Judge won’t give infomercial pitchman approval to visit Canada while appealing 30-day sentence

February 25, 2010

Canadian Business

By Mike Robinson

A federal judge refused Wednesday to give infomercial pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau permission to visit Canada next month while appeals his 30-day criminal contempt sentence in Chicago.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman said Trudeau’s $50,000 bond, which also requires him to surrender his passport, was set by a federal appeals court. The judge said he has no authority to interfere with the higher court’s order by giving him permission to go to Canada.

While the bond set by the appeals court does require the passport be surrendered, Gettleman noted he saw nothing in it that would specifically bar a visit to Canada. But he said he was not certain of just what it allows.

“I’d be careful if I were you,” he told Trudeau.

Trudeau — who sells books advocating “natural cures” for a variety of ailments — has been fighting a court battle since 2003 with the Federal Trade Commission over alleged misleading advertising for a diet book.

Gettleman last week found Trudeau in criminal contempt, sentencing him to 30 days and fining him $50,000 — later reduced to $5,000 — for urging his supporters to flood the judge’s computer with messages praising his remedies.

The hundreds of messages that followed crashed Gettleman’s computer and inundated the judge’s BlackBerry while he was teaching a course at Northwestern University law school.

Trudeau left court Wednesday with attorney Thomas Kirsch II, who said they were still deciding whether to take their travel request to the appeals court.

Trudeau said he wants to visit Toronto and Vancouver for unspecified business reasons. The appeals court has yet to decide if it will hold a hearing on the appeal of Gettleman’s sentence.

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Infomercial pitchman denied OK to leave country

February 24, 2010

WBBM

By Associated Press

A federal judge has refused to give infomercial pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau permission to visit Canada next month while he is appealing his 30-day contempt sentence in Chicago.

Judge Robert Gettleman said Wednesday an appeals court has set Trudeau’s bond – which requires that he surrender his passport – and he can’t interfere with the higher court’s order.

Trudeau sells books advocating “natural cures” for a variety of ailments. He is fighting the government over alleged misleading advertising.

Gettleman last week sentenced Trudeau to 30 days for getting his supporters to flood the judge’s computer with messages, locking up his e-mail.

Click here for the full report

Judge won’t give pitchman OK to leave US

February 25, 2010

ABC News

By Associated Press

A federal judge refused Wednesday to give infomercial pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau permission to visit Canada next month while appeals his 30-day criminal contempt sentence in Chicago.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman said Trudeau’s $50,000 bond, which also requires him to surrender his passport, was set by a federal appeals court. The judge said he has no authority to interfere with the higher court’s order by giving him permission to go to Canada.

While the bond set by the appeals court does require the passport be surrendered, Gettleman noted he saw nothing in it that would specifically bar a visit to Canada. But he said he was not certain of just what it allows.

“I’d be careful if I were you,” he told Trudeau.

Trudeau — who sells books advocating “natural cures” for a variety of ailments — has been fighting a court battle since 2003 with the Federal Trade Commission over alleged misleading advertising for a diet book.

Gettleman last week found Trudeau in criminal contempt, sentencing him to 30 days and fining him $50,000 — later reduced to $5,000 — for urging his supporters to flood the judge’s computer with messages praising his remedies.

The hundreds of messages that followed crashed Gettleman’s computer and inundated the judge’s BlackBerry while he was teaching a course at Northwestern University law school.

Trudeau left court Wednesday with attorney Thomas Kirsch II, who said they were still deciding whether to take their travel request to the appeals court.

Trudeau said he wants to visit Toronto and Vancouver for unspecified business reasons. The appeals court has yet to decide if it will hold a hearing on the appeal of Gettleman’s sentence.

Click here for the full report

Judge says infomercial pitchman can’t visit Canada while appealing contempt sentence

February 24, 2010

WREX

By The Associated Press

A federal judge in Chicago refused today to give infomercial pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau permission to visit Canada next month while Trudeau appeals his 30-day criminal contempt sentence.

U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman says Trudeau’s $50,000 bond, which also requires him to surrender his passport, was set by a federal appeals court, and he has no authority to interfere with the higher court’s order.

Trudeau sells books advocating what he calls “natural cures” for a variety of ailments. He has been fighting a court battle since 2003 with the Federal Trade Commission over alleged misleading advertising for a diet book.

Gettleman last week found Trudeau in criminal contempt for urging his supporters to flood Gettleman’s judge’s computer with messages praising Trudeau and his remedies.

Click here for the full report

Infomercial pitchman denied OK to leave country

February 24, 2010

WREX

By Associated Press

A federal judge has refused to give infomercial pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau permission to visit Canada next month while he is appealing his 30-day contempt sentence in Chicago.

Judge Robert Gettleman said Wednesday an appeals court has set Trudeau’s bond – which requires that he surrender his passport – and he can’t interfere with the higher court’s order.

Trudeau sells books advocating “natural cures” for a variety of ailments. He is fighting the government over alleged misleading advertising.

Gettleman last week sentenced Trudeau to 30 days for getting his supporters to flood the judge’s computer with messages, locking up his e-mail.

Click here for the full report

Judge denies Trudeau request to travel to Canada

February 24, 2010

Chicago Sun-Times

By Natasha Korecki

It’ll be “No, Canada” for Kevin Trudeau — at least for now.

A federal judge this afternoon wouldn’t grant the infomercial king, controversial author and radio host’s request to travel to Canada and other parts of the country for “business engagements.”

U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman said he thought the matter was out of his hands now that Trudeau, found in criminal contempt of court earlier this month and sentenced to 30 days in prison, has filed an appeal.

The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals put a temporary halt to the prison sentence, pending arguments before a three-judge panel there.

Gettleman penalized Trudeau after he urged his followers to deluge the judge’s email box regarding his ongoing civil case. Gettleman said Trudeau was trying to improperly influence the bench. Trudeau has said he believed he was exercising his First Amendment right.

Since his contempt finding, Trudeau, who continues to keep up a healthy tan, has been bound by a court order that doesn’t let him leave the Northern District of Illinois. Trudeau, who has a residence in Hinsdale, was ordered to give up his passport.

Trudeau sought to travel to Vancouver and Toronto as well as other parts of the country for “medical appointments and numerous business engagements,” according to a federal court filing.

Trudeau’s criminal lawyer, Thomas L. Kirsch, said he is still weighing whether to ask the appeals court if his client can travel.

Click here for the full report

Judge: Informercial pitchman can’t leave country

February 25, 2010

Business Week

By Mike Robinson

A federal judge refused Wednesday to give infomercial pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau permission to visit Canada next month while appeals his 30-day criminal contempt sentence in Chicago.

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman said Trudeau’s $50,000 bond, which also requires him to surrender his passport, was set by a federal appeals court. The judge said he has no authority to interfere with the higher court’s order by giving him permission to go to Canada.

While the bond set by the appeals court does require the passport be surrendered, Gettleman noted he saw nothing in it that would specifically bar a visit to Canada. But he said he was not certain of just what it allows.

“I’d be careful if I were you,” he told Trudeau.

Trudeau — who sells books advocating “natural cures” for a variety of ailments — has been fighting a court battle since 2003 with the Federal Trade Commission over alleged misleading advertising for a diet book.

Gettleman last week found Trudeau in criminal contempt, sentencing him to 30 days and fining him $50,000 — later reduced to $5,000 — for urging his supporters to flood the judge’s computer with messages praising his remedies.

The hundreds of messages that followed crashed Gettleman’s computer and inundated the judge’s BlackBerry while he was teaching a course at Northwestern University law school.

Trudeau left court Wednesday with attorney Thomas Kirsch II, who said they were still deciding whether to take their travel request to the appeals court.

Trudeau said he wants to visit Toronto and Vancouver for unspecified business reasons. The appeals court has yet to decide if it will hold a hearing on the appeal of Gettleman’s sentence.

Click here for the full report

Obama May Ban All Foreclosures Without HAMP Review

February 26, 2010

Bloomberg

By Dawn Kopecki

The Obama administration may expand efforts to ease the housing crisis by banning all foreclosures on home loans unless they have been screened and rejected by the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program.

The proposal, reviewed by lenders last week on a White House conference call, “prohibits referral to foreclosure until borrower is evaluated and found ineligible for HAMP or reasonable contact efforts have failed,” according to a Treasury Department document outlining the plan.

“It is one of the many ideas under consideration in the administration’s ongoing housing stabilization efforts,” Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly said in an e-mail. “This proposal has not been approved and there are no immediate planned announcements on the issue.”

She confirmed the authenticity of the document, which hasn’t been made public.

At present, lenders can initiate foreclosure proceedings on any loan that hasn’t been submitted for HAMP eligibility. Under current HAMP rules, foreclosure litigation can proceed while borrowers are under review for the program or even in a trial modification.

The proposed changes would prohibit lenders from initiating new foreclosure actions before loan screening by HAMP and would require lenders to halt existing proceedings for borrowers once they are in a trial repayment plan.

‘Improved Protections’

The Treasury Department will soon release guidance “which will include a set of improved protections for borrowers” in HAMP, Phyllis Caldwell, chief of Treasury’s Homeownership Preservation Office, said today in testimony prepared for a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee. She didn’t provide details.

The proposal goes further than rules adopted amid the crisis by federally controlled mortgage-finance companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which require lenders to review borrowers for a federal loan modification before a foreclosed property can be sold.

Foreclosure proceedings can still be initiated without a review, said Freddie Mac spokesman Doug Duvall. Fannie Mae spokeswoman Amy Bonitatibus said it adopted the same policy last March.

About 89 percent of outstanding residential mortgage loans are covered by the voluntary HAMP program.

About 2.82 million U.S. homeowners lost properties to foreclosure last year and 4.5 million filings are expected in 2010, RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California data company, said last month.

Seven Million

Obama’s foreclosure prevention initiative, announced in February 2009 to help as many as 4 million Americans avert foreclosure, has modified 116,297 loans through steps such as lowering interest rates or lengthening repayment terms. More than 830,000 borrowers received trial repayment plans through January, according to Treasury data.

“Foreclosure processes differ among states, and the process is often confusing to homeowners already facing distress,” Caldwell said in her prepared testimony. “Treasury has been reviewing guidelines around outreach and the foreclosure process as part of its continual assessment of program effectiveness and transparency.”

Foreclosures may reach as many as 7 million mortgages, and an additional 5 million are at risk of default because borrowers owe more than the property is worth, Laurie Goodman, senior managing director at Amherst Securities Group LP in New York, said in a Feb. 17 interview.

Republican Criticism

“This is a problem of mammoth proportions,” Goodman said. “You can’t throw 12 million people out of their homes, so you need a successful modification program. My fear is that this isn’t it, but I’m highly confident that the administration will continue to iterate until they succeed.”

The Treasury proposal would require all borrowers who are 60 or more days delinquent on their mortgage to be sought out for participation in HAMP. Mortgage companies would need to try to contact the borrower at least four times by phone and twice by certified mail over 30 or more days before going to foreclosure.

Under current Treasury policy, foreclosure proceedings are only halted when a borrower receives a permanent modification plan.

House Republicans criticized HAMP as a failure today, saying in a report that it is prolonging the economic crisis and harming homeowners.

“By every empirical measure, HAMP has failed,” according to the 18-page report released by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “In its current form, HAMP both hurts homeowners who might otherwise spend their trial-period mortgage payments on rent and also distorts the housing market, delaying any recovery.”

Click here for the full report

Greenspan: Worst Financial Crisis Ever, Including Great Depression

February 26, 2010

Washington’s Blog

Greenspan just said that the current credit crunch is “by far the greatest financial crisis, globally, ever” — including the 1930s Great Depression.

Bloomberg notes:

Greenspan said that while the economy was in worse shape in the Great Depression, the recent financial crisis was potentially more harmful than that in the 1930s because “never had short-term credit literally withdrawn.”
Greenspan also said “fiscal affairs are threatening this outlook” for recovery.

As I pointed out last May:

The following experts have said that the economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression:

•Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke

•Economics professors Barry Eichengreen and and Kevin H. O’Rourke (updated here)

•Investment advisor, risk expert and “Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb
•Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker •Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
•Economics scholar and former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin
•Well-known PhD economist Marc Faber
•Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead
•Morgan Stanley’s UK equity strategist Graham Secker •Former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae Edward J. Pinto
•Billionaire investor George Sorors
•Senior British minister Ed Balls
Unfortunately, virtually everything the American government has done since the crisis started has been counterproductive. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

The same is true of most other governments.

In the understatement of the day, Greenspan also called the recovery “extremely unbalanced,” driven largely by high earners benefiting from recovering stock markets and large corporations.

Click here for the full report

Wall Street Bonuses and Unemployment Continue To Grow

February 26, 2010

The International Forecaster

People should not underestimate the rational of those in high places because their agenda may be totally different then what they say it is. That includes the predicament of Dubai and Greece and a host of other nations that include the US and UK. The credit crisis, borne of the subprime crisis just didn’t happen; it was planned that way. Are we supposed to believe that the Fed took interest rates close to zero and that they flooded the monetary system with money and credit, because they were incompetent or stupid, hardly? The Fed, banking and Wall Street knew subprime loans were not AAA, but triple BBB. They all knew the syndication of these bonds were a fraud, which they allowed and which kicked off the credit crisis. Again, all is not as it seems to be. Thus, those of you who believe it was greed and incompetence are wrong. Up until four years ago it was Sir Alan Greenspan who sold his soul out to the Illuminists, now it is Ben Bernanke.

The troubles that countries are having with sovereign debt are growing exponentially. First it was Dubai supposedly with $100 billion in debt problems, which in fact may be underwater three or four times that number. Then, of course, there are a host of others. In the case of Dubai, British banks are holding the bag and probably will go down in flames. Greece cannot find any support even from Goldman Sachs. The Germans don’t want to help even though they knew Greece never was qualified to be in the euro. Greece is in a state of denial; is demanding reparations from Germany, which in 1960 paid a substantial amount to Greece in compensation. Germans for some time have wanted to exit the euro and the eurozone, some 71%. They have been sick and tired of carrying most of the rest of the zone with their balance of payments surplus. Greece makes up about 2.4% of GDP of the zone hardly enough to be concerned about. Eurozone governments would be better off writing off Greek bonds than subsidizing the country. Any bailout would be short lived, because so many other nations are in serious trouble. Let’s face it the eurozone is really Germany, France and the Netherlands.

For the last two months the dollar with the help of insiders Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, who knew the Greek problem was on the way, has had an unusual rally that is about to end. They obviously knew the IMF would announce another gold sale and that the Fed would raise the discount rate. How could they not know with Goldman controlling the Treasury and Morgan the Fed? They also knew like any other observant economic professional that M3 was being reduced to almost no expansion as was happening simultaneously by the ECB and England, an event that would tend to strengthen the dollar. Doing this they all are playing a very dangerous game. If they lose control deflation will overwhelm inflation and a deflationary depression could begin. That will happen eventually, but the elitists would like it to happen on their timetable. The US has to find a way to end monetization and they have run out of options. The only possibility is for government to steal Americans’ retirement plans. The trouble is almost all sovereign debt cannot be avoided. Now the only question is when will the big conference begin to revalue, and devalue currencies, settle debt default and form a new international currency-trading unit in part backed by gold? All nations have been well aware for a long time that sovereign debt and some corporate and individual debt will never be repaid. That is why nations have reduced dollar holdings from 64.5% of foreign reserves to 61.4%. With the exception of four nations sovereign debt is not worth the paper it is written on. They are Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Norway.

The dollar rally will soon end and speculators should begin to take short positions. All the good news for the dollar is out. For the moment it is the best of a bad lot. Then only real money is gold and silver. In the future more and more people worldwide will realize that and eventually there will be a stampede into the two precious metals. America will produce a debt to GDP ratio or 95% to 100% this year.

A staggering blow to the Illuminists is the exposure of the criminal cartel known as Goldman Sachs in their testimony to Congress and now helping Italy and Greece illegally circumvent eurozone rules. This will push the public away from investment and toward the safety of gold and silver.

In an attempt to smother inflation and hyperinflation the US government may follow China’s lead and increase reserve requirements. That may reduce inflation, but it would also bring the US closer to deflationary depression. One false step and the game is over. That risk also includes the ECB and England. Funds already are not being lent out and such further constriction could be disastrous. Credit has already dropped by trillions of dollars as unemployment continues to grow. There is now no question that there will be no recovery. How can there be when there is little money and credit available to grease the skids of recovery. All we are seeing is a switch to stage 2 of inflation. The question is will central banks lose control, and it is obvious they are acting in concert, and fall victim to a deflationary depression.

Domestically real estate foreclosures, both residential and commercial, continue to climb. The government’s attempt to assist the residential market has been pathetic in a situation that is overwhelming. By next year, 50% of homeowners could be under water. Business can’t get the loans they need, so they cannot increase employment and the more workers fired the more who have lost their homes.

Click here for the full report

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