We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, December 9, 2011

William M. Diefenderfer: The Financial Hit Man of Student Loans

Click here to access article by Catherine Austin Fitts from Solari. 

In recent times women have innocently and increasingly entered the traditional male realms of high finance only to experience disillusionment. I'm thinking of such courageous women as Elizabeth Warren, Yves Smith (pen name), and this author. (I certainly am not implying that gender are related to evildoers, but generally to innocence when it comes to high finance.) This rather lengthy but excellent article is in a sense a description of a journey of such a woman who ultimately comes face to face with people doing evil within a system that produces so many evil people (sociopaths). 
I have spent much of my professional career cleaning up mortgage fraud, trying to prevent mortgage fraud or protecting my subscribers and clients from the financial and economic ramifications of mortgage, federal credit and related securities fraud.  Before that, I spent my childhood watching mortgage fraud destroy the equity of my neighbors' homes. I have watched the cancer of mortgage fraud spread to thousands of communities and, eventually, the whole country. I thought I had seen the worst that financial fraud could do to America. I was wrong. What has happened in the student loan industry over the last fifteen years is worse than anything I have seen before.