Over 100 entries were involved in the parade including marching bands, motorcycle groups, and military units. In addition, some 600 veterans, many in military uniforms and fatigues, marched down Market Street waving and giving salutes and thumbs-up to the crowd.

Organizers estimated the turnout reached 100,000. It was truly an honor and a privilege to be able to attend this parade and help welcome home and honor our brave soldiers. More photographs from the parade can be seen here.

When parades happen in downtown St.Louis, it is customary that many businesses along the parade route allow spectators to use their front steps in order to gain a better view of the parade. This access is incredibly helpful to those who are elderly or suffer from disabilities. A good example of this is the Peabody Opera House at 1400 Market Street as pictured in the background below:

The parade route stretched from 4th St. & Market St. down along Market St. to Union Station.
Click to Enlarge

Absolutely all of the businesses along Market Street allowed such access during Saturday’s parade welcoming home our U.S. military, well, all except the Bank of America Plaza. Bank of America was so adamant about denying access to their precious “patio”, as one security guard described it as he repeatedly told me to leave, that they made sure these large barricades were in place before many arrived.

This additional elevated vantage point would have been greatly appreciated by spectators to last Saturday’s parade wanting to show their support for our troops whether they were elderly, disabled, veterans or not.

For a bank that is already suffering from the image of being “against our troops” by their recent illegal foreclosure tactics against our U.S. servicemen, last Saturday was a real missed opportunity. As ABC News reported on Nov. 11th, 2011:

At least 160 active members of the U.S. military had their homes “illegally foreclosed upon” by the Bank of America, according to the Justice Department.

One thing the execs at Bank of America could have done was spend a few dollars and help area veterans, who could not easily make it to this event, and position them on their patio so they could enjoy the parade and show their support as well. I guess the brain trust at BofA missed that one.

Oh, but that would cost more than just requesting barricades to keep out those wanting to welcome home our brave servicemen and servicewomen. I suppose when you have presidents bail-out your bank to the tune of $45 Million, you don’t have to worry about PR or doing the ‘right thing’ like other businesses. No fear of failure here.

Foreclosure proceedings were commenced against Willey in 2010, but Willey was able to stop the expedited 14-day foreclosure process by filing a fraud suit against her lender, One West Bank. In an exclusive telephone interview with Big Government from her Richmond based home, Willey told me the following:

I applied for a modification back in 2009. My bank was IndyMac, which was the very first bank the feds seized in 2008. Then they turned it around and sold it to George Soros and Larry Dell for a song. So, the two of them–big Obama contributors–they bought that bank.

That got a lot of play in California. There were lots and lots of stories, but it just kind of died. Out of sheer desperation I finally said look, I’ve had it, I need to know something about what’s happening to my home, and I was reading all the horror stories of what they were doing to people and so I told them if you don’t do something to help me and all these other people I’m going to go on television and they laughed at me.

I went on Fox & Friends on October 21, 2010 and someone from One West Bank called into the show and suspended the foreclosure. All of a sudden they were my new best friend. I had my very own modification officer at the bank, but then it just started dragging on again. Finally, I called last February. They were supposed to give me a decision within 30 days to tell me whether or not I even qualify, but they didn’t.

Finally, I called again and I got someone on the phone who said it was looking good and that I shouldn’t have any problem and then I called again and then they turned me down. Then they turned around and they sent me a 2-page self-explanatory letter signed by a person telling me the reasons I’d been turned down, a number of reasons I could have shot bullets through. So, I waited, waited and waited and then it got to December 29 when I got my first letter of fair debt collection, that they were moving in and they put it on fast track and now my home is scheduled to be sold next Thursday, February 2nd.

But there’s more—Willey may have stumbled upon a new form of “robo-signing,” the illegal practice of bank employees signing thousands of documents and affidavits without verifying the information. Right now, the U.S. is in talks with five major banks including Ally Financial Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. about a $19 billion settlement for their participation in robo-signing fraud.

Virginia is a “non-judicial” foreclosure state, which means that the lender does not have to file a lawsuit to start foreclosure proceedings. Instead, the lender sends the borrower a “notice of default” and can then initiate a sale. In Virginia, a homeowner will receive notice and then have only 14-days to vacate their home unless they take legal action to halt the process.

In Willey’s case, she was scheduled for foreclosure in the fall of 2010, but shortly after her Fox & Friends appearance she received a required “substitution of trustee” notice from a lender’s representative telling her they were now handling her account.

Willey immediately noticed something suspicious, on the second page of her notice: a Xerox image of a staple in the upper left hand corner, but no staple image on the first page. That made Willey suspicious that the signature page had been attached to another document prior to her own and that the signature and notarization, which should have been exclusive to her own foreclosure notification was used before and was possibly being recycled, a.k.a. robo-signing.

“It was just another example of all the tricks they pull,” Willey said of the mortgage industry. “I’m not saying they don’t have a valid point. I have to make my payments, but they’re supposed to do everything right by law, and they didn’t.”

As a result of Willey’s lawsuit, her bank cancelled the original October 21, 2010 foreclosure that included the allegedly defective substitution of trustee notice. For the moment, Willey was victorious.

Subsequently, in February 2011, the lender executed a new appointment document, which mooted the original point of whether the first document was valid.

This time, the substitution of trustee notice did not appear to be invalid.

Willey’s house is scheduled to be sold on her local courthouse steps on February 2nd and she is currently exploring alternative ways to halt the sale. Still, she feels determined to keep speaking out about corrupt foreclosure practices taking place within the banking industry.

“I have every single thing documented,” she said. “They just try to wear you down and wear you out. A lot of people in this country have been hurt by what they do.”

The media team takes a smart strategy and realizes that attacking the owner of the house directly is probably a bad move. However, behind the scenes they can’t help trashing him and calling him dishonest…

“Post story, owner made several claims, most of them false.  Says OWS won’t let him into his house.”

Despite this insult, the back-and-forth reveals that there are actually negotiations going on back-and-forth between Wide’s attorney and Occupy Wall Street.

1.  Premo: one question – meghan hasn’t been able to get in touch with Wise’s lawyer since the new year?  El: don’t think she’s been trying actively to get in touch with him.  Now that the article has come out that changes the negotiation.

2. [ed note: this line blank in original email]

3.  El: the last meeting did go well, Wise wasn’t there but his lawyer was.  Lawyer agreed to speak with Wise about working with us, agreed that the best solution would be to work with us to transition it to a community land trust, and fight the banks to reduce his debt so that he can become a home owner again.

Will the public and the lenders be made aware that there is a behind the scenes shakedown via media exposure being worked out here? The homeowner is trying to play on sympathy to get back his foreclosed property and Occupy Wall Street wants to gain positive media exposure, even though they were squatting in someone else’s private property.

Oh, wait. The Occupy Wall Street media team is smart enough to ban the use of the word squatting to describe their squatting. Media team member Premo says;

messaging…never use the word squatting when  reporters come to the house

This is another example of how Occupy Wall Street is far from the “spontaneous” gathering that many in the press of try to make it out to be. It’s a media savvy operation with calculated messaging designed to hide their far left tactical agenda. They’re smart enough to realize that tactics like squatting which the left has used in Europe for many years probably won’t play with the middle class Americans that #OWS is so desperate to reach.

A Brooklyn man living in an apartment with his two daughters was alerted to the fact that his in-foreclosure-home had been broken into and occupied by Occupiers, as in Occupy Wall Street activists. When he rushed to his home he found a group of strangers that had broken into his home claiming to have “reclaimed” the house and given it to another family.

“They’re trying to take a house and say the bank is robbing the people because the mortgage is too high — so contact the owner!” fumed Wise Ahadzi, 28, who owns the home at 702 Vermont St. in East New York.

Apparently Ahadzi had bought the house in 2007 for the princely sum of $424,500 but during the housing bubble of 2009 the house ended up being worth only half that. Then, when he lost his job and got behind on the mortgage, the bank foreclosed on the property.

Enter — illegally, mind you — Occupy Wall Streeters who discovered the home in foreclosure and decided that they’d steal it away from “the bank” with the ostensible goal of helping the needy.

Ahadzi is rightfully indignant that they didn’t contact him so that they could help him retake possession of his own house. Ahadzi also asked why they didn’t try to help him and his two daughters to which the Occupiers claimed he “didn’t qualify” because he wasn’t in their group. “Why can’t you fight for me?,” he wondered.

So, who did they want to “give” the house to? An organizer for VOCAL-NY — a gay rights activist group. A fellow with a job and one that belongs to their own group, yet.

Worse, when Ahadzi got to his home he discovered that the Occupiers had taken all his personal belongings and shoved them in a pile in the basement and then began to tear out walls and “remodel” the place, spending, they claimed, over $9,000 in the effort.

This isn’t a lone incident, either. It is apparently an idea that the OWSers are going to try and push nation-wide. At a recent Chicago OWS rally, for instance, a purported Lutheran pastor preached an OWS sermon urging OWSers to do the same thing in the Windy City.

John Ruberry attended the speech and notes that Reverend Tom Gaulke told those assembled that they were going to repeat the New York efforts.

“We will be supporting a homeless family in reoccupying a vacant house,” the reverend claimed.

As Ruberry notes, this is called trespassing.

So, what have we learned form this? We’ve learned that OWS is not altruistic in anything they do even as they claim the mantle of Mother Theresa — well, Mother Theresa if she engaged in rapes, drug abuse, deaths, racism, anti-Semitism, property destruction and general lawlessness, anyway.

We’ve learned that, like any self-interested Wall Street Banker, the OWSers only want to enrich themselves and help their own members. They aren’t really interested in helping defend the poor and downtrodden. Just helping themselves.

“While we saw positive numbers in November, December’s totals failed to meet even the latest revenue projections. Coupled with higher spending tied to unrealized cost savings, these latest revenue figures create growing concern that legislative action may be needed in the near future to ensure that the State can meet its payment obligations.”

The above are “code words” that the state is financially dysfunctional and getting worse. The December report shows that compared to last year, California revenue, at $39.4 billion, is down by 11.2% due mostly to a 26.4% nose-dive in sales tax collection, and state spending of $52.3 billion is currently running 33% higher than the state’s revenue.

The Controller does not seem impressed that Governor Brown and the California State Legislature’s only solution to fix this budget mess is to relying on voters’ willingness to approve an initiative to raise the already hefty sales tax they pay by 13% and add another surtax on the wealthy to generate $6.9 billion in revenue. Even if the public shocks pollsters and actually passes the tax increase, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) calculated the initiative would only generate $4.8 billion per year.

Prior to the Controller’s grim report of a $5.2 billion budget miss, the LAO had already estimated that state’s revenue would be $3.7 billion below forecast and “trigger” $2 billion of automatic budget cuts to K-14 education. The LAO’s estimate of a $13 billion deficit next year, due mostly to constitutionally required “settle up” payments for short-checking public schools in prior years, now looks like a $20 billion deficit.

California’s budget projections are so consistently whacky, the Governor closed the “California Recovery website” this summer to avoid ridicule regarding its ludicrously optimistic recovery projections. Despite creating one of the most unfriendly business climates in the nation, California socialist politicians were able to do “vida loca” spending on the economic momentum of an epic 20 year real estate boom. With the real estate bust now in its fourth year, California ranks third in the nation in foreclosures and, according to “The Foreclosure Radar Report”, is one of only two states in the nation where foreclosures increased in December.

The credit rating agencies will undoubtedly take a very hard look at downgrading California’s municipal bond debt, which is already the worst rated in the nation at only two notches above junk. But the budget disaster also spells bad news for the credit ratings of California local government. Earlier this year, the Legislature passed a law striping $2 billion per year from state’s 400 redevelopment agencies to augment their own budget shortfall.

Moody’s Investor Services immediately put $11.6 billion of California tax allocation bonds on review for a possible downgrade. Moody’s stated: “If left unchanged, this law would be significantly negative for bondholder credit. This legislation could result in multi-notch downgrades on bonds of the dissolved redevelopment agencies.”

Perhaps California’s budget problems can be best understood from a Fox Television interview of Joseph Vranich, President of the “Business Relocation Coach”, who makes his living moving companies out of California to avoid the “high businesses taxes and excessive regulations imposed on commercial enterprises of all types. Costs are illustrated by the fact that a business leaving the City of Los Angeles for a nearby county can save up to 20% in costs while moving to another state can save up to 40% in costs.”

Vranich pointed out that in the first half of 2011, there were 129 companies with 100 or more employees that moved out of the state. This averages 5.4 larger companies leaving for “greener pastures” per week, versus 3.9 per week in 2010 and only 1 per week in 2009. The top relocation destination is not China but rather neighboring business friendly states of Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Utah.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in a TV interview in 1976, famously said: “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them”. Had she lived in California 35 years later, she would have added: “or else the other people will take their money and just leave!”

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Foreclosures

The housing crisis is completely and entirely the fault of the banks.  I reject the notion that borrowers had any culpability whatsoever.  All those rules and regulations made it necessary to have a Ph.D. to understand all those mortgage documents.  There was too much paperwork for any borrower to actually wade through and read.  And don’t give me the excuse that all that paperwork was the result of government regulation.  We needed all that paperwork so that banks wouldn’t take advantage of borrowers.  And even though we had all that paperwork, they still took advantage of borrowers.  Everybody knows that nobody reads contracts, so saying that it was the borrower’s fault for signing something they didn’t understand makes no sense.  The borrowers were all duped into signing all that mortgage paperwork and didn’t understand that mortgage rates would reset and that they couldn’t afford to own the home.  Besides, the housing bubble was so out of control that who could blame a borrower for wanting to cash in?  Everybody else was!

So I say that anybody who can’t pay their mortgage should not have to pay their mortgage.  Banks should be forced to modify any loan that any borrower has fallen behind on.  They should modify it so that the borrower can live in the house for as long as they want as long as they can’t pay the mortgage.  The bank never should have approved the loan in the first place, even though the loan documents weren’t necessarily truthful.  The banks should be able to read people’s mind, and since they can’t, they should pay the price.

For everyone who has paid their mortgage on time, why should you get a break for being responsible?

Gun Control

We have to get all guns off the street.  The Second Amendment was intended for people who had to repel invaders with muskets.  There are no more muskets, and the only invaders will have bombs strapped to their chests or flying airplanes into buildings.  Guns are useless.  Shooting caribou is stupid, and it makes animals suffer, and that isn’t a sport.  It’s just mean and cruel.  You don’t need a gun to defend your house.  The risk of the gun going off accidentally and killing someone in your house is too great a risk to have.  If you can’t understand a mortgage document, you cannot understand how to handle a gun.

Criminals can be given incentives to turn in guns, because the only reason criminals have guns is they are misunderstood and don’t have after-school programs.  The Federal Reserve can offer coupons for Chuck E. Cheese in exchange for guns.  The coupons offer 2000 free tokens and 20 free meals, and we can pass legislation forcing the company to offer this since it will be better for society.

Congressional Ethics

I don’t see what the big deal is with Weinergate.  Bill Clinton fooled around with that girl and got away with it.  He didn’t even have to resign.  So unless somebody does worse than Bill Clinton, they should be left alone to do whatever they please.  There is one exception, and that’s for Republicans.  If a Republican ever once says something publicly about morals or values, or gets so much as a parking ticket, then they should be impeached and forced to resign.  They have to live lives of perfection.  We Democrats don’t see any moral problem with a guy like Weiner who sent a completely inappropriate photo of his junk to another woman, then lied about it publicly, accused an innocent man named Breitbert of hacking his account, exchanged texts with another woman and planned to cheat on his wife with her, and with yet another woman, he coached her to lie. Moral relativism is the way to go.

Light Bulbs

I don’t think Congress went far enough in banning regular light bulbs.  We should ban the fluorescent ones as well because they still cause global warming, even though it happens at a slower rate.  No light bulbs for anyone, ever.  In the olden days, people used candles.  We should return to the Dark Ages because folks got by just fine that way at night.  Plus there’s the sun.   Without any light bulbs being allowed, then people will be forced to use solar panels to create power.

The Internet

There are way too many stupid people out there who have a voice when they shouldn’t.  The internets give everyone freedom of speech even when they say hateful things.   The government should give a trillion dollar grant to George Soros to hire an army of people to read every single page on the internet, and anybody who says something hateful gets their IP revoked, just like those online poker sites.  We can trust Soros to be totally fair in determining who is speaking hateful speech because he survived the Holocaust by collaborating with the Nazis, so he knows exactly what kind of speech is hate speech.

MORE (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment) and other leftists held meetings in 2010 to plan their strategy for squatting on properties in the St. Louis area. The video above introduces some of their leaders. A future video will outline MORE’s longterm strategy to acquire residential property through extralegal means like squatting.

Who or what is MORE, you may be wondering. When ACORN was put out of business, the local chapters re-branded themselves. St. Louis’s ACORN chapter became MORE. Even after the re-branding MORE still has ties to communist organizations.

They’ve sponsored bank protests at Chase Bank and Bank of America. They recently stormed an event at St. Louis University. Their efforts to acquire property through squatting and “urban homesteading” are just another page out of the radical left’s play book.

More here.