Sarah Palin proposes an insignificantly tiny reform. The impressed response to Sarah Palin’s suggestion, the horde of blogs thrilled by her suggestion, shows how rare such suggestions are. She suggests a tiny move rightwards, while normally the extreme right wing of the Republican party merely proposes that we move leftwards at a slightly slower rate.
Who fortold the financial crisis?
Howard Husock did in 2000
Winning will be another Republican disaster
Everyone on the Republican side is sucking up to the anti capitalist left – including Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnel. None have the will to reverse the policies that are ruining the economy, making the middle class poor and insecure. So, when elected, will get the blame for the consequences of these policies. Since the supposedly hard core capitalism of the Republicans will not work, obviously the solution must be …
Elections do not matter.
The most extreme of the “right wing” candidates are proposing measures far too feeble to make a difference. Consider for example, the mortgage scandal. Where is the candidate that suggests that to fix our financial system, the bums (the entire financial sector of wall street and the regulators to which they are connected by a revolving door) need to be fired for incompetence and imprisoned for fraud? A lot of …
The whitewash proceeds
One of the bigger criminals in the mortgage scam was Former Countrywide CEO Mozilo. The SEC has made a symbolic settlement with him and a couple of his accomplices for seventy two million dollars, not a dime of which he has to pay personally, and which would be peanuts even if he had to pay it personally. As a part of the agreement, all potentially embarrassing details associated with his …
The enormous mortgage-bond scandal
Felix Salmon has found an interesting document in the financial crisis inquiry hearings. It seems the banks not only knew that the loans they were selling to investors generally failed to meet underwriting standards, they were so careless as to have documents lying around saying so in plain English. Seems like they were a bank of morons. When I was involved in criminal conspiracies, none of us would write in …
Foreclosure fraud chaos
Pines and Associates reports that: Most [mortgage] loans are securitized and most investors have filed class action suits. He finds those suits and joins them on behalf of clients as a “special interest†in the suit. This is Armageddon for the financial system. The underlying problem is that finance runs on trust, and these days they are all crooks, so the entire financial system has seized up. Any solution to …
Conspiracy
If you watch the reality show “survivorâ€, you will have noticed that in any power struggle, the winners usually have invisible connections – there is a group that conceals from outsiders that it is a group. Conspiracy tends to be a substantial part of any winning strategy. Conspiracies are therefore as common as cockroaches and crabgrass. Conspiracy theory has a deserved bad name because it tends to be invoked to …
More astroturf
The one nation rally was largely AstroTurf, students bussed by their teachers, unionists bussed by their unions. If it was not hundred percent AstroTurf, it was close enough to one hundred percent that it was hard to see the difference. Jon Stewart’s “March to keep fear alive” rally is looking like it will be more of the same. On the morning of October 30th, we’re loading up a fleet of …
The foreclosure scandal
It looks as if houses are being foreclosed to the benefit of those who merely hold the junior tranches and thus have no right to benefit by the foreclosure, or perhaps do not hold anything at all – it is difficult to tell, perhaps impossible to tell. It is also unclear how much money the people being foreclosed upon actually owe – again, it is difficult to tell, perhaps impossible to tell. When the scammers sold mortgages on to the next guy in line, they tended to pad up the mortgage, tended to exaggerate the amount of debt the borrower had promised to pay.