LIEN-WORLD EXISTS! There is a SMARMY, PROFITEERING UNDERBELLY to THE RECESSION
 i.e. ALL KINDS OF BUGS ON THE MELON 

The HORRIFIC ART of buying real estate for pennies on the dollar -- Institutionalized! On STEROIDS!
 
TURN TREND AROUND BY CREATING GROUPS THAT HELP  LIEN SUFFERERS!
BUDDHIST LIEN FIXERS  -- a NEW CONCEPT, ONE PROFITABLE TO THE COMMUNITY!

A LIENSUCKER LOW LIFE like THIS villainous heartless HARV NUSBAUM And David Rosenberg, who are profiteering on families with city liens against their homes..., (story below) can be the death of a community.  Happy Harve is an Ex IRS AGENT who buys your home for pennies on the dollar and self enriches off your sorrow. Rosenberg parties with Hollywood floozies, both buy these LIENs on your real estate from the heartless CITY which has not given you time, payments or advice. They just took  your HOUSE! The city  doesn't squeeze people who simply were having a poor moment and couldn't pay their HEAT BILLS. They choke off their windpipe in one SECOND!

This whole phenomenon could be turned around, enhancing communities, if a.) cities would work with folks who hadn't paid house taxes or heating bill, and b.) if community charitable orgs would get involved. Potentially, saintly charities could buy the liens, a group  who does what city should have done, finds and rescues  families with this problem, sees to the preservation of the family home, the main investment of the poor.

The drowning critter sets up a splash visible from afar as paperwork in City Hall, one which can be seen by a rescuer. NO? Think of MOHAMMED YUNUS who created freebie people's banks across Asia, non interest loans for entrepreneurs. The true flowering of the Islamic anti-interest ethos!

This would be a great investment now for a saintly person, in these times of mass evictions. Mass non payment of utility bills causing city to take over a home. Someone who could sight down the river, see the drowning mammals. step in the same way NUSSBAUM DOes, pennies on the dollar. And then do the debt-fix, jobless situation fixed, get a PC in the house, teach 'em how to make resumes. Remember that unemployed people cannot get jobs, so take anything, be employed!

Amnesty for the Banksters, Debtor's Prison for the Serfs by William Norman Grigg

Long before he orchestrated a scheme to rig auctions of tax liens in
Maryland, attorney and real estate mogul Harvey M. Nusbaum had a long and
lucrative career in officially sanctioned crime as an IRS agent.

In 2002, Nusbaum grew weary of robbing people on behalf of the state.
Rather than repenting in sackcloth and ashes, as any decent person would, he hired
out as a privateer - a freelance buyer and collector of tax debts.

This form of retail fascism - a public-private partnership in plunder - was
immensely profitable for Nusbaum. Had he exercised even the slightest
restraint on his corrupt appetite, Nusbaum most likely wouldn't be headed
for prison.

Maryland is one of 29 states that permit city governments to raise money by
selling tax debts to investors. Each year, Baltimore's municipal government
bundles up tax liens against properties whose owners haven't paid local
taxes or utility bills (such as water and sewage fees) and sells them at
auction.

In the most recent auction, Baltimore sold liens on 12,689 properties -
ranging from rotting shells of long-abandoned homes to office buildings in
the downtown business district. Purchasers assume responsibility for
collecting the debts, and the opportunity to foreclose on properties whose
owners can't pay them off.

According to a study conducted by the Baltimore Sun, twenty percent of
those liens involved amounts smaller than $1,000. Financial necromancers employed
by collection agencies can transmute a trivial amount - a delinquent
utility bill or an unpaid and long-forgotten municipal citation - into a
budget-crippling debt of several thousand dollars.

"You will pay," one of Nusbaum's minions told a victim who called to
complain after a tiny unpaid water bill had metastasized into a $4,000
extortion demand. "Everybody does."

Nusbaum and his cronies filed over 6,000 lawsuits, raking in an estimated
$11.5 million in legal fees, title search fees, and interest. This
inevitably attracted the attention of the "Justice" Department's antitrust
division, which discovered that Nusbaum, his partner Jack W. Stollof, and
other as-yet unnamed investors engaged in collusive bidding in a dozen tax
auctions conducted in Baltimore and five other Maryland jurisdictions.

According to federal prosecutors, the actions of Nusbaum and his colleagues
were a criminal conspiracy to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Once in
possession of the liens, the conspirators "used the court system to
threaten homeowners with seizure of their properties unless they paid legal fees,
interest, and other charges ... [that] often totaled 10 times the original
debt," observed the Sun.

The real crime here, according to the Feds, was not the use of
government-aided extortion to wring hugely inflated sums from struggling,
debt-plagued citizens, but rather the use of collusion to enhance the
cabal's profits at the expense of local governments. You see, the entire
point of the tax auction racket, in the Sun's eminently suitable phrase, is
"feeding the public treasury."

During a rigged auction in 2006, Nusbaum and his comrades bought a bundle
of liens containing Vicki Valentine's unpaid $362 municipal water bill.

Valentine had inherited a home in West Baltimore from her father, who died,
after a long struggle with Alzheimer's, in 2003. The house was free and
clear, but many of the utility bills had been left unpaid.

Struggling with chronic depression after taking care of her dying father,
Vicki was soon dealing with unemployment as well. In 2006, Vicki paid $100
on an outstanding water bill of $462.28. That figure shot up to more than
$700 after the city added interest, processing charges, and property taxes.

Under severe financial strain, Vicki filed several legal challenges, which
delighted the firm that had purchased the lien, since this permitted them
to tack on additional legal costs. On September 19, 2008, a judge ordered
Vicki to pay $3,603.41, or lose a home that was already bought and paid for. She
didn't have the money. So last February, the local sheriff's department
seized Vicki's home on behalf of Montego Bay Properties, the entity that
held the lien following at least two post-auction transfers of ownership.

In a desperate letter written a year before her house was seized, Vicki
pleaded with Baltimore City Circuit Court to extend the payment period.

"For now, this is the roof over my son's and my head," she observed,
pointing out that she was unemployed and frantically looking for work. "I
am trying to get the money together to catch up on my delinquent bills. Please
allow more time to pay all bills connected with the foreclosure...."

Vicki didn't understand that in the corporate socialist system that now
exists, mercy is a gift conferred only on the powerful and politically
connected. This is illustrated by the fact that the presiding officers of
DRT Fund, which was listed as a co-conspirator in Nusbaum's bid-rigging
scheme, were granted amnesty - that is, official forgiveness - in exchange
for admitting that they had done wrong and facile promises to pay
restitution "to any person or entity injured as a result of the bid-rigging
activity ... in which [the investment firm] was a participant."

Here's the curious thing about that promise of "restitution": The only
party "injured" by the bid-rigging scheme, according to the Feds, was the
Municipal Government of Baltimore.

The specific terms of the settlement remained sealed, and DRT Fund's owners
aren't discussing the particulars in public. However, we can be sure that
Vicki Valentine isn't listed among those "injured" by DRT, whose co-owners,
Anthony De Laurentis and John Rieff, are now in possession of her home.

Two years ago, Milwaukee resident Peter Tubic nearly lost his home to
foreclosure as a result of an unpaid $50 citation for parking an inoperable
van on his own property. A government that arrogates to itself the supposed
authority to regulate such matters won't scruple to add extortionate
penalties to the original citation; thus it's not surprising that the City
of Milwaukee eventually demanded $2,645 from Tubic as ransom to prevent the
seizure of his home. Eventually a local judge succumbed to an
unprofessional fit of common sense and dismissed the citation outright.

Confiscation of a home to collect small debts remains uncommon. However,
"people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts,"
reports the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. As is the case in Arizona, Arkansas,
Indiana, Illinois, and other states, the Land of 10,000 Lakes is infested
with agents of "well-funded, aggressive and centralized collection firms,
in many cases run by attorneys, that buy up unpaid debt and use the courts to
collect."

As a result, it's increasingly common for people who owe small amounts to
find themselves being confronted by police - in the streets, at home or
work, while driving, or even while recovering from surgery - and hauled
away in handcuffs. Warrants have been issued over outstanding debts as small as
$85, which is "less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight."

After a brief but robustly unpleasant interlude behind bars, debtors are
brought before a judge and compelled to sign documents permitting the
collection firms to garnish their wages or extract money from their bank
accounts. Refusal can lead to "indefinite incarceration," a sentence
recently imposed, without trial, on a debtor from Kenney, Illinois. "Bail"
consists of paying the amount demanded by the collection firm, which is the
amount of the purchased debt plus whatever enhancements the firm can
devise.

"A firm aims to collect at least twice what it paid for the debt to cover
costs," points out the Star-Tribune. "Anything beyond that is profit."
Successful debt-buying firms enjoy very impressive profit margins.
Portfolio Recovery Associates, a Virginia debt buyer, reported a 16 percent net
margin last year; for Encore Capital Group of San Diego, last year brought a 10
percent net profit. By way of contrast, Wal-Mart's profit margin last year
was 3.5 percent.

The "distressed receivables" market is immense, and bundled debts are
constantly repackaged and re-sold. It's quite common for people to be
contacted by multiple collection agencies demanding payment on the same
long-forgotten debt, which may have been sold and repackaged several times
after being written off by the original creditor.

Ohio-based Unifund CCR Partners, one of the most aggressive debt-buying
firms, "feasts on the famine of others," explained a 2003 profile of its
founder, Turkish-born David Rosenberg, in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Unifund, which serves clients such as Citibank, "isn't in the embarrassment
business," insisted Rosenberg seven years ago. Either there are odd gaps in
Rosenberg's vocabulary or his priorities have changed: Today, Unifund
routinely seeks arrest warrants for those unable or unwilling to pay off
old debts.

Rosenberg created Unifund as a 20-year-old high school dropout in 1986.
Originally the company bought and collected on bad checks written to
supermarkets. The company paid 75-80 percent of the dollar value of each
check, and reaped 115-125 percent of its face value by imposing
insufficient-funds fees.

As bank failures accumulated in the late 1980s, Unifund began to buy and
collect on batches of bad bank loans sold by the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation for pennies on the dollar. By 1990 it had sufficient capital to
buy up a series of bad debt portfolios from Manufacturers Hanover Trust
with face values of up to $50 million apiece, according to the Enquirer.

Rosenberg, who profited handsomely on the debts of others, is no stranger
to bad debt himself. "Over the past decade," reported the Enquirer in 2003,
"Rosenberg's name has appeared on Ohio income tax liens, an overdue notice
for Vermont real estate tax, and a lawsuit for an unpaid auto loan."

Unlike many of his victims, Rosenberg has never felt the cold steel of
handcuffs biting into his wrists. Given the pervasive perversity of our
times it's not surprising to learn that Unifund, which is able to suborn
police and courts into doing its bidding, is a criminal enterprise.

During the past decade, Unifund has settled several class-action lawsuits
asserting that the firm routinely engages in illegal practices - such as
imposing bogus legal fees and collecting on debts beyond the statute of
limitations. In one settlement, Unifund was forced to pay Queens resident
Jose Luis Muniz an undisclosed sum after it fraudulently attempted to
collect on a $21,000 credit card debt Muniz had paid off ten years earlier.

Suits filed in Texas and Illinois claimed that Unifund defrauded credit
reporting agencies by "freshening up" credit card delinquency dates on old
debts the firm had purchased.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that delinquent credit card accounts
be expunged after seven years of dormancy. Plaintiffs accused Unifund of
"rolling back to odometer" on the debts they had purchased by moving up the
delinquency dates as much as six years. This damaged the credit ratings of
the victims and made them vulnerable to the other abusive collection
practices in Unifund's arsenal.

In the mid-1990s, Unifund was bought by ZB Limited Partners. "ZB" refers to
the Zises Brothers - Jay, Seymour, and Selig. In the mid-1980s, the Zises
Brothers created an immense pyramid scheme-cum-tax shelter called
Integrated Resources, which funded its operations by issuing high-yield or "junk"
bonds.

In early 1989, the brothers "managed to sell most of their holdings at $21
a share - far above the market price - to the ICH Corporation, a highly
leveraged insurance company," observed the New York Times.

The company defaulted on its bonds and commercial notes in June 1989. A few
years later, the Zises Brothers - who cultivated some very useful political
ties with the neo-conservative establishment - reached a settlement in
which they were permitted to pay their creditors a small fraction of what they
owed.

The brothers had enough cash on hand to buy Unifund and get involved in
several other ventures, such as Family Management Corporation - an
investment firm that reportedly funneled millions of dollars into Bernie
Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

It's not likely that the Zises Brothers are haunted by the thought that the
investors whose money they've pissed away will someday arrange for them to
be arrested and humiliated in front of their friends, families, and
children.

Unifund is just one of dozens or scores of similar firms that are
flourishing in the aftermath of the debt bubble's collapse. The mechanism
at work here is the mirror image of the one that operated while the bubble was
being inflated.

In the early 2000s, with the Federal Reserve pumping huge amounts of
"liquidity" into the economy, it was immensely profitable for lenders to
entice borrowers of dubious credit-worthiness into mortgages and other
loans they weren't really able to pay. Before the collapse, bundling and
re-selling bad debts to investment banks was a lucrative enterprise for
Goldman Sachs and other major powers on Wall Street. Now that the bubble
has burst, the titans of Wall Street are being bailed out by the same taxpayers
who often face the prospect of arrest and incarceration for their own bad
debts.

The welfare queens of Wall Street, cushioned by subsidizes extracted from
taxpayers at gunpoint, are ill-disposed to liquidate bad debts through
negotiation. This helps explain why an increasing number of people who find
themselves "upside down" on their home mortgages are practicing "strategic
default": With lenders unwilling to negotiate reasonable terms, the debtors
simply stop making payments. This, in turn, has inspired Wall Street's
tax-subsidized deadbeats to begin a PR campaign to demonize such people as
"ruthless borrowers."

"Having been deadbeats and strategic defaulters of the first order," writes
economic analyst Yves Smith, the major banks "continue to manifest their
characteristic unmitigated gall [by] hectoring the public about honorable
behavior." Smith predicts that ere long we will witness the return of
debtor's prison, which was supposedly abolished in the 19th century.

A cynic once said that while a petty thief will find himself behind bars or
dangling from the end of a rope, the most powerful criminals are those who
run the jails and operate the gallows. The corporatist plutocracy
controlling our country is determined to make a prophet of that anonymous
cynic.

June 16, 2010 by William Norman Grigg AUTHOR OF: 'The 'Tax Mahal': A Shrine to Corporate Socialism

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Our 'POSTER-BLOGGER' is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Researcher,  mother of 4, grandmother of 6, also a career Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The  FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS,  HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS....* Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 35$ natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter DESTINY reading out there .

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