Sunday, June 13, 2010

Amnesty for the Banksters, Debtor's Prison for the Serfs














Evicted and "served": A Sheriff's deputy presents Vicki Valentine with a "writ of possession" that supposedly entitles a private investor to confiscate her home. That investor acquired the alleged right to foreclose on Valentine's home by purchasing a "tax lien" involving an unpaid $362 municipal water bill. The bill grew ten-fold after fees and interest, an amount the unemployed mother couldn't pay.

  
Long before he orchestrated a scheme to rig auctions of tax liens in Baltimore, 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."
Ancient artifact, or foreshadowing of the future?
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 he paid $100 on an outstanding water bill of $462.28. By year's end, 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 a "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 doesn't come as a surprise that Unifund, which is able so 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


Rosenberg goes clubbing with Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons and celebrity trollop Kim Kardashian.

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 by 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. 


Seymour Zises (left) at a 2008 social function.
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 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 has inspired Wall Street's tax-subsidized deadbeats to begin a PR campaign to demonize "ruthless borrowers" as uniquely depraved. 

"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. 

*In the original version of this essay  I mistakenly referred to Russell Simmons as Jay-Z. My thanks to commenter thebigbus for correcting my error.








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21 comments:

Anonymous said...

There must be an immediate federal law that mandates that on all public debts and resold private debts, the amount of penalties and interest can never, under any circumstances, exceed the principal.

Mister Spock said...

anonymous - Anytime there "must be" a law, there needs to be 50 state laws, not one federal one.

William N. Grigg said...

Your logic is impeccable as always, Mr. Spock.

I would add that the first thing we should do would be to repeal any laws permitting Unifund and its ilk to conscript courts and police to shake down people at gunpoint.

thebigbus said...

Great article! By the way, is that really Jay-Z in that pic?? Looks like Russell Simmons :)

Kam Kam Fam said...

I disagree with the anonymous poster on a more fundamental level. Further regulation is not the answer. Regulation inevitably becomes a warren and haven for just this type of scheme to unfold. No, we must strip the regulations from our society so as to liberate the free and thereby unbridled potential of each individual. The more laws and regulations passed, the more layers of restraint to fight through! The more we are impeded!

We must ask ourselves. Are we free? No, we are not. That is easy enough. But the next question is quite a bit more difficult once we pass a first glance. That is to ask, do we truly want to be free? Freedom is, I once heard, and ask not where as it fails me now, a perspective. To rid ourselves of the parasites we encounter in this life we must each be equipped with the ability to tell the difference, and thereby defend against, that which is good and bad. Or consistent with a free man's perspective.

Upon the completion of reading William's worthy essay I asked myself, "what mechanism has delivered such inhumane circumstances upon these individuals?" It was not a lack of regulation I can assure you of that. No, I submit it was the regulating and legislating of all aspirations out of these peoples lives. Want to start a business? Deal with the all seeing Government! Want to get a job? Many "jobs" require certification, licensing, insurances of this stripe or that hue. FOR THE WORKER NO LESS!

Not an entrepreneur then? Dissuaded from being your own master and commander? Decided to trade sweat, blood and toil for your livelihood? Your a brave one! Good luck!

The Governed are now consigned to the nether regions of an unskilled service economy. And it is here where we are slowly boiling together in Walmart nation.

The answer is not more regulation. It is more Free Men! More who will begin the great roll back of the tide of squalor and servitude to another mans petty whim and direction.

It is easy to be a subject of either king or country. Chattle live mundane and unchallenged existences. To be a man and a country unto himself and govern yourself as a King is hard. Accept that no one is helping you and you will become the best advocate possible in your own name.

Such a perspective is the very difference between the lilt and strain of humanity today and the dynamic possibilities that could be.

hopey changey said...

Someone should tell president Barry the messiah© about this he will wave his magic wand and make it all better.

dwayne chandler said...

Lewis Black says it well, "You lose either way, we are nation of buyers and sellers, buyers and sellers, pimps and whores, pimps and whores!"

Anonymous said...

"Kim Kardashian"? Oh Lordy NO! I almost lost my lunch. I've heard and seen enough of this goof. Yet another bent example of this "Facebook" nations collective insanity.

As far as the article goes I believe we're witness to a modern day Shylock.

William N. Grigg said...

MoT, I think Shylock would have considered this sort of thing excessive.

I had actually written a 'graph or two about Shylock, but decided the piece was too long and involved already.

My take on "Merchant" is that Shakespeare wanted the audience to sympathize with Shylock (and especially his daughter) initially, because they were treated horribly -- and then be horrified by what Shylock wanted to do when he had the opportunity for vengeance. In any case, that was my take-away the first time I saw the play performed decades ago.

Anonymous said...

We are fast approaching the day when the lid will blow off the pressure cooker whereupon the human jackals, hyenas and vultures will be sweating while the great unwashed chase them down with pitchforks.

apollonian said...

Shakespeare Affirms Treatment Of Jews Is Just, Well-Deserved
(Apollonian, 14 Jun 10)

But Grigg, regarding the "treatment" of Jews like Shylock, question is who is doing what treatment and why. For gentiles demonstrably only react to Jews, Jews making it a pt. to strike first, like any "virtuous" military strategists--as all history confirms. And note best way to confirm hist. is to start w. most recent and then work backwards, rather than beginning w. pre-conceptions.

For if u merely examine Jews' basic document, the Talmud (see RevisionistHistory.org and Come-and-hear.com), u easily see Jews are LITERALLY at war w. rest of an ignorant, un-aware, un-assuming gentile humanity whom Jews assert were meant by their slave of a "god" to being slaves for Jews. Jews literally make themselves (collectivistically) God, whom "god" is sworn by "covenant" to serve.

For how are u a "Christian," Mr. Grigg, unless u stand for truth? And truth, easily verified, is Jews are the original and foremost racists of all time, to this very day, without the slightest doubt, which racism is now blamed upon gentiles by these very Jews who hold themselves exempt and who demonstrably control the mass-corporate Jews-media (see http://www.natall.com/who-rules-america/index.html)--and everything else in West and USA by means of their Fed COUNTERFEIT fraud (see RealityZone.com and TheMoneyMasters.com for expo/ref. on US Federal Reserve Bank [Fed] fraud).

My own take is Shakespeare verily meant to CONFIRM the gross inhumanity of these Jews, consistent w. their deliberate murder of Christ for having preached the TRUTH, including about them, master criminals as they are and as ur present blog article even confirms, every single one of the principals u name being Jews--which of course, u religiously ignore, as usual for ur sort.

USA is Christian country, Mr. Grigg, made for white Christians, and u should begin to starting to acting accordingly w. due loyalty properly owed.

Sure, it's common dramatic device to get audience to emote w. all and any characters--and Jews are veritably hated--but Shakespeare simply wants to confirm justice for this well-earned hatred of these sanctimonious monsters who gloat about having killed Christ for heresy and blasphemy--which their Talmud affirms and justifies.

CONCLUSION: Note Mr. Grigg, basic Christian honesty requires u to acknowledge u cannot and must not attempt to serving two masters, one TRUTH and the other Talmudic lies. If u're true Christian, u must be honest and admit Jews, foremost conspirators and satanic liars, only get minimum of what they deserve fm gentiles--they deserve far worse. Honest elections and death to the Fed. Apollonian

William N. Grigg said...

Your copy of the New Testament apparently differs from the standard-issue one in many respects. And your copy of "Merchant of Venice" must not include the following lines from Portia's soliloquy:

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.


"Basic Christian honesty" compels me to admit that I am a sinner incapable of saving myself, and in that respect am just like everybody else, whether Jew or Gentile.

The same principle constrains me to acknowledge that I have no right or calling to hate anybody, including those of any background who have injured me. I'm also required to confess that I find this to be almost impossibly difficult.

I am fascinated to learn that the U.S.A., by your reckoning, was "made for white Christians"; does that mean that non-white Christians such as myself shouldn't live here?

Anonymous said...

Oh Appolian please take your meds. And while your at it don't drink your tap water the Jews might have poisoned it, don't eat any food those nasty little Hymes have probably tampered with it and lastly don't breathe the air because those horrible little hook nosed bastards have probably polluted it.
Your Semitic paranoia is disturbing

liberranter said...

I really hate to be the one to bring everyone's attention to the ten-ton elephant rampaging through the room, but one cannot help but notice the predominance of a certain racial-ethnic group being at the center of these criminal enterprises in better than 90 percent of the examples cited so far. We might not LIKE to face the fact that this is the case, as none of us who consider ourselves libertarians want to think that we judge others on the basis of stereotypes alone. However, the fact that we would like the patch of toadstools in our backyard to be shiitakes of the gourmet variety doesn't make them so. If someone can point to SOLID EVIDENCE that the ethnic group in question doesn't make up but a tiny fraction of the criminal enterprises discussed here and that the examples contained in this article are the extreme exceptions rather than the norm, I would be greatly relieved. Otherwise, something is grossly amiss, and it can't be mere coincidence.

Just sayin' (and flame away if you want to)...

apollonian said...

Grigg Imagines His Heresy Is Obligatory Upon Fellow Gentiles
(Apollonian, 14 Jun 10)

Exactly Grigg, just as u say: u're gross recipient of charity (how easily u forget, eh?--surely u're not otherwise that stupid) who presumes upon the patience and charity of stupid white gentiles who've made horrific mistake, borne of gross HUBRIS, of tolerating such as u, comrade--now u're beginning to see the light, truly.

Ur gross inferiority Grigg--in honesty and Christianity, if not elsewise too, though I don't pretend to judge for that--is presuming so dishonestly and inhumanly, not to mention irrationally, to not having right to hate. For hatred (aversion) is OBVIOUSLY necessary emotional virtue, reciprocal of love (attraction), oriented for success in Darwinian struggle.

If u don't hate, then u can't love; they necessarily go together, being basically the same emotion, the refutation of "hate-crime" rationalization, by the way.

Ur further treason to fellow gentiles, Mr. Grigg, is ur presumptuous "mighty-white" treatment and patronization of Jew monsters and psychopaths as obligatory to gentile people including whites.

Yet another of ur failures of inferiority, Grigg, is fatuous presumption of "justice" as optional (falsely imputed fm Shakespeare quotation)--it isn't, certainly not always. Removal of Jews and false-Christian traitors (heretics in worst meaning of the term) like urself is absolutely necessary for survival of the host.

CONCLUSION: Ur sin is against truth and reason first, and only then against fellow gentiles, including esp. that magnificent white race which has practiced and bestowed such undeserved charity upon u, they having betrayed in turn their fellows among whites and gentiles, never doubt. Honest elections and death to the Fed. Apollonian

apollonian said...

Jews, Criminal Geniuses: Too Slick, By Half
(Apollonian, 14 Jun 10)

"Liberranter": it's just INDUCTIVE LOGIC u're using so excellently, if I may say so, particular observations/instances leading to general.

And observe such typical and thematic criminal behavior by Jews is perfectly in line w. their Talmudic philosophy and programmatic hatred of gentile humanity (see RevisionistHistory.org and Come-and-hear.com for best Talmudic expo).

And don't forget scientific method which includes that thematic INDUCTION: (a) considering ALL the evidence (observation), then (b) concluding, (c) ck-ing most carefully then for dis-confirming evidence.

As Sherlock Holmes said (sorry I don't have exact citation), "once u've eliminated the impossible, the remainder, no matter how un-likely, is necessary solution set."

Observe then these Jew criminals are merely following-up on the initial criminal Fed COUNTERFEITING (see RealityZone.com and TheMoneyMasters.com for expo/ref.) and fraudulent expansion of credit, based upon funds which don't and won't exist when suddenly, due to inflation, banks must constrict credit, having suckered the dummies among gentiles. Such COUNTERFEITING and credit-expansion is all then part of classic "ponzi"-type scheme.

CONCLUSION: And Jews further have their counter-measures ready, pre-positioned--as they did for over-whelming 9-11 evidence against them (see Bollyn.com)--consisting of MORALISM-Pharisaism which they insist renders inoperative that inductive logic: u cannot so conclude against Jews as it is anti-semitic, hence "immoral"--are these people criminal geniuses or what? Thus moralism-Pharisaism TRUMPS reality, reason, and logic. Now u see why they want A THIRD, no less, Jew Sup. Ct. justice (Kagan). Honest elections and death to the Fed.

liberranter said...

Apollonian, I sincerely hope that my previous observations are grossly misplaced and I take no joy in the conclusions to which they seem to lead. While the preponderance of evidence seems to lend credence to the widely-entrenched and repulsively negative stereotypes of Jews, we cannot also ignore the fact that at least two Jews in particular have been among history's greatest, most respected, and most indispensable bearers of the message of liberty, peace, and free markets. I'm speaking, of course, of Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Murray Rothbard.

It's true that we can safely assume that a number of the individuals portrayed in a deservedly unfavorable light by Will's article would attempt to justify their criminal predations by linking them to some perverse distortion of "free market principles" in action. But the Misesian/Rothbardian philosophical and legal framework would tear any such argument to shreds, if on no other grounds than that the co-opting of the coercive machinery of state for one's own ends that could not be met through the natural laws or through the common law principles underlying laws of contract is COERCIVE FORCE, and thus a violation of the libertarian principle non-aggression.

As for "Talmudic philosophy and programmatic hatred of gentile humanity" being factor in the criminally rapacious behavior Will describes, it doesn't strike me that Jews of the Nusbaum-Rosenberg-Zises ilk were raised with anything remotely resembling traditional Judaic religious norms. More likely, their family backgrounds were some half-baked amalgamation of secular Marxist Zionism and humanism/hedonism, the predominant framework within which much of contemporary Jewish America exists, a framework which corresponds roughly to the "non-practicing, ecumenical" quasi-Christian "values" that characterize the majority of America that calls itself "Christian," but is so in name only. Children brought up within such a flimsy moral framework in which there are NO absolutes or boundaries based on the laws of God inevitably leads to the sort of narcissistic, self-justifying behavior manifested by the individuals mentioned, usually with coated with some veneer of "higher purpose." This is what we see in the individuals described herein.

Isaac said...

Hugh Nibley made the observed (found in the biography Sargeant Nibley) that the "Jewish problem" was a problem of culture and race, not religion, the problem being that the culture had so ingrained in people the importance of their race that it became an obsession. I'm taking liberties with Nibley's words here, but my point is that when a group abandons the religious aspects of a religion and focuses on something else, such as racial aspects, there is bound to be a problem of some sort. Like a superiority complex. That's not to say all "Jews" would be contained in that group, whether racial or religious.

Vulture said...

Apollonian,

Ur still in need of a dicshunary.

How about you come back when you can communicate like an adult, in plain English, and without these childish text-speak abbreviations?

Just so you know: pretty much everyone here worships a Savior whose ministry was to the Jews. It was only after his death the we Gentiles were exposed to the light of the Gospel.

Your Antisemitism is almost as childish as your chosen mode of communication.

Luke Fisher said...

Well, my bible says that ALL have sinned and come short of the glory off God. All of us deserve death and the wrath of God. Jews are not worse than anyone else. We're all THAT bad. Jesus Christ made a way of escape from the wrath to come, for the Jew first and also to the Greek (gentiles, like me). Thank you Jesus!

Since we are all so bad, why give an entity comprised of sinful men so much power -- the State? Why do we ignore the sins of this entity?


So since I'm actually in the debt purchasing and collections business, let me shed some light. We provide a needed service in helping to liquidate all of the bad debt that had accumulated these past few years.

Regarding the debtor's prisons:

There is a such thing called supplemental proceedings. This is after a money judgment has been entered against a debtor and the debtor is called into court to give an accounting of their finances and assets, to gauge whether they are able to pay this debt. This is a court order. If they disobey this order, they can be held in contempt and an arrest warrant issued.

This costs big money to do. Very rarely have I seen regular consumer debts get to that level. I have seen where debtors who have bilked many folks refuse to go these proceedings, then get arrested and end up paying.

Regarding out of statute debts: these are actually still owed, it's just that you cannot use the courts to sue on these. You can call the debtors or send letters. Unifund trying to extend the limitations restrictions in order to sue is fraudulent and bad business.

In this business, you have to respect folks. Alot of people made bad decisions in the boom years. We make it a point to work with people, discount the amount owed by huge margins if necessary in order to close cases. Folks feel better too when they're able to close those chapters of their lives for pennies on the dollar and still be paid off in full.

But making threats of arrest willy nilly and trying to sue on out-of-statute debt is not the way to do it.

Anonymous said...

Debtors prisons were a 19th century solution to the problem of too much debt. In the 21st century, there is no real need to have a bricks and mortar prison, debtors can be electronically enslaved. There is no requirement that individuals take out debt to run their lives. All that is needed is a realistic outlook on what can be achieved with one's available resources. The only way to mount an effective campaign against predatory lenders is to stop borrowing. In the absence of fresh loans, the loan sharks will cease to exist. Sure, this sounds preachy, but what else is there? I have yet to see any effective representation of individuals interests within government; you are on your own and meat for the hungry wolves. The less you resemble a pork chop, the better you will be.