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Bankers are different than you and me

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Imagine, if you will, that you were the plaintiff in one or more lawsuits. Imagine that you submitted evidence to a court knowing that it was fraudulent, or, upon learning it was fraudulent, failed to make the court aware of that fact.

Now imagine that just about everyone knew what you’d done or were doing, because the person who committed the fraud pleaded guilty to doing it.

What do you suppose would happen to you?

Well, if you were a normal human being, you would very likely go to jail, or at the very least, the tainted evidence would be tossed, your cases would likely be tossed out of court and you might incur some hefty sanctions.

But that’s because you’re not a bank. For this very scenario is now playing itself out.

On November 20th 2012 I told you about a guilty plea taken by Lorraine Brown, the founder of DOCX (later known at LPS), in federal court in Florida. The press release for that plea did not come out until after 5 PM on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving most of the reporters who usually occupy the front pages of our newspapers and network news were presumably traveling or preparing for their holiday. The story was barely reported.

Lorraine Brown also pled guilty earlier that same day in state court in Missouri. She is rumored to be in plea negotiations in other states.

Even though this is no longer breaking news, it still belongs on the front page of every paper in the country and should be the lead story on every newscast. I’ll tell you why:

Whatever the banks thought about the robo-signing being “sloppy” before, once Lorraine Brown admitted that virtually every document coming out of DOCX/LPS was a forgery and that ALL documents coming out of DOCX/LPS were suspect, the banks that had court cases pending using DOCX/LPS documents had an obligation to either withdraw the documents and/or withdraw the lawsuits and other foreclosure proceedings.

It is a crime (common law fraud) to knowingly use a false, perjured, forged, fraudulent document as “evidence” in court. The specific statute violated will vary from state to state, but it is impossible to conceive that there is a single state where this is legal. If I’m wrong about that, I’m sure someone from the fraud-allowing state will set me straight in the comments. This is certainly a violation of federal criminal law, for example 18 USC §§ 371, 1341, 1342, and 1343 and 39 USC§§ 1341 and 1342.

(via Firedoglake)

To a certain extent, the fact that the banks can get away with this is due to the fact that individual judges may be unaware of these facts. But this doesn’t explain why state AGs are not going after the banks. It truly is inexplicable, as I can’t imagine there’s an AG in any state, be it ever so red, that would become less popular by going after these banks.  Maybe our own George Jepsen would like to lead the way.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Fitting in the Frame

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

This morning I attended a breakfast meeting of the Chamber of Commerce in Norwich. I made this sacrifice solely to show support for Chris Murphy, who addressed the assembled multitude. I figured that it could only help if there were at least a few Democrats in a crowd consisting mostly of people who think that their interests are aligned with the people who actually control the Republican Party.

But I digress.

Murphy acquitted himself well, but would I be a good Democrat if I didn’t find something to complain about?

There may breathe a member of Congress who speaks the flat out truth about the “fiscal cliff”, but if there is, I haven’t heard, unless it’s Bernie Sanders. I will give Murphy credit for having the brains to realize that all this talk about cliffs; looming economic Armageddons, and debt crises are fact free diversions from the agenda that is really being pushed. Yet, there he was, accepting, or appearing to accept, the reality of this artificial crisis and fitting comfortably within the frame constructed by the beltway insiders, who masquerade as deficit hawks until it looks like they will have to contribute, if ever so slightly, toward reducing the deficit they claim to deplore.

I can sort of understand why an informed politician might nonetheless feel obligated to talk to a group such as the Chamber folks in the way Murphy did. By and large, they’re uninformed, since they get their news from the media elite that have constructed the frame. It would be hard for them to bend their minds around the concept that the deficit is actually a minor matter in the near term; that in fact decreasing it is not a good idea; that the only danger posed by the “fiscal cliff” is the fact that it might very well reduce the debt too quickly; and that slashing Social Security and Medicare would be inefficient and destructive ways to deal with deficits, either in the short term or the long term.

To give him his due, Murphy did allude to the fact that Social Security does not contribute to the deficit, and that Medicare’s contribution is fairly insignificant and he certainly didn’t embrace the slash and burn solutions to the non-problem that are so often proposed. But he said nothing that would lead anyone to question that the entire debate is predicated on the existence of a threat that exists only in some fevered imaginations. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a politician tell us the whole truth and nothing but the truth: that deficits are the least of our problems right now, given that we have huge numbers of people unemployed and an entire generation at risk of permanent relegation to the ranks of the unemployable. Sure, they’re not used to hearing that, and the first politician who breaks free of the mandatory meme will be taking a risk, but here we might learn from Republicans. They have found, with this issue as with so many others, that all you need to do to get people to believe a lie is repeat it often enough. It’s about time for Democrats to at least experiment with the possibility that the same thing works if you keep repeating the truth.

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A tax that can’t be mentioned in polite company

Monday, December 10, 2012

The “fiscal cliff” scare is a phony issue on a number of levels. It is a situation that was purposely created, and is now being used as a justification for taking steps that don’t have anything to do with the “cliff” itself.

One indication of this, and I’m by no means being original in saying this, is the fact that some obvious ways to enhance revenue without inflicting any real pain go unmentioned by our rulers, because the pain they would inflict, tiny as it would be, would be felt exclusively by the .01%.

The financial transaction tax is the best example. A tiny tax on each financial transaction would yield enormous sums of money for the treasury, without doing any harm whatsoever to the wider economy, and it would, as is pointed out at the linked article, impose the cost of recovering from the 2008 crash on those who caused it.

For us commoners, it would mean paying a tax so small on our infrequent stock purchases that we would never notice it. But high frequency traders would feel it.

There are two possible outcomes.

First, the traders could continue their current level of high frequency trades, which trades benefit no one but them, and often lead to market instability. This would be good, in that it would yield a bonanza for the Federal treasury without hurting the rest of us at all.

Or, the traders could stop engaging in high frequency trading, which would also be good.

But the serious folks in Washington don’t want to hear such things. It makes far more sense, apparently, to raise the eligibility age for Medicare, despite the fact that doing so would increase medical costs nationwide and inflict real harm on real people.

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Friday Night Music, Take Two

Friday, December 7, 2012

I couldn’t resist passing on this very silly video.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, December 7, 2012

Unfortunately, the choice was made for me this week. Back in the dim and distant past, if a member of my generation had only one jazz album, the odds were 10 to 1 it was Take Five, The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s masterpiece. Of course, Take Five is the signature piece from the album, but they’re all great, including this one, Blue Rondo a la Turk. And hey, check out these special effects, state of the art circa 1962.

I just have to reprise this feel good video that I believe I posted once before. I love the look of delight in Brubeck’s face as the young violinist joins in the fun.

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What would Abe do?

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Yeesh, I’m embarrassed on behalf of Joe Klein. Not that I have much good to say about the guy, but well…it’s like when I was quite young and I used to squirm while watching Lucille Ball get herself involved in a really stupid situation on I Love Lucy. Even though I knew it was all made up, I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed for the lady. But this is even worse. This is real.

Klein purports to channel Abraham Lincoln and tells us exactly what Lincoln would have done had he had to deal with the “fiscal cliff”. I know it’s a wild coincidence, but it turns out Lincoln would have done precisely the same thing that Klein would do, which means, I guess, that we should all conclude that we missed out on a great president when Klein decided to be a “journalist”.

What would Lincoln do about the fiscal cliff? The answer seems obvious. He would narrow the debate where necessary—on the revenue side—while expanding it to make more-creative long-term judgments about spending. He’d set a revenue figure, let’s say $2 trillion, and allow politics to run its course toward a $1.5 trillion-or-so compromise, with the actual menu of rate increases and loophole closings subject to the convenience of the pols. On the spending side, he would probably have to look at health care in a new way.

(via Balloon Juice)

Of course, Klein has zero insight into what Lincoln would do about the “fiscal cliff”, other than be unsurprised that it’s been engineered by a bunch of Southerners. But attributing his own opinions to Lincoln, at least in his own mind, gives them a validity they would lack if they had to stand unbuttressed by the asserted endorsement of our greatest president. But give Klein credit, at least he didn’t claim that he could channel God. http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/11/30/creating-god-in-ones-own-image/, though how can we assume anything other than that God would agree with Honest Abe?

It is sometimes possible to make a convincing case that we can guess what a certain person might have said or done in a given situation, but it’s never possible to truly know. It’s never a good idea to assume that they would share our own beliefs. There must be a psychological name for this phenomenon. I couldn’t find it, even after five minutes of googling, but I’m pretty sure that Freud and Jung would both agree (as would both Aristotle and Plato if they could read Freud first) that it’s a form of projection, and in this case it’s so blatant that it truly is embarrassing.

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Truly disgusting

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

When I was in high school I used to amuse myself reading the paranoiac articles in the John Bircher’s magazine and a few other extreme-right rags, which for reasons I can’t fathom, were available in the high school library. This should have been odd anywhere, but particularly in a high school which even then had to be classified as inner city. My best guess is that the magazines were put there by one of the teachers, for at least one or two of them were actually Birchers. I suspect the faculty adviser to the rifle club (who was, in fact, a member), but that’s just speculation on my part.

Anyway, I found the magazine amusing since I couldn’t imagine anyone taking the fevered paranoia of the organization seriously. So far as I was concerned, it was funny, and since these organizations posed no threat (LBJ had just soundly thrashed Barry Goldwater) it never occurred to me that these right wing views, if not the particular organizations, would ever wield influence in the halls of Congress. But wield it they now do, though there’s no real indication that their views are any more widely held now than they were in the mid 60s.

Today we get dismal proof of the extent to which we are in thrall to the insane, as Senate Republicans voted down a treaty on the rights of the disabled, citing as pretext their recently acquired yet firmly held belief that it would interfere with the our sovereignty and the sacred rights of our citizens to fill their children’s minds with lies in the name of home schooling. It would do neither, though in the case of the latter it wouldn’t be so bad if it did. So, we have sunk to this: a major political party finds it necessary to cater to people who are literally unhinged. They stood up there and voted against this treaty while their form leader, Bob Dole was present, in a wheelchair, supporting the treaty on behalf of the disabled. These people are sick.

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Speaking of Socialism

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Apropos the previous post, there are some areas in which we are the victims of a sort of perverse creeping loser socialism. It’s a national disgrace, but rarely mentioned. One of those rare mentions occurred today. The New York Times is now running a multipart series about the fiscal impact of tax “incentives” that are being doled out by the billions to corporations that routinely play one part of the country; one part of a state; or one community against another. This is a peculiarly American form of socialism. The state invests in these corporations, but gets nothing but empty, non-binding promises in return. As the Times has documented, there is very often no demonstrable return. It is a race to the bottom, the futility of which is captured perfectly in this quote from a man whose job it is to run in the race:

Soon after Kansas recruited AMC Entertainment with a $36 million award last year, the state cut its education budget by $104 million. AMC was moving only a few miles, across the border from Missouri. Workers saw little change other than in commuting times and office décor. A few months later, Missouri lured Applebee’s headquarters from Kansas.

“I just shake my head every time it happens, it just gives me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach,” said Sean O’Byrne, the vice president of the Downtown Council of Kansas City. “It sounds like I’m talking myself out of a job, but there ought to be a law against what I’m doing.”

(via NYTimes.com)

Indeed, there should.

I’ve written about this subject before, having come up against it a couple of times when I served briefly on the Groton Town Council. That experience gave a special salience to this quote:

Even big retailers and hotels, whose business depends on being in specific locations, bargain for incentives as if they can move anywhere. The same can be said for many movie productions, which almost never come to town without local subsidies.

(via NYTimes.com)

Mystic, for those unfamiliar, is merely a placename, and is partly in Groton and partly in Stonington. The “Mystic” Marriot is not in Mystic, but close enough. I don’t know if we are still waiting for the magic year when their tax break runs out, but if we’ve arrived, it’s only recently. We couldn’t have kept them out of Groton with a team of lawyers working overtime. Yet we paid them to come. I’ve also mentioned the even more egregious example of our fair town incentivizing a hotel that was already built, because it wouldn’t be fair not to give a tax break to a developer who forgot to ask beforehand. But hey, think of all those high wage jobs hotels create. Yes, think of them. What is the ability to fantasize for?

The Times article demonstrates pretty convincingly that Groton is no outlier; that what we may have lost by extreme foolishness we gain by not having had the opportunity to pass out truly huge bucks, as have some towns and states. The returns cannot be demonstrated, but the impact on the country can. The same states and towns that give out corporate welfare are cutting spending on schools and other needed services. We are throwing away our future at the behest of corporate shakedown artists and con men.

The Times isn’t finished, but at least in today’s article, there was no attempt to suggest a solution to the problem. That solution is clearly a federal one. The situation is akin to the tragedy of the commons; everyone knows these breaks make no sense, but the players perceive, though the perception is often erroneous, that it is in their self interests to play as long as everyone else does. Even our present Supreme Court would likely agree that these tax breaks have an impact on interstate commerce, though given the gang of five’s enthusiasm for corporations, one can never truly know.

In any event, the solution is quite simple. A federal ban would do the trick, and would probably be welcome by most states and cities. However, this is a form of socialism with which our corporate friendly Congress has no problem. It scarcely needs saying that if there is a giant problem in this country the problem normally goes undiscussed and the obvious solution goes unconsidered. Look for this Times series, which should set off alarms in Washington, to cause scarcely a ripple.

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An Open Letter to the New London Day

Sunday, December 2, 2012

It’s alright. You can stop trying now. For years and years you’ve been trying to placate the crazy folks on the right, but nothing seems to work. Years ago you actually handed over editorial page space to a slew of local right wingers (non-insane need not have applied) in order to prove that you really were fair and balanced, and not the left wing rag that can be perceived only in their fevered minds. Alas, as anyone could have told you, that didn’t work. So accept it, either become the Fox News of New London, or give up on making the right wing happy, and please stop subjecting us to verbal assaults from people who live in fantasy worlds, and while you’re at it, spare us the columns from people who insist that only people who think like them are true Americans. (Note to readers: do not follow the link if you value logical thinking.)

Here’s a hint on one way to weed out the right wing chaff from the right wing wheat (note to readers:there may not be any right wing wheat): shut your mind to anyone who uses the word “socialist” to refer to Obama. That way your mind will be in the same condition as the aspiring columnist’s, but we, at least, will be spared the stupidity. The word actually has a definition, and it is demonstrably the case that Obama is not a socialist. That’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact. You can take it from me, as a person who wishes Obama was as close to being a socialist as were FDR, JFK and LBJ. And may I ask, would you have printed a column from me had I dared to apply the word “fascist” to George W. Bush? Of course we socialists-lite can take some consolation from the fact that the constant application of the term to Obama has increased the favorability rating of the term in the years since it’s been thrown at Obama, but that still doesn’t excuse the Day’s willingness to inflict the ravings of a Fox propagandized ignoramus on the rest of us.

So don’t worry. Be happy. To the rest of us you’re still the same old New London Day, constantly seeking the middle ground, and usually locating it safely within the leftmost bounds of conventional Foxian thinking. Your editorial urging Obama to “compromise” is a great example. Besides being almost as oblivious of recent history as your right wing columnist, it plays directly into the Republican strategy. They have “compromised” by agreeing to maybe consider raising taxes on the rich, especially if they can do it by actually raising them on the rest of us. They have, in other words, offered nothing. In return, Obama should offer specific, preferably program destroying cuts to Social Security and Medicare. No need for them to propose where such cuts would take place; that would make it harder for them to campaign against them. But then, asking the Republicans to specify what they want is unfair, like asking Ryan to show us how he managed to alter the laws of arithmetic, and besides it would make life so difficult for the GOP:

Complicating matters for the GOP is the paradox that it’s easier, both politically and legislatively, to realize savings in Medicare by making the program more robust. Democrats are prepared to push those sorts of reforms in 2013 when the two sides set about seeking a broader package of entitlement and tax reforms. In contrast, the Republican aim in these budget negotiations is to forge ahead with proposals designed to weaken the program, not to reduce spending on Medicare per se.

(via TPMDC)

So, by all means, you say, Obama should walk into the trap in the name of compromise. Fortunately, and finally, he, if not the Day, has learned a little from recent history.

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Yet another mystery

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Robert Waldman, of the excellent Angry Bear blog, which concentrates on economic issues, notes something that is well known, yet little noted nor long remembered, inasmuch as the folks who dominate the chatter in this country have very short memory spans for some things:

Many have noted that under success hating kenyan islamosocialist Barack Obama nominal corporate profits just set a new record. Uh so what. A dollar isn’t worth what it used to be worth. Graphing nominal quantities is silly. The more interesting points is that the ratio of after tax corporate profits to GDP just set a new record (data only go back to 1947)

He further notes that Obama is not a Democratic outlier; in fact, far from it:

Angrybear readers know that GDP grows faster under Democrats and so should not be surprised at how much more horribly real corporate profits tend to do under Republicans.

So this raises the question, in light of the fact that Democratic policies tend to increase corporate profits (this can’t, after all, be entirely coincidental) why our corporate masters almost all support Republicans. Could it be that they don’t really care how their corporations do as long as they do well personally, and that they believe, not without reason, that they will be allowed to enrich themselves, the general and corporate good be damned, under Republicans. This is just a hypotheses, of course and needs study, but like any good hypothesis it does appear to explain the observed facts.

Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)