Month: October 2009

It’s Away!!!!!

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I really look way too much like this Starwars dude


Yes, I know it was Red 9 who said that, but I look more like the fat pilot

Did you know that the Washington Post is having a, “America’s Next Great Pundit,” contest?

Well, I’ve heard of it, basically, after submitting an article, and going through a series of “run-offs” with other winners, you get a 13 article gig for the Post online at $200 an article.

You are supposed to start with an essay of less than 400 words and a bio/sales pitch of less than 100 words.

After one abortive attempt (it was too much about me, and I do not write well about me), I ended up revisiting some of my posts on recent Federal Reserve ass covering on consumer protection, where the Fed discovers that, in order to avoid getting boned in the battle between regulators in the new banking system, they need to pretend that they care about consumer protection.

You know, it’s tough to imagine the Washington Post OP/ED hiring me, but they could do worse, by picking….Hmmmm…..I’ll get back to you on that.

In any case, I can’t publish this essay here, at least not until I get the news about whether it has been rejected or not, because the contest requires that, “I certify that I have perpetrated no fraud or deception in connection with my entry, that my Opinion Essay and my Paragraph above are my original work (created solely by me solely for participating in the Contest), and that neither my Opinion Essay nor my Paragraph have been published previously.“

This is subject matter that I have written about before, but it is a completely new essay, and until the folks at WaPo tell me, “Sorry Charlie,” I can’t publish it here.

Then again, my regular reader(s) have already read most of the statements and the thesis, only spread around about a dozen short posts, with hyperlinks.

Which is true, I haven’t

Wanker of the Day

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T. Boone Pickens :

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. energy companies are “entitled” to some of Iraq’s crude because of the large number of American troops that lost their lives fighting in the country and the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Iraq.

Boone, speaking to the newly formed Congressional Natural Gas Caucus, complained that the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

“They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it,” Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. “Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars.”

Because the Iraqis asked us to invade, create a civil war, and set off a chain of events that killed somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 of them, all while driving another million of so out of the country.

I’m not sure what it is about the oil bidness, but it does appear that they attract more than their share of sociopaths: T. Boone Pickens, Dick Cheney, John D. Rockefeller, the bin Laden clan, the royal families of the UAE and Kuwait, and (of course) the House of Saud, just to name a few.

Change I Don’t Believe In

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So, it now appears that the Obama administration is promising to restrict pay for senior executives at the big banks that got TARP bucks:

Responding to the growing furor over the paychecks of executives at companies that received billions of dollars in federal bailouts, the Obama administration will order the companies that received the most aid to deeply slash the compensation to their highest paid executives, an official involved in the decision said on Wednesday.

Under the plan, which will be announced in the next few days by the Treasury Department, the seven companies that received the most assistance will have to cut the cash payouts to their 25 best-paid executives by an average of about 90 percent from last year. For many of the executives, the cash they would have received will be replaced by stock that they will be restricted from selling immediately.

The devil is in the details, and I simply believe this to be political theater.

There will be loopholes large enough to drive a truck load of cash through. I do not know what they are, but I believe this to be the case.

Barack Obama and Geithner/Summers have been steadfast in their continued support of Wall Street fat cats, and I do not expect this to change.

Hoocoodanode?

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So it turns out that the industry gave us the phony property assessment to qualify for home mortgages is low fraudulently employing the tax credit for first-time home buyers:

The Internal Revenue Service is examining more than 100,000 suspicious claims for the first-time home-buyer tax break, another sign of potential trouble for the soon-to-expire program.

I am gobsmacked that realtors and mortgage brokers might game the system.

Deep Thought

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I was talking with Sharon* about her special education consulting and advocacy business today, and told her about some friends of mine who raise Morgan horses, who would front load purchases before a given year, and then end load purchases after the end of the year, so as to create a profit every 5 years or so, because otherwise the IRS would call it a hobby, and would not allow them to deduct expenses from other income.

Then I told her that this was completely different from her business.

Then I thought about it, and told her it was completely the same as her business: Both people have to shovel loads of horsesh$#, only hers comes from school administrators.

BTW, if you kid has unmet special education needs, you want to contact her, she’s a pit bull, Or maybe a Tazmanian Devil, for her clients…..

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Maybe it’s Not “No Balls”

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Yesterday, I posted that the folks in the White House had no balls because of their hands off attitude toward the public option in healthcare reform.

Scarecrow at FDL has an alternate theory, and current behavior does not make it seem far fetched, that the White House is actively opposed to a public insurance option, either because they cut a secret deal with the insurance companies, or because these people are profoundly afraid of real change:

It is hard to avoid the fear that this White House has now become a principal obstacle to getting meaningful health care reform. It claims it wants major cost reductions in Medicare, via a semi-autonomous cost-cutting commission. But the White House has already bargained away the savings it can achieve from most of the major providers: PhRMa ($80 billion), hospitals ($155 billion) so they can give it back to the doctors (for whom AMA is demanding $240+ billion more over ten years in relief from automatic Medicare reductions).

Why should we not also believe that the White House has a deal to shield insurers from competition by preventing the creation of a public option in exchange for the insurers agreeing to reforms on guaranteed issue and limited community ratings (with the flexibility Baucus provided) and to support this framework with tv ads? (Read Ignagni’s WaPo op-ed today; while defending the PwC study, she says they made a deal, but Baucus broke it; she didn’t say the deal’s off.)

The White House isn’t taking up most of the chairs in Harry’s Reid’s meetings just to watch him make decisions on his own. They’re there to make sure Harry Reid doesn’t undo the White House deals and wander off the reservation.

(emphasis mine)

If the White House sees healthcare reform as an electoral tool, i.e. that if Barack Obama signs a bill that he can call comprehensive healthcare reform, he can run on in in 2012.

The problem is that the natural result of this, forcing people to buy overpriced health insurance from the insurance parasites, will kill the Democratic Party for a generation.

Karl Rove did not manage to create a permanent Republican majority, but, if this analysis is accurate, it looks like Barack Obama might.

The Recent Pissing Contest Between Fox and the White House

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Well, for once, the White House was actually telling the truth when Anita Dunn said, “”Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party…Let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

That being said, it’s kind of like declaring that milk is white, and the sky is blue, so I find it uninteresting, and it really means little in the scheme of things.

No Balls

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The word is that the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill will have the public option, but only if Barack Obama actually asks for it:

There is a growing sense on Capitol Hill that the White House’s refusal to weigh in more forcefully in the health care debate could come at the cost of a public option for insurance coverage.

Democratic aides said that a “handful” of senators who are skeptical of a public plan likely could be persuaded if not to support it then at least to oppose a Republican filibuster, if the administration were to apply a bit more pressure — or even guidance.

(emphasis mine)

Barack Obama has two problems here:

  • He is desperate to sign something, anything, as in keep him away from toilet paper, into law that he can call “healthcare reform”.
  • He still wants everyone, including the Republicans, to like him.

So he is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because he does not have the guts to even try to win, even though it appears that Harry Reid is pretty much begging him for some backup on the public option.

I know that it is only 9 months into his term, but it’s already screaming “1 term wonder” in my ear.

Looks Like I May Have to Reevaluate the Shepard Fairey Matter

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While I thought, and still think that the AP’s pursuit of Shepard Fairey is bogus (original post is here), it’s become increasingly clear that he’s not telling the truth about his sources to anyone, including his lawyers, who just quit claiming that he had lied to them:

On Friday night, Fairey’s attorneys — led by Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University — said they intend to withdraw from the case and said the artist had misled them by fabricating information and destroying other material.

Fairey admitted that he didn’t use The Associated Press’ photo of Obama seated next to actor George Clooney he originally said his work was based on — which he claimed would have been covered under ”fair use,” the legal claim that copyrighted work can be used without having to pay for it.

Instead he used a picture the news organization has claimed was his source — a solo picture of the future president seemingly closer to the iconic red, white and blue image of Obama, underlined with the caption ”HOPE.” Fairey said that he tried to cover up his error by submitting false images and deleting others.

I’m still a firm believer in an expansive definition of fair use, and I am still inclined to believe that the poster did not cross the line, but I’m also inclined to believe that Fairey is a dishonest self-aggrandizing hack, and that the court will likely spank him for that, and other people will use that decision to attempt to roll back fair use rights.

More Fun With the Mortgage Racket

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Calculated Risk Loan Securitization Diagram
Or Maybe a Description of N-Dimensional Space

Here’s a factoid that should surprise no one, securitized loans 500% more likely to be delinquent.

That a loan that you planned to offload on some poor schlub was executed with less due diligence than one you planned to hold onto, in part or in full, for the life of the loan.

Hoocoodanode?

In any case, it looks like that merry-go-round may be coming to an end, because it’s beginning to look like the Kansas decision that said that the electronic database of mortgages, MERS, has no standing in a foreclosure matter, which means that no one knows who has standing in a mortgage matter for about ½ of the mortgages out there is expanding, though I am not entirely sure whether or not this directly applies to MERS, but in Massachusetts, a ruling throwing out thousands of foreclosures has been reaffirmed, and it is clear that the Judge will have none of the banks counter arguments:

Despite the lender’s attempt to convince him otherwise, Judge Long came out (again) in favor of consumers:

The issues in this case are not merely problems with paperwork or a matter of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. Instead, they lie at the heart of the protections given to homeowners and borrowers by the Massachusetts legislature. To accept the plaintiffs’ arguments is to allow them to take someone’s home without any demonstrable right to do so, based upon the assumption that they ultimately will be able to show that they have that right and the further assumption that potential bidders will be undeterred by the lack of a demonstrable legal foundation for the sale and will nonetheless bid full value in the expectation that that foundation will ultimately be produced, even if it takes a year or more. The law recognizes the troubling nature of these assumptions, the harm caused if those assumptions prove erroneous, and commands otherwise.

Judge Long also had some choice words for lenders:

[T]he problem the [lenders] face (the present title defect) is entirely of their own making as a result of their failure to comply with the statute and the directives in their own securitization documents… What the plaintiffs truly seek is a change in the foreclosure sale statute (G.L. c. 244, § 14), which can only come from the legislature.

I think that the courts are looking at the situation, and deciding that the lenders and securitizers are people with huge legal resources who chose to ignore the law because of the cost, and that property law has developed over the past few century and so is very specific regarding the formalities of documentation for a good reason, just look at historical accounts of theft of deeds, forged property papers, etc.

In any case, I would also point you to the following document, which shows how many of these property transactions are actually fraudulent, with a person acting as an agent for both the seller and the buyer, non existent signatures, false notarization, etc.

Foreclosure Fraud – Guide to Looking up Public Records for Fraud
You can find the author’s blog here.

Buy Bye Bernie

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Not Madoff, the other crook Bernie, Bernard Kerik.

About a month ago, the judge in charge of the Bernard Kerik case, Federal Judge Stephen Robinson, took him and his defense team to task for releasing information that was under seal.

Well, it appears that Kerik has tried other ways to leak this information out, potentially tainting a jury pool, so he revoked Kerik’s bail, sending him to jail:

Judge Stephen C. Robinson of Federal District Court in White Plains said Mr. Kerik could not be trusted to honor a consent order prohibiting him from revealing confidential information. The judge cited an email that Mr. Kerik sent to the head of his defense fund that apparently included such information.

Mr. Kerik had been allowed to remain free on $500,000 bail, which was secured by his house in New Jersey. The judge turned down a request by Mr. Kerik’s lawyers to keep him from being put behind bars for 48 hours while they prepare an appeal.

Before revoking the bail of Mr. Kerik, Judge Robinson described him as a “toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance, and I fear that combination leads him to believe his ends justify his means.”

It appears that Kerik, not only sent an email to the lawyer running his defense fund, Anthony Modafferi, but then tweeted to people directing them to his posts, which raises stupidity to a whole new level.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the case at hand, which is for taking bribes from mobbed up businesses in the form of things like renovations.

It’s one of the things that Rudy Guiliani will have to deal with if he runs for office: The guy who he plucked from obscurity and made police commissioner is mobbed up, which makes him more vulnerable as a candidate, as is the fact that the more he campaigns, the less people like him.

The only way that he can win is if he runs against a complete loser like David Dinkins or David Paterson….osh#@!

Economics Update

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Housing Start Graph Pr0n Courtesy of Calculated Risk


Foreclosure/Default Graph Pr0n Courtesy of The Big Picture

We are still not seeing any signs of inflation, with wholesale prices falling 0.6$ in September, largely on falling energy costs, so this is unlikely to repeat this month.

Also, the G20 country in the best fiscal position right now is Canada, and the Bank of Canada is keeping its benchmark rate at 0.25%, so it is declining to follow Australia’s lead.

In real estate, housing rose to 590,000, which was below expectations, and applications for housing permits fell.

In energy, the eight-day long rally has ended after briefly being about $80/bbl, though it’s likely just some profit taking.

8 Days is a long time in the commodities market.

Meanwhile, the dollar is up, largely on strong statements from various European central bankers and politicians about how they support a strong dollar.

What’s Up With Petraeus Disrespecting a Foreign Head of Government?*

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Gen. David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, left, shakes hand with Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, prior to their talks at the Prime Minister’s residence in Islamabad, Pakistan, Monday.


General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, meets British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street, in London, on October 1, 2009

OK, so I’m reading an article regarding differences between the Pakistani and US Military, and I see this picture, with that caption.

What’s wrong with this picture? The fact that General David Petraeus is meeting with a prime-minister of an allied country in his fatigues (I know, technically the Army Combat Uniform) at the Prime Minister’s residence, not some air field named Camp Middle-of-Nowhere.

While I understand that the chain of command for the US military goes through the White House, and not the Pakistani PM’s official residence, it seems to me that when one shows up at such a place, whether you civilian or military, you should wear something that involves….You know…A tie.

Notice when another 4 star General, meets another Prime Minister, one who has a lot less skin pigment, and speaks English with near native fluency, somehow or other the tie comes out

My guess is that this is not about racism, but rather about the way that Petraeus has sold himself, as America great warrior™, and he therefore wants to be seen by the press and the public as a warrior, and so he wears a “battle uniform”, but that’s psychoanalysis from a distance, and if you do that you become Charles Krauthammer, and I really do not want to head down that road.

*In a parliamentary system, the PM is head of government, and a president (or monarch) is head of state. In the United States, the President is both.