Bro Omowale:

You describe yourself as a wealth strategist, what is that?

Sis Sandra:

Well, I coined the term because I look at various areas of wealth. What I tend to look at is creating a balance; money and finance is relatively a small part of our life.

I look at five areas of wealth, which is 1. Economics; 2. Health; 3. Intellectual wealth (how our minds work; our left and right hemisphere) 4. Interpersonal wealth (our relationships and how we communicate) 5. Spiritual wealth (the key to our being, going back to our spirit).

So that's what a wealth strategist does.

Bro Omowale:

Sis Sandra, this evening we're looking at the global credit crunch, what is the credit crunch?

Sis Sandra:

When we look at this system, we cannot take anything they say for granted, we're in what we're calling a global debt crunch; you have to look at the words and what they actually mean. The global debt cunch is something I've been talking about, but not giving it that term, for the last three years.

I knew that it was a really quite predictable because that's the way the system works; it works on a system of expansion and contraction.

Every so often 'The Banksters' (the people who control the money supply) either put more money into the system or take more money out. At the moment, they are taking more money out; they're restructuring themselves and also they're looking at ways to create debt.

So it's about going through these xpansions and contractions every so often. The work that I've been doing for the last three years was trying to prime people, or suggest to people that we get educated to prepare for this kind of global contraction of finances so we do not find ourselves short.

It's still not too late; we still can take advantage of it by acknowledging the main focus and not become a slave of the system.

Bro Omowale:

The credit crunch is connected with something called sub-prime mortgages that our brothers and sisters in america, in particular, have been affected by. What is a sub-prime mortgage and how has it affected African people?

Sis Sandra:

Well, there isn't really a distinction to be made - they'd like us to think there's a distinction between what's happening in US, the UK and the Caribbean or on the continent, but there's more than just one system.

If we look at sub-prime mortgages, we have to give a background; a bit of brief history because the sub-prime mortgages did not really happen by themselves.

The banksters create wealth from nothing and what I would suggest is that we've got to research. Go to on to any search engine and type in 'how banks create money'.

Once you understand how banks create money, you get a fuller understanding of the system we're in. They create money from nothing virtually.

In the mortgage industry they make money not through creating the mortgage itself but from the little note that you sign - the 'I owe you' and before that ink has dried on the note you've signed, that note is traded globally backwards and forwards for billions and billions of dollars and pounds.

That is how they make their money. The more mortgages that they can create, the more notes they create, they have a bigger mortgage book.

So how can they get more people onto their books? Most people think the standard institutions have pretty strict criteria. I remember friends of my parents in the early 60s when they wanted to buy outside of the main capital areas like London, they couldn't get mortgages. Building societies wouldn't give us mortgages because we were red lined as African people.

Bro Omowale:

Please explain that term?

Sis Sandra:

The banksters don't give credit to this group or will only give it a certain rate because they wanted us to live in certain areas for their purposes.

So, if we couldn't get mortgages directly from the established building societies, banks and other financial institutions; other people would come along and say, "we will give you a mortgage; but beacuse you're so high risk, we will give you a mortgage at a much higher rate".

So the sub-prime really came in to facilitate people who were ignorant about mortgages. We were uninformed about mortgages as African people, because we have been enslaved - we went from chattel slavery to wage slavery and now we've become debt slaves.

The so called contracts that they are using, a ot of them are illegal, there isn't even a contract there, but because people are uninformed and uneducated about what they are actually signing, people believe they have contracts.

It's more subtle as well because they are creating these things or giving you what you believe to be some sort of asset from the, when we are not actually getting assets and they are charging us interest on something they have not given us.

That's the level that we need to start confronting them with and I think that is starting to happen. It's certainly starting to happen here and I can give people information about that.

Bro Omowale:

Are you saying that Afrikan people have been part of that group that have been red-lined and if so, why?

Sis Sandra:

Oh yes, definitely.

When we were transferred from the Carribean and Afrika to the UK, we lived in particular areas, usually in the inner-cities under County Councils and were not allowed to re-move beyond those boundaries, so most of congregated in London, Manchester and Leeds, the industrial areas because that's where the work was.

We couldn't go out into the country to places like kent and all other suburbs because we were not going to get accommodation, we were not allowed or given access to mortgages.

Bro Omowale:

Are you saying this is a conscious decision by the banks and the mortgage companies not to give us certain loans?

Sis Sandra:

Yes! Yes!

A family I know wanted to move into the (London) Borough of Croydon and it was a white man who worked with them to front the mortgage until the last moment when it was too late for them to pull out and that's how they managed to get a mortgage - that was late 50s, early 60s.

Lots of us had difficulty getting mortgages. I know of people who got private mortgages from Jewish firms - not through banks or the building societies.

Bro Omowale:

They are deemed sub-prime mortgages because the prime or standard mortgages are for standard (non-Afrikan people) but Afrikans have been distinguished as being sub-human or 3/5th of a human (according to the US Constitution), hence, the only kind of mortgage that we can attract is the sub-prime.

The NAACP (National Association for Advancement of Coloured People) are filing law suits now in federal courts against mortgage lenders because they have been accused of steering black borrowers into sub-prime loans. 50% of Hispanic people and 62% of Afrikan people (ie people not (sic) in the higher income earning bracket of $150K - $250K) have been ear marked for these sub-prime mortgages compared to 20% of Europeans.

Thos figures wouldn't surprise you?

Sis Sandra:

No.

But I would be interested to see what aspect those law suits are taking place from, beacuse it shouldn't just be that these mortgages have targeted Afrikan people and they were 'bad mortgages'.

What I would be more interested in is actually looking at the so-called agreement and contract that these people have been led into because I believe 99.9% of those so called agreements & contracts do not have a leg to stand on and that's really where the emphasis should be.

If the mortgage contract or agreement is fundamentally flawed or illegal then people are entitled to full restitution. For example, if their property has been repossessed - full restitution (repayment) of the cost of the property at today's price...

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