in the foreclosure crisis. Last year, I called for a moratorium on home foreclosures after Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo signed affidavits initiating foreclosure against borrowers without verifying the information they contained. In fact, problems have been so rampant that banks now require many buyers of foreclosed homes to sign contracts absolving the bank of liability should irregularities appear with the original foreclosure.

In light of these negligent practices, the $26 billion settlement last week between the U.S. Department of Justice, state attorneys general and the major banks raises as many questions as answers. For instance: If a house is illegally foreclosed upon and subsequently sold by the bank, who owns the home? The new buyer or the original owner? Untangling this mess might require new consumer protections, not just a payout from the banks accused of wrongdoing.

The best way to prevent foreclosure problems, however, has always been to prevent foreclosures in the first place. Offering families facing foreclosure the same bankruptcy protections enjoyed by business speculators is one place to start.

As it stands today, a single family that buys a home in a housing development is treated differently in bankruptcy court than a businessman who bought 10 units in the same project. If and when the housing bubble bursts, the underwater speculator is able to seek bankruptcy relief on all 10 units, while the owner of the single home is left out in the cold. There is no good reason that homeowners should face this discrimination in bankruptcy or be treated differently than commercial interests. If it's good enough for business, it should be good enough for homeowners.   READ MORE

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the impacts of the financial crisis on homeowners, click here.

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The article is incorrect. Homesteads are exempt from $25000 in Louisiana to value of home in Florida.

Here is a not-up-to date listing of exemptions: 

Welcome to Bankruptcy Action.com: 

Bankruptcy Lawyers; Bankruptcy Information; Filing Bankruptcy.

In DocX Case, Robo-Signing Forgery Charge Hits Top Executive

For the first time since the start of the robo-signing crisis, a senior executive has been indicted on criminal charges of forgery and faces jail. The forgery charges against a mortgage processing executive come as the nation's largest banks attempt to close the books on a civil investigation into widespread document fraud and could spark further federal criminal cases.

A grand jury in Missouri handed up the 136-count indictment late last week charging Georgia-based DocX -- a subsidiary of the massive mortgage processor Lender Processing Services -- and its founder and former president Lorraine O. Brown, with forgery. The indictment alleges that DocX employees fabricated signatures on hundreds of real estate documents, some used in foreclosures.

"This is the first time any grand jury in the country has indicted a corporation or a high-level executive at a corporation for 'robo-signing,'" Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster told The Huffington Post. "The grand jury is alleging that the documents have false signatures on them, that the notarizations are fraudulent and that it was all done with an intent to deceive. If that’s true, it makes the [foreclosure] documents forgeries."

A lawyer for DocX did not immediately return a call seeking comment. A lawyer for Brown told The New York Times she intended to plead not guilty and had no criminal intent.

The indictment stands in sharp contrast to the settlement shaking out over so-called "robo-signing" allegations between the state attorneys general and five of the nation's largest banks. So far, more than 40 states have agreed to what could amount to a $25 billion settlement with Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial over allegations they forged documents and incorrectly foreclosed on homeowners.  READ MORE

Foreclosure abuse rampant across U.S., experts say

A foreclosed home is shown in Stockton, California
May 13, 2008. Home foreclosure filings in the U.S.
jumped 23 percent in the first quarter from the prior
quarter, and more than doubled from a year earlier.

By Tim Reid

LOS ANGELES | Fri Feb 17, 2012 12:34pm EST


(Reuters) - A report this week showing rampant foreclosure abuse in San Francisco reflects similar levels of lender fraud and faulty documentation across the United States, say experts and officials who have done studies in other parts of the country.

The audit of almost 400 foreclosures in San Francisco found that 84 percent of them appeared to be illegal, according to the study released by the California city on Wednesday.
"The audit in San Francisco is the most detailed and comprehensive that has been done - but it's likely those numbers are comparable nationally," Diane Thompson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told Reuters.

Across the country from California, Jeff Thingpen, register of deeds in Guildford County, North Carolina, examined 6,100 mortgage documents last year, from loan notes to foreclosure paperwork.
  READ MORE
 

Occupy the Neighborhood: How Counties Can Use Land Banks and Eminent Domain

A foreclosed home in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Photo: Monica Almeida / The New York Times)

Saturday 14 January 2012

by: Ellen Brown, Truthout | News Analysis 

 

An electronic database called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) has created defects in the chain of title to over half the homes in America. Counties have been cheated out of millions of dollars in recording fees, and their title records are in hopeless disarray. Meanwhile, foreclosed and abandoned homes are blighting neighborhoods. Straightening out the records and restoring the homes to occupancy is clearly in the public interest, and the burden is on local government to do it. But how? New legal developments are presenting some innovative alternatives.

John O'Brien is register of deeds for Southern Essex County, Massachusetts. He is mad as hell and he isn't going to take it anymore. He calls his land registry a "crime scene." A formal forensic audit of the properties for which he is responsible found that:

• Only 16 percent of the mortgage assignments were valid.
    

• Twenty-seven percent of the invalid assignments were fraudulent, 35 percent were "robo-signed" and 10 percent violated the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute.
    

• The identity of financial institutions that are current owners of the mortgages could be determined for only 287 out of 473 (60 percent).
    

• There were 683 missing assignments for the 287 traced mortgages, representing approximately $180,000 in lost recording fees per 1,000 mortgages whose current ownership could be traced.

At the root of the problem is that title has been recorded in the name of a private entity called MERS as a mere placeholder for the true owners. The owners are a faceless, changing pool of investors owning indeterminate portions of sliced and diced securitized properties. Their identities have been so well hidden that their claims to title are now in doubt. According to the auditor:

What this means is that ... the institutions - including many pension funds - that purchased these mortgages don't actually own them....  READ MORE

 

How two shell companies duped the Pentagon

 

By Brian Grow and Kelly Carr

CHEYENNE/ATLANDA | Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:12am EDT

(Reuters) - Two companies incorporated at a little house in Cheyenne, Wyoming, won Pentagon contracts after their owner took advantage of the state's liberal incorporation laws to create the firms using an alias, and then represented them as minority-owned to win favorable treatment as a military supplier. The firms and their owner were later banned from doing business with the Pentagon for providing knock-off parts.
A Reuters investigation has found that more than 2,000 companies are registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne, the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business incorporation company that specializes in corporate anonymity.

Among the firms incorporated there is a small subset that make their money from government contracts.
A Reuters review of federal contracting databases found nine firms registered at 2710 Thomes Avenue have been awarded 93 contracts worth more than $1.6 million by a half dozen government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury's Internal Revenue Service, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

More than 90 percent of the contracts were awarded by the Department of Defense.
READ MORE

The King of All Vegas Real Estate Scams

LAS VEGAS

A twisted tale of how homeowners were bilked by those they least suspected: their neighbors

 By Felix Gillette 

Before the market crashed and home prices tumbled, before federal investigators showed up and hauled away the community records, before her property managers pled guilty for conspiring to rig neighborhood elections, and before her real estate lawyer allegedly tried to commit suicide by overdosing on drugs and setting fire to her home, Wanda Murray thought that buying a condominium in Las Vegas was a pretty good idea.

At first glance, Murray doesn’t look much like the type of person who would arrive in Las Vegas only to get tangled up in and eventually help unravel a complex criminal conspiracy. At 65, she stares out at the world through thick glasses. She is legally blind. Her eyes never quite seem to focus on any one thing. On a recent Friday morning, she sits at her dining room table wearing a zip-up leopard-print sweatshirt and recounts how she helped to foil a group of lawyers and contractors running amok in Sin City. “They didn’t think there would be four old ladies who wouldn’t put up with their stuff,” says Murray. “They really pissed me off.”  READ MORE

7 of the Nastiest Scams, Rip-Offs and Tricks From Wall Street Crooks

December 26, 2011

How many high-level Wall Street players have been put in jail for the crimes that led to the financial crisis?  Not. Even. One.   

Last week several executives from the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, known as “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,”were sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for civil fraud. They were charged with misleading investors about the quality of the loans they were buying.  But this is a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution, so they face no possibility of jail time.  And the SEC is notoriously ready to settle these cases, accepting fines without admission of guilt.  Meanwhile, last month Bloomberg News revealed that the Federal Reserve secretly loaned  $1.2 trillion to banks on Dec. 5, 2008, their neediest day, even as some of their CEOs were assuring investors their banks were healthy.  Are these CEOs facing prosecution or even civil fraud suits for doing the very same thing?  Not so much.  READ MORE

Why Do the Koch Brothers Want to End Public Education?

By Robert Greenwald, Open Mike Blog

16 August 11

Call David Koch and tell him to stop funding school resegregation now! His number is 212-319-1100." -- CW/RSN

he Koch brothers have more than $42 billion to make public policy out of their anti-government ideology, and their assault against public education epitomizes their tactics to remake our nation.

The Koch brothers founded Americans for Prosperity and have contributed more than $5 million to its political coffers. Americans for Prosperity, in turn, contributed to organizations that financially influenced a community school board election.

That's right: the Koch brothers are involving themselves, through their wealth-backed political apparatus, in local schools.

READ MORE