This is Memorial Day and besides all of the expected ways it is celebrated I figured some memorable thoughts of our founding fathers might be appropriate to reflect upon:
In 1798 Jefferson wrote: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” John Adams said in 1772, “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” His wife Abigail later commented, “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.”
In a letter to George Washington in 1784, Jefferson asserted that the foundation on which any constitution must rest is “the denial of every preeminence.” He further argued in 1786 that the essence of America was that “the poorest laborer stood on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar.”
Robert Liptak
Iowa Bankruptcy Attorney
The main definition of insolvency is the condition of having more debts (liabilities) than total assets available to pay them, even if the assets were mortgaged or sold. In other words, one’sliabilities exceed the fair market value of one’s assets. For those who are close to being insolvent a critical issue is making transfers of property without fair consideration for its value thereby causing insolvency.
So let’s say one has a house worth $200,000, a car worth $20,000, a motor cycle valued at $8,000 and a boat at $3,000. The rest of the assets (e.g. household goods and furnishings, clothes, jewelry, etc.) are worth $14,000 fair market replacement value. That makes $245,000 of assets, nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Sounds impressive until we look at the typical debts.
Debt could easily be $180,000 on 1st mortgage and $10,000 on a home equity loan; an underwater $20,000 SUV with a $30,00o loan balance; and $5,000 of secured furniture and appliance loans. That makes $225,000 of debt. Then there is $3,000 credit card and medical debt plus $15,000 in student loans. Added together the debt equals $243,000. In theory this person is not insolvent to the tune of $2,000.
In time it may be a pinch to pay loans as they become due. They seldom seem to reduce much in the face of minimum payments and adjustable rate loans, for example. Eventually payments are missed and creditors attempt to collect. Not a pleasant experience.
For this or other unrelated reasons people sometimes start to transfer their property to children, parents, friends, and partners for little or no consideration. In the example, the unsecured boat ($3K) or motorcycle ($8K) or both ($11K) may be transferred away. Often people believe, wrongly, that they are protecting themselves. While a natural reflexive reaction to debt stress or just an innocent gesture these transactions would render the person insolvent. In the state of Iowa this would be considered a fraudulent transfer if the transfer occurred within the last 5 years (even longer in certain circumstances). If the person files bankruptcy, a federal law, the trustee would look back at least 2 years. In either situation the creditors or trustee could reverse the transaction as fraudulent with unpleasant if not dire consequences.
Moreover, even if one is filing bankruptcy, where in fact one does not have to actually be insolvent due to other property protections called exemptions, such transfers could be reversed as fraudulent because the property’s value was not received.
There are myriad possible examples of how transfers can hurt us. See a lawyer BEFORE you start giving assets away or selling to your kid or brother-in-law for peanuts. Peace of mind should be based on facts and the law.
Attorney Robert Liptak
Iowa Bankruptcy Attorney
Most of us know about the economic bubbles, big and small, that hit the economy every few years during the last two decades. All the “economic experts”, politicians and their media clients inundate us with the rationales for why there was a tech bubble blowup, or housing bubble explosion, commodities bubble burst or oil bubbles spill. One crisis after another comes down the pike. “More than $ 5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ [bubble crash] alone.” –Tabbi
Most of us experience how much these bubbles negatively impact on our personal finances from the loss of public wealth to job and personal investment losses. But what we don’t usually know is that almost always, “the financial crisis, is created by huge aggrandized financial institutions borrowing vast sum of money and gambling it all away, knowing that the government will swoop in and rescue them if they failed.” –Taibbi. All while the major players, both corporate and individual, make enough money (not to mention the cost to the taxpayers and real loss to the economy we live in) to significantly bail out the rest of the country from its financial woes. But these facts do not make the agenda, so are never considered in making the policies.
The financial game playing is obscene and all too often criminal. The vast majority of people who suffer from it (not those elites who benefit exorbitantly from these schemes and scams) are left to pay the bill or worse become personally insolvent without having done anything wrong or anything at all. The sound bite response from those who benefitted might be something like, with the housing bubble, the blame lies with the poor people on welfare, the government mandate to get everyone in a home, and on those poor lazy people living in too much house. Or with oil, it’s our gluttony for oil usage in America. Those, it terms out, are the pretexts. Through the establishment media probably most of us are swayed to believe such misdirections, particularly because the truth seldom enters the media’s politicized attention n these regards.
Over-the-counter derivatives, CDOs, credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, US cities literally selling (OK, leasing for 75 years) parts of their infrastructure, like Chicago selling off its meter system, the tax code changes providing tax breaks to giant corporations (especially those in trouble) and TARP, had nothing to do with the problem and its horrific effect for the population.
The facts continually show that the welfare (such as the bail outs and slick tax and interest rate changes) goes to those “systematically important” financial institutions. Too big to fail. The rest of us get the bill.
So where are we? Mostly in a play in which we are pawns to the elite, whether financial, political, or media who in concert run the show and tell us the story.
Our real government is mostly kept hidden from view, and the truly weighty decisions about where our society is going and what rules it is going to live by are made mostly in private, by groups of anonymous lawyers and bureaucrats and lobbyists, government officials and industry reps alike.
Taibbi, Matt (2010-11-02). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (p. 247).
We have voters who don’t pay attention, a news media that either ignores key subjects or willfully misunderstands them, and a regulatory environment that bends easily to lobbying and campaign financing efforts. And we’ve got a superpower’s worth of accumulated wealth that is still there for the taking. You put all that together, and what you get is a thieves’ paradise— a Griftopia.
Taibbi, Matt (2010-11-02). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (p. 250).
And this is a place where the vast majority of the people suffer because as Taibbi points out, these “drivers of the Great American Bubble Machine aren’t producers, but takers.” We know this to be fact from any fair review of the bubbles that have burst upon us. They are taking from us, behind our backs, leaving too many in financial extremis.
Learn and speak up to create a challenge and a change.
Robert J. Liptak
Iowa Bankruptcy Attorney
One of the primary causes of financial strain, insolvency and eventual bankruptcy is the burden of medical debt on families and individuals. There is researched evidence showing this by such notables as Professor Elizabeth Warren (now senator) while she taught law and researched at Harvard. Statistics have the number of filers due to medical indebtedness as high as 50%. Much of the problem it turns out is among those who in fact have medical insurance–as high as 75% of those who file.
It is common knowledge that there is an epidemic of illness in the United States and the US ranks low among industrialized countries in healthcare. According to Forbes,
It’s fairly well accepted that the U.S. is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, but many continue to falsely assume that we pay more for healthcare because we get better health (or better health outcomes). The evidence, however, clearly doesn’t support that view.
For example in the same Forbes report of the ten countries reviewed the US ranked dead last, as follows:
1. United Kingdom
2. Switzerland
3. Sweden
4. Australia
5. Germany & Netherlands (tied)
7. New Zealand & Norway (tied)
9. France
10. Canada
11. United States
Many other studies and reports support the finding–the US has not only poor health and shorter lives but by far the most costly healthcare system in the world. There is a huge disparity between what we pay for and what we get, insofar as real health outcomes.
A major reason for this plight is the massive administrative costs of the healthcare system. Across the US, hospitals and doctors need to spend inordinate amounts of their time and overheard on paperwork and the ensuing battles caused by private insurance companies’ machinations behind closed doors.
Because we have no single-payer system, because we have 1,300 different insurance companies that all require different forms to be filled out and have different methods for judging claims, the great bulk of nonmedical personnel at hospitals and clinics are assigned to chasing claims.
Taibbi, Matt (2010-11-02). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (p. 178).
In many hospitals more than half of the staff is devoted to collecting money from the insurance companies. Taibbi continues,
American health care, to employ a seriously overused term, is a Kafkaesque parody of corporate inefficiency, with urgently necessary procedures approved at split-second speed by doctors standing over living patients at one end, balanced out on the other end by a huge Space Mountain of corporate denials that must later on be negotiated in the dark by helpless underpaid clerks in order to extract payment for those same procedures.
Taibbi, Matt (2010-11-02). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (pp. 178-179).
In sum, the enormous paperwork is a huge excessive cost in the health care system with the patient eventually bearing the brunt of the bill. Healthcare is over 22% of our GDP according to the 2015 government forecast. On the average we spend more than twice as much on healthcare than countries with market economies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
and for that greatly increased outlay we get higher infant mortality, higher obesity rates, lower longevity, fewer doctors per 1,000 people (just 2.4 per 1,000 in the United States, compared with 3.1 in OECD states), and fewer acute care hospital beds (2.7 per 1,000, compared to 3.8 per 1,000 in the OECD countries).
Taibbi, Matt (2010-11-02). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (p. 179).
The bottom line is that the cost of health care is increased by about 31% due to huge non-health related administrative expenses according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
One result is there have been many hospitals that have gone bankrupt. While sad in itself, this procedure is often cloaked in a Chapter 11 Reorginization plan which may slip by unnoticed by the general population and the patients because the daily functioning of the institution does continue. But the inevitable response is that the insurance companies, having created the problem, do not reduce the administrative costs. Rather in most cases they increase the paperwork demand, particularly with added and absurd denials. For example, after its bankruptcy one NJ hospital was denied a claim because the patient who received IV antibiotics had been a nurse twenty years earlier and should have been able to administer that care for herself, to herself, at home. Taibbi quotes one hospital administrator trying to cope with the very problem: “I guess if your father’s a surgeon and your mother’s an anesthesiologist, lie down on the kitchen table and get your heart fixed there.”
These insurance companies make endless requests for more proof, more copies, more this and that, saying we will get back to you. And the cost and the company’s income skyrockets. This is against a backdrop of no meaningful federal regulation of the system and of state regulators being the servants of these corporate masters. Of course, on the other end, the CEO’s and high level managers of these insurance companies make massive salaries.
In the end, the patient and the patient’s family–the customers– are asked to pay the bill which does not get covered. There is a grand scheme to build up costs in the dark and the patient who had to or is still dealing with the illness is the victim. Insurance without any assurance…
Personal bankruptcy is one solution to this debt problem but a careful informed look behind the scenes shows that this should have been avoided if the system was structured to actually be concerned about health care and not only money.
Robert Liptak
Iowa Bankruptcy Attorney
There are a lot of ads and even expensive TV commercials about negotiating your debt. There may be some good companies available who can actually do something for you rather than just fill their coffers with your much needed money (which as a bankruptcy attorney I saw was the usual result my clients’ had experienced, sometimes for years and for large sums). There also are many inquiries by state attorney generals throughout the US claiming fraud and scams by a lot of these businesses.
Regardless, even if you can successfully negotiate your debt through a company or perhaps by your self or in the case in which the lender closes the account for various reasons (which does happen) there is another issue you will not be able to overlook–the mandatory 1099 C (the debt cancellation 1099) which you and the IRS will receive.
As there is a logic to every law debt cancellation 1099’s probably have one, although after all my years as a bankruptcy lawyer I still cannot grasp why income taxes are charged on a deficiency from a loan. Whatever the reason the point is that yes, your 1099-C will arrive after the cancellation and you will have to report everything that you did not pay AS TAXABLE INCOME. There of course are some exceptions for those who are insolvent or for which the debt was discharged in bankruptcy which relieve one from the income tax liability. (See IRS form 982). But even if you are not insolvent or did not file bankruptcy, that does not mean you are beyond the binding grasps of the monthly expenditure of all your income for your and your family’s subsistence needs. This in effect makes the tax a not so subtle garnishment of your vitally needed wages with no recourse. Don’t be surprised!
Learn more about the black holes of debt cancellation or see an attorney or tax accountant who can help you understand the pitfalls before you trip into one.
Attorney Robert Liptak
Iowa Bankruptcy Attorney
When one reaffirms a debt in bankruptcy it in effect takes the debt out of the protection of the bankruptcy laws. The contract is treated as if the bankruptcy did not exist. There are sometimes good reasons to do this and most times not. Your bankruptcy lawyer can help you steer through the murk. Although the law actually relates to personal property debt and not real estate, the mortgage companies have taken the tact to ask, and in an indirect way, demand that one signs a reaffirmation agreement on the mortgage and note. This move should be very carefully considered by the debtor in bankruptcy and only upon the advice of an experienced attorney.
One advantage is that if one gets a reaffirmation then the mortgage company will continue to notify the credit reporting agencies that the debtor is paying the debt–which is helpful to rebuild one’s credit. Part of the twist though is if one does not sign the reaffirmation the company refuses to alert the reporting agencies of the regular monthly payments, with the side effect of not improving the credit. Although this is not warranted by law it has become the common bank practice.
I had an example yesterday that was indicative of the absurdity of the bank tactics. The debtors did not get a reaffirmation for their home on which Wells Fargo Bank possessed the mortgage. For over 4 years since the bankruptcy the debtors made every single monthly payment on time to Wells Fargo. As the interest rates have improved of late the debtors approached WFB to refinance their loan. The person they negotiated with proposed a very nice refinancing deal (better interest rate, limited closing costs, no docs, etc.). This would save the debtors a large amount of money. Unfortunately, when the broker placed the loan application into review the bankruptcy department nixed the loan solely because the reaffirmation had not been signed. The point of the reaffirmation is to insure that the loan was paid. In fact it had been since the BK and for 6 years prior, AND it was paid to the same bank that would refinance the loan. Yet the loan was denied.
There obviously was no increased risk to the bank (which by the way had netted $5.7 billion dollars in the last reported quarter) but was a good savings for the debtors. Moreover, in Iowa even if the debtors would default the bankruptcy reaffirmation would having little practical meaning because the usual procedure is to waive any deficiency in the foreclosure (regardless of the so-called protective reaffirmation). The reaffirmation would give no real value to the bank. Also in this particular case there was a substantial amount of equity in the home so the bank was protected even with a default–and it knows this! This is the nonsense we face with banks…
Lastly it is noteworthy that both judges and debtor attorneys are reluctant to agree to reaffirmations–in part because these agreements tend to contradict the very goal of most bankruptcies and for real estate, don’t apply. Each may sign when presented with the right arguments, but there is resistance.
It may seem harsh to say the there is a class war in the US that we battle every day. It is between the rich and the vast majority of people. If you are rich, the system is working well for you. It is set up that way. As the rich control the economy, the corporate world, the government and the media, they command it all and explain that everything is just fine (or we’d like to deal with that but can’t right now–believes us).
Professor Chomsky points out that,
“Household debt is out of sight, but corporate debt is very low. In fact, corporations are making huge profits. That’s part of the shift in the way economic planning is carried out, to benefit the superrich and the corporations and to harm the general population. In fact, the ratio of taxed income to gross domestic product is close to an all-time low, and it is skewed toward the general population, much more so than before.”
For example, corporations hardly pay or do not even pay taxes due to sophisticated, complicated techniques–tax havens and protected investments. So the corporations and rich people barely pay any taxes. And as long as they are doing fine there is no problem. Except for the ones too many are actually experiencing but which are not redressed.
It’s not just Wall Street or Walmarts that benefit from the rich man’s loopholes. The larger the corporations the more benefits they receive. For example, having been an enthusiastic football player in college and a fan of professional football all my life I also marveled in my youth at the possibility that individuals could own professional teams in the NFL. Now as an adult I am shocked by the fact that the NFL does not pay any taxes. A mega-rich organization exempted from taxes! The general population is in financial crisis, low minimum wages, underemployment, stagnation or decline in real wages, working longer hours with fewer benefits. But at least we can turn on the TV and between the manipulative commercials, watch the ball games.
We certainly can say that the US is a very rich country. “It’s got enormous advantages, of scale, resources, anything you can think of. But it is being subjected to domestic policies that are frightening,” noted Chomsky. What we see today is short term gains and disregard for long term impact. Wall Street and the government is essentially transferring costs to the general public, including future generations–our kids and their kids. This greatly serves the rich and powerful today and costs the general public now and then.
One example is health care. Not a problem for the rich who can afford excellent coverage. The health care insurance industry, the pharmaceutical corporations and health maintenance organizations are doing quite well. Yes the rich are doing fine. If the general population is struggling with health care, that’s not the problem of the wealthy (or the representatives in Congress they paid to elect). Astronomical health care costs for the population, too bad. Cutting back Medicaid or any health services for the masses becomes the policy because it only harms the poor people. Not the concern of the rich. Or what about social security. It’s not for the rich, so it should be shelved.
In short always ask the question, “does it help the rich or does it help the general population?” From that you can usually predict what is going to happen.
One unfortunate aspect of all this is that too many of us are mislead, misinformed and misdirected into thinking that is just the way it is or has to be. The privileged created the privileges. Really? Think again and deeply into the causes and effects. Does it have to be this way?
“Many of the basic institutions of our society are totally illegitimate. Do corporations have to be controlled by management and owners and dedicated to the welfare of the shareholders instead of being controlled by the people who work in them and dedicated to the community and the workers? It’s not a law of nature. –Chomsky.
These set-ups reflect made-made laws that can and should be altered to embrace human values, values more meaningful that the immediate profits. We really did not have to spend trillions of dollars to bail out those self-proclaimed “too big to fail” businesses. They were not too big to fail (or too big to jail). We must stop looking the other way and accepting what is deeply wrong for the people collectively. With all fundamental changes that have ever taken place, it is when the masses of people awaken to the fact of their own power that a revolution of real human (and humane) progress begins.
We have to be very careful with our kids. The TV, the radio, the internet, the commercials, the sinister manipulation done to entice them to want what is not needed. Then to buy, in other words, to get mommy and daddy to buy, producing the seeds of a vicious cycle of desire and reaction, inevitably leading to habits that will be used against them their entire lives. According to Noam Chomsky,
there has been a century of intense . . . a very sophisticated effort to develop a complex propaganda system. Mostly it’s used to brainwash people here through advertising. Huge amounts of capital go into marketing and advertising, and it’s basically to maintain a consumer society. For example, some years ago advertisers realized that there is a segment of the population that they are not reaching, because they don’t have any money, namely children. And a lot of thinking was done about what to do with this and they developed propaganda aimed at infants to try to get them to nag their parents because that’s where the money is. So if the children can demand from their parents, that they want this or that, parents would get it for them.”
And there is now an academic discipline, taught at applied psychology departments, of nagging. Different kinds of nagging for different kinds of purposes. If you ever watch television as I sometimes do with my grandchildren, from two years old they are being bombarded with consumer messages. There is nothing left untouched.”
Chomsky, Noam; Vltchek, Andre (2013-09-05). On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare (Kindle Locations 726-728). Pluto Press. Kindle Edition.
How much of our spending habits comes from those seeds intentionally planted in us when we were young, innocent, and malleable. And who is to blame? The debtor? And by the time we were teenagers, often with our own money, what commercial techniques and messages were we subject to? And as adults, it should be obvious, but for most it is not…
Bankruptcy Attorney Robert Liptak
Iowa
I am an Iowa bankruptcy attorney. Bankruptcy law is the only type of law I practice. I become a lawyer in 1979 and practiced in other legal fields in Pennsylvania and then New York. Of course, there are many valuable areas of law that can help people and businesses, but over time it became abundantly clear that bankruptcy is quite exceptional. So throughout my home state of Iowa it’s all that I do.
Through my extensive experience I have concluded that in order for clients to be really satisfied with bankruptcy they need personal care and attention and it should be by a lawyer—not a paralegal or debt settlement agent.
I also found that it is valuable to gain a deeper understanding WHY you need to file bankruptcy. Once you understand, your experience changes. If you can appreciate that you were actually set up—a victim of the profit motive forces driving the financial system—the stress can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated altogether.
Liptak Law Offices provides both of these opportunities: personal attention by an experienced, compassionate lawyer AND some valuable education. I also have a very informative radio show which can be heard through my website under the Life and Debt resource archive.
By way of introduction, I want to share with you some of my ideas about bankruptcy which you probably have not heard before. A few accurate statistics and facts will lead you to a different conclusion about filing bankruptcy, your situation and even your feelings about yourself.
First, it really is important never to blame yourself, as if you alone are at fault for the economic woes you—and the entire country– are suffering. Simply not true. Just look around you, particularly at the country as a whole, and you will get very strong evidence that something basic is not right.
In fact, every year about 1.5 million people and families across the United States file bankruptcy. That does not include commercial bankruptcies. According to Professor Elizabeth Warren from Harvard (who has done extensive research in this area) about 7 times that number (more than 10.5 million consumers over the age of 18) qualify for and desperately need relief each year from the massive weight of debt that holds them and their loved ones down. And this does not include the approximately 45,000 million Americans who are in poverty and are below even the need to file bankruptcy.
Most who should, do NOT file though. Why? Because of what they heard and fear. There is a sort of “blaming the victim” strategy that has been cultivated in our country for a long time. We trust what we hear from supposedly reliable sources providing “guidance”. You are innocently and naively drawn into a game which is rigged against you from the beginning. When you lose you were taught to feel it is your fault.
If you could step off the playing field for just a moment and look at the whole game you would be amazed at how you were set up to be controlled and to fail!
I highly recommend the book Web of Debt by Attorney Ellen Brown to give you a thorough understanding of the system and process. It can change your thinking, feelings and financial life.
Most of what you have learned comes from a structure set up by the money powers. These are primarily the banking and credit industry which was spawned by the wealthy power mongers through the media that it owns. So the facts are skewed, spun, interpreted and manipulated to the industry’s point of view. This gives them a huge advantage.
It creates a lot of myth which tends to be held as the truth. It is mostly what one would call propaganda. Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at deliberately and systematically influencing the attitudes, perceptions and behavior of a community towards some cause, response or position that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.
In this case the benefit goes to the major banks and credit industry—which ultimately represent the wealthy class. The media creates confusion, diversion, stress and failure in order to benefit the banking and credit powers. (That, by the way, also have a revolving door with the government jobs).
My reason for specializing in bankruptcy is that it is a very powerful tool, a highly dignified body of law, that substantially helps people and businesses that have found themselves caught in a terrible bind–in the web of debt created by the system! In fact, as we will discover, we are all in that web but some come to the point when they can no longer move away from the ravenous spider that is descending upon them.
For a starter, bankruptcy is defined as: 1) being unable to pay your debts as they come due; or 2) being insolvent. Insolvent means having liabilities greater than the reasonable market value of all your assets.
Bankruptcy law confronts these conditions directly. It is there to balance out the overwhelming power and negative effect of the banking and credit system. It is a simple process that efficiently, successfully and inexpensively helps those who are facing financial struggles—which usually arise from circumstances beyond their control.
The biggest statistical triggers for bankruptcy are lost income, sickness, accident, injury, divorce and separation, for the individual; and a downturn in related markets or just having well intended ideas that do not bear fruit, for businesses. Each of these conditions causes a stoppage of the creative energy of the people involved and also of their financial dependents. It becomes a domino effect. Not only does the checkbook suffer but the quality of life deteriorates due to the over-emphasis and dependence on money in our world.
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.” In other words, property is not as important as people! But we live at a time when the financial powers through their actions strongly disagree—property is much more important than human values—it is the source, course and goal of the economy we are captured by. Something even deeper is going on—beyond the turbulent surface waves you believe caused the loss.
The fact is that money actually operates below the surface—it no longer even represents property as a means of exchange, it represents debt which directs the power to manipulate and control the material world itself—to control you, your family, your business, and even your community, city, state and nation.
In the words of Ellen Brown: “Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money [itself] has been “privatized” or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions, including the “private” Federal reserve—which is neither federal nor has back up reserves. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices, and robbing you of the value of your money.”
It is a deception devised to trap you within the web and to strip you of your money—which should represent your hard work and creative productivity in industry and agriculture, rather than debt. On the other hand, it pushes all the money power to the top of the pyramid—where the wealthy reside.
Everything in our lives is influenced either directly or indirectly by an underlying financial system developed over time through the profit-only mentality. Banks and corporations are legally driven by profit. The banking and corporate parents of the financial system have one primary LEGAL mandate—to make money and to make it NOW—regardless of the long term effects on people and businesses like yours—either here or abroad. It is like abusive, dysfunctional parents looking after themselves and a select group of their spoiled kids. The rest of the kids–the majority of family–suffer as a result.
Scholar Hans Schicht says in the ”The Death of Banking”:
“Through a network of anonymous financial spider webbing only a handful of global King Bankers own and control it all… Everybody, people, enterprise, states and foreign countries, all have become slaves chained to the Banker’s credit ropes.”
As a result, today many cities and states are bankrupt and are selling off public assets to satisfy creditors. The American banking system, which at one time extended productive loans to agriculture and industry (which really should be the purpose of banks), has today become a giant betting machine.
For example, by December 2007, an estimated 681 trillion dollars were riding on complex high–risk bets known as derivatives. This amount is 10 times the annual output of the entire world economy. These bets are funded by big US Banks and are made largely with borrowed money created on a computer screen. Derivatives can be and have been used to manipulate markets, loot businesses, and destroy competitor economies. (Ellen Brown)
This all may be hard to believe, or even comprehend, but it is the real game. We are puppets in a hidden global banking scheme operating behind the curtain and pulling the strings. Of course, it impacts on your personal financial life everyday. The bottom line is that even though you are a typical, hardworking, hopeful and good intentioned consumer or business, you have been set up to be a victim, to struggle and eventually to fail. It is just a matter of time. It is like a carefully orchestrated game of musical chairs in which not only is there financial music playing over which you have no control, but you are squeezed into a quite dark room with everyone one else in the economy and with a limited number of chairs to run for when the music stops. Also there is an inside track to the chairs. The wealthy–the insiders–are informed well in advance when the music will stop and how, through law, regulation and misdirection—a sleight of hand by the choreographers setting the stage– to get near and onto a chair when the music dies.
The quality of Amercian life is unfortunately eroding—regardless of what you hear or read in the mainstream news. An honest reflection on what you actually see and hear from people in the trenches is more real. All of us living within this web of debt are being attacked by the spider. Some of us eventually are stung and become the bankrupt victim! The profiteering process scrapes money from you without you really knowing or understanding that it is happening until the poisonous spider descends on you trapped in the debtweb. The bottom line is the financial stability of all of us is suffering without doing anything wrong, immoral, unethical, or bad.
In response you need to do something to protect and save yourself from the attacking spider. You need to take some control of the situation and stop being a defeated victim of the system of banks, creditors and collectors which are trying to humiliate, blame and devour you. You need to take charge and enhance your total quality of life.
Part of the thinking shift you need to make is that quality of life is the goal—not how much money you immediately have access to or what your credit score is. You need to reduce your stress and get healthy again on all fronts.
Bankruptcy is one revitalizing step. It creates a win-win situation—a protective armour– for those caught in the web who currently lack the ability to move away from the spider.
Through bankruptcy you legally walk away from most obligations to pay debts and get a fresh start to rebuild your financial life. It allows a protective barrier from the spider in the web as you regain your opportunity to be mobile. Moreover, as financial issues are so intricately woven into our lives, all other aspects are potentially benefited—such as less stressed relationships, improved health and an opportunity to create a better future on all fronts.
Having a bankruptcy lawyer that understands the debt web and is personally working with you can help you stave off the spider. Also a lawyer who is personally concerned about you, your family and business, who spends time to help you understand your case and who is there with youthroughout the entire process is ideal. You wind up with a fresh start for your financial life but also with a deeper understanding of the issues and a reduction in stress on your journey into building a better future for yourself.
So contact me immediately and whether you are already on the slippery slope or approaching it like most middle class people, we can work together to protect you with the law—like David against Goliath. I look forward to talking with you soon. All the best.
Iowa Bankruptcy Attorney Robert J. Liptak
Fairfield, Iowa