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Thursday, June 18, 2015

BANK MORTGAGE CLERKS HYPER SCRUTINIZE FIVE YEARS OF YOUR DEPOSITS & WITHDRAWALS BEFORE MAKING COMMITMENTS~HUD WANTS TO REGULATE "INEQUALITY" IN WEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS

BANKS DEMANDING CUSTOMERS ACCOUNT FOR EVERY DEPOSIT & WITHDRAWAL BEFORE OFFERING MORTGAGES

Information reportedly being sent to IRS
Banks Demanding Customers Account for Every Deposit & Withdrawal Before Offering Mortgages
SEE: http://www.infowars.com/banks-demanding-customers-account-for-every-deposit-withdrawal-before-offering-mortgages/republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

Banks are beginning to demand that customers account for every deposit and withdrawal in their account before they can obtain a mortgage, another illustration of how capital controls imposed on the middle class are intensifying.
“My sister just bought a house and to get the mortgage she had to explain every deposit and cash withdrawal in her account going back five years. My mother had simply written her a check for $400 to reimburse her for picking up some medicine. They wanted her to explain why my mother gave her $400,” writes economist Martin Armstrong, adding that his sister was also grilled on the $2,000 she withdrew ever few months to pay for incidental purchases.
Another of Armstrong’s friends who shared an apartment with his girlfriend was also forced to account for five and a half years worth of rent checks he had written her before they could get a mortgage together.
“It is no longer good enough that you pay your taxes. Now they want to know to whom you are giving any money, right down to $50,” writes Armstrong, warning that the controls will have a negative impact on the housing market and force buyers to leave the United States.
The details are also reportedly being passed on to the IRS, with those who fail to account for payments being subject to five years in jail.
“This is all under the pretense of terrorism, whereby they have to know where every penny goes,” according to Armstrong, who is best known for predicting the 1987 Black Monday crash as well as the 1998 Russian financial collapse. “This is not applying a new law with notice that from this date forward you have to keep track of everything you do with anyone else, as in East Germany, Stasi, this is being applied retroactively.”
The financial elite are currently attempting to impose a myriad of new capital control on the middle class under the justification of preventing tax fraud and the financing of terrorism, including the idea of banning cash altogether which has already picked up steam in countries like Denmark and Sweden.
As we previously documented, influential voices across the spectrum have repeatedly invoked the need to ban cash in recent weeks, including former Bank of England economist Jim Leaviss, who penned an article for the London Telegraph last month in which he said a cashless society would only be achieved by “forcing everyone to spend only by electronic means from an account held at a government-run bank,” which would be, “monitored, or even directly controlled by the government.”
Banks in the United States and United Kingdom have also intensified policies that treat the deposit and withdrawal of relatively large amounts of cash as a suspicious activity.
In France, new measures are also set to come into force in September which will restrict French citizens from making cash payments over €1,000 euros.
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HUD Seeks to Address "Inequality" in Wealthy Neighborhoods Through Regulations


SEE: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/21073-hud-seeks-to-address-inequality-in-wealthy-neighborhoods-through-regulationsrepublished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

The federal government continues to reach far beyond its constitutional parameters by proposing regulations to increase diversity in wealthy neighborhoods. Officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development argue that a new rule entitled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” would simply clarify obligations under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, but critics view it as another example of federal overreach.
The Hill reports, “The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities.”
According to HUD’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, the proposed rule is to ensure that public housing agencies, as well as local governments and states receiving Community Development Block Grants, HOME Investment Partnerships, Emergency Solutions Grants, and Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS are properly adhering to the Fair Housing Act. In order to do so, the proposal entails the completion of an assessment of fair housing (AFH). Program participants would then be required to incorporate the findings from the AFH into subsequent housing plans: the Consolidated Plan, which would “describe how the priorities and specific objectives of the jurisdiction would further fair housing,” and the Action Plan, which specifies “actions to be taken during the next year that address fair housing issues identified in the AFH.” The proposal identifies four goals of the AFH:
The AFH focuses program participants’ analysis on four primary goals: improving integrated living patterns and overcoming historic patterns of segregation; reducing racial and ethnic concentrations of poverty; reducing disparities by race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability in access to community assets such as education, transit access, and employment, as well as exposure to environmental health hazards and other stressors that harm a person’s quality of life; and responding to disproportionate housing needs by protected class. HUD would provide all program participants with nationally uniform data on these four areas of focus as well as outstanding discrimination findings. Once program participants have analyzed the HUD data, as well as local or regional information they choose to add, they would identify the primary determinants influencing fair housing conditions, prioritize addressing these conditions, and set one or more goals for mitigating or addressing their determinants. 
The AFH is subject to HUD approval, which is granted only if it does not violate fair housing or civil rights laws, as deemed by HUD. According to The Hill, the regulations would apply to roughly 1,250 local governments.
Failure to comply would risk federal block grants, which critics argue is virtual blackmail. Fox News writes:
Critics point to the case of Westchester County, N.Y., which has been locked in a battle with HUD since it settled in a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit Anti-Discrimination Center over the county's lack of affordable housing units. The 2009 settlement, which HUD helped broker with the Justice Department, mandated the affluent county spend $50 million of its own money to build units, most of which would be in predominantly white neighborhoods. The county and HUD have been arguing ever since over compliance, with Westchester claiming HUD has been changing the rules along the way. As a result, HUD has repeatedly withheld annual funding from the county
"It’s an overreach on our liberties to live and work and move to wherever we want,” declared Representative Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who has led the efforts against the proposal, sponsoring an amendment to the House HUD spending bill Wednesday, blocking any future funding for the new rule.
“American citizens and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to federal neighborhood engineering at the behest of an overreaching federal government,” Gosar stated, adding,
[The rule] tells us how we can live, where we go to school, how we will vote, what this utopian type of neighborhood should look like. These rules want to manipulate the way American neighborhoods look.
But defenders of the rule claim it is about fairness and leveling the playing field. “This rule is not about forcing anyone to live anywhere they don’t want to,” insisted Margery Turner, senior vice president at the left-leaning Urban Institute. “It’s really about addressing long-standing practices that prevent people from living where they want to. In our country, decades of public policies and institutional practices have built deeply segregated and unequal neighborhoods."
However, liberty-lovers have pointed out that regulating to address inequality is misguided. As observed by the CATO Institute, inequality is just a symptom of economic problems, which result from a number of issues, including “awful public schools dominated by teachers unions,” broken families that are plagued by unemployment, substance abuse and criminality perpetuated through government programs, and ineffectively harsh drug laws. Likewise, a complicated tax code that features loopholes and favors cronyism and a free market that is stifled by regulation all conspire to create the economic problems that contribute to inequality. Using the Fair Housing Act to correct inequality is merely attempting to put a band-aid on broken leg.
Still, supporters of the proposal claim that the rule would help alleviate some housing discrimination issues. But Hans von Spakovsky, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, notes that such a rule does not deemphasize race in an effort to alleviate discrimination, but rather emphasizes it. He asserted that the Obama administration “too race conscious.” “It’s a sign that this administration seems to take race into account on everything,” Spakovsky said.
Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge characterized the proposal as an attempt to “create a wealth-adjusted community utopia.”
If passed, the proposal would have far-reaching consequences beyond its alleged aims, including empowering HUD with authority over local zoning laws. Gosar asserts it would allow the agency the power to dictate what types of homes can be built where, and who may live in them.
Gosar also warns that the rule had the potential to depress property values as cheaper homes crop up in wealthy neighborhoods, raise taxes, and even influence elections as more minorities are funneled into Republican-leaning neighborhoods.
The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision on a housing discrimination case in the coming weeks. The case concerns whether Texas violated the Fair Housing Act by disproportionately awarding low-income housing tax credits to developers who own properties in poor, minority-dominated neighborhoods. The court is being asked to weigh in on whether government policies that unintentionally create a disparate impact for minority communities violate federal laws against segregation. That decision could influence the future of HUD's proposed rule.