Truly a Golden Age

Right now, I'm a few miles up in the sky with both kids passed out.

I've surfed the web, distracted the boy for over an hour with Fruit Ninja, then spent well over an hour catching up on my RSS feeds.

And now I blog this using free (airborne) Wifi.

That's not even the amazing bit.

I used Google Voice to send mom a text using my data plan.

I know! FU AT&T.

Yes, yes the data plan is 15 a month, but they would have jacked me for 20¢ a pop to send it using free bandwidth.

Loving it.

Quote of the Day - 12/20/2010

Today's winner courtesy of Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, in response to the question "what was the worst job you ever tried?"

Of the 300 I would say for pure, epic horror - there's a thing called a lift pump and it's at a wastewater treatment plant. And a lift pump weighs about four tons and it sits in the bottom of a five story silo. And when the lift pump ruptures, the silo fills with whatever you flush.

And to make a long story short: you swim through the muck to the pump, you crawl on top, a crane lowers a cable, you affix it, you hang on. And the sound that a broken lift pump will make when its hoisted out of the silo and breaks the seal of poo that was holding it to the floor will haunt your dreams.

Why Was There a Crisis? GOP: Well... "Bubbles Happen"

(Via CJR)

It's hard to know where to begin after you read the primer conservative defectors from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Krugman gives us the primer's origin story:

Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”

When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.

Here's a sample from the primer:

Bubbles happen. In retrospect, they always seem easy to identify, but as they are building, experts debate whether they exist—and, if so, why. The recent housing bubble was no different. Despite national home price appreciation well above the historical trend for almost a decade, and local markets with even more pronounced price swings, most homeowners and mortgage investors believed there were sound fundamentals underpinning their investments.

We will likely never have a complete explanation for why there was a housing bubble, but we have some clues. First, even without a big change in the costs of building a home, a sharp increase in demand for homes can cause rapid price increases until new homes are built, bringing prices back down.

Got that? We will likely never have a complete explanation....

Geez guys, couldn't you have just said No one could have conceived...?

CJR's Ryan chittum does us all a solid and directs us to Bethany McLean's column over at Slate.

She calls the primer what it is - bullshit.

...get ready for a few of the primer's breathtaking conclusions. "Put simply, the risk of a housing collapse was simply not appreciated." Shit happens. ("Bubbles happen" is, in fact, the first sentence in the report.) How about some exploration of why consumer advocates—who in the 1990s began warning the Federal Reserve and members of Congress that people were getting loans they couldn't pay back—were ignored? Here's another genius insight: "The panic ended when confidence returned." That one inspired me to check the definition of panic (a "sudden overwhelming fear") to make sure I wasn't wrong to find this a bit redundant. Daylight appeared when the sun rose. War ended when the armies stopped fighting. Hurt went away when the pain subsided.

In a way, we should be greatful to Vice Chairman Bill Thomas and commissioners Peter J. Wallison, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Keith Hennessey for so clearly illustrating who they work for.

They wrote a report about the financial crisis and agreed to avoid using the words "Wall Street."

Ye gods.

Due to Our Incompetence, Your Data is at Risk

So, the other day while I'm reading a happy little letter from E's alma mater telling us in politely minimized language that her name and social security number have been potentially compromised. They'd stored this information in cleartext and (whaddaya know) somebody found a way to get to it.

They take great pains to point out they are not sure that the entire database was transferred (although it could have been) and that they don't know that anyone has used the data (although they could have) - all they're saying is that they were storing her personal data on a server that somebody had obtained unauthorized access to.

Well, great. This keeps happening to Universities - there are books telling you how to mine SSNs from universities - yet over 5 years later E's data sits in cleartext because they needed to "archive" their poor security choices.

Helpfully, they suggest watching our credit reports and account activity to see if anything "unusual" occurs. Forever.

Thanks, guys.

I don't believe that her data is likely to be put to evil ends that would affect us - but isn't it nice to know that that possibility will always exist?

-----

On a related note - I received an email from Gawker telling me that my account had been compromised. I honestly didn't remember ever having an account with them, but it's possible that I posted a comment there years back.

I'm set to ignore it when I get a second email from LinkedIn - telling me I should reset my account because of the Gawker intrusion.

So I reset LinkedIn and start on Gawker for good measure. Gawker's website is just godawful UI and (bonus) their email server is having problems, so when you try you get a "Reset Failed" message that appears for 2 seconds.

Well, thanks guys. I'm so glad that I tried, now I will try again.

And again.

And then wait 5 minutes and try again.

And then go away for an hour and then try again.

And so on - until the damn thing finally sends me a reset link.

You figure you have a security breach that requires resets, you might try to see if your reset process is actually working before you push the send button on the "we're so owned" message.

Fail.

Coding Horror has the goods on Gawker's data faceplant, and wow have they screwed the pooch.

The hack came complete with release notes from the hackers which goes out of its way to shame them.

They post the usernames and passwords of Gawker staff. Then they use the password of Gawker's Nick Denton to see how many other accounts they can get to.

Subtext for users: Don't use one password for multiple sites.

They post this bit of fun:

You'd think by now after being compromised Nick would change all his passwords.

He doesn't, instead his fellow circle jerkers convince him that it was his own fault,

That the account wasn't hacked but instead Nicks own fault by clicking a "link" lol.

They then post ftp logins for several other companies to drive home the point.

Nice.

The release notes detail the depth of the attack - and is illustrative for lots of reasons.

Forbe's has more detail.

What Could Gawker Have Done Differently?

Everything. Their founder noticed strange activity a month ago, and reported it, yet the investigation into it came to the wrong conclusions. It seems clear they do not have a good information security person on staff or that they can call. When they closed out the Nick Denton account on campfire, they could have realized that someone logging in as him to an internal system might mean that someone outside the company has access to internal systems or that the extent of the breach may be larger..

Subtext to businesses: don't be like these guys.

Get It Out

This year, the anniversary of Dad's death passed without a lot of observance on my part. Jen makes a point of sending flowers to Mom from the kids. My role in this is to accept that she is doing this and thank her for including my kids names on the card as well.

As if they are from me, or that I had the slightest involvement in them arriving .

I think the first year, I may have actually sent flowers - or conferred with Jen prior to her sending them - but ever since I've regarded it as something that was being handled.

Blogs being wonderfully self indulgent things - my observance took the form of heartfelt, yet virtual text. This year, I simply could not locate the right frame of mind to post.

In a self justifying way, I viewed this as progress.

Having spent countless hours bending depressing music towards my situation – this might actually be progress.

But there’s a certain amount of baggage that refuses to go quietly – and this is an attempt to shove it out the door despite the screaming.

What I’ve come to realize is that this stuff never really comes up. While this is good in lots of ways, it lays down a pattern of avoidance that is unhealthy. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me.

Mom is in the other camp – which is perhaps the reason I’m not. When I was in Norway, Mom started talking about Dad and Katrina with our assigned dinner group and I remember being angry with her. Angry because Mom talks about “the storm” a lot. It always seems to come up – any tenuous connection is an excuse for Mom to recount some storm-related factoid. “We didn’t have that during Katrina…”

You were in Katrina?

“Oh yes,” she’ll say with a sort of Now that you mention it… air. And she’ll start in with one of the stories I’ve heard too many times.

This is bothersome for all sorts of reasons. Ones that are easy to conjure up, but hard to articulate.
Trolling for pity, trading on the death of a loved one – or just simply the overwrought segue that precedes the story.

Now I say all this having vividly felt this – but having never breathed a word of this to Mom. I would never do that. Yet the moment we’d finished dinner with the Norway crowd - Mom all but apologized for it. “I know you don’t approve of that, but…”

I clearly need to restrain my facial expressions better.

Having thought about how little I’ve spoken to others about Dad – it occurred to me that I’ve managed to guilt my own mother about discussing what is clearly the defining event of her life right now. I so clearly failed her up to that point – and I can’t recall what I said – but I was too surprised to say anything intelligent.

Really. Why the hell should she hold back on that stuff?

This was my realization today. Think of any time somebody lets loose with a painful story. What happens? Someone else does the same.

I’ve always viewed these exchanges as a race to victimhood (“Oh, you think that was sad? Try this…”) and while I’m sure there’s some of that – think about these stories a minute.

They aren’t the box score for the local team - these are stories that never come up. They have no segue. Events that forever alter the lives of a person, or a family. Stuff that really matters, not some crap you saw on TV.

And you can’t bring them up without looking unseemly, or pathetic, or ghoulish.

My dad died from a heart attack brought on by massive head injuries. Who do I talk to about that? When does that come up?

Fricking never, is when. You can wait a long time for that perfect segue. And while you’re waiting, you build up a collection of anecdotes that are harmless to everyone but you.

Mom’s got it worse – she was there for the whole thing. Saw him sputter, watched the neighbor do CPR – and I’m slighting her for edging anywhere near that story? WTF is wrong with me …?

I’m beginning to believe that when somebody starts to lets something like that out, it’s because they need to. Yeah, it might come out as one-upsmanship or a rehearsed anecdote, but there are damn few opportunities to say what you’re really thinking.

Outside of blogs, that is.

You spend a lot of time conjuring up discussions that never, ever happen – and then you sit on them until one day something sets them off.

….

The lighted match of the moment are the words “passed away.” Some months ago, E surprised me by saying my exact thoughts on them – at least as they applied to my Dad.

As in – they don’t.

E said she couldn’t bring herself to say that my father had passed away. Because those words are the sanitized, polite form of what happens when a person lives to a ripe old age before going on to their final reward.

Passive. Passed away.

Gradual.

Internal

Only my dad’s death was not passive. It was active, external.

He did not go, he was taken.

And for some reason I’m sure I’ll one day realize in a sudden eureka-moment – I’ve resisted this categorization with the fervor of a fundamentalist.

Not “died,” but “killed.”

I wince even writing that, because I know how it sounds – but I refuse to put a polite face on something I find so offensive. And I don’t indulge others who try.

For some reason, it is also important that the blame be properly assigned. “Accident” is so beneath my father.

For years, my mind has saved a justification I’d direct at anyone who would try to exonerate the guilty party. My hope is that by giving it substance it can finally just go away.

If my mother is to be widowed,
If my children must be denied their grandfather,
If my grandmother must bury her oldest son,

If all of this must happen
– let it be a hurricane.

A storm like no other.

One that empties cities and erases towns.
One whose name is forever associated with destruction and loss.

If my father is to be brought down,
let it be a hurricane.

Anything less would seem inadequate.

(Via The Big Picture)

I'll just quote it - because there's no better way to introduce it:

Prepare yourself to be floored:

Google Maps keeps evolving, expanding the ability to drill down into granular detail. The latest updated trick? Mapping foreclosures for sale.

...

Google Maps Foreclosure Listings

1. Punch in any US address into Google Maps.

2. Your options are Earth, Satellite, Map, Traffic and . . . More. (Select “More”)

3. The drop down menu gives you a check box option for “Real Estate.”

4. The left column will give you several options (You may have to select “Show Options”)

5. Check the box marked “Foreclosure.”

Seriously. Do this, and see every foreclosed house plotted as a little red dot. I did my own address and was ready to zoom out to see any impact. Turns out, there are over 100 forclosures in the inital map results by my house (11 of which are within 3 miles of my house).

TBP posts a search on Detroit which just bends my head:

 Ye Gods.

AT&T? I Think I've Found Which Half of Your Marketing Budget is Being Wasted

Hot on the heels of AT&T being declared the worst cell carrier, I've decided to re-up for another two years with them (courtesy of my iPhone).

So, today I'm logging in to pay this month's bill and I experience something that can only happen at a fortune 500 company.

Let's set the scene...

I hit the AT&T log in screen:

The ice princess will see you now

and instead of the dashboard screen of my current balance, etc, I'm shown the following:

We interrupt your attempt to give us money,
to bring you the following...

I have to believe that the vast majority of users will simply click the (understated) link that will take them into their account, but I've heard some buzz that telcos are trying "mea culpa" marketing strategies and I'm wondering if AT&T is one of them.

After the crap they've put me through...I'd like to hear them grovel.

So, I click on the "Learn More" button - and I'm taken to this:

Thank you for logging in.
Now.... who are you and what do you want?

This is a seriously WTF page. I've logged in, asked for more information about upcoming changes to my account manager - and they're asking me if I'm an existing customer.

Worse, they want me to enter my phone number - manually.

I've fricking logged into your website, you know my damn number. Oh, and is this for a personal account? I don't know maybe you could remember how I got here:

But okay, this is AT&T - the land where the left hand doesn't know if the right hand even exists.

I check Personal account, enter my home phone number, and press 'Go.'

Then I see this:

Okay, three bullet points saying my account manager will do the same things it does now, only with a new look.

Whoopee. Oh, there's a video, too.

I click the video - expecting to see a sneek preview of what I can do online.

And here's the AT&T treatment in full flower: the video is 17 seconds long.

Here is the script in its entirety:

"Soon your internet and home phone account management will have new features and a new look.  Managing your account online will be more convenient than ever. Check back to see how we're making online account management easier for you."

Basically a video version of a bad powerpoint presentation - sans actual content.

Blah, blah, blah... but with pictures!

Eleven seconds into the video, you see a peephole glimpse of what a new page might look like

- for less than three seconds.

Roll credits. Fin.

This is what passes for marketing/customer outreach at AT&T apparently. Think of the dollars they wasted on this mess. Somebody proposed this, got it greenlighted and then paid developers to code, test, and deploy.

All to direct paying customers to a 17 second POS video whipped together by marketing's pet monkey.

And as a customer, I have learned what? That their website will change, in some unknown way, at some unknown time in the future.

Speaking as a person who helped pay for this - I'd like to offer my suggestions:

1. If your content amounts to "check back later" - I don't need to have a video. I'd argue you don't need to bother me at all, actually.
2. If you can't tell me anything concrete - maybe you souldn't interrupt me like this is breaking news. Just because CNN does it doesn't mean you should. A banner ad would have sufficed.
3. If you are going to interrupt a logged in customer, perhaps you should not ask them to fill out a form to direct them to your "content"

Frankly, the AT&T website experience isn't all that terrible unless you leave whatever silo you happen to be in. AT&Ts account manager allows me to do the basics quite well. Log in, pay the bill (or copy the amount and pay from my bank's website). These are basics - I'm not sure what more the website would do for me (other than summarize my bill better - oh, and beat the living F&**# out of whoever wrote their biling software).

AT&T's website tanks horribly any time you want lateral movement in the site. AT&T has no end of fault lines and every link runs the risk that the new page has no idea who the hell you are.

They want to impress me - they could work on that problem.

I'd watch a video about them fixing that. Hell, I might even congratulate them. I know that kind of fix is brutal.

But I know AT&T as well - and I think the odds are good that we'll get a lot more 17 second videos before we'll see any progress on stuff that customers actually give a crap about.

Huge

(Via NPR)

For a state that prides itself on aloha, Hawaii hasn't had much in the way of broad appeal entertainers - (De Lima, Reiplinger, Bumatai, - ack - Medeiros). But the Aloha state really caught a break with the instant likeability of it's largest, favorite son - Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.

I think the first time I heard Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's rendition of Over The Rainbow - was on E.R. It's one of those songs that immediately resonates with you. If iTunes had existed back then, it would have been downloaded a million times by the time the show ended on the west coast.

Assuming people could spell the name right.

I've played my copy for the uninitiated a few times and the reaction was the same. People stop, listen and say somthing like "sweet voice."

Because it is. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole (all 500 pounds of him) had a voice like butter. NPR's story recounts his unlikely rise to fame and the equally improbable creation of his signature song.

Check this out.

It began at 3 in the morning. Milan Bertosa was at the end of a long day in his Honolulu recording studio.

"And the phone rings. It was a client of mine," Bertosa remembers. The client rattled off Israel's unpronounceable name and said he wanted to come in and record a demo. Bertosa said he was shutting down, call tomorrow. But the client insisted on putting Israel on the phone. "And he's this really sweet man, well-mannered, kind. 'Please, can I come in? I have an idea,' " Bertosa remembers Israel saying.

Bertosa relented and gave Israel 15 minutes to get there. Soon, there was a knock at the door.

"And in walks the largest human being I had seen in my life. Israel was probably like 500 pounds. And the first thing at hand is to find something for him to sit on." The building security found Israel a big steel chair. "Then I put up some microphones, do a quick sound check, roll tape, and the first thing he does is 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' He played and sang, one take, and it was over."

That's just great from any angle.

Much as I loved the song, I've always wondered why he released a version where he screwed up the lyrics.

Knowing that he sang that song at 3 in the morning on the first take is somehow better than an explanation - More like a badge of honor.

Unvarnished, unrehearsed, unfiltered - he laid down vocals that rose above any other shortcomings.

Front Runners

(Via CJR)

Looks like the Fed finally coughed up some information about whose crap it's been buying all this time:

• Deutsche Bank (GER)- $290 billion
• Credit Suisse (SUI) - $287 billion 
• Morgan Stanley - $205 billion
• Goldman Sachs - $159 billion
• Citigroup - $185 billion
• Merrill Lynch/Bank of America - $174 billion
• JPMorgan Chase - $153 billion
• Barclays (UK) - $123 billion
• UBS (SUI) - $94 billion
• BNP Paribas (FRA) - $67 billion

For those of you keeping score at home - that's $1.7 trillion dollars, $861 billion of which is going to foreign banks.

The best bit:

It's not clear how much these firms profited by engaging in the kind of activity that allowed Gross to profit so well, known as "front running." However, it's abundantly clear that they did turn a profit.

Nice.

Free market, my ass.

(Also - isn't this kind of news dump two days early?)

Dancing to the Other Side's Tune

(Via War is Boring)

There is Only One Threat Level

Bruce Schneier records the obit of the DHS's laughable Terror Threat indicator:

The DHS is Getting Rid of the Color-Coded Terrorism Alert System
Good. It was always a dumb idea.

But the money quote is in his addendum. Something dubbed Blakley's Law:

"Every public alert system's status indicator rises until it reaches its disaster imminent setting and remains at that setting until it is retired from service."

It's easy to see why Blakley's law holds: if something terrible happens and the alert status didn't predict it, the keepers of the alert status will be blamed for not preparing us for the disaster. Setting the alert status to "Disaster imminent" when no disaster is likely costs the public some money and mental health, but it doesn't hurt them in other ways. On the other hand, setting the alert status to "Don't worry, be happy" just before a disaster does happen is the worst case for everyone - nobody prepares for the disaster, and the people in power lose their jobs for failing to prevent or prepare for the crisis.

That....is full blown awesome.

"We're not aware of a single case so far of a substantive error"

ProPublica's Marian Wang puts together a tidy summary of reasons why people might be in foreclosure that undermine the infamous WSJ assertion that the foreclosure scandal is all a big misunderstanding.

I'm sure we've all heard about people with paid off homes getting foreclosed on, but Ms. Wang nicely summarizes a few other scenarios that grab less ink, but are just as ridiculous:

1) Homeowners were not in default but faced foreclosure.
2) Homeowners who were told that to be eligible for a loan modification, they needed to fall behind on their mortgage—and subsequently found themselves on the path to foreclosure.
3) Homeowners were behind on their mortgage but could have caught up if not for additional fees.
4) Mistaken foreclosures due to dual track of foreclosure and loan modification processing.
5) Foreclosures in which the bank can’t prove it has standing to foreclose.

Here's the full post.

If I Showed You My Unit Badge, I'd Have to Kill You

Danger Room keeps posting awesomely-bad military patches, and I have to say I'd admire this effort from an Air Force unit working for Space Command:

Confirmed: The Air Force Totally Hides Aliens From Us...A former officer at Air Force Space Command tells Paglen that he and his friends had the patches made at their own expense after getting endlessly ribbed for working in a secure vault "where they kept the alien bodies." They wore them on their flight suits for months before a one-star general asked where he could get one of his own.

Oh, and the barely-decipherable legend on the bottom? It's Klingon for "Don't Ask." Paglen got it in the mail from its creator after mentioning that he knew about its existence on the Colbert Report.

How unbelievably awesome is that?


A valiant runner-up patch was this one:Omnis Vestri Substructio Es Servus ad Nobis

Less and Less Representative

Other than pointing out that the chart on the left starts at $840K, and the one on the right tops out at $150K
- I have nothing to add.

(Via CJR and Jesse's Café Américain)

When Are We Going To Fish?

(Via TPM)

WaPo has a gripping story from the survivors of the Alaska plane crash that killed 5, including fmr. Sen. Ted Stevens.

Here's the passage where frm NASA chief Sean O'Keefe's son, Kevin regains consciousness:

"When are we going to get to the fishing?"

"We're not," his dad told him. "We crashed."

Wow, Kevin thought through a muddled haze. Why are we not fishing? His teeth felt wrong, and he thought he must have lost one. Actually, his jaw was broken.

The cockpit radio had been crushed, so the only hope of reaching help was to find another radio or satellite phone somewhere in the mass of stuff.

The pilot, Terry Smith, didn't respond when they called his name. One glance told Kevin he was dead. It all felt surreal.

Somebody asked from the back: "Could you go through his pockets? See if he has a cellphone so we can call out."

But even though the dead man was chillingly close, he was just too far to reach. "I couldn't move my leg, and my hip was all out of place," Kevin said.

Still strapped in his seat belt, Morhard had slipped head first into the rear of the plane, very badly hurt and unable to move. O'Keefe was still trapped by debris.

The job of searching the plane fell to 13-year-old Willy Phillips, who had a battered and broken ankle but was the only one able to move.

"Where's my dad?" he asked.

"He's right here with me," O'Keefe responded, leaving it at that.

I second Josh Marshall's "wow."

Neko Brings It

It's no secret I'm a huge fan of Neko Case.

I can never decide if I like her vocals or her lyrics better - but it's clear that some of her lyrics demand a voice exactly like the one who first sang them.

It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small.

I mean, damn.

Anyway - So I'm looking up the lyrics to a song of hers on her website to make sure I can play it for little e's birthday crowd (Answer: no), and I run across this bit of intro text which just pulls me in further:

WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE

It has taken years and millions of tax dollars to develop, so I hope you will not be disappointed.

Cute, but the real payoff is the brief history of her life - where she introduces us to her parents.

This is done succinctly, and with her trademark ferocity:

I was born on an Air Force base in Virginia to some teenage children. After a short classified assignment for the president, my family returned home to Washington State. From about age four to age fifteen, I was raised by dogs and cats. I occasionally intersected with my parents by accident. “Oh it’s you?! I have to make you a lunch, don’t I?” As I grew into a young adult I was very confused and lacked direction. My parents very much wanted me to become a crack-whore, but I gravely disappointed them by graduating from college. Though they did not notice until years after the event, they still take my failings personally.

Holy crap, that's just awesome. Concise writing just bursting with imagery.

Like stepping into the Tardis. How the f#ck did all that get in here..?

She finds the right tune, Neko might just have another album in there.

I know I'd buy it.

Peek Into The Chamber

(Via CJR)

Ryan Chittum nabs an interesting find from Bloomberg.

Health insurers last year gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce $86.2 million that was used to oppose the health-care overhaul law, according to tax records and people familiar with the donation.

...

The spending on the Chamber exceeded the insurer group’s entire budget from a year earlier and accounted for 40 percent of the Chamber’s $214.6 million in 2009 expenditures. ...The $86.2 million paid for advertisements, polling and grass roots events to drum up opposition to the bill, said Tom Collamore, a Chamber of Commerce spokesman.

Read Chittum's commentary. Nice to see the health care lobby doesn't have the guts to own up to its own viewpoint. So they hire the Chamber, willing surrogate for anyone who can pay.

Psst! 800,000 People Are About to Lose Their Unemployment Benefits

Not that anyone is bothering to tell you about it.

The Washington Post stuffs the unemployment news in the ninth paragraph of an inside story in which the first eight graphs discuss expiring tax cuts. Sample sentence on the tax cuts:

Unless Congress acts, virtually every taxpayer will be hit with higher taxes in January that could leave monthly paychecks hundreds of dollars lighter.

Sample sentence on unemployment (there are only three sentences to choose from, and emphasis is mine):

Unless it is extended, advocates say as many as 3 million people will see their checks cut off by the end of January.

The Post story gives the distinct impression that it’s more concerned about tax cuts than unemployment benefits.

Chittum's even better when he recounts that the unemployment benefits would cost $12 billion. Which begs the question what kind of money is at stake with those tax cuts anyway?

...there’s no real debate on extending most of those tax cuts, especially at a time when the economy is depressed. Where Democrats and Republicans disagree is on whether tax cuts for the top 2 percent of earners, ones who make more than $250,000 a year, should be extended. How much would that unfunded cut—86 percent of which would go to millionaires—cost? Thirty-six billion dollars in 2011, or three times what extending unemployment benefits would cost.

In other words, an average $100,000 each for 310,000 millionaires. You have to marvel at how the right isn’t holding that up until they’re paid for.

(H/t CJR)

Also, read how the press tanks on covering the risk of deflation. It's like they're on cruise control.

How Do You Really Feel, Barry?

(Via The Big Picture)

Love this:

I feel compelled to correct an embarrassing grammatical error in the Washington Post.

The paper, whose grammar is usually outstanding, wrote this morning that

“The [foreclosure] problems came to light this fall as firms such as Ally Financial, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase halted foreclosures because of revelations about shoddy documentation and other questionable practices.”

It came to light because the banks were embarrassed by public disclosures of the half-arsed, slip shod operations they were running — and because courts started kicking out foreclosure proceedings because of this.

As to the grammatical error: Forgery, fraud, and criminal contempt of court are not mere “questionable practices” — the word you are having some difficulty recalling is Felony. If the editors at Washington Post do not know how to spell the word, perhaps we can help them out:

The word is Felony.

Spelling bee contestant: “Can you use that in a sentence?”

Yes: “Felony. The bank executive was convicted of a felony involving fraud, went to prison, and was sodomized daily. Felony”

We can dream.

Make the Budget Deficit Your Problem ('cause it kinda is...)

I'm addicted to good infographics. Love, love, love them. With the web, there's the added value of making them interactive - so you can get iterative feedback and learn a hell of a lot more.

One informative graphic + functionality = many, many informative graphics.

So here's the NYT's Budget graphic

and it's awesome. It presents you with the projected short term and long term budget shortfalls for the US budget - as well as a list of current proposals for reducing the deficit.

Here's the starting point:

A great illustration of the magnitude of the problem - and a wonderful tool for letting the air out of coffeehouse theories or tv talking points.

Let's cut foreign aid!

Okay, we'll slash them in half:

What now?

Uh...we'll eliminate earmarks, too!

Done.

What else?

Uh......

Sure, a lot of the proposals don't show what other consequences would occur (from, say raising the age for Medicare, or freezing Medicare payments) but I do wish they'd have this graphic at hand the next time some airhead like Mitch McConnell pitches an idea as if it is the silver bullet.

Eat Your Own Puppy Chow

What follows is a true story... at a company that shall remain nameless.

It's an average day in the web department of a large financial company. A project manager gets an email from a high executive who happens to sit just down the hall.

They are asking for the Project Manager to explain something to them.

As Project Manager doesn't usually hear from High Executive, they quick pop down the hall.

In your mind's eye - picture the dutiful PM strolling over towards the corner office - eager to assist.

Bit of background:

Large financial company sells many financial products. Financial products typically come with legal contracts and scheduled payments. High Executive (like most of their ilk) buys many of these products from the company. Above a certain rank, it's considered bad form to buy from competitors.

Back to our PM, now bounding into the office of High Executive. While it is a lovely day, it is immediately apparent that High Executive is not pleased.

Their mood can be directly connected to two events:

1) Over a month ago, High Executive had used the company website to set up automatic payment (in full) for a financial product.
2) High Executive had just received a cancellation/dunning letter for the same product from their company.

HE says something to the effect of What the hell is going on? I set up automatic payment and I get cancelled? Who sent me this crap?

PM rushes to find out just what the hell happened. They start with the department in charge of sending that kind of crap. The department readily admits, yes - we sent that letter to an executive in our own company - because they hadn't paid us in over a month.

PM points out that the executive not only set up automatic payments, but set them up to pay the full annual bill - as opposed to just the monthly installments.

Ahhh... replies the department with a bureaucratic smile ...there's the problem. Automatic payment doesn't take effect for a month after you set it up. You still need to manually make the first payment.

You can imagine them holding that smile for a moment - as if their answer has solved everything. PM points out that this executive has supplied an account number & routing number to set up automatic payment - and that this information is identical to information that would be required to make a payment of any amount.

PM: "So, you couldn't take a monthly payment using that information...?"

Of course not (you big silly) They said they didn't want to pay by the month - they wanted to pay in full.

PM: "Couldn't you make a note that their payment is scheduled for 30 days from the date of setup?"

Our process doesn't support that. We'd be taking the risk their payment wouldn't go through.

Smile is weakening a bit - but still there.  

They should have made their first payment when they set up automatic payment

PM: "They thought they had."

We have warning text on the screen - it's very specific.

PM: "It looks like terms and conditions. They didn't read it."

Well, they really should have read it. Then this wouldn't have happened.

PM: "We should change the automatic payment to make the initial payment at the same time."

Our process doesn't support that.

PM: "Well, what are you going to do about this?"

--------

Now, I'll give you two scenarios that could result from this:

Scenario 1: A review of the payment web interface is undertaken. A gap is found where three tasks (View outstanding balance, Make a payment & Set up automatic payments) are kept entirely separate, despite being very closely related.

The underlying processes are integrated - so that a user who sets up automatic payment is presented with the amount of their initial payment, shown the scheduled date of payment, and asked to confirm it. Behind the scenes, an initial payment for 30 days is recorded - and a second payment for the remaining balance is scheduled with the automatic payment system in the following month.

Conversely - each time a user makes a single payment, they are presented with their outstanding balances and offered the opportunity to make a single payment or set up automatic payments.

Scenario 2: A script is written to scan all outgoing dunning letters for the names of all company executives. Those letters will be routed to an employee tasked with investigating the account balance and resolving any issues with a minimum of exec involvement.

 Now - Any bets on which of these two will actually happen?

Taibbi vs. the Rocket Docket

Read Taibbi's latest column on the forclosure mills.

I especially enjoy the segment where the judge tries to keep public proceedings from the ears of a journalist.

At one point during Judge Soud's proceeding, a tallish blond woman named Shawnetta Cooper walks in with a confused look on her face. A recent divorcee delinquent in her payments, she has come to court today fully expecting to be foreclosed on by Wells Fargo. She sits down and takes a quick look around at the lawyers who are here to kick her out of her home. "The land has been in my family for four generations," she tells me later. "I don't want to be the one to lose it."

Judge Soud pipes up and inquires if there's a plaintiff lawyer present; someone has to lop off this woman's head so the court can move on to the next case. But then something unexpected happens: It turns out that Kessler is supposed to be foreclosing on her today, but he doesn't have her folder. The plaintiff, technically, has forgotten to show up to court.

Just minutes before, I had watched what happens when defendants don't show up in court: kerchunk! The judge more or less automatically rules for the plaintiffs when the homeowner is a no-show. But when the plaintiff doesn't show, the judge is suddenly all mercy and forgiveness. Soud simply continues Cooper's case, telling Kessler to get his shit together and come back for another whack at her in a few weeks. Having done this, he dismisses everyone.

Stunned, Cooper wanders out of the courtroom looking like a person who has stepped up to the gallows expecting to be hanged, but has instead been handed a fruit basket and a new set of golf clubs.

I follow her out of the court, hoping to ask her about her case. But the sight of a journalist getting up to talk to a defendant in his kangaroo court clearly puts a charge into His Honor, and he immediately calls Cooper back into the conference room. Then, to the amazement of everyone present, he issues the following speech:

"This young man," he says, pointing at me, "is a reporter for Rolling Stone. It is your privilege to talk to him if you want." He pauses. "It is also your privilege to not talk to him if you want."

I stare at the judge, open-mouthed. Here's a woman who still has to come back to this guy's court to find out if she can keep her home, and the judge's admonition suggests that she may run the risk of pissing him off if she talks to a reporter. Worse, about an hour later, April Charney, the lawyer who accompanied me to court, receives an e-mail from the judge actually threatening her with contempt for bringing a stranger to his court. Noting that "we ask that anyone other than a lawyer remain in the lobby," Judge Soud admonishes Charney that "your unprofessional conduct and apparent authorization that the reporter could pursue a property owner immediately out of Chambers into the hallway for an interview, may very well be sited [sic] for possible contempt in the future."

Let's leave aside for a moment that Charney never said a word to me about speaking to Cooper. And let's overlook entirely the fact that the judge can't spell the word cited. The key here isn't this individual judge — it's the notion that these hearings are not and should not be entirely public. Quite clearly, foreclosure is meant to be neither seen nor heard.

(H/t The Big Picture)

Feeling a Bit Irish...

(Via CJR)

CJR's Ryan Chittum highlights a WSJ story about the financial ruin of Ireland.

See if any parts of this sound familiar:

September 2008

The party ended in 2008, when the property bubble popped and the global economy tipped into recession. The government remained optimistic; an internal finance-department memo concluded in May that the Irish banking system was "sound and robust based on all key indicators of financial health."

Yet by September, Irish banks were struggling to borrow quick cash for daily expenses. The government thought they faced a classic liquidity squeeze. Ireland—whose hands-off regulator had assigned just three examiners to two major banks—didn't recognize the deeper problem: Banks had made too many bad loans, whose defaults would leave the lenders insolvent.

December 2008

[PricewaterhouseCoopers, on behalf of the Irish government] was sent to look at the banks' books. It found defaults creeping up. Still, banks insisted they could soldier on unaided. In December meetings with bankers in the fifth-floor boardroom of Ireland's debt agency, the government resolved to act.

"It's not credible that you don't need equity," John Corrigan, the agency's chief, snapped. "You're taking capital. That's it."

March 2009

[Irish Finance Minister] Mr. Lenihan met with advisers to bat around remedies. None sounded promising. He turned to Peter Bacon, an economist he'd hired a week earlier, who shocked the crowded room with a figure far bigger than the few billion Ireland had spent. The banks made more than €150 billion of potentially toxic property and land loans, he said. "That's the extent of your problem."

Mr. Bacon suggested the government buy loans from the banks at discounted prices, effectively handing them cash and easing doubts about their viability. By insisting on steep discounts, Ireland would be less likely to lose money on the purchases. On the flip side, bargain prices would trigger losses at the banks—which the government would probably have to patch with more capital. The taxpayer would foot the bill either way, but at least Ireland would understand how big it was.

The approach "has the merit of certainty and clarity," Mr. Bacon argued. But, he added, it would only work if "the projection of the extent of impairment is accurate in the first place."

It wasn't.

and

In early 2010, Mr. McDonagh's team [working for the Irish debt agency] got a rude surprise upon diving into the books [of Irish banks].

"We opened it up and said, 'Oh, my God,"' Mr. McDonagh said in an interview. "What they are telling us is not the reality."

The banks had said they had loaned 77% of the value of a property, on average. The other 23%, put up by the borrower, would cushion a default.

The NAMA teams found that banks often piled on "equity releases" that amounted to lending out 100% of the value, and left them fully responsible in a default.

Worse, much of the collateral was shaky. Several times, a developer pledged future profits on other ventures. Many loans were riddled with flawed documentation, leaving banks without solid legal rights to the property they had believed was backing up the loans.

and then

"The detailed information that has emerged from the banks in the course of the NAMA process is truly shocking," Mr. Lenihan told lawmakers. But, he added, "we now know the extent of the losses in our banks....This certainty will further boost international confidence in our ability to recover."

He was wrong.

...

The total capital injected into banks by the government so far: €34 billion, with at least another €12 billion on the way. The bailouts mean Ireland will run a government deficit equal to 32% of its gross domestic product, the highest figure ever in any euro-zone country. Skeptics say a still-sinking property market will next sour residential mortgages, inflating the government tab even more.

Ye gods.

I Challenge You to a Michael Caine-Off!

Oh my God, this made me laugh...



(Via the Awl)

A Poor Trade

(Via the Awl)

November came on, and wow did it suck. There was that miserable election, for one thing—in a world where Harry Reid survives but Russ Feingold loses (and don't even get us started on his opponent) what hope for justice is there? Where is the sanity?

Some good perspective written by someone at Senator-elect Ron Johnson's victory party:

Tea Party types mistakenly believe reasonable and progressive Americans disrespect them for their anti-government rhetoric. That's untrue. Despite its use in attack ads, there is no such thing as an "anti-jobs" candidate. Everyone wants less spending, reduced deficits and decreased government control of everyday life. Russ Feingold has wanted that for 18 years and has been rewarded, by the very people who should most champion him, with unemployment, ironically putting Feingold, once again, more in touch with the average American than any other pol. So it's not that many of us don't want what the Tea Party wants; it's that we don't believe the Tea Party genuinely wants those things.

How do I know the people before me tonight are hypocrites and counterfeits? Math. So far, the Republicans have notched gains since the last election nearly across the board. With women, GOP candidates recorded six point gains. With men, eight points. White people are voting nine points higher for Republicans than they did previously. Yet, when asked how they feel about the GOP, 53 percent answer that the are "dissatisfied" with the party. Bullshit.

But more than that, I know they are phonies because they openly champion this greatest phony. [Ron Johnson] is a man who claims to worship the values of Atlas Shrugged's objectivism, with its stress on personal responsibility and freedom from government regulation of the individual. Yet he is for government restrictions against homosexuals. In his victory speech, Johnson praised his hometown of Oshkosh, yet he would not grant that very same hometown's newspaper an interview (maybe because of how the interview went with the nearby Green Bay Press Gazette). He has been named the "Tea Party" candidate. Yet, his opponent Feingold was endorsed by none other than Bob Barr. He has criticized the bank bailout even while accepting political donations from those same bailed out banks. He lambastes the stimulus and champions tax cuts even though a huge portion of the stimulus was tax cuts. He calls climate change fictive, blaming temperature changes on sun spots. He is anti-government subsidies—yet his business has directly benefited from them. They are him and he is them. And they will all abandon him in six years when he hasn't delivered these people from their disappointment and personal joylessness. A feat which, of course, nobody is capable because they are fundamentally joyless people.

Death by Bunga Bunga? Seriously....?

I mean, it's in Newsweek for F#%&@! sakes:

'Bunga-Bunga' Scandal Threatens Burlusconi

Ruby, a Moroccan belly dancer who is now 18, has testified in front of Milan’s prosecutors that one of these parties included “bunga-bunga,” a kind of orgy. The party supposedly featured a naked Berlusconi and 20 nude female guests.

Ruby has denied having sex with [Italy's Prime Minister] Berlusconi and has said she lied to him about her age, telling him she was 24. She added that Berlusconi explained bunga-bunga was a ritual he had imported from the Libyan leader. “Silvio told me that he’d copied that formula from Muammar Kaddafi,” she said to prosecutors. “It’s a ritual of his [Kaddafi’s] African harem,” she added, according to the daily La Repubblica, which also reported that the prime minister called Milan police to try to get the teenager out of trouble when she was arrested in a separate theft case, telling the cops she was a relative of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

See Spot Jump

(Via Danger Room)

Incredibly, the accompanying text is stranger than the picture:

[British Special Air Service] pooches are trained for High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) jumps, in which parachutes are deployed at a high altitude and long horizontal distance away from a target location in order to allow jumpers to glide in without detection. The SAS dogs are trained to jump tethered to their handlers from heights as high as 25,000 feet and up to 20 miles away — or a 30 minute glide — from a target location.  At that height, the lack of oxygen puts them at risk for hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation,  so the dogs are fitted with special masks to give them breathable air. The Brits reportedly borrowed the tactic from America’s super-secret Delta Force, which first trained dogs to make HAHO jumps.

Because We Care

Corpworld is abuzz with moving these days. Shifting people means moving stuff.

Papers, phones, cables, computers and all manner of clerical detritus are being packed or unpacked everywhere you look. Corpworld has a plan for these sorts of things - and it would appear that it functions about as well as any large project that is divided against itself.

Case in point: personal storage. My current workstation has no storage of any kind. My prior desk had overhead bins, a closet, and two file drawers.
The fact that a worker is being moved from a place with storage to a place with no storage does not appear to have concerned anyone.

Not that I'm traumatized - but it did require adjustments. I've moved all my personal effects home - and the business related hardcopy is currently bivouacked in storage generously offered by my pod-mates.

I have no drawers for pens or papers - and one of my podmates appears to believe that the wastebasket I carried from my old desk belongs to them. This is a natural assumption - my podmate assumed that their new desk would be outfitted with one. I made the same assumption myself - only because I was relocated first - I had time to pilfer my old bin from my old desk.

I can deal - and I doubt my pod mate cares one way or another. They are merely making the easiest assumption. Correcting them would seem petty - would actually be petty. But it is yet another illustration of stuff falling through the cracks.

Today, for some reason - I have have a new phone on my desk. My old phone has vanished to parts unknown. My team leader has two phones now - new & old and is similarly curious why this is so. Both have dial tones, but only the old one responds to a call.

After lunch, my old phone returns. Now I have two phones as well. As no one else seems that curious - I shrug and assume the answer is in a forthcoming email.

Later in the day - I'm told I will be receiving a locker key. The past few days, I've watched maintenance folks moving and installing banks of lockers along the hallways - I guess there was a calculation that I would need storage after all. It just took a week for the machinery to deliver it.

My boss hands me my key and BD's as well. They're each in an envelope - complete with a machine lable identifying who they are for and where the locker may be found.

Yadda yadda - I'm back at the desk and it occurs to me I could lock up my coat. I have a nasty habit of leaving important stuff in my coat pockets and while outright theft seems a remote possibility - my coat and stuff is starting to leak out into the middle of the aisle.

For the first time I read the envelope my boss gave me.

Twice.

Then I walk over to BD's station. I'm dying to know if this is a typo.

BD, can you check your locker envelope? Mine looks like it's on the first floor.

BD and I are stationed on the third floor.

He checks and his locker is next to mine - wherever that is. The numbers are the inverse of where we are located, so I'm hoping that there's just been a mistake. We walk our entire floor, but our floor tops out well before it gets anywhere near our locker numbers.

We hit the elevator and walk the length of the building. Sure enough, the powers that be have assigned us storage space that is two floors away and at the opposite end of the building. We're expected to store our stuff there, then go to our desk.

It'll be easy, because we'll just reverse the process when we go home - go down two floors, walk the length of the building, then go up a flight of stairs to exit.

Really quite simple.

BD gave his key back right after he saw his locker.

I may wait until tomorrow.

And somewhere off on someone's project plan - a box is checked next to my name. Locker provided? Yes.

Black vs. B of A

William K. Black and L. Randall Wray are calling Bank of America out:

Bank of America Should be Placed in Receivership NOW


We argued that the FDIC should place Bank of America in receivership and the federal banking agencies should impose a moratorium on foreclosures until the mortgage servicers correct their systems, which currently often rely on massive fraud and perjury. There can be no assurance that foreclosures are lawful until the banks actually find the mortgage "wet ink" notes signed by debtors to prove they are the true beneficial owner of the mortgage debts, which is required to seize property.

Quite the shot over the bow, that.

They follow up with:

...Bank of America's data indicate another form of deceit that is a typical consequence of accounting control fraud. Bank of America has delayed foreclosing, sometimes for years, on large numbers of loans that have no realistic chance of being brought current, even with the loan modifications it offered. This behavior would be irrational for an honest lender, for it would increase ultimate losses, but is a typical strategy for a lender controlled by fraudulent senior officers because it greatly delays loss recognition and allows them to extend their looting of the bank for years through bonuses paid on the basis of fictional reported "profits" after the bank has (in economic substance) failed. Bank of America's response to us admit that, of their 1.3 million customers who are more than 60-days delinquent, 195,000 have not made a payment in two years. Of those loans which have not received a payment in two years, 56,000 are already vacant.

That would be B of A putting off the day of reckoning with its shareholders - while increasing the damage to their investments when the reckoning eventually comes.

This bit is nice, too (not that the FASB rule change is news - but it's good to see it in context):

The bank's response primarily criticizes its borrowers as deadbeats, yet the data it provides support points we have made in our prior posts, including Bill Black's posts about the banks working with the Chamber of Commerce and Chairman Bernanke to extort the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in order to destroy the integrity of the accounting rules requiring banks to recognize losses on their bad loans. We have explained why the fraudulent officers controlling many lenders followed a strategy of making bad loans at premium yields in order to maximize (fictional) accounting income and their bonuses. This dynamic drove the current crisis. These frauds hyper-inflated the housing bubble and caused trillions of dollars of losses.


The extortion of FASB was successful; Bank of America was one of the leaders of that extortion. It changed the accounting rules so that banks could often avoid recognizing losses on these fraudulent loans, until they actually sold the home taken back through foreclosure. This dishonorable accounting fiction creates perverse incentives for banks to do exactly what Bank of America has done -- let bad assets waste away and make already severe losses catastrophic.

Good stuff. Part II is just as good.

Random Sip From the Firehose, V

• Navy SEAL smuggles assault rifles into US from Iraq and Afghanistan (oh, and he works on the set of Transformers 3).
  

  "the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, stated in the complaint that [he] was able to supply the guns because SEALs don’t have to have their bags checked when returning from deployments."
  
  Kind of a soft spot in our security, no? This guy and his accomplices smuggled in at least 84 Kalisnikov assault rifles. I'm thinking even a modest search would spot an AK-47. (Via Danger Room)

• Glenn pokes some inconvenient holes in the conventional wisdom about the midterms:
  
  
  • Dems lost because they were too liberal
    

    But one [Democratic] group hit especially hard was the [Conservative] Blue Dog Coalition...23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down on Tuesday....slothful pundits who want to derive sweeping meaning from individual races in order to blame the Left and claim that last night was a repudiation of liberalism, the far more rational conclusion -- given the eradication of 50% of the Blue Dog caucus -- is that the worst possible choice Democrats can make is to run as GOP-replicating corporatists devoted above all else to serving corporate interests in order to perpetuate their own power: what Washington calls "centrists" and "conservative Democrats." That is who bore the bulk of the brunt of last night's Democratic bloodbath -- not liberals.

  • The Tea Party results show a big for convervatives
    

    ...for all the giddy talk about the power of the "Tea Party" -- which is, more than anything else, just a marketing tactic for re-branding the Republican Party -- the reality is that the Tea Party almost certainly cost the GOP control of the Senate. Had standard-issue GOP candidates rather than Tea Party fanatics been nominated in Delaware, Colorado, Alaska and Nevada, the Republicans would have almost certainly won those seats (in Alaska, rejecting the GOP incumbent in favor of a Tea Party candidates appears to have ensured that Lisa Murkowski will return to DC as a GOP-hating reject rather than a loyal Republican, the way Joe Lieberman returned after 2006).
    

  (Via Glenn Greenwald)
  
  To which I would add the observation that it is vanity to assume that the discontent felt by progressive voters equates to support of conservative policy. It may result in political victories for those policies - but you'd have a very tough time establishing that progressives stayed home because they wanted Boehner to be Speaker of the House. You had more old folks, more white folks as a percentage of the electorate - and there are assuredly many things playing into those numbers. Like many - I am disappointed with what the Dems have managed so far - but they have gotten my support only because they were better than the alternative (and that's not saying a lot).
  
  
• I remember saying to a co-worker when this whole mortgage mess started to blow up "This is not about bad calls in business - this is about fraud. People need to go to jail." This person looked at me like I was a raving nutter. The foreclosure mess has made this even more obvious - and the more people sound off on this point - the better. Naked Capitialism points us to a few posts in this vein:
  

  I know so many people who say it’s an outrage that we had more accountability in the ’80’s with the S&L crisis than we are having today. Yeah, we fine them, and what is the big lesson? Behave badly, and the government might take 5% or 10% of what you got in your ill-gotten gains, but you’re still sitting home pretty with your several hundred million dollars that you have left over after paying fines that look very large by ordinary standards but look small compared to the amount that you’ve been able to cash in.
  
  So the system is set so that even if you’re caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.
  
  The fine is just a cost of doing business. It’s like a parking fine. Sometimes you make a decision to park knowing that you might get a fine because going around the corner to the parking lot takes you too much time.
  
  ***
  
  I think we ought to go do what we did in the S&L [crisis] and actually put many of these guys in prison. Absolutely. These are not just white-collar crimes or little accidents.

Random Sips From the Firehose, IV

• A study in The Lancet suggests that a legal, cheap and commonly available drug (alcohol) is considerably more harmful in aggregate than an illegal, expensive, and difficult to obtain one (heroin). For some reason, this is causing controversy.
   
• Robosigning: The foreclosure mills didn't invent it, they merely publicized it. Debt collectors have been doing the robo-signing thang for years.
   
• Barry links to a summary of recent caselaw dealing with MERS: Short version - MERS is a convoluted mess that is only now getting the judicial scrutiny it deserved.
  

  MERS is a construct of the mortgage finance industry created and implemented to facilitate the sale of promissory notes and servicing rights in residential mortgage transactions. But, the architechts of MERS did not simply create a modernized system of keeping track of loan transfers. They also adopted untested, novel terminology for the most importatn documents that protect lenders and investors claiming liens on real estate - the mortgage/deed of trust and assignments. Then they decided that the execution and/or recording of assignments was unnecessary unless foreclosure needed to be filed...Time outran the MERS system, and now state and federal courts acros the country are struggling to give meaning to [an entity that claims to be] "acting solely as nominee."

Chase Bank: We Took Your House By Mistake - Our Bad

It just keeps happening - the WSJ reports on another erroneous foreclosure, this time by Chase bank.

...last Saturday, [Julio Burmudez and Magaly Cervantes] received a letter saying Chase foreclosed and the condo was sold online.

Just a few minutes after 9 a.m., on Tuesday Ms. Cervantes and Mr. Bermudez stood before the judge. In broken English, they tried to explain the situation. “There’s nothing I can do about the sale,” Judge Deehl says matter-of-factly. “You’re going to have to deal with the bank.”

They tried calling Chase many times, they said, but couldn’t get anywhere. After inquiries from The Wall Street Journal, Chase looked into the matter and discovered they made a mistake. In an email, a Chase spokesman said, “We are working to reverse the sale, and are reaching out to the customer to apologize. We have also been reviewing the application for a permanent modification.” No further detail was provided.

Just picture that, you're paying your mortgage and you get a letter from your lender saying they've SOLD your house.

As in - it's already happened. Just FYI.

I hope they sue. Where are the blood sucking litigators when you need them? Somebody needs a free house.

(Via CJR)

Oh, and Chittum tags an investigation in Florida that finds that mortgage fraud extends to summonses as well.

So, not only are foreclosure mills screwing up the essential paperwork of who owns the loan - but when they use that screwed up paperwork to begin foreclosing on property they may or may not own - they're committing fraud when they notify people they are being foreclosed on.

In [Florida resident Patrick Jeffs's] case, Circuit Judge Frederick Tygart ruled that there were two important problems with the affidavit of service that said papers were served on Oct. 16, 2007:

- The summons was allegedly served to Jeffs' mother, Jeanne Jeffs, at 10:09 a.m., but the lawsuit wasn't filed until that afternoon. "That means the summons served on Mr. Jeffs was not a summons issued by any Florida court," Tygart wrote, "and, therefore, must have been counterfeited."

- The affidavit was signed by the process server, LaTarshag Armstrong, who lives in Jacksonville, but notarized by Ruby Lee French, who lives in Tampa, "which means that Ms. Armstrong was not present when her signature was notarized."

Madness.

What is This Man Thinking?

Answer: Not a hell of a lot. I'm pretty sure this guy is certifiably crazy.

But sometimes...crazy is a hell of a thing to watch.

(H/t Danger Room)

Mortgages from MERS

The Big Picture has a guest blogger with a monster post about MERS - the umbrella corporation that owns (but does not "own") over 60 million mortgages nationwide.

MERS, a transparent means to dodge regulatory expense and delay is swiftly metastasizing into a much bigger problem.

The deposition they quote is absolutely priceless:

As the treasurer and secretary of MERS admitted in a deposition:

Q Does MERS have any salaried employees?

A No.

Q Does MERS have any employees?

A Did they ever have any? I couldn’t hear you.

Q Does MERS have any employees currently?

A No.

Q In the last five years has MERS had any
employees?

A No.

Q To whom do the officers of MERS report?

A The Board of Directors.

***

A That’s correct.

Q And in what capacity would they report to you?

A As a corporate officer. I’m the secretary.

Q As a corporate officer of what?

A Of MERS.

Q So you are the secretary of MERS, but are not
an employee of MERS?

A That’s correct.

***

Q How many assistant secretaries have you
appointed pursuant to the April 9, 1998 resolution; how
many assistant secretaries of MERS have you appointed?

A I don’t know that number.

Q Approximately?

A I wouldn’t even begin to be able to tell you
right now.

Q Is it in the thousands?

A Yes.

Q Have you been doing this all around the
country in every state in the country?

A Yes.

Q And all these officers I understand are unpaid
officers of MERS?

A Yes.

Q And there’s no live person who is an employee
of MERS that they report to, is that correct, who is an
employee?

[Objection]

A There are no employees of MERS.

A great walkthrough of the MERS situation. And some great snark, too.

Black is Back

Bill Black speaks with Dan Froomkin - and goes all hammer and tongs about the under reported aspects of the ongoing financial mess:

The things I think are critical and badly underreported are:

1. The astonishing amount of mortgage fraud (literally, millions of cases annually) and how it hyperinflated the bubble and led to the Great Recession.

2. The fact that these mortgage frauds were overwhelmingly due to consciously fraudulent lending practices in which the CEOs of seemingly legitimate entities used accounting tricks as their “weapon of choice” to report higher profits and get bigger bonuses. (George A. Akerlof and Paul R. Romer got it right in the title to their 1993 article: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.)

Like a refreshing bucket of ice water to the head. It's just a pity we're lost in a blizzard.

(H/t CJR's Ryan Chittum, naturally)

It Gets Better

I'd read a few weeks ago about Dan Savage's YouTube LGBT outreach project It Gets Better Sounded like a flat out great idea.

Using technology to reach out to people so isolated they are willing (even preparing) to die. Savage posted a video of encouragement telling gay teens that life may be hard now, but it does get better. He invited others to share their stories.

I just got done reading a BBC article that points out that lots of people have taken him up on his invitation.

Like this guy:



From the article:

But his video soon went viral, and within weeks, more than 2,000 videos of people pouring their hearts out were uploaded from across the country and the world. The videos have been viewed more than 10 million times...

Young people and old, Mormons, Muslims and Jehovah's Witnesses, have all contributed.

One of the earliest videos posted is from Kitty in London, who admits to having harmed herself when she was younger. She wishes there had been a project like this when she was growing up in a small town.

Although Mr Savage didn't seek celebrity endorsements, numerous stars, including Neil Patrick Harris, Zachary Quinto and Chris Colfer from Glee, have recorded their own videos.

Great stuff, and what a great idea.

Two Boxes, a Bag, and a Chair

It's moving time in CorpWorld. I'm to be relocated to be closer to my project team. In theory, this is a good thing. Project teams that are scattered all over creation have communication issues - and bad communication eats time like candy.

Moving the team to a common area has been discussed ad naseum for so long - I regard the idea like some mythological creature. I'll believe it when I see it.

Well, I've seen it. Out of the blue one day, I get an all-bold-text email informing me that I will be moving in four days. I am to respond with the ID numbers of all office equipment that will be moved, indicate the number of boxes the movers should expect, and add any special needs I may have.

I have only one special need: Where the hell am I going?

This was not in all-bold email - and my manager was not informed that I was moving- so they don't know. My project leader tells me what floor I will be on - but in CorpWorld, that's like saying "Move to Cleveland. Details to follow."

I typically have a light footprint at my desk. I put crap on my walls like any office stiff, but the idea of bringing in anything other than photos from the outside world is just alien to me.

This is work, I reason. Work stuff goes here.

So I email my equipment IDs back and say I'll have two boxes of stuff. I think it's closer to 1, but might as well have a cushion.

Which leaves only three items I give a rip about.

1) Laptop
2) Laptop bag
3) Chair

This seems a bit ungrateful - after all, when I first arrived in CorpWorld, they gave me loads of stuff. I remember thinking I'd landed in Shangri-La. My old gig had small cubes and office gear you scrounged from the abandoned gear of your predecessor.

In Corpworld you got a box of new office swag delivered to your desk. The nicest pair of scissors I've ever seen is the one I got here. Yes, it's just a pair of scissors - but it's clearly a design that's been focus-group tested to seem solid and expensive. It does.

In the same box was a (black) swingline stapler and an assortment of NEW office gear. An impersonable welcome, but a welcome nonetheless.

Now - four years later, I'm shoveling it into a box along with a random collection of paperwork and office printouts.

Because - and this occurs to me only as I'm moving - I've almost never used any of this stuff. The job I do leaves very little physical evidence behind. The sum total of four years work amounts to a series of differently aligned magnetic bits on a network drive. It is entirely possible the reason I'm saving any paperwork at all is because pitching it would destroy the scant evidence I was even here.

The evidence takes up two boxes, with room to spare. These will be picked up by unseen forces and delivered to my new location.

These same forces will be moving the one asset I value above all others: My laptop. Improbably - I was given a good laptop. It has been reliable, durable, and its battery outlasts virtually every other machine I'm around. Even the case is good. Moving my laptop is not my job - so I just leave it behind and hope the process goes well.

-----------------

Not that the early intel from the move is encouraging. My pod-mate, BD, was slated to move yesterday. Being a gregarious sort of person - they went to their future desk and introduced themselves to the neighbors.

What appears to have followed is that these same neighbors smiled, shook BD's hand, and as soon as they were out of sight - ran to their manager to protest BD being stationed in their midst.

The net result was that BD shows up the following morning with pastries for their new neighbors and sees that none of their stuff has been set up: No laptop; no boxes - and the neighbors are saying in no uncertain terms that BD will not be relocating to the desk in question.

BD has no laptop - no desk - and a box full of pastries. Oh, and a meeting to present at in less than two hours. Welcome to limbo. They ended up back at their old desk, sans tech.

There was a happy ending though - I got to eat pastries.

-----------------

Stuff like that makes me think I'm about to pay for any good corporate karma I've experienced. My laptop will get broken and I'll end up with some POS Toshiba (the horror!!).

Or they'll take my chair.

I love my chair. It's a genuine, undeserved luxury item. An ergonomic masterpiece with all the trimmings. Bequeathed to me by a co-worker who had the good sense to bail before the layoffs. They got it by way of an ergonomic need. I have it by way of.... well... having it.

There's a spot on the form to indicate that I want to keep my chair. Rather than entrust my chair to unseen forces - I opt to wheel the thing up there myself.

I have to go up there early anyway. I've collected all my personal items into a single bag - I figure I'll move them myself and if there's no room - I'll just take them home.

So the afternoon finds me wheeling my chair and bag to the new digs, along with a coworker who (miracle of miracles) has a printout that says where we are supposed to go.

As everything looks the same in these buildings, I turn up the wrong aisle and run right into the Client. Now, I consider myself a grown up - but this is not a happy event. The few times I've seen the Client this past year - I have been greeted with an incredulous "Do you still work here?" (To which I always reply "What kind of 'hello' is that?").

The Client sees me and is visibly disappointed. "There goes the neighborhood," they say - but they are obviously not kidding that much.

Honestly I'm thinking I get that we're not friends, but is barely masked hostility the best you can do?.

Turns out, I'm in the wrong row - which relieves both of us, for a little bit anyway.

I roll to my new digs and there the reality is inescapable: I will be sitting at the midpoint between the desks of two other people. One has been my team leader for years - and is awesome. The other I have no idea who they are.

The personalities are beside the point, actually. I will be sitting at a spot that is in the middle of a through route and essentially looking over the shoulders of two people while they work. This sucks for everyone. I used to have my own desk, and now I'm downsized to this non-space - but more to the point even if you would argue that only one out of the three of us deserves a desk, that person should get a desk of their own. Not some half measure with me lurking over their shoulder while they work.

Cube farms are anything but private, and I've learned more about the private lives of my co-workers than I've wanted to - but there's always been some remedy to minimize the intrusion. Earbuds, or just turning more towards your screen. Now I'm literally staring over their shoulder while they work. They want to check their bank statement, they get to feel like I'm spying on them.

Which is just crap. I get the idea of locating project teams together - I'm all for it, frankly - but give them their own space, eh?

I leave the chair and the bag. I have no drawer space for office tools and no place for my files. My team leader volunteers some of their desk for my papers. It's looking more and more like I should have pitched them. Madness.

It's only temporary I remind myself. In a few months we're supposed to move again.

In the morning, I go up to meet the new neighbors - and find that none of them have arrived. It's just me and my team leader - so far. My laptop is there (yea!) and my chair is there also - alongside another chair that the unseen forces saw fit to deliver (no doubt because I said I wanted to keep my chair). I unbox my boxes into my team leader's deskspace. I make a mental note to destroy these items if I haven't referred to them by summer.

The bag of personal stuff is (still) here as well. As my laptop and its docking station take up my entire desk surface - I opt to take all the stuff home. I tape one picture of the kids to my monitor - but there's no place to hang anything up.

My Swingline and scissors go into my team leader's overhead bin - not that I'll miss them - and I put up my nametag.

And that's it. I'm unpacked.

I scope out the network printers, search in vain for a supply room, and resign myself to the new reality that is my workspace.

All set. Buds in. Time to work.