A Whistle Blower Speaks Out

“The trade in derivatives, using home notes, was designed as a Ponzi scheme. Excel knew it. Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (CWT), knew it. My fellow junior associates laughed at me, senior associates got mad at me, and the senior partners ultimately asked me to resign or be fired when I wrote repeated lengthy memoranda explaining this out to them.” – Charles Lincoln, III, PH.D., Harvard, J.D., University of Chicago, School of Law

Who is Charles Lincoln, III?

In October, 1993, Charles Lincoln, III began work as an associate at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (CWT). He had just completed a judicial clerkship for Kenneth L. Ryskamp, U. S. District Judge, Southern District of Florida. During his clerkship with Judge Ryskamp, Lincoln had planned, coordinated, and framed the jury questions for a very large securities fraud trial in Palm Beach against Alan B. Levan’s Florida-based BankAtlantic Bancorp and Subsidiary Bank Atlantic Financial Company (BAFCO), which were heavily involved in Florida Real Estate from 1952-2011.

What he was about to learn, and challenge, would change the course of his life, from one of privilege to destitution.

In many ways, Lincoln might have appeared exactly the kind of associate who could be expected to make partner rapidly. Ambitious, bright, and energetic, CWT hired him because he received top law school grades in Securities, Antitrust, and Banking Law, as well as for his clerkship experience in Securities & Banking cases in the post-S & L Collapse period in Florida. He had also been President of the Environmental Law Society at University of Chicago, School of Law.

In law school, he had become intrigued by the role of securities in establishing, maintaining, and shaping the global-elites of the 20th century. The complexities of hierarchical and socio-political structures had been his greatest interest in Anthropology & History at Harvard.

In his first month at CWT he turned in 393 billable hours, wildly exceeding any expectations. First-year associates are expected to bill at least 2,000 hours per year; Lincoln managed to do this in less than six months. At Cadwalader, Lincoln aspired to a professional specialization in securities litigation, fraud, shareholder’s and directors’ relations, rights and obligations, general agency and relationships of fiduciary duty.

Lincoln had taken up law as a second career after a decade as a working archeologist in Mexico and Central America, during which time he wrote a doctoral dissertation “Ethnicity & Social Organization at Chichen Itza, Yucatan” at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. His dissertation resulted from a project he directed in his 20s, funded by the National Geographic Society, Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, and private donors such as Doris Zemurray Stone and novelist James A. Michener.

As an archaeologist, Lincoln had become frustrated, acutely aware of problems mounting in the world, which originated in finance. Determined to use law creatively as a force for positive change, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, School of Law. At the school, he served as President of the Environmental Law Society (ELS), presiding on a year-long symposium at the Law School in 1990-1991, concerning oil spills in the immediate wake of the Exxon Valdez disaster of March 24, 1989.

Raised as the grandson, and effectively adopted son, of a wealthy petro-chemical engineer and military supplier in Highland Park, Dallas, Texas, Lincoln was not a stranger to the better addresses in New York. The welcome dinner held at the Waldorf Astoria for the 20 associates hired at the same time, of which he was one, did not impress him. Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft, though claiming to be the oldest, founded in 1792, the same year as the New York Stock Exchange, was by no means the largest.

Lincoln knew Cadwalader’s history and greatest claim to fame and power. This is its status as primary law firm to the Bank of New York (BNY), now BNY-Mellon, founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton, eight years before Cadwalader opened its doors under a different name.

The long relationship between the oldest bank and the oldest Wall Street Law Firm include Cadwalader’s role in setting up BNY to be the very first law firm to be traded on the NYSE. Cadwalader’s historical policies have consistently matched and supported those of the BNY and the thinking of Alexander Hamilton.

Cadwalader’s flagship office was then at 100 Maiden Lane, in New York 10038, close to the heart of the financial district in New York.

Having been hired on for Cadwalader’s litigation department, Lincoln encountered a department which was essentially inactive in 1993. The only active cases involved municipal defense to voting rights act cases in California.

Even the litigators, in 1993, were all working on one particular project which was shrouded in great mystery and secrecy.

The Excel Mortgage Project

Instead of litigation, Lincoln, along with all other first-year associates, were temporarily to work with the “Structured Finance Department” on preparing the registration statement of Excel Mortgage. Lincoln’s role was to review and assess a series of some 1,500 Arizona residential properties in relationship to state and federal environmental law and geographic issues, such as cultural resource management, and other points relating to the entire history and possible condition and liabilities of these properties.

The 1,500 or so properties, subject of his study, were earmarked as assets being “deposited” into the Excel Mortgage Bond Fund, along with promissory notes originated by a number of creditors on homes conforming to a certain size and value profile, but having no other relationship. These were not part of the same communities, not part of a single development project, not built by a common builder, or anything else. This struck Lincoln as strange. Why “pool” all these unrelated properties together? And would be in the completed “pool?” Why was the Bank of New York underwriting this project?

Enter the Securitized Derivative

Excel Mortgage, a highly valued client of CWT was about to become part of history, doing something that had never been done before: registering a bond for sale to the public, which bond was based on pooled notes, a hybrid of debt and equity interests in and contingent claims to realty. This type of financial instrument had never before been sold to the public, though it had existed for about 25 years in the “private placement” market.

Lincoln was unwittingly participating in the first initial public offering (IPO) of a bond, a debt instrument, derived in part from promissory notes, ‘debts,’ and in part from contingent pledges of title, ‘secured equity,’ in residential real estate.

Secutitized derivatives were being born at 100 Maiden Lane.

Bernard Madoff, who founded the NASDAQ when he was 33, was a prominent client of CWT, walking the floors of Cadwalader late at night.

The entire staff of CWT, underwritten by the Bank of New York, supporting Excel, were charged getting these new-fangled “derivative” instruments past examination by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC).

This was an arduous, and expensive task, necessitating a “lint-picking” review, before these ‘derivative instruments’ could be packaged under the name of Excel Mortgage and offered both on the NYSE and NASDAQ. An SEC Registration Statement is an application for Federal Blessings affirming investing in a certain stock, bond, or “other instrument or obligation,” a reasonable investment for an average investor to make.

Supposedly “sophisticated investors” can do whatever they want to do, so long as it’s not expressly fraudulent or otherwise illegal. But the average grandmother investing for her grandkids’ college needs Federal protection. Like “Social Security,” the concept of “Security” in the “Securities and Exchange Commission” is essentially a matter of “Trust us, We’re the Government.”

SEC Registration Statements require, prior to sale of any debt or equity instrument to the public, disclosure of all a companies’ assets and liabilities along with the qualifications of its officers and directors, and more.

Nobody outside of the law firms who prepare such things, and SEC staff, would ever read this, but preparing the registration would bring CWT millions of dollars.

Excel Mortgage, however, was not selling stock in itself as an enterprise or an entity: it was selling a pooled collection of utterly unrelated and unconnected and barely similar promissory notes with contingent interests in, and access to, equity ownership of real property owned by 1,500 different people and subject to 1,500 separate notes and mortgages.

1993 – Anomalies, and Questions, Emerge

Who was to supervise its operation after “Registration?” What coherence did this “enterprise” have ASIDE FROM the Registration Statement? Would anyone ever recognize it as a “business?” If so, how and why? Lincoln was puzzled and perplexed, and not satisfied with any of the answers he was getting.

The SEC did not appear to inquire into post-issuance management or maintenance of the pool of assets. Once “securitized” the notes would still be handled by individual originators or assigned to servicers. Lincoln asked “what was there left to be assigned or handled once the notes and mortgages were pooled?”

The SEC is charged with protecting small individuals and the corporate investor.

The SEC is expected to be involved in examining and making inquiries about a company’s claims for potential and predictions of earnings or profitability.

On what opinion or data would these be based for the Excel Mortgage Pool, since there weren’t any?

The opinions used were based on the “normal statistical performance of similarly credit rated and similarly valued mortgages in similar markets from studies of a group at MIT Sloan School of Management headed by a then no-name professor Frank J. Fabozzi. Fabozzi, with close ties to the Bank of New York, was also among the occasional night walkers at Cadwalader.

The process of preparing an SEC registration statement is a gold-mine for lawyers inclined to highly detailed work. Such a process for registration can normally require, Lincoln said, over a thousand individual revisions. The Excel Mortgage registration would be subject to over 2,000 revisions, but in all this there was still no attention given to claims of ownership, transfer of title, the laws of agency and fiduciary duty of managers, any of the concerns which normally plague the corporate world and frame the concern of SEC examiners and securities lawyers.

What’s In It for CWT?

The careers of young associates, and even older partners, at firms such as Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft, Chadbourne & Park, Sullivan & Cromwell, or Skadden, Arps, depend upon work measured in billable hours. Cadwalader had a “billing goal” of multiple millions of dollars for the Excel Mortgage registration project.

Lincoln recalls three relevant details:

First, the firm was never able to reach it’s own goal of billable hours by the time the project was complete.

Second, the firm sent constant “internal memoranda” by e-mail to all employees, down to the lowliest legal secretaries and paralegals, to work harder and BILL MORE HOURS. It was simply inconceivable that Cadwalader might have to refund any part of enormous retainer paid for the Excel Mortgage, SEC Registration Statement project. The money for this had all been advanced by BNY, who counted on Cadwalader to do the job which needed to be done.

Third, the practical purpose of any billable hours stood quite above and beyond any possibility of doubt or question. In fact, any and all billings, however described, so long as they were assigned to the Excel Mortgage Registration Statement Account, were welcomed.

Lincoln was therefore able to unleash his curiosity, delving late at night after hours into issues which ranged far, far afield from the environmental history, condition, and culturally or historically significant use or contents of the subject properties.

Despite some losses during 2007-2008, CWT was in 1993-1994, and remains today, the top firm representing the creators and implementing the designs of “structure finance and derivative securitization” worldwide. Lincoln wanted to understand what he was doing, and what he was involved in creating. The more he found out, the more troubled he became.

As an entry-level associate at Cadwalader, Lincoln received his own office and secretary and paralegal. Little time was spent interacting with others in the office. A quick question might be asked, but friends did not come quickly. Each associate knew what mattered was the hours billed, and friendly socialization was hard to itemize even on the Cadwalader charts. Hanging over the heads of all new associates was the goal of “making partner.”

As an anthropologist, Lincoln saw immediately the subculture of the law firm had its own standards, values, and mandates. The firm had high standards for dress which included ties which remained in place all day, regulations for tie clips or tie pins and cufflinks and belts and, of course, shoes, whether white or “normal.”

Standards for women included skirts below the knee and mandated the length for sleeves and the height of necklines and collars. Even the length of hair, for women, was described and outlined in the firm guide, although one paralegal from the litigation department was granted a special exemption, for cause. Known to and noted by everyone in the firm, for his ponytail and paisley shirts, the associate was hired from SDS in California as “our eyes and ears to the lower classes,” as the senior partners consistently and uniformly described him.

Lincoln, as an undergraduate, had twice been voted, “best dressed man on campus,” but the whole Cadwalader atmospheric ethos of bloodless conformity, as noted above, was for him one of stifling suffocation.

The anomalies which began to intrude on Lincoln’s consciousness during his late hours trying to understand the “entity” being sold almost as if it were a company or entity, without actually being one, became an obsession. At first, this lead only to more billable hours, but the trip down the rabbit hole became increasingly disconcerting.

All questions of real value or reasonable expectations led the inquirer to the Bank of New York’s heart, ending any questions.

The Disconnect between Law and Derivatives

Lincoln’s law school classes, under the University of Chicago’s Andrew M. Rosenfield, William Landes, Geoffrey Parsons Miller, and Richard A. Posner, and from his further and ongoing research as a Law Clerk with Ryskamp and now at Cadwalader, had considered the question of real value and reasonable expectations.

Issuing and selling securities, debt or equity, takes place when a company, or group of people who have control over assets they planned to use to make money, or with which they were already doing something generally profitable, or wanted to raise new capital and/or liquidate their ownership and interests in an ongoing and successful venture.

This did not come close to describing what Bank of New York had underwritten for Cadwalader to prepare for Excel Mortgage.

This SEC Registration Statement gave birth to new type of “debt-equity-derivative debt instrument” which had none of the elements or characteristics of a traditional enterprise at all. It was PAPER MADE FROM PAPER, SECURED BY PAPER.

Indeed, the Excel Mortgage Bond, which was soon to be popped onto the market with an SEC certification of Federal conformity was a creation of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers.

As one of the most senior associates, now firm chairman, Christopher White, explained to Lincoln when he asked him, “Who will own the interests in these notes once they are securitized?”

He replied, “We will, because everyone will have to pay us to tell them.”

Without any unifying manager or common owner for these properties, the pool of notes struck Lincoln as like nothing so much as “res nullius” in Ancient Roman Law—the legal category of “property belonging to no one”, e.g. virgin forests, wild beasts, and undomesticated fur and game animals of every kind, the un-owned and un-ownable creatures of the deep.

Excel Mortgage was going to pool all these “derivative” real estate mortgage interests, whose only commonalities marking them as similar were the price, promissory note, range, size and “single-family home-residential” nature of the properties, and the credit or FICO scores of the owners.

Having “pooled” these “cherry picked” assets, Excel was going to create a strange creature without an owner until either default or foreclosure moved someone to homestead these unownable notes back to control and “ownership” again.

In essence, the concept was, “everything belongs to everyone in common” and “debt is not individual but collective.”No one owes his or her debt to any person, but everyone owes it to everyone to pay.” This concept seemed, even to Lincoln in 1994, strangely reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

The Excel Mortgage Bond to be securitized reflected an artificial “derivative” interests in a non-coherent, uncontrolled mass of wealth, which could and would have to be tamed individually, just like hunting the wild game of the woods.

There would be only a pretense of relationship between the notes originated and the notes collected upon.

There was no one to oversee the transfers, no one to audit the exchanges of values; there were quite simply no responsible parties any more than anyone can take charge of wheat chaff thrown into the wind or the by-products of a paper mill dumped into a river, yet these “derivative by-products” were being STRUCTURED into something said to have value.

Around 1,500 or 2,000 properties had been collected together and placed in a basket or pool. But no single plan of real estate development or construction or sales was involved, nor was any contemplated. Nothing joined these properties as a class. Most were not new, but merely resales.

Raising the Issues

Lincoln dug in further, producing and circulating to all his fellow associates and the senior partners at Cadwalader his own memoranda: lengthy studies and analysis on issues such as the fiduciary obligations in the Law of Agency.

Fiduciary responsibility of issuers of securities to purchasers, holder in due course doctrine, implied covenants of good faith and fair dealing between parties to a contract, privity of contract itself, and commercial paper doctrines such as endorsement and ownership as holder, and the comparative rights and priorities of “naked” holders vs. “perfected” holders.

As Lincoln’s months stretched out among the whirring circular brushes which polished the green and white marble floors of CWT, he spent more-and-more time with the partners of the real estate department, which seemed to understand his worries and concerns better than others, certainly better than the fourth- or fifth-year associate in charge of coordinating the Excel Mortgage Project who kept explaining “this is my road to partner; if I can finish this and make it happen, I won’t have to worry about how to live on these lousy six figure salaries anymore, I’ll finally be making millions, and that’s why we all came here, isn’t it?”

Questions Find Answers

Since it was not why Lincoln had arrived at 100 Maiden Lane this presented a dead end for him.

The real estate connection, and an aborted plan to open a CWT office in California, permitted him to compare the Excel Mortgage project with another, more traditional real estate development in Sacramento, Calif.

An extremely prominent CWT client based in Los Angeles was complaining and encountering major problems because of a parallel but separate and distinct set of misapplications of the law of agency, fiduciary duty, and obligation, also originating from the same historical “Cadwalader Memorandum” on transfer of interests which had triggered the explosion of derivative innovations in the securities realm.

With CWT acting as counsel for an old and distinguished California family and collection of enterprises, the Ahmansons, tracts totaling several dozen suburban “townships” in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo, and Yuba Counties had sold by the Ahmanson family to a Japanese firm and retained an “Ahmanson Construction Group.”

The intention was to build a resort in the area for the benefit of the Japanese owners acting as “construction agents.”

Normally, construction is performed pursuant to agreements with “independent contractors” who make estimates but are not obligated to continue working if their estimated budgets prove insufficient to complete a project. The Japanese investors were seeking to securitize all the sales in this immense, almost unimaginable project.

Involved were the Bank of New York, with Cadwalader’s long-time California-based H.F. Ahmanson holding company, parent company both to Ahmanson Construction and the since failed Home Savings of America Bank.

The “construction agency relationship” which Cadwalader had created imposed devastating duties and obligations on Ahmanson. As agents, Ahmanson Construction was obligated to use its own money to achieve the ends of the principal, in this case the Japanese company which had purchased the real estate but woefully underfunded the construction of the vast tracts of homes. Ahmanson could not make a profit or even break even. In effect, they had become slaves to the Japanese and might never be compensated.

Lincoln, having reviewed the facts, pointed out to Stephen Meyer, Richard C. Field, and John McDermott, the partners most closely associated with Ahmanson, that by not only failing to protect Ahmanson, but in fact, selling them into quasi-slavery as agents under a contract without guarantees of adequate funding to execute agency obligations, the firm had made a ghastly mistake amounting to nothing less than legal malpractice. This was a breach of fiduciary duty in and of itself.

Lincoln was told, “This firm has a policy of doing no wrong. Therefore, you are wrong. The firm is never wrong. You should reevaluate your conclusions.”

This happened in 1994, only two and a half years after the sensational October 1991 confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas. The Paula Jones allegations against the new President Clinton, were beginning. “Sexual harassment” became a great boogie-man haunting law firms all over America.

Consequences are Clarified

After reading his memorandum on the Ahmanson project, these senior partners asked Lincoln to leave the room.

When they called Lincoln back in, they told him, very solemnly:

“you know you need to keep your nose clean around here. We have all received reports that you have taken your secretary Alex to lunch more than once and what’s more you gave Holly, the Senior Secretary in recruitment & personnel, flowers for her birthday and Valentines Day. So just remember: never ever do anything, anything at all, that you would not want to see published on the front page of the New York Times. Anything here can be, you know, and anything will be, at the drop of a pin, because everyone is very sensitive to questions of decorum these days, and, after all, you are a married man.”

Lincoln reports he did not even bother to ask how they happened to think of this only after a three-hour meeting concerning the Ahmanson contract of construction agency, when he had never heard about any concerns of this nature before.

At work, Lincoln continued to pile up daunting billable hours doing research on a growing list of issues, each going back to the dissection of the elements of value, which were being “deposited” into the derivative pool. He was determined to understand what was really happening. Why were they doing this?

Confirming what Christopher White had told him before, a Properties Department attorney named Stephen Meyer advised Lincoln to keep his mouth shut, this happening shortly before Lincoln was asked to resign. Both men had made it clear, in nearly the same words, that Lincoln should be careful about questioning or criticizing the firm’s plan for transforming the economy of the Western World, “This is how things are being done these days. We do because we get to charge everybody. This is how the whole world will be managed by 2020; we have a plan.”

As Lincoln was to discover, there was a plan. A book called “Cadwalader 2020” contained a comprehensive manifesto of how the world would be changed by the year 2020. Unsecuritized individual debt would no longer exist.

During Lincoln’s entire time at CWT, the firm maintained a high level of security over the Excel Mortgage work, work which finally involved everyone at the firm. All who worked at the firm had to submit to a frisk on leaving work. No papers or laptop computers or diskettes, this still the era of 3.5 inch diskettes, were to be taken home or removed from the premises, and no external e-mail was allowed connecting to firm e-mail. All firm e-mail was in fact carefully monitored.

To entirely use up the retainer on the Excel work, Lincoln and all the other firs-t and second-year associates found themselves in a large conference room supervised by some of the partners pasting labels on files.

The partners had to review the signature pages before officers of Excel would sign the documents, and the associates were there to prepare and affix signature tabs, saying “sign here, Mr. So-and-So, on to the final pages of Statement before final submission.”

Lincoln said it seemed odd to use attorney billable time to prepare, double-check, and verify signature tabs, even on a super important document until you considered the driving desire of CWT to maximize their billable hours.

Billing rates were $150 an hour for new associates, $60 – 80 an hour for paralegals, and $40 – 50 an hour for secretaries. On being told that he had failed to bill his secretary’s and paralegals’ time for bringing him after hours meals and snacks, Lincoln asked the senior associate in charge of organizing the Excel Mortgage Project how much the firm billed out for the hourly operators of the automated circular marble floor polishers which whirred seemingly ceaselessly day and night throughout the offices. Epstein just glared at Lincoln silently. Those hours were not billable.

CWT was determined to drain every possible penny from the work done for Excel Mortgage, and did. This appeared to be consistent with the Bank of New York’s plan in financing the project in the first place.

As Lincoln’s research continued, the business plan being followed by Excel Mortgage also emerged, in all of its complexity and disturbing detail. The company had seen the potential to redefine a debt, recreating it as equity, and equity can be used as collateral for originating and extending more debt, which can be hybridized with contingent interests in an ever-expanding pyramid of debt, doubled into equity, doubled into debt…. And again, this was the CWT-BNY plan for perpetual inflation.

There was quite simply no plan other than to pool and securitize the notes to issue X millions of dollars in bonds. These would be sold on the major stock exchanges, generating equity. The equity would be used to extend or originate more money to the borrowing public who then “sell” or give their new notes. This then generates more equity through debt, a constantly pooling and production of derivatives then sell to continue the cycle.

Ponzi Scheme Emerges

After his first month of painful research, it took Lincoln an additional six weeks to figure out and map the nature of the pyramid, another six weeks to check his work and accept the results, and then he started writing memoranda, one after the other, each one critiqued by other associates or the senior partners and getting longer and longer.

His first memorandum was entitled “The Law of Fiduciary Duty in Agency.”

His second was “Transfer and acceptance of instruments by endorsement and receipt: who is responsible?”

There were at least four others, the longest of which was over 500 pages.

Lincoln’s conclusion was breathtakingly simple: “Merger of identities destroys the identities merged, there is no individual liability for debt in the absence of privity of contract, and no privity of contract without individual identity of contracting parties.”

It was clear from the elated attitude of the Senior Partners that designing and implementing the Excel Registration Statement, as the first IPO of its kind, stood in their minds as their most important contribution to western civilization, as envisioned through the world of “Cadwalader 2020.”

Finally, Lincoln was asked to resign, about six weeks shy of his first anniversary. His questions and concerns had not ended and the Partners were becoming hostile.

Leaving with a not quite “Golden Parachute” consisting of a $50,000 severance payment, he had vocally identified a series of challenges which the management of Cadwalader had no intention of addressing. It was now clear to Lincoln these were not any kind of mistake or oversight.

Lincoln’s final memorandum at Cadwalader opined, perhaps overestimating general knowledge of the law, “no mortgage note included in the Excel mortgage pool will ever be lawfully collected in the event of borrower/credit-debtor default, because the pooling of identities obliterates individual obligations and rights, and discrete transactions lie at the foundation of our system of contract and debt.”

At the meeting where he finally resigned, the Senior partners, perhaps understanding the American public better than Lincoln, said to him, “Who is ever going to notice lack of privity of contract besides you? They teach you all those archaic “Elements of Law” at the University of Chicago. We know all about it, but nobody does business that way anymore. The economy of the future is now. Nobody cares about endorsements and signatures anymore; it’s all going to be electronic, anyhow.”

Lincoln responded, “Well, then, you’re going to have to change the law.”

The masters of the CWT universe said, “Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. We write the law, we interpret the law, we tell everyone in America what the law means, that’s what we do.

The Price Paid

The next 19 years of Lincoln’s life have been filled with constant attacks from the legal establishment from directions and in ways which exacted a hideous toll on him and those he loves. He has repeatedly learned what it is to be hated, rejected, despised, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. In those two decades he lost his wife, his birth family, and his son, all his inherited property, including several homes and a gigantic private library and personal collections of fossils, numismatic, painted, and sculptural art, his law licenses in three states and even his own not-at-all-insubstantial investments.

Lincoln notes that, after what can only be called a blessed beginning in life with his loving grandparents supporting him, an exceptional education, and basically a privileged and charmed first three decades of life, his consistent pattern of loss only began when he was 33-34 years with his entry into private law practice at Cadwalader, in what, quite simply should have been “the best of all possible worlds.”

Left with nothing, he refused to quit.

All of these events began after those critical months, less than a year, that he had spent at Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft.

As historical events unfolded, parallel to his own life, his worst projections regarding the impact of the new market in mortgage derivatives proved to be frighteningly accurate. Lincoln began to research how the runaway Ponzi Scheme could be halted, and reversed.

A Solution

According to Lincoln, for the past 10 years his life has been entirely shaped by the mortgage crisis and its origin in securitization. The question which, he says, drove him is how private property and integrity of contract could be restored in the face of the “New World Order” plan. This is the plan Lincoln first became aware of from the internal firm booklet “Cadwalader 2020,” while he was working at CWT in 1993-1994.

Lincoln believes such restoration is possible. The systemic fraud has not gone unnoticed, as CWT and BNY clearly thought would be the case. Their concern is registering through the rising wave of settlements which are now extinguishing the cases they deem most threatening. These cases are now settling on the courthouse steps for significant amounts and return of the real estate, free and clear of mortgage-related liens.

Banks understand the ominous possibilities they face if juries realize what really happened. And today, it is not just Cadwalader. Nearly every major financial law firm in the United States who is involved, directly or indirectly, in the implementation, defense, or coverup of securitization is potentially liable.

This potential for liability makes the settlements paid out by cigarette companies seem like chump change.

As long as such settlements are few and remain outside the view of the courts, the banks are safe. But the moment juries hear the facts, and see the reality, the banks are toast, and they know it.

And here, Lincoln said, is the leverage point from which change can be enacted. More cases must be litigated using the facts so cases won in the light of day can become case law and precedent. The war can be won, but will be costly. This challenge requires, along with several lines of attack, the means for funding litigation.

One possible solution is to solicit private direct investment in litigation for individual cases in exchange for a share of the awards by the jury. Another is to design an “anti-derivative derivative” plan which bundles and pools both investments and potential awards, allowing Americans at all income levels to invest in the effort.

For this derivative, investors would understand both the risk and the benefits of investing.

Lincoln’s team, they know, cannot fund its efforts as the banks do, by an out-of-control pyramid scheme piling debt on equity to create more debt, but Lincoln sees a certain symmatry achieved by using the weapons created by the originators of the problem against them.

Either solution, Lincoln says, lies directly in the hands of Americans. If the money is available, litigation can go forward. He and the team see a build-out across the country, with litigation taking place in every state as attorneys sign on and funds are available.

They have already begun. Lincoln’s team is now working with homeowners and the currently small number of attorneys willing to litigate. They have no illusions. They are aware they are going up against the most powerful institutions in the world. But they also know that, if they are successful, the crack now forming in the protections constructed by CWT, BNY, and so many others, makes it possible to reverse the ominous trends in the American housing market while proving it is possible to enact accountability for a corrupt establishment and good for the people.

If houses now held by banks go on the market, or are returned to their owners, the heavily inflated prices of homes will drop to their natural market levels based on supply and demand. Communities will stabilize, as will the lives of Americans.

The America which emerges from this crisis can be very different. No stability will ever result from the current expectations of perpetual economic growth relying on perpetual inflation and perpetual motion in the market place, and the resultant social instability.

The 99% need to bring the 1% home to live with the rest of us in peace, Lincoln says.

Given the propensity of the legal establishment to go after activist attorneys, Lincoln admits this will not be without risk, but public involvement can help here, too. He remains confident that many will step forward. They did so in 1775 and in other times of crisis in America.

Failing to act, he said, means abandoning Americans to the cartels and monopolies who are responsible for what has happened to our country.

Lincoln and other members of the team believe strongly most attorneys and judges, when asked to make a choice in the light of day, will do the right thing.

The effort has already begin in New Jersey. Right now he has a case in motion in the Garden State, just across the river from Manhattan, where Cadwalader still holds sway at the ominously named “One World Financial Center.”

Now, they are looking for more attorneys who love and respect the law, and investors who know what matters most and want to make a difference. His website is homeownersjustice.com.

The Last Step For War – Keeping Saddam Hussein In Iraq

Why did Saddam Hussein stay in Iraq? There was every motive to leave. He had seen what happened to leaders who attempt to withstand the corporate interests who are looking for an opportunity to loot a country. While John Perkins had not yet written his book, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” he knew the score. Saddam could never withstand an invasion by America. He was not suicidal. He had gotten his start as a hire for the CIA and knew what was poised to happen to him, his family, and his nation.

 Cast your mind back to those dark days when we were reeling, the images of towers falling from the sky still engraved on our retinas.

 Voices were being raised in objection and silenced.

 Look over the time line appearing in Mother Jones, September/October 2006 Issue, titled, “Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq,” by Jonathan Stein and Tim Dickinson.

 The war against Iraq began June, 2002, with intense bombing. The U.S. military flew 21,736 sorties and attacked 349 targets between June and the official start of the war in 2003.

 Bombing is an act of war.

 Rove, Cheney, and the Bush Administration, thwarted with the lack of evidence that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11, falsified evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Reports by debunked sources, specifically Curveball, known to be unreliable, was treated as trusted sources.

 Every conceivable action was taken to suppress the truth and allow the spin campaign, which began as the White House Iraq Group in August of 2002. This included, Rove, Libby, Rice, as well as Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin.

 Cheney personally lied, over and over again, to get Congress to acquiesce, to the media and to the public.

 The Administration knew they were manufacturing, spinning, to start a war even while Saddam Hussein was offering to allow UN inspectors into his country (Sept. 18, 2002) and all reports from returning CIA moles affirmed Saddam had abandoned WMD programs. This information was buried in the CIA bureaucracy.

 Anything which disagreed with the drive for war in Iraq was suppressed. Lies, ‘sexing up,’ reports, were reported publicly.

 The use of torture has been rationalized and was being used, despite the Geneva Conventions and Protocols on Human Rights and the Conduct of Hostilities.

 The Bush Administration was, collectively, behaving like a bunch of chimps working themselves up to violence, to a person, ignoring their actions and were, effectively, converting a nation dedicated to individual freedom and human rights into its antitheses.

 One Sept. 26, 2002, during a Rose Garden speech, Bush said, “The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.” The same day, during a speech in Houston Bush said of Saddam, “After all, this is a guy who tried to kill my dad.”

 Two days later Bush said in his address to nation: “‘The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more, and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given.”‘

 In an ominous foreshadowing of what was to come, Bush delivered a speech on Oct. 7, 2002, in which he stated, “‘Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Today we know effective deployment of drone technology was far beyond anything available to anyone – but the U. S.

 Battered and intimidated, on Oct. 11, “Congress—including all serious Democratic contenders—votes to grant Bush power to go to war.”  On Nov. 5, control of the Congress moved to the GOP. The campaign of lies, using fear and their love of country, had allowed the ongoing theft of elections by Karl Rove to work again.

 On Nov. 10 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1441 offering Iraq ‘”a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”” Iraq immediately agreed and UN weapons inspectors returned.

 Saddam Hussein would have known of every comment and been forced to consider his options. His country was being hammered by bombs, his plans to sell oil to partners other than the U. S. were, therefore stymied. It would be a compelling reality for him to consider an exit strategy at this point.

 Only one event could now stop the War in Iraq from going forward, for Saddam to offer to leave Iraq. Given his options, this would have been the only safe thing for him to do. All previous events, now clear to us and documented, show he was being set up. His very life, and those of his family members, were on the line.

 Saddam made just this offer in November of 2002.

 Clearly, the Bush Administration would ignore this request. Saddam, therefore, made contact with the previous administration. The Clintons, through their associate Sidney Blumenthal, former White House aide and his son, Max, pulled out all of the stops to ensure the one event which could derail plans to invade Iraq.

 The offer was made by Saddam, via email, through Max Blumenthal, this forwarded on to his father. With the Clintons’ assurances, they were able to persuade Saddam to stay in Iraq.

 Sidney Blumenthal was then unaware his computer had been hacked. A keylogger was sending his e-mails to another party, who reported this to the CIA. The same party then found herself subject to a barrage of harassment and threats beginning as the Iraqi invasion began.

 How much was it worth to keep Saddam in place? Could pay-offs have been made to ensure the cooperation, and silence, of the Clintons and Blumenthals?

 According to a Los Angeles Times article, titled, “Clintons disclose wealth,”published April 05, 2008, written by Peter Nicholas, Robin Fields, and Dan Morain,when the Clintons left the White House, “in January 2001, they (the Clintons) had amassed more than $11 million in legal debts, incurred during investigations into the Whitewater controversy and the former president’s affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.” Within the next year or so their, “returns show that the family’s annual income shot up after her husband left the White House, rising from $358,000 in 2000 to $16 million a year later, when Bill Clinton listed his occupation as “speaking and writing.” “

 Sidney Blumenthal also left the White House in less than prosperous financial condition. The cause was also a lawsuit stemming from elements of the NeoCon cabal which went into the White House in 2001.

 In 1997, Blumenthal had filed a $30 million libel lawsuit against Internet blogger Matt Drudge and AOL, Drudge’s employer, because of a false claim Drudge made of spousal abuse.

 In fact, the article was the brainchild of Drudge and John Fund, then still on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Drudge had attributed the story to “top GOP sources.” Drudge later retracted the story.

 Drudge publicly apologized to the Blumenthals and the lawsuit was dropped with Blumenthal, who, ironically, settled by making a small payment to Drudge over a missed deposition.

 In his book, The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal claimed he was forced to settle because he could no longer financially afford the suit, which had proven to be expensive. Drudge, who was guilty, had managed to receive support from both solicitations, claiming he was being harassed, and likely from operatives working for the NeoCons.

 Saddam’s actions, in offering to leave, were entirely predictable.

 Soliciting support from the Clintons, by the Bush White House, resulted in a cooperative relationship between the former and then president which was mutually beneficial, ending any threat from the Clintons and sealing them into a role within the power elite, which they continue to enjoy today.

Wayne Newton hired Jamie Phillips, after her equine apprenticeship program, to run his Arabian Horse Farms. Jamie says Wayne is a nice, generous man. She still sends him pictures of her kids at Christmas time.

Wayne made his wedding gift to her Ali Design, an Arab horse. Ali, like most Arabs, is friendly and would love to come in the house and sleep at the end of their bed. Bedouins raise their horses to live inside their tents.

That was 15 years ago now, before her two children and the “girls” arrived in her life.

Jamie and her husband bought a farm in Rock Creek so Ali would have room to run. It is located at 3948 State Route 45.

The “girls” entered Jamie’s life as an alternative to a day job.

Even early a few chickens were running around the yard. Folks would stop and ask if they could buy eggs. From this grew Phillips Egg Company.

The girls are Golden Comets, and each can lay 360 brown eggs a year. Jamie’s chickens, who she calls, “her girls,” go out a lot when the garden is not yielding. If it is, they have to stay in their yard, as the garden is a real magnet for them. So you could say the “girls” are a combination of “pasture raised,” and “free range.” They are always “cage-free.”

The girls chase and catch frogs and whatever they can find. In the summer they peck at the toes of visitors, too, being especially attracted to painted toe-nails, especially red ones.

Raising chickens and eggs commercially was easy to do, Jamie says. The inspection to be certified was free. The food inspector man came out, looked around and signed off. Jamie rigorously follows the rules, labeling instructions on the cartons of eggs, typed and printed out on recycled cartons. The only other requirement is having a thermometer in her refrigerator.

Jamie has also had Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Barred Rocks but prefers the Comets. The flock is not as pretty but their personalities are friendly and they are very, very brave. When she goes out to clean the coop as many as four chickens will try to ride on her because she appears to be roost-able.

The business is growing. They are branching out with their garden, cut flowers, and meat chickens. And every day has its little adventures with the “girls.”

Ashtabula, Ohio, is facing problems which could overload its already struggling social welfare services.  Across America more people are being forced onto food stamps or facing starvation. Some of these have lost their jobs. Others can no longer work because of disabilities which can be accounted for in other ways.

This appears to be especially true, and becoming more so, in Ashtabula, a small town of 29,000 inhabitants which sits at the epicenter of four super-fund sites, one of the most in any county in Ohio today.

While many of the companies responsible for the toxic waste have packed up and moved operations to third world countries, others have moved in, continuing the same practices. From the perspective of such companies, for instance Millennium, the attractions of the area include the history of previous pollution. Although the impact on the people and environment, calculated monetarily, would be enormous the company has routinely paid a tiny stipend, frequently around $50,000 a year in fines to the EPA.

Diseases and conditions which, two generations ago, were barely known, now account for a significant number of the individuals now requiring aid. Among these conditions are Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis, both neurological in origin, both becoming far more common in Ashtabula.

From multiple directions and sources indications now affirm something has changed. Tracking the incidence of these devastating diseases could result in nothing but more rapid action to identify the conditions which are increasing their incidence in Americans. Yet legislation which would accomplish this is stalled in Congress. In 2010, the House passed H.R. 1362, a act similar to the stalled Senate bill, S. 425: National Neurological Diseases Surveillance System Act of 2011.

The House bill passed with 206 cosponsors. The nearly identical Senate bill has 14 cosponsors, nine Democrats and five Republicans.. Both would provide for the establishment of permanent national surveillance systems for multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurological diseases and disorders. But until both pass and are signed into law, this cannot happen.

Having information freely available not only enables better choices for all of us, today it may well spell the difference between life and death for many Americans. Not knowing forces us to struggle in ignorance of facts essential for our health and well-being. And since these facts widely include information collected and retained by those in public service, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, this calls into question the motives of those working for government.

In Steve Lerner’s book, “Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States,” we see the unstated policy of ignoring corporate impact in specific areas for reasons which are never stated, also applied to the lives of the people who live there. The section of the Lerner book, which outlines the impact of Manganese poisoning in Marietta, Ohio, could well have been written about Ashtabula.

By so doing, the joining of corporate interests with the power of the state to externalize their costs and so augment their profits. In a rational world destroying the present value of resources which are common to all of us as the life-spans, intellectual and health of people are diminished and destroyed would be automatically treated as crimes.

Evading the consequences of these crimes by using the institutions of government smacks of a violation under color of law. Now, we must ask ourselves if the present compilation of policies is random, or planned.

A“National Sacrifice Zone” is defined as an area so contaminated or depleted of its resources as to have little or no future use. The term has been applied to areas which are badly polluted through previous corporate abuse of resources which go far beyond any right of ownership which can, rationally, be claimed by those responsible. Of the enormous number of examples presently in the forefront of public consciousness are fracking and manganese poisoning.

But the ‘sacrifice zones’ go beyond land, air, water, and the environment of which these are elements. It also includes people. In Ashtabula, and across both Ohio and Indiana, the sacrifice made to corporate prosperity included people’s health, their lives, and an additional cost has been paid in the slow, but inevitable shock suffered as they individually discovered the institutions, for which we pay, were actually working against them.

As you read Lerner’s book you hear the words of ordinary Americans, struggling to understand what is happening to them and why their lives and well being do not matter.

“We thought we had the American dream,” says Lesley Kuhl, who since 2002 has lived with her husband and two young children on a quiet, leafy street in Marietta, Ohio.

Mrs. Kuhl is a Republican, who considered herself conservative, when the threat to her children forced her into action along with both environmental activists and others in her town, like Caroline Beidler, who could no longer ignore the visible impact of pollutants on the health of their families.

Caroline Beidler and her husband, Keith Bailey, a carpenter, had built their “dream home,” in Marietta, Ohio. At the time they were unaware that their little piece of heaven was only four miles, as the crow flies, from the French-owned ferroalloy plant of Eramet Marietta, Inc.

According to Steve Lerner, author of “Sacrifice Zones,” “Eramet (which uses manganese, cadmium, and lead, among other feedstocks, to strengthen steel and purify chromium) releases tons of heavy metal dust into the air. It is one of the county’s top polluters.”

Their efforts transitioned from an informal club which logged the ugly odors carried by the breeze from the plant to increasingly organized efforts to stop the emissions. These struggles began in 2002. They continue today.

Tetrachloroethylene, “a chemical that can cause dizziness, headaches, nausea, unconsciousness, and even death.,” was only one of the pollutants being emitted. Tetrachloroethylene was not even on the long list of chemicals that Eramet admitting having released. In 2004, the company did, “emit 15,000 pounds of chromium compounds into the air and 75,000 pounds into the river and 500,000 pounds of airborne manganese.”

Manganese is a known neurotoxin. Manganese poisoning mimics Parkinson’s Disease, among many other conditions.

At first, Beidler was reluctant to make trouble. Over time she realized just how many road blocks existed between the safety of her children. Little help was forthcoming from state regulatory officials.

They discovered how many ways accountability could be evaded by companies which routinely spend money to influence government but never enough to solve the problems they create. Fingers were pointed in every possible direction but little changed.

According to Lerner, “Total releases of toxic chemicals by Eramet reported to federal officials were radically cut from about 12 million pounds when the company was purchased in 2000 to about 6 million pounds of TRI releases in 2004.”

In December 2005 a report by David Pace of the Associated Press listed Eramet as the top factory nationwide “whose emissions created the most potential health risk for residents in the surrounding community.” Washington County was ranked number one for the “highest health risk from industrial pollution in 2000.”

This was the year Lesley Kuhl really confronted the problem.

The group which formed around Beidler and Kuhl, “began to collect information about air quality in their region and make their network of members aware of key regulatory developments, scientific studies, health studies, and emissions at Eramet.”

The bottom-line motive was the continuing threat to children, their children. In December 2005 Mrs. Kuhl read an article in the local newspaper on the impact of elevated levels of air-borne heavy metals their possible impact on the development of the brains of very young children. The Kuhl children had suffered numerous sinus infections that had to be treated with antibiotics, and one of whom was diagnosed with a developmental disorder. Loss of IQ points was also listed as a possibility.

Further research revealed older people could experience mood and movement problems from exposure. Suggestions for a ‘study,’ to take three years, was not a solution.

Also, the families realized even moving was no guarantee of a safe haven. How could they know where was safe? Their children began to be tested for manganese exposure.

The Kuhls and others continued to be shocked at the disregard for the health and well being of their children. Their knowledge of the problem, and how long it had been known, increased.

Dick Wittberg, another resident, who heads the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department, had carried out a pilot study in the late 1990s. The study compared the ability of children in Marietta to perform physical tasks and answer academic questions. These were compared the results from Marietta with, “a control sample of children from a similar-sized town in Athens, Ohio, located forty-five miles away.”

A battery of 13 tests were administered to fourth-graders in both cities. The children were matched, “for age, sex, and parental education. The tests measured such things as educational proficiency, balance, visual contrast sensitivity, and short-term memory.”

The results were disturbing: “across the board: the Marietta youngsters scored significantly lower on the tests than did those from Athens.” In his opinion, “the study points to some neurological differences and one has to suspect manganese. Nobody knows, for kids, how much [exposure] is too much.”

The stalling tactics continue from Aramet.

Protocols for handling potential pollutants, thus eliminating the danger of impact exist today.  This is not rocket science.  The only impact to be felt if such procedures become standard is to end a threat to public health, the need  for clean-up, all too often paid for by taxpayers, and awaken corporate balance sheets to the reality of a real free market.  There is no inherent freedom to cause harm to others.

It is time to get specific about what protocols must be applied and on the issue of liability.

This is how a free market is applied. You can tell if it is a free market because if government can intervene to limit liability or allow acts which are, by their nature criminal, what you are seeing is corporate fascism.

As bad as the situation is in Marietta, what is facing Ashtabula could be far worse. The toxic releases of Manganese are double what is present in Marietta, the source of pollution, Millennium, is far closer to population centers, and a clock, of which we have only recently become aware, is ticking toward a point of no return for many people.

A study, Parkinsonism Induced by Chronic Manganese Intoxication– An Experience in Taiwan, by Chin-Chang Huang, MD, includes the troubling facts, “Excessive manganese exposure may induce a neurological syndrome called manganism, which is similar to Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, close observation of patients with manganism reveals a clinical disease entity different from PD, not only in the clinical manifestations, but also in therapeutic responses. “ “…after long-term follow-up studies, patients with manganism showed prominent deterioration in the parkinsonian symptoms during the initial 5-10 years, followed by a plateau during the following 10 years.”

The summary, in large part quoted above, ends with, “Although typical patients with manganism are different from patients with PD, the potential risk of inhaling welding fumes, which may accelerate the onset of PD or even induce PD, has been raised during recent years. This controversial topic requires further investigation.

The results of this study should be considered along with this graph showing money spent on lobbying by the American Chemical Council. Source: Open Secrets While it is nearly impossible to know how the money was spent the timing is telling.

Also available to influence legislators are the many corporations who readily donate to non-profits which, people believe, are working solely to protect them. These include, “3M, Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, Occidental Petroleum, Philip Morris, Proctor & Gamble and W.R. Grace,” according to Integrity in Science, who routinely tracks such relationships.

The people of Ashtabula are not inhaling fumes from working as welding. They are getting it directly and it is time action was taken to establish real standards backed up by real disincentives as those impacted are compensated. In so doing, Ashtabula can begin the process of returning America to a nation of law and justice.

For more information contact Ashtabula Renewal – The Clean-Up ashtabulanenewal.org
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster, Organizing Director, Dave Lincoln, Technical Director

The present aftermath from Hurricane Sandy should not surprise any of us since we have seen the effects of hurricanes on population centers before. Even today, New Orleans has not been entirely rebuilt, leaving over 30,000 people who formerly had homes still waiting.

The tragedies now enveloping Americans in the communities hit by Frankenstorm, on Oct. 29, could have been avoided. This disaster is a direct result of our failure to make sure the infrastructure on which we depend politically, economically, and to keep us safe in the face of disaster does the job we pay to have done for us by government. The source of the problem is not ‘natural disaster’ but one of design and priorities.

The tens of thousands now homeless, having lost everything, remain mired in the evidence our system has failed. We need to see this and take action.

Instead of providing relief, government talks and gives news conferences. Relief efforts remain, largely from volunteers, including Baptists coming in from Louisiana, veterans of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and residents from surrounding areas who are digging into their own resources to ensure people in need are helped.

Instead of sending out suggestions on supplies to have on hand, the enormously expensive government agencies which were assigned to provide for disaster relief should have:

Stockpiled immediate resources to be made available to put people back into their neighborhoods with temporary housing, complete power generated on site, and sanitary and cooking facilities. Plans for such units, which could have been moved in either by road or helicopter, as needed, were ignored in favor of FEMA trailers and shelters, where available.

The specter of small children and elderly, starving and freezing in America, or anyplace else, is not to be tolerated.

Now, we should be working on fast-tracked plans for rebuilding. Since we know it will be necessary to replace homes, schools, and other buildings quickly, the correct approach would be to do it now by spending money to provide better stability and security in impacted areas proven to be vulnerable to disaster. We need pay for no studies to know where this one is.

Rebuilding should be carried out Deep Green, entirely off the grids. The needed materials and technologies exist. Let’s use them, at the same time demonstrating their thrift and superiority. Homes, schools, and businesses could even now be going up. Construction and rehabitation could take place in as little as a month for the first structures.

This is the plan we should have had in place.

Both major political parties today focus only on continuing their sinecure for job security and profits.

It is time to move forward and it is past time for Americans to join together to make this happen. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Reformers, Greens, or Justice, we are all one in needing the security we are now paying for so dearly.

The election is over. It is time to begin examining what we have accepted and believed and instead become more discerning.

President Obama will continue in office for the next four years. A simple swearing in would be appropriate and a powerful statement which needs to be heard. We must conserve our resources and use them wisely.

All of us hope and pray for real change. We need it and should demand it from those elected to serve.

Plans are now going forward for an Inaugural. Instead of spending money on what is, essentially, a party for corporate donors, money which was earmarked for this event should be spent on the plan for rebuilding above and for immediate relief for those still homeless and without power and food.

Corporate donors should dig into their pockets and help make it happen. Arrange another time for a party at the People’s White House, when those now in need are cared for.

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster – Rebuild America

Nathan MacPherson – MacPherson Investment Group

Sign the petition HERE

It was obvious the election was going to be stolen months ago. Rove and company were pulling the same old tricks we have been watching since 2000 with the voting machines, ‘de-registering’ voters, and using phone calls to keep people away from the polls. It looked like a cakewalk for Karl.

Then reports started coming through the Voter Integrity mailing lists with reports of voters seeing their votes transferred, not just from Obama to Romney, but Romney to Obama. True? Who knows.

The jumping vote was exactly what Marilyn Blankenship of Dallas, Texas, reported happening when she tried to vote for the Libertarian candidate in 2004 instead of George W. The little mark, all on its own, finds the X Spot has been selected for them. Mrs. Blankenship protested vehemently for several years, to no avail.

From both sides the cheating started as both candidates ruthlessly destroyed the opposition from within their own party. Ron Paul was just the most visible example.

Did Obama design a strategy to ignore the popular vote, going for the Electoral College! Did it, too involve hacking? Who knows. Ol’ Karl ‘s eyes probably bugged out. Our electoral process is dead either way.

Now it is kind of quiet. No one is happy. Those who were supporting Obama as the lesser of two evils can now consider how very bad the last four years have been. The lesser of two evils is still not a good deal.

Mike Adams, of Natural News predicts these events:

#1) Huge expansion of TSA and the surveillance state;

#2) Expansion of secret arrests of American citizens;

#3) Acceleration of national debt blowout and endless fiat currency creation;

#4) Rapid expansion of GMOs and USDA collusion;

#5) Increasingly dictatorial government health care;

#6) Immediate surge in sales of guns and ammo;

#7) Accelerated erosion of the Bill of Rights and civil liberties;

#8) Continued destruction and looting of the U.S. Economy;

#9) A “giant sucking sound” of employers leaving America;

#10) Stepped-up attacks on veterans and preppers.

There is really only one solution. We need to take back the vote to the most local level, voting on paper ballots which are counted openly and transparently at the precinct. People from all political viewpoints have traditionally done this routinely with no friction. Each precinct publishes to the Internet. We can count for ourselves.

It can be done. See you in 2016.

Henry Story, born in 1941, was raised here. As a small child he began to dream of places far away with an intensity which called to him.

Henry’s parents, Henry Senior and Iola, came to Ohio from Arkansas in 1940s so Henry’s dad could work in a war plant.

After the war, the family moved to a dairy farm in Windsor, Ohio. The elder Henry began milking cows, planting oats and wheat, to be used as fodder for the cows, also raising hogs, chickens and ducks. “They did the whole deal,” as Henry, Jr. put it.

Later, the family moved to East Trumbull. Home was down a dirt road a mile and a half long with no close neighbors. There was no electricity and the water came from a hand pump in the kitchen.

During winter, Henry walked the mile and a half to the bus because the bus could not make it down the road through the snow. He attended school in Rock Creek. His favorite subject, then and today, is history. History takes us out of ourselves in many directions and Henry had already decided on the direction for his life.

Since his earliest years Henry had experienced two dreams. The first was a shiny gold disk with wings. When young Henry saw the disk in his dream he felt himself lifting out of his body and seeing the world from very different perspectives. The second dream, which also recurred, was of a bull, which chased him. He would run, levitating himself into the tree. The disk, he later realized, was the ancient symbol of the Rosicrucian Order. He remembered a reincarnation in China and studying at the Shaolin Temple in China.

Henry’s study of martial arts began by watching Little Ricky on Ozzie and Harriet, after the family had a television.

At age 19 Henry left Ashtabula County to study martial arts. He returned in Ashtabula in 1985 where he began sharing his mastery at the YMCA and later at the Wellness and Total Learning Center. He taught martial arts, and also his philosophy, continuing his own studies until last November, when he suffered a stroke. As he has recovered, his studies have served him well.

Today he is a student in the Qi Gong class he once taught. Now nearly blind, he continues to seek wisdom and solutions which heal body, mind, and spirit.