Eminent Domain in Richmond, CA--The Slippery Slope to Agenda 21

In my novel The Planner, published last year, local municipalities use eminent domain to take the homes of families so that these families can be forcibly removed to new Smart Growth-style, sustainable housing as a part of a coordinated plan to implement Agenda 21 nationwide.  Unfortunately, we may be about to see something similar take place in our country.



This week, Richmond, California became the first city to vote, 4-3, to partner with Mortgage Resolution Partners to use eminent domain to seize underwater homes for the purpose of restructuring the mortgages. The plan purports to help homeowners obtain more favorable terms on their mortgages so that they can avoid foreclosure and stay in their houses.

Eminent domain by a municipality to seize private property and invalidate mortgage contracts is such a dangerous precedent that if the stated purpose were not to help the "poor victimized homeowners" the entire nation would be up in arms. As it is, this is being sold as another magnanimous attempt to help regular people at the expense of the banks, and so this plan is not getting the attention it deserves.

As soon as city council voted to approve this plan, the major banks announced their intentions to sue Richmond for attempting to invalidate their contracts. HUD instructed the Federal Housing Finance Authority to not allow Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to make any more loans in Richmond. Presumably the moratorium on loans will also extend to FHA. In other words, Richmond is about to become the only city in the United States where no individual, regardless of financial solvency or credit worthiness, can get a mortgage.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that this effort by the Richmond City Council and the MRP be repudiated in court as soon as possible. MRP has been running around for over a year pitching this concept to cities, including San Bernadino, California and North Las Vegas, Nevada. All of the other cities where they have tried to sell this concept have soundly rejected it--probably because someone stood up and explained the short-term consequences which would most immediately be a moratorium on mortgage financing in the city. That means not only that the fine folks in Richmond won't be able to buy properties; they also will not be able to sell their properties--unless they find cash buyers.

As bad as that is, the long-term consequences are worse. MRP has been trying to get a test case to demonstrate that a municipality can nullify mortgage debt and a contractual obligation, and Richmond has just agreed to be the guinea pig. If they prevail in court, this will open the door for cities across the U.S. to "erase" billions of dollars in mortgage debt. The action does not just hurt the big banks; it also harms the taxpayers who have been saddled with the burden of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008. In the last five years, taxpayers have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into these two agencies. Now, Fannie and Freddie are paying back the Treasury out of their earnings. But if Richmond and the MRP prevail, cities can simply say, "Guess what, these mortgage obligations for all of the note holders in our city are worthless. Go suck lemons."



MRP website actively recruits citizens to take this concept to their own city councils.  Under the website's How You Can Help tab, readers are encouraged to contact their local mayors and city councils about the CARES program.

So who are these generous people at MRP and why are they so eager to get this experiment started? According to their website Mortgage Resolution Partners current chairman is Steven Gluckstern.  Although Gluckstern has had a long career, a pivotal part of it was his position as the General Manager of reinsurance operations of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group. In 1988 he founded Centre Reinsurance with $250 million in start up capital, which made the company one of the largest start-ups of its kind.

CEO Graham Williams was the Senior VP and Director of Residential Lending at Bank of America in 1990's. Graham created BofA's "Neighborhood Advantage" housing initiative which allowed select groups to borrow money for their houses with very low down payments and reduced credit score requirements. (We all know how well those programs turned out). The website also credits Graham with developing "credit policy, pricing models and capital management tools" at BofA.

John Vlahoplus, founder of MRP who is the current Chief Strategy Officer for the company, worked for Zurich Financial and Credit Suisse--a banking firm that was heavily invested in subprime mortgages prior to the market crash of 2008.

  In 2012 the SEC charged Credit Suisse Securities with misleading investors about their offerings of mortgage-backed securities and Credit Suisse paid 120 million to settle the SEC's charges.  Vlahoplus, while not personally implicated in any wrong doing, is a product of this environment.

Partner Bill Falik's description says that he has practiced "land use, real estate, and environmental law in Northern California for the past 40 years." He currently is "a managing partner of Westpark Associates, which developed at 1483 acre masterplanned [Smart Growth] community in the City of Roseville." WestPark constructed 4300 residential units and created a "precedent setting open space funding mechanism for Placer County" and then the project sold to three of the largest builders in the US before Falik bought back 50% of the project in 2009 along with an additional 400 acres. As if his devotion to environmentalism and Smart Growth were not enough of a signal of his extreme progressivism, Falik also tells us that he is a visiting professor at Berkeley Law School.

Finally Byron Georgiou, also a partner, is the owner of Georgiou Enterprises www.georgiouenterprises.com. "with wide ranging interests, including as lead investor in Xtreme Green products...lead investor and director of Health Fusion (www.healthfusion.com) providing practice management and electronic health records information technology to U.S. healthcare providers" among others. (Obamacare requires a lot of these electronic health records so Health Fusion stands to profit handsomely off of the new regulations.) Other industries in which his company invest include aerospace and defense and "various real estate development and management projects in Nevada and California." Georgiou was Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown during the second of Brown's three terms as governor. More recently Harry Reid appointed Georgiou as one of ten bipartisan nationwide members on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission--the commission responsible for the official inquiry into the causes of the financial, economic and housing crises which reported directly to the President and Congress.

The only other partner mentioned on the website is Garrett Gruener, the founder of Ask Jeeves, which is now Ask.com.

The only name missing from this stew pot big government and environmentalism is the former chief of staff BJ Greenspan, who left MRP in March to accept a new position with a New York non-profit. But it is Greenspan's prior employment that is more noteworthy; before becoming the chief of staff at MRP she worked for Institute of New Economic Thinking, a think tank founded by the patron saint of the New World Order himself--George Soros.

So we have here an organization made up of people who worked in the very firms which created and sold the products that caused the financial crisis and housing crash and who are now heavily invested in everything from Obamacare, to green energy to Agenda 21 style housing--Smart Growth, Smart Code--who hired one of George Soros' former employees as their chief of staff, and who have now persuaded the city council of Richmond, California, to allow them to subvert the property rights of the entire city on the pretext of protecting homeowners trapped in notes they can't pay. Why? Because if they can win this suit and have a court declare that a municipality can invalidate mortgage debt with eminent domain, then any city can invalidate any mortgage obligations with eminent domain, which means that municipalities can nullify not only mortgage obligations but all private property rights. This is only the beginning; if this is successful we can expect to see American cities using eminent domain to implement Smart Growth and sustainable development for the greater good of the society without regard to the rights of property holders or lien holders. Since the goal of Agenda 21 is to eliminate private property rights and force all Americans into dense urban living, one solid victory for this group would advance this by light years. And this group's initiative is moving Agenda 21 to the next level.



Now they have talked the people of Richmond into going along with this experiment. Be afraid; be very afraid.


Read Alexandra Swann's novel The Planner, about Agenda 21 implemented through eminent domain free on Kindle 09/25/2013 -09/28/2013

Find out what Agenda 21 is, who is behind it and how it is being implemented in cities across the United States:

Alexandra Swann's novel, The Planner, about an out of control, environmentally-driven federal government implementing Agenda 21, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.