WASHINGTON — Carmen Pittman had no intention of becoming an activist, but her bank, the Department of Justice and Occupy Atlanta turned her into one. Shortly before her grandmother died in 2011, the family realized that JPMorgan Chase was preparing to foreclose. HuffPost interviewed her late that year for a story on Occupy Atlanta and found a bewildered and desperate 21-year-old, talking about her childhood home in the past tense.

“My every Christmas, my every Thanksgiving, my every birthday, my every dinner was in this house,” Pittman said then of a home that had been in her family since 1953. “This was the base home. We could not stay away from this home. This home is my every memory.”

A year later, she won the house back from Chase. During the course of her fight, she was arrested for sitting on the floor of a local Chase branch and refusing to leave until the bank turned over the deed.

On Tuesday, she was camped out in front of the Department of Justice in Washington, having been fully transformed into an activist by her experience, asking why more Pittmans have been arrested related to the foreclosure fraud crisis than top Wall Street executives. She was answered with a stun gun.

The video above shows three large men surrounding Pittman as she tries to cover her face. Abruptly, an officer tasers her, and she crumples to the ground before being hauled off and arrested.

Pittman’s arrest came a day after 17 former homeowners were arrested, according to District of Columbia police, some of them also tasered while demonstrating outside the DOJ building.

As HuffPost reported, the protesters on Monday blocked traffic in front of the Robert F. Kennedy Building beginning at 2 p.m. Five hours later, Constitution Avenue remained shut from 9th Street to 10th Street. Many of the protesters who were not arrested pitched tents outside the building, setting up Tuesday morning’s showdown.

Tim Franzen, an organizer with Occupy Atlanta who was featured in the HuffPost series “Occupy Y’all Street,” was also arrested Tuesday and can be seen in the video. He helped bring together the effort that had saved Pittman’s home.

Those arrested Monday were charged with “incommoding,” or obstructing, traffic, according to Ann C. Wilcox, a lawyer representing the protesters.

The demonstration was organized, in part, by Occupy Our Homes, a grassroots group that grew out of Occupy Wall Street to support homeowners facing foreclosure. Other grassroots groups, including coalitions from as far away as Washington state, California and Florida, also joined the protest.

Shab Bashiri, an organizer for Occupy Our Homes Atlanta who was part of the DOJ protests and witnessed the tasering, told HuffPost that police officers had warned the activists Monday night that they had to clear out by 7 a.m. An hour before the deadline, she said, Department of Homeland Security agents showed up in force. “They had enough cars to line the entire street in front of DOJ,” she said. “They came with caution tape and cordoned off … the entrance.”

While other activists cleared out, nine people — including Pittman and Franzen — decided to remain at the DOJ entrance. They had linked arms as the police moved in. Bashiri said she was surprised that the police made “very little effort” to remove the activists before they began tasering Pittman. “Carmen was very visibly in pain,” Bashiri said. “She was crying.”

“Carmen fought for a very long time for her family’s house and had seen firsthand the effects of the crimes the banks committed,” Bashiri said. “Her grandmother had an extremely predatory loan that was impossible for her to pay off … It’s a very personal situation for Carmen. Carmen spent a year fighting for her home.”

No Justice Department officials came outside to acknowledge the protesters on Monday or Tuesday. A request for comment was not returned.

“We want our attorney general, Eric Holder, to bring some accountability from the banks and put them in jail,” said Vivian Richardson, 62, of San Francisco, whose home was foreclosed in 2010. Richardson fought to win back her house with the help of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and other community-based organizations.

Nearly one-third of all borrowers who faced foreclosure proceedings brought by the biggest U.S. mortgage companies came to the brink of losing their homes due to potential bank errors or now-banned practices, according to a study from bank regulators published in April. Many homeowners who successfully fought banks have received compensation checks far below the value of the homes they lost.

Eric Krasner’s home in Frederick, Md., was foreclosed in 2010 after he had filed for bankruptcy. Krasner, 52, who is now living in Atlanta but was protesting in Washington, battled banks for years before winning compensation. He said his fight revealed disorganization in the distribution by federal regulators of a $9.2 billion settlement with mortgage companies over improper foreclosures.

“When they said, ‘Oh, we’re going to do this settlement, but it’s taking so long we’re not even going to look at your files,’ I started calling my elected officials looking for answers,” Krasner said. “How are they going to determine how much to pay us … if they’re not going to even look at our [files]?”

Krasner said he figured he was owed $62,000 from the settlement, but when his check came, he received only $2,000. Many in his situation received as little as $300 in compensation. “Until Eric Holder does his job and puts bankers in jail, this is going to continue,” Krasner said.

“Banks were bailed out when they needed help … and they’re not giving back like they were supposed to,” said Richardson, echoing the same anger toward big banks that received billions in 2008 and 2009 to help keep them afloat after the economy soured.

The Democratically controlled Senate recently took a swipe at the “too big to fail, too big to jail” assumption. In March, it voted 99-0 in favor of a nonbinding budget amendment, introduced by Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), to eliminate subsidies or funding advantages for Wall Street banks with more than $500 billion in assets. The nonbinding amendment was attached to the Senate budget, which was never taken up by the Republican-controlled House. (Instead, the House passed a budget introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).)

In early March, Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that some banks are in fact too big to prosecute because doing so “will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” Last week, the attorney general tried to roll back his earlier statement, telling the House Judiciary Committee that there is “no institution … who cannot be investigated and prosecuted by the United States Department of Justice.”

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• Rudy Giuliani And The Price Of Milk

  While running for president in 2007, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a href=”http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/news_theswamp/2007/04/giulianis_price.html”told/a a reporter at a Montgomery, Ala., supermarket that he estimates “a gallon of milk is probably about a $1.50, a loaf of bread about a $1.25, $1.30, last time I bought one.” It must have been a few election cycles since his last trip: The grocery store’s website listed milk for $3.38 and bread up to $3.49.

• Dan Quayle And Single Mothers

  During George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle a href=”http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314dat=19920521id=b1tWAAAAIBAJsjid=NfADAAAAIBAJpg=6921,388223″ target=”_hplink”scoffed/a at the “Murphy Brown situation,” referring to a television character who had a child out of wedlock. Quayle called the Brown story “totally unreal,” adding, “A highly paid professional woman [with a baby] … give me a break.”

• Martha Coakley And Shaking Hands

  In a display of aloofness that many political observers say led to her defeat by Republican Scott Brown, Democratic Senate candidate and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley erred in a href=”http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0110/Coakley_not_sweating_it.html” target=”_hplink”brushing off/a the idea of ramping up her campaigning. When asked whether she was being too apathetic, she referenced one of Brown’s ads and fired back, “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”

• Spiro Agnew And Poor Neighborhoods

  Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew, branded as Richard Nixon’s go-to guy on cities, a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/18/us/spiro-t-agnew-ex-vice-president-dies-at-77.html?pagewanted=allsrc=pm” target=”_hplink”vowed/a in 1968 to avoid poor neighborhoods. “If you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all,” Agnew said.

• Gerald Ford And Tamales

  While visiting the Alamo in 1976, President Gerald Ford a href=”http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/No-one-told-Ford-tamales-need-to-be-unwrapped-1536700.php” target=”_hplink”bit/a into a tamale through the husk, a faux pas later deemed the “Great Tamales Incident.”

• George H.W. Bush And Grocery Scanners

  President George H.W. Bush caught flak for a href=”http://www.snopes.com/history/american/bushscan.asp” target=”_hplink”appearing awed/a by a supermarket check-out scanner while touring a grocers convention in 1992. It turned out the president was being shown a new bar code technology, and the convention worker who was alongside Bush later said it’s “foolish to think the president doesn’t know anything about grocery stores. He knew exactly what I was talking about.”

• George W. Bush And Gas Prices

  In 2008, President George W. Bush a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/business/worldbusiness/03iht-assess.4.11654214.html?_r=1″ target=”_hplink”said/a he had not heard predictions that gas prices could soon hit $4 a gallon. At the time, the national average was $3.29 a gallon.

• John Kerry And Cheese Steak

  In 2003, Democratic presidential contender John Kerry a href=”http://www.nationalreview.com/battle10/244119/bloombergs-john-kerry-cheesesteak-moment-thomas-shakely#” target=”_hplink”ordered/a Swiss cheese on a cheese steak while campaigning in South Philadelphia, straying from the traditional favorite topping, Cheez Whiz.

• Michael Dukakis And The Tank

  Democratic presidential contender Michael Dukakis a href=”http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/01/17/the-photo-op-that-tanked” target=”_hplink”tried/a to one-up Republican opponent George H.W. Bush on national defense by striking a pose in an M1 Abrams tank.

• Mitt Romney And Wawa

  Mitt Romney has had his fair share of seemingly out-of-touch statements this election cycle, admitting he likes to “fire people” and a href=”http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/mitt-romney-sandwich-computer-wawa/story?id=16587170#.T-Ca3XBfaUc” target=”_hplink”expressing amazement/a at the touchscreen ordering system at convenience store Wawa.

• Barack Obama And The Private Sector

  President Barack Obama is not exempt from the “gotcha” moment. In June, he a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/08/obama-doing-fine-private-sector_n_1581874.html” target=”_hplink”described/a the private sector economy as “doing fine.” The gaffe immediately elicited comparisons with his 2008 Republican opponent, John McCain, who said that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong” in the midst of a crippling financial crisis.

Here’s a fact that may make your blood boil: Nearly 8,000 Occupy Wall Street protesters have been arrested in association with the activist movement, while not one banker has been prosecuted for the actions that lead up to the country’s financial meltdown.

The website OccupyArrests.com has tracked 7,736 in 122 cities nationwide since the Occupy movement began in September 2011.

On Monday, hundreds of members of Occupy Our Homes, an organization that supports homeowners facing foreclosure, protested outside of the Justice Department to speak out against homeowner abuses in the wake of the housing crisis. Seventeen former homeowners were arrested that day, according to Washington police.

“We want our attorney general, Eric Holder, to bring some accountability from the banks and put them in jail,” protester Vivian Richardson, whose home was foreclosed on in 2010, told The Huffington Post Monday.

The Department of Justice has long been a target of Occupy protesters for its unwillingness to take judicial action against those responsible for the financial crisis.

Even Attorney General Eric Holder has acknowledged that some of the nation’s largest banks have become too big to prosecute — a claim he later walked back on after it incited backlash.

Just last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to federal officials demanding to know why no Wall Street bank has faced prosecution in the wake of the crisis.

Hat tip: The Contributor

Also on HuffPost:

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• Sanford “Sandy” Weill

  The former a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/sandy-weill-cnbc-break-up-big-banks_n_1701274.html”Citigroup Chairman and CEO told CNBC in 2012 that/a “we should probably… split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, and have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”

• John Reed

  Retired Citigroup chairman a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/opinion/l23volcker.html?_r=0″John S. Reed wrote to the New York Times in 2009/a: “Some kind of separation between institutions that deal primarily in the capital markets and those involved in more traditional deposit-taking and working-capital finance makes sense.”

• Phil Purcell

  Phil Purcell, former chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley, a href=”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304765304577480743265772620.html” target=”_hplink”argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed/a that the big banks should break their divisions up into separate firms. “These businesses should be spun off to give the value to shareholders and let investment banks be owned privately — hopefully largely by employees… so that the interests of the owners and bankers are aligned,” he wrote.

• David Komansky

  Former Merill Lynch CEO, David Komansky, is another former megabank CEO calling for the breakup of “too big to fail” banks, a href=”http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/under-pressure-megabanks-rely-on-three-myths/” target=”_hplink”according to Simon Johnson./a Komansky told Bloomberg TV that he a href=”http://www.bloomberg.com/video/59862858-komansky-says-he-regrets-role-in-glass-steagall-repeal.html” target=”_hplink”"regrets” calling for the repeal of Glass-Steagall,/a which allowed banks to become bigger than ever.

• Sallie Krawcheck

  Former Citigroup CFO Sallie Krawcheck has argued that big banks are simply a href=”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/12/sallie-krawcheck-jpmorgan-chase-loss_n_1588989.html” target=”_hplink” too complex to manage.

• Richard Parsons

  After announcing the end of his 16-year tenure on the board of a href=”http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-19/parsons-blames-glass-steagall-repeal-for-crisis.html”Citigroup, Richard Parsons told Bloomberg/a, “to some extent what we saw in the 2007, 2008 crash was the result of the throwing off of Glass-Steagall. Have we gotten our arms around it yet? I don’t think so because the financial-services sector moves so fast.”

• Scott Shay

  Scott Shay, the founder and chairman of Signature Bank, wrote in American Banker that a href=”http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/the-absurdity-of-too-big-to-fail-banking-1052812-1.html?zkPrintable=1nopagination=1″”reinstating Glass Steagall should be the highest priority”/a for financial regulators.

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MADISON, WI — DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”

The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details how state/regional “fusion center” personnel monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012. Personnel engaged in this activity at fusion centers include employees of municipal, county and federal counter terrorism/homeland security entities. Such entities include local police departments, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (including U.S. DHS components such as the Transportation Security Administration).

The report also examines how fusion centers and other counter terrorism entities that have emerged since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have worked to benefit numerous corporations engaged in public-private intelligence sharing partnerships.

While the report examines many instances of fusion center monitoring of Occupy Wall Street activists nationwide, the bulk of the report details how counter terrorism personnel engaged in the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC, commonly known as the “Arizona fusion center”) monitored and otherwise surveilled citizens active in Occupy Phoenix, and how this surveillance benefited a number of corporations and banks that were subjects of Occupy Phoenix protest activity.

While small glimpses into the governmental monitoring of the Occupy Wall Street movement have emerged in the past, there has not been any reporting — until now — that details the breadth and depth of the degree to which the nation’s post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights.

The report reveals for the first time:

• How law enforcement agencies active in the Arizona fusion center dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups organizing both protests of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the launch of Occupy Phoenix and how the work of this undercover officer benefited ALEC and the private corporations that were the subjects of these demonstrations.

• How fusion centers, funded in large part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, expended countless hours and tax dollars in the monitoring of Occupy Wall Street and other activist groups.

• How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has financed social media “data mining” programs at local law enforcement agencies engaged in fusion centers.

• How counter terrorism government employees applied facial recognition technology, drawing from a state database of driver’s license photos, to photographs found on Facebook in an effort to profile citizens believed to be associated with activist groups.

• How corporations have become part of the homeland security “information sharing environment” with law enforcement/intelligence agencies through various public-private intelligence sharing partnerships. The report examines multiple instances in which the counter terrorism/homeland security apparatus was used to gather intelligence relating to activists for the benefit of corporate interests that were the subject of protests.

• How private groups and individuals, such as Charles Koch, Chase Koch (Charles’ son and a Koch Industries executive), Koch Industries, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council have hired off-duty police officers– sometimes still armed and in police uniforms — to perform the private security functions of keeping undesirables (reporters and activists) at bay.

• How counter terrorism personnel monitored the protest activities of citizens opposed to the indefinite detention language contained in National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.

• How the FBI applied “Operation Tripwire,” an initiative originally intended to apprehend domestic terrorists through the use of private sector informants, in their monitoring of Occupy Wall Street groups. [Note: this issue was reported on exclusively by DBA/CMD in December, 2012.]

The report is authored by Beau Hodai, DBA Press publisher and Center for Media and Democracy contributor.

Read the full report and Appendix of cited materials at Sourcewatch.org.

Read the full report on DBA Press here and view the document archive on DBA Press here.

In addition to the report, PR Watch will be publishing articles extracted from the report throughout the week at PRwatch.org.

Fox Searchlight’s “The East” takes on Wall Street, and at the May 20 premiere in Gotham, the cast and creatives were also unafraid of criticizing that bastion of greed gone wild.

“The whole idea behind the film is that corporations are above the law almost,” pic’s Alexander Skarsgard said at the Landmark Sunshine Cinemas. “It doesn’t matter if you are Democrat or Republican, everyone is frustrated with the political system and the lack of accountability and power.”

Brit Marling, who stars and cowrote the script with helmer Zal Batmanglij, recalled, “A week after we wrote the opening scene, the BP oil spill happened and two weeks before filming, Occupy Wall Street blew up. In a very lucky way, we had our finger on the pulse of something that people are feeling right now.”

Batmanglij said the cast and crew felt excited during filming about that emerging Occupy Wall Street movement.

“Civil disobedience is an important part of the experience,” said the helmer. “I would love to see some 35-year-old bankers being thrown out of their homes because I saw a poor 75-year-old woman being evicted out of her home, which was cruel and wrong.”

Post-screening, guests traveled to the Hotel Chantelle’s rooftop, where pic’s Ellen Page said she didn’t totally sympathize with her anarchist character in the pic. “I understand her anger at corporate greed — profit before people and the widening gap between the rich and poor — but I don’t understand hurting people,” she said.

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A two-day long housing protest outside the Department of Justice this week has resulted in nearly 30 arrests and several instances of law enforcement unnecessarily using tasers on activists, according to eye-witnesses. The action – which was organized by a coalition of housing advocacy groups, including the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes – called for Attorney General Eric Holder to begin prosecutions against the bankers who created the foreclosure crisis.

“Everyone here is fed up with Holder acknowledging big banks did really bad stuff but [saying] they’re too big to jail,” says Greg Basta, deputy director of New York Communities for Change, who helped organize the event. Holder has previously suggested that prosecuting large banks would be difficult because it could destabilize the economy. The attorney general recently tried to walk those comments back – but the conspicuous lack of criminal prosecutions of bankers tells another story, one that Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi has written about extensively.

Gangster Bankers: Too Big To Jail

Alexis Goldstein, a former Wall Street employee and current Occupy Wall Street activist who was also at the event on Monday, agrees. “I want Eric Holder to uphold the rule of law, regardless of how much power the criminal has,” says Goldstein. She says the lack of criminal prosecutions has created a “culture of immunity” that only gets further entrenched by the small settlements that banks now consider a cost of doing business. “There’s no risk,” she says, adding that the DOJ is effectively “incentivizing breaking the law.”

Around 400 homeowners and 100 supporters took part in Monday’s actions outside the DOJ, according to Basta. One of them was Vera Johnson, of Seattle. “I’ve been dealing with foreclosure issues for three years,” says Johnson, just minutes after being released from the jail where she was held for over 24 hours for participating in this peaceful protest. Bank of America recently granted Johnson a loan modification after the media picked up on a Change.org petition that she started to save her home; this reprieve turned out to be a time bomb, as her rates were set to return to their original levels after four years. It’s an all too common story, and Johnson went to Washington, D.C. to “join in solidarity” with others in similar situations.

Many of this week’s protesters have been black and Latino homeowners, who were hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis. Mildred Garrison-Obi – a black woman from Stone Mountain, Georgia – was evicted from her home in 2012, though with the help of Occupy Our Homes she was able to return to it after four months of facing homelessness. “It was devastating,” says Garrison-Obi, who was arrested today in a related action held outside of a law firm where Holder was once a partner. “But I’m not alone.”

Activists note with dismay that the government has been significantly harder on people who stage nonviolent demonstrations against Wall Street than it has on the crooked bankers responsible for the housing crisis. Goldstein and Basta both say they witnessed law enforcement using tasers on multiple protesters this week. Johnson says that several hours before her arrest, as she and others sat on planter boxes outside the DOJ, a Department of Homeland Security officer asked, “Do you want to get arrested?” and then, “Do you want to get tased?” Later, when she refused to unlock her arms with another protester after three warnings – hardly a violent act or a threat to public safety – she says she was tased from behind on her left arm. She turned around to see the same officer, who she recalls telling her, “That’s what you get.”

Carmen Pittman, an activist with Occupy Our Homes in Atlanta, suffered similar treatment at this week’s protests. In video footage of her arrest, Pittman appears to have her arms interlocked with another protester.

Lawyers familiar with police codes of conduct note that this kind of passive resistance generally does not meet the official standards for when an officer can use a taser. “In a study of regulations around tasers, the National Institute of Justice found that most police departments do not allow taser use against someone who ‘nonviolently refuses’ a police command,” says NYU law professor Sarah Knuckey, who co-authored a report on the suppression of the rights of Occupy activists. “The incident needs to be thoroughly investigated, there must be a public accounting of what happened and why, and any wrong-doing must be punished.” 

Zach Lerner, another activist with NYCC, displayed marks left on his torso after a taser had been used on him.

A spokesperson for the Washington, D.C. police department directed requests for comment to the Federal Protective Service, part of the Department of Homeland Security. Scott McConnell, an FPS spokesperson, said that “a number of individuals” had “breached a security barricade after repeated warnings to leave the area” and that there had been 27 arrests as of Tuesday morning; he declined to comment on the video of Pittman getting tased or on FPS’s taser policy generally.

Monday and Tuesday’s actions came as the DOJ falls under increasing criticism for its investigations of journalists – first seizing records that cover dozens of Associated Press reporters, and now targeting Fox News’ James Rosen. Many media observers have found the Rosen case especially troubling, due to the fact that he was investigated under the theory that he engaged in a conspiracy with Stephen Kim – his source – to leak government information. This is the same theory that U.S. officials have used to go after Wikileaks, and if applied more widely, it would effectively criminalize the basic act of investigative reporting. Some see the Obama DOJ’s war on whistleblowers and leakers – and now journalists – less as a means of protecting national security than a way to crack down on who controls information.

As journalists start to get the feeling that their profession is under attack by Obama’s DOJ, that department is saying something entirely different – though just as clearly – to the nation’s financial elite. “The message,” says Goldstein, “is that you can get away with anything.”

Non-profit group buys old debt in credit markets like the collection agencies do.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — An offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement has bought more than $1 million in old medical bills in this area and freed the debtors from the obligation of paying it off.

The New York-based nonprofit Rolling Jubilee fund says it is in the process of buying almost $12 million in outstanding old bills nationwide for pennies on the dollar in an effort to liberate debtors who often cannot afford to pay. And it intends to buy more as it gets more money from donors.

STORY: Bill collectors get tough, complaints surge

“It is the Rolling Jubilee’s position that it is making a tax-free gift to the people whose debt it is abolishing,” the organization says on its website. This debt is unpaid bills that creditors sell to collection agencies at a discount and collection agencies sell among themselves, what Rolling Jubilee calls a “shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors.”

Sometimes those debts have been paid off, were settled in bankruptcy court or had an expiration on their statute of limitations. But debt collectors often try to revive a claim, cajoling a debtor to make even a small payment so the entire debt can be resurrected legally.

Critics call this “zombie” debt because obligations that people thought were long dead come back to haunt them — and can get new life if a debtor gets intimidated and makes the wrong moves.

“We’re going into this market not to make a profit but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities,” the Rolling Jubilee Fund says. “Think of it as a bailout of the 99% by the 99%.”

Shirley Logsdon, 80, is one of 1,064 people in the Louisville area who has benefited.

She thought Medicare had paid her delinquent $983 bill for back pain care last year. That’s what her doctor told her after a 2011 dispute during which the bill had gone to a collection agency, she said.

“I am very happy that somebody paid it,” said Logsdon, the first debtor in this area to publicly identify herself. “In fact, I had quit worrying about it when we didn’t get any more notices that we owed it.”

Rolling Jubilee spokesman Thomas Gokey said all of the half dozen or so Louisville-area debtors who contacted the fund after being notified last month that their debt was forgiven said they were unaware their medical bills still were owed.

Each got a letter from Strike Debt, the sponsor of Rolling Jubilee, like the one Logsdon received, telling her she no longer owed the $983.

“It is gone, a no-strings-attached gift,” the letter said.

Logsdon said she was relieved but also irritated because she thought insurance had already paid — a reaction that Gokey said was typical of those who didn’t know their debt still was sloshing around in the financial system.

The $1.12 million in Louisville-area debt bought by the Rolling Jubilee Fund came from six physicians here, said Fred Melroy, the billing and finance director for the medical practice management firm CureMD in New York City. In January, the Rolling Jubilee fund purchased the entire bundle for $10,000.

Melroy said the doctors, who work for Louisville Inpatient Physician Services, want anyone who received a letter from Strike Debt to know that they indeed are free from those debts.

“I would believe that any patient with disputed debt would welcome a letter saying for whatever reason we are canceling your debt,” he said.

Medicare and Aetna, Logsdon’s former insurance company, had disputed who should pay her bill, But Melroy said an investigation Tuesday, prompted by a Courier-Journal query, concluded that Medicare should have paid it.

The doctors’ previous billing agency is to blame for not sorting that out sooner, he said.

Melroy said his company became responsible for collecting the doctors’ receivables in 2011. The physicians were unsure which of the delinquent medical debts their previous billing agency managed already had been paid. Instead, they decided to sell the debt for an average 1 cent on the dollar to the Rolling Jubilee Fund.

“The last thing they would want would be to harass any patient whose debt was not validated or could not pay for economic reasons,” Melroy said in an email.

“They kept sending me bills saying the insurance company refused it and Medicare refused it, and then finally, they turned it over to a collection agency,” said Logsdon’s 83-year-old husband, Norbert.

Shirley Logsdon’s medical records, which she provided, show she had an overnight hospital stay and diagnostic tests, including an X-ray and CAT scan.

Logsdon’s daughter, Mary Ann Seger, said the numerous phone calls with her mother, the doctors’ office and the collection agency in 2012 were “a nightmare.”

Then the collection agency stopped calling.

“We assumed everything was good,” Seger said.

She had mixed feelings about the notice from Rolling Jubilee that the debt had been paid off.

“It keeps coming back,” Seger said. “You can’t kill it. If it had been billed properly and handled properly, the debt wouldn’t even have been there.”

Since the recession, the debt collection industry has ballooned, according to the Federal Trade Commission. But the way the delinquent debts are sold, as a bundle of thousands of different debts, can lead to errors.

Debt less than 3 years old was verified to be accurate just 58% of the time, said an FTC report called The Structure Practices of the Debt Buying Industry.

“Confusion is the grease that keeps the wheels of the medical collections industry turning,” Gokey said.

Meanwhile, Logsdon said she was “tired of fooling with this.”

“When you step in it, it takes a long time to get it off your shoe,” she said. “It just lingers and lingers and lingers.”

You’ve probably had to deal with one or two phone calls from a debt collector, calling about a debt that you might not even remember, or even owe.

If you were to peek at the Hotel Chantelle rooftop Monday evening, you might not suspect that guests were toasting a movie about eco-terrorism.

Brit Marling, the star of the film—titled “The East” and directed by Zal Batmanglij—wore a “Piaget rose pendant necklace,” according to a spokeswoman for the film, who added “she’s the first to wear it ever in the U.S.” Alex Skarsgard mingled by the open bar, tall and Swedish as ever. And crowds gathered to smoke cigarettes while admiring views of the nearby Williamsburg Bridge.

But “The East” isn’t exactly a big-budget action flick, glamorous premiere party notwithstanding.

The latest film from Mr. Batmanglij, who previously directed the cult-favorite movie about cults, “Sound of My Voice,” centers on a securities-firm operative who infiltrates an anarchist organization committing crimes against corrupt corporations only to find herself charmed by the “freegan” fringe group. It’s equal parts artsy fashion spread (the anarchists clean up well when they have to) and intellectual who-dun-it.

In a room packed with reporters, Ms. Marling said her role as a charming yet steely undercover agent had a journalistic quality.

“Journalists go in deep cover all the time,” she said.

To earn the trust of those she planned to expose, her character was game for anything but never too enthusiastic. “She threatens to leave. That’s the ultimate way to infiltrate something: Threaten to leave and have them invite you in. Then it’s like you were never trying to infiltrate,” she said.

The anarchists in the film have ideological nods toward the “Occupy Wall Street” protests, which began two weeks before Mr. Batmanglij started shooting the film. “We had our finger on the pulse,” Ms. Marling said. (The actress, who co-wrote “The East,” was valedictorian at Georgetown University.)

The premiere, on the other hand, had no nods toward the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. Guests from Vogue magazine’s Grace Coddington to Adam Goldman, the creator of the Brooklyn-based web series “The Outs,” turned up for the screening, held at the Landmark Sunshine Theater.

The afterparty was summery: Partygoers imbibed a few too many comp vodka sodas; picked at deliciously greasy spring rolls (“these are award-winning,” one guest remarked); and flitted among circles talking about everything from Mr. Skarsgard’s inexhaustible hotness to recent bad dates.

Perhaps the social spirit of the filmmakers rubbed off on guests. Director Mike Cahill has been “best friends” with former roommates Mr. Batmanglij and Ms. Marling for the past 12 years, Mr. Batmanglij said in his remarks. Ms. Marling and Mr. Cahill just finished working on another film, Ms. Marling said, and she’s already at work on a new script with Mr. Batmanglij.

“Then,” she said. “I think I might take a break.”

So this happened outside JPMorgan’s headquarters in New York today… 

This is Marni Halasa, a performance artist who moonlights as the ‘Bank Reform Bitch,’ an Occupy Wall Street dominatrix character. Her mission is to spread the message that ‘naughty bankers’ should be ‘seriously spanked.’
She appeared this morning in front of JPMorgan’s 270 Park Avenue offices to protest the shareholder vote over whether or not to split Jamie Dimon’s role as CEO/Chairman at today’s meeting in Tampa, Fla.
She told us that people seemed to enjoy her performance. ‘Let me tell you something…No one is really a fan of the megabanks. There are numerous bankers who came out of 270 Park and took my photo, gave me a thumbs up and a nod of approval,’ she said in an email to us.

WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) has been named the new CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), one of Wall Street’s largest lobbying trade associations. Gregg retired from the Senate in January 2011, two years after he withdrew his nomination to serve as secretary of commerce under President Barack Obama.

SIFMA also announced Monday that former Rep. Ken Bentsen (D-Texas) will be the group’s president. Bentsen has worked for SIFMA’s government relations team since 2009.

In a statement issued Monday, incoming SIFMA Chairman Jim Rosenthal said Gregg is “a national leader and a respected voice on financial regulatory and economic issues,” who, along with Bentsen, will help the Wall Street lobby accomplish its major goal of “increasing trust and confidence in the financial markets.”

As the onetime ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Gregg was a staunch defender of Wall Street and the financial sector throughout the 2008 financial crisis, helping to author the bill that bailed out the nation’s largest banks. The finance, insurance and real estate sector was a top contributor to his campaigns, donating more than $1 million since the 1992 election cycle.

Gregg’s career in elected office spanned three decades, most notably as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, then governor of New Hampshire and finally as a three-term senator from the Granite State.

In early 2009, reports emerged that Gregg had agreed to serve as secretary of commerce in Obama’s Cabinet, a significant move for the lifelong Republican. Within days, however, the senator signaled that he disagreed with the new Obama administration’s position on a number of issues, chiefly the stimulus bill and the U.S. Census. Gregg announced he had withdrawn his name from consideration soon after.

Since leaving office, Gregg has taken a position as a senior adviser to financial giant Goldman Sachs and served as a co-chair of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a deficit reduction campaign backed by billionaire Peter G. Peterson.

At SIFMA, Gregg will continue efforts to salvage the public image of the nation’s largest banks in the wake of the financial crisis triggered by the 2008 collapse of the U.S. housing market, which buckled under the weight of risky sub-prime loans that had been packaged and sold by the big banks as highly profitable financial products. Over the next few years, Americans lost trillions of dollars, much of it in home values.

As far back as 2009, SIFMA viewed the rise of populist anger at big banks, which would later jell into the Occupy Wall Street movement, as a threat. In an internal memo that year obtained by Bloomberg News, SIFMA executives described a plan to hire lobbyists and public relations specialists to portray the industry “as part of the solution,” a tactic the group believed would “allow it to better defend against populist overreaction” to the financial crisis.

To do this, the group spends big money on Washington lobbyists, more than $5 million in 2012 alone.

In a statement on Monday, Gregg said, “It is an honor to join SIFMA as CEO. America’s success and prosperity depends on a vibrant financial system providing access to capital and credit that helps people on Main Streets across America build on their dreams of opening a small business, saving to be able to send their children to college, buying their first home or saving for retirement.”

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 I don’t know if Occupy Wall Street has been quiet lately or if I have just not been paying attention.  Nonetheless, they have something going on right now.  The OWS Bring Justice to Justice rally was scheduled to begin at 1:oo PM with a march on the Department of Justice.

Five years after Wall Street crashed the economy, not one banker has been prosecuted for the reckless and fraudulent practices that cost millions of Americans their jobs, threw our cities and schools into crisis, and left families and communities ravaged by a foreclosure crisis and epidemic of underwater mortgages.

They cite Attorney General Holder’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which gave us the catchy “Too Big to Jail”

 But I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Meanwhile we hear cries from Republicans in Congress to prosecute some GS9s or something like that for thinking that people who call themselves a party might be planning some campaign activity.

There is an encampment in front of the Department of Justice.  You know it is getting serious when you see comments like

Need food. Call for pizza delivery? 202-***-****, to 930 Constitution Ave in front of the DOJ.

put glycerin drops in eyes before the pepper spray it will help when you flush eyes out, keep a bottle of water with you, swimmers goggles work great too

There is a meeting going on right now.  There have been seventeen arrests, but they are still there.

I have not seen any mainstream coverage yet just facebook and twitter.

You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.