Alleged fraud at JP Morgan.  Who could have guessed?

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A federal class action lawsuit is making some strong allegations against JPMorgan Chase, claiming the  lender routinely fabricates documents to deceive bankruptcy judges into believing Chase is the beneficiary in bankruptcy cases, and goes so far as to Photoshop documents to “create the illusion” of standing “in tens of thousands of bankruptcy cases.”

According to the JPMorgan Chase bankruptcy fraud class action lawsuit, “Chase is engaged in the business practice of deceiving bankruptcy judges, Chapter 7 trustees, Chapter 11 trustees, Chapter 13 trustees, the Office of the United States Trustee, creditors, creditor attorneys, debtors in possession, debtors and debtors attorneys as to Chase’s status as a secured creditor in tens of thousands of bankruptcy cases filed nationwide.”

Among the numerous allegations in the Chase bankruptcy fraud class action lawsuit, Chase is alleged to have:

1. engaged in perjury, fraud and intentional misrepresentation by manufacturing a chain of title transfer evidence in order to falsely prove it stands in thousands of bankruptcy matters; and

2. used manufactured evidence to deceive the bankruptcy court and other bankruptcy players as to the identity of the true beneficiary or creditor of Class Members’ non-negotiable promissory notes (MLNs).

A copy of the Chase Bankruptcy Fraud Class Action Lawsuit can be read here.

The case is Ernest Michael Bakenie v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., Case No. SACV12-0060 JVS (MLGx), U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

CONTINUED at Top Class Actions.

It is not every day that you are separated from your body and then stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife.

But such experiences are routine in the lab of Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who uses illusions to probe, stretch and displace people’s sense of self. Today, using little more than a video camera, goggles and two sticks, he has convinced me that I am floating a few metres behind my own body. As I see a knife plunging towards my virtual chest, I flinch. Two electrodes on my fingers record the sweat that automatically erupts on my skin, and a nearby laptop plots my spiking fear on a graph.

Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson’s repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person1, gained a third arm2, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions3. The storeroom in his lab is stuffed with mannequins of various sizes, disembodied dolls’ heads, fake hands, cameras, knives and hammers. It looks like a serial killer’s basement. “The other neuroscientists think we’re a little crazy,” Ehrsson admits.

But Ehrsson’s unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.

“Descartes said that if there’s something you can be certain of in this world, it’s that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson. Yet Ehrsson’s illusions have shown that such certainties, built on a lifetime of experience, can be disrupted with just ten seconds of visual and tactile deception. This surprising malleability suggests that the brain continuously constructs its feeling of body ownership using information from the senses — a finding that has earned Ehrsson publications in Science and other top journals, along with the attention of other neuroscientists.

“A lot of people thought the sense of self was hard-wired, but it’s not at all. It can be changed very quickly, and that’s very intriguing,” says Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

… A year after removing his subjects from their own bodies, Ehrsson learned how to trick them into acquiring new ones. This time, the volunteers’ goggles showed them the view from a camera on the head of a mannequin looking at its own plastic torso. Simultaneously poking the arm or stomach of the mannequin and the volunteer a few times was enough to convince the subjects that they were the dummy. They could even stare at their old bodies from their new ones and shake hands with their old self, all without breaking the spell¹. “It really is very intense and incredibly fast,” says Mark Hallett, a neurologist from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who experienced it first hand.

CONTINUED at Nature.

*Taken from Reason. Written by Steve Chapman.

When you pick up a glossy, multi-page color brochure at a presidential campaign event, you expect to see a candidate’s image on the front. The ones stacked on a table inside the Sports Page Grill, where Tim Pawlenty is appearing this morning, do feature that sort of photo. But it’s not of Pawlenty. It’s of Barack Obama.

This choice does not reflect a heroic sublimation of ego. The headline on the flier says, “Leadership isn’t about fancy speeches and empty promises.” Pawlenty wants to convey a simple message: He is nothing like Obama, and that’s an excellent thing.

The candidate, who is spending the week touring Iowa in an RV, stands in front of a banner reading “Results. Not Rhetoric.” The contrast highlights his strength, his record as a two-term governor of Minnesota, while reminding voters of the limits of oratorical talent.

CONTINUED..