Month: February 2014

Not Enough Bullets………

No Comments

To no one’s surprise, this involves real estate developers, a scurvy lot who depend on the kindness of taxpayers while extolling the virtue of “free market heroes” like themselves.

Case in point, Seattle developers are suing because they think that the city is charging too much for them to break zoning laws:

A coalition of several developers filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court on January 15 that would make Seattle, already booming with construction cranes, more friendly for developers. Their issue? One of the city’s affordable-housing programs.

Since 2006, the city has struck a deal with developers in the downtown core: In exchange for setting aside a few modestly affordable units or paying fees toward a city housing fund, developers get to build taller buildings. For example, developers could build a 400-foot tower where they’d otherwise have to keep it under 300 feet. The Seattle City Council raised those fees by about one-third in December 2013. In their lawsuit, which cites three Supreme Court decisions, the developers claim that fee hike is “an out-and-out extortion.”

So they’re asking a judge to invalidate that higher fee, making it cheaper and easier to build the tallest buildings allowed downtown—while throwing even fewer scraps to the city’s growing affordable-housing needs.

“This just shows developers are not willing to do their fair share,” says Rebecca Saldaña of Puget Sound Sage, an affordable-housing advocacy group. She says Seattle’s taxpayers fund a housing levy, and politicians have eased other development requirements. This latest uptick in fees, Saldaña says, is “really just asking developers to come up to speed.”

………

For example, Smith’s Second and Pike project is a proposed 400-foot tower, with 290 residential units above retail and restaurant space. Normally, the height limit there is 290 feet. Under the new fee regulations, in exchange for that extra height, Smith would have to pay a one-time fee of around $2.5 million into the city’s housing fund. The lawsuit says the city should revert to the former requirements, which require paying only $1.8 million. (In an odd twist, Smith will pay the $1.8 million either way, because he applied for a permit under the old rules.)

“My hope is that most people won’t actually pay the fees,” says O’Brien. “They’ll just provide the housing” inside the new construction. In Smith’s building, that would mean setting aside 20 or so moderately affordable units—around $1,300 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

Clearly, even that isn’t particularly affordable, and 20 apartments don’t amount to much housing. And the city knows its program isn’t good enough. Which is why housing advocates, developers, and lawmakers have been meeting since last summer to overhaul the program.

$1300/month.

If you figure that 25% of pre-tax income should go to housing, that translated to about $62K a year.

For a one bedroom apartment.

And this is too much for the developers to tolerate.

You know, when Mao came to power in China, he executed the landlords, basically the real estate developers of China of the time.

I’ve always found it hard to condemn this act.

I’d Never Looked at the Christo-Fascists this Way Before

No Comments

Considering that I have tended to call them Fascists, I’m rather surprised that I’ve never noticed that bullying is THE core value of the Talibaptist crowd:

The anti-bullying campaign was supposed to be one of those causes that everyone, regardless of ideology or political party, was able to get behind. As Emily Bazelon discovered in her seminal book on bullying in schools, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy, even in schools where it seems fairly obvious that authorities were being negligent toward victims of bullying, the schools insisted that they were opposed to bullying. No one is for bullying, right?

 Well, that’s what we’d like to believe. But it seems that, as with many things, bullying is becoming a partisan issue. Anti-bullying efforts seem liberal in tone and emphasis, which means that they will inevitably attract negative attention from the knee-jerk “anything to piss off the liberals” crowd. But let’s be honest: Part of the reason conservatives frequently support bullying—or at least resist efforts to end it—is because bullying works. Bullies are good at exerting exactly the kind of social control that the right, especially the Christian right, wants to exert. So here’s a list of incidences where conservatives just straight-up supported bullying in the face of efforts to curb it.

Seriously.

Every “freedom” that they insist upon violates the old adage, “Your freedom ends where my nose begins.”

They want the right to discriminate, and to act on their hatred and their bigotry.

You have the right to be a bigot and a hater, but you cannot inflict your bigotry and hatred on the rest of society.

It Now Sucks Even More to be Mitch McConnell

No Comments

Because the latest polling from the right leaning Rasmussen polls has him tied with Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is tied with his Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, at 42 percent each in a new poll by conservative-leaning firm Rasmussen Reports.

Six percent preferred neither of them, and 10 percent were undecided, according to the survey, which was released Monday.

Rasmussen’s polls came under fire during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles for regularly overstating the standing of Republican candidates.

Note that undecideds tend to break for the challenger. (Happy dance!!)

If I were a Democratic political consultant right now, I would be using these numbers to push Matt Bevin, the teabagger running against McConnell in the primary.

What McConnell has going for him, both in the primary and the general, is the sense of inevitability that he intends to convey.

Drive a stake through its heart.

Congress Does the Right Thing, and then Scrambles to Repeal It

No Comments

I am talking, of course, about the attempts to repeal changes to the federal flood insurance program, so as to stop subsidizing people who choose to live in flood prone regions:

Setting aside objections from the White House and fiscal watchdogs, a bipartisan Senate majority voted Thursday to delay rate increases in federal flood insurance for coastal property owners from Maine to California.

The 67 to 32 vote reflected mounting political opposition to big insurance hikes that Congress passed in 2012 to prop up the nation’s nearly bankrupt flood insurance program. The bill, which faces an uncertain outcome in the House, would delay the increases for up to four years for hundreds of thousands of property owners across the country, including tens of thousands in Massachusetts.

The measure also postpones the adoption of a new set of official flood maps for coastal regions, which would have dramatically expanded areas designated as prone to floods and required thousands more to obtain costly insurance. In Boston alone, the number of properties encompassed in the new maps would rise from 8,000 to 18,000.

Floods are getting worse because of anthropogenic climate change, and the original maps were too conservative, and the rates were never appropriate to the level of risk.

The solution to ameliorating damage from flooding is not to pay people to live there.

Capitalism, Huh?

No Comments


click a picture for a slide show

When Metallica discovered that their music was being used to torture inmates at Guantanamo, they send a cease and desist letter.

Canadian electro-industrial band Skinny Puppy went a different route, and have sent an invoice demanding payment:

By now we’re all familiar with the U.S. government’s practice of using heavy metal to torture detainees. We’ve all seen “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Homeland”—we get the drill. Usually metal music is used for its general unpleasantness. It’s impossible to sleep through and just all-around unnerving.

 Except Canadian band Skinny Puppy had no idea their music was being used in the service of the U.S. military.

 ………

 The Independent points out Friday that when Metallica learned their music was being used as a torture device at Guantanamo they sent the the government a cease and desist. Skinny Puppy, on the other hand, went the other way and just sent an invoice.

 “We heard that our music was used on at least four occasions,” Evin Key said. “So we thought it would be a good idea to make an invoice to the U.S. government for musical services.”

 Asked how he felt about his music being used to torture people, he said, “Not too good. We never supported those types of scenarios. Because we make unsettling music, we can see it being used in a weird way. But it doesn’t sit right with us.”

It doesn’t sit right with anyone who values the idea of rule of law and civil rights, Evin.

I would remind you thought that the statutory damages for such a use, it is clearly a public performance, are on the order of $150,000 per infraction.

It might be more worth your while to sue.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Goes to Work

No Comments

CFPB Alleges Mortgage Insurer Operated 15-Year-Long Kickback Scheme – Consumerist

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun proceedings against PHH Corporation for its involvement in a 15-year-long mortgage insurance kickback scheme that collected hundreds of millions of dollars from homeowners.

 The CFPB announced Wednesday that it is seeking a civil fine, an injunction to prevent future violations and victim restitution from PHH Corporation and its residential mortgage origination subsidiaries, PHH Mortgage Corporation and PHH Home Loans LLC, as well as it’s wholly-owned subsidiaries, Atrium Insurance Corporation and Atrium Reinsurance Corporation, for violating the Real Estate Settlements Procedures Act and harming consumers through a kickback scheme beginning as early as 1995 and continuing until at least 2009.

 ………

 An investigation by the CFPB showed that when PHH originated mortgages, it referred consumers to its mortgage insuring partners. In exchange for the referral, the insurers purchased reinsurance – a product that transfers risk to help mortgage insurers cover their own risk of unexpected losses – from PHH’s subsidiaries. As a result, consumers ended up paying more in mortgage insurance premiums.

Good, but this will not send anyone to jail.

Until we start people, not just corporations, start experiencing the direct consequences of the misdeeds, nothing will change.

A 23 Year Long Multi-Billion Dollar Long Contract Dispute Settled

No Comments

And, surprise, surprise, it is a sweetheart deal for the defense contractors: (paid subscription required)

After more than two decades and numerous attempts at a settlement, the U.S. government finally agreed to accept $400 million from General Dynamics and Boeing in the dispute over the Navy’s cancellation of the $4.8 billion A-12 Avenger II program.

 The settlement is a fraction of what the government sought when the lawsuit began, demanding $1.3 billion in restitution ($2.2 billion in 2014 dollars) for money spent on the stealthy carrier-based aircraft program that had yet to deliver an aircraft. And it is even smaller when compared with an agreement for $2.9 billion that was nearly negotiated in 2003.

 ………

 The Navy will receive three EA-18G Growlers that will be delivered on top of the 21 Boeing aircraft that were funded by Congress for fiscal 2014 and are expected to be delivered in 2016, according to the Navy.

 General Dynamics will provide $198 million in credits to the Navy toward the design, construction and delivery portions of the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 destroyer.

 ………

 The dispute began in 1991, when then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the $4.8 billion stealth attack aircraft, run by General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, which has since been acquired by Boeing. It was terminated in part due to the government’s conclusion that contractors were not meeting cost and schedule targets. The Navy demanded that contractors repay $1.3 billion to the government.

 The prime contractors sued the government, arguing the government should make penalty payments because the contract was canceled for “convenience,” not a failure to perform. The case festered in the court system, eventually reaching the Supreme Court.

 ………

 In 2011, 20 years after the start of the dispute, the Supreme Court considered the case. The Navy argued that the contractors had not completed the work they had promised. The contractors argued that the government held back classified information about stealth technology that hampered their effectiveness. Ultimately, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, where it remained until now.

They met none of their technical requirements, they missed their schedule, and they were hideously over budget, and the punishment for the (now effectively admitted with the settlement) misfeasance and malfeasance is that the contractors get to secure the status of existing programs.

5 Words that Strike Terror into My Heart

No Comments

“Wall Street’s New Housing Bonanza“

Wall Street’s latest trillion-dollar idea involves slicing and dicing debt tied to single-family homes and selling the bonds to investors around the world.

 That might sound a lot like the activities that at one point set off a global financial crisis. But there is a twist this time. Investment bankers and lawyers are now lining up to finance investors, from big private equity firms to plumbers and dentists moonlighting as landlords, who are buying up foreclosed houses and renting them out.

 The latest company to test this emerging frontier in securitization is American Homes 4 Rent. The company talked to prospective investors at a conference in Las Vegas last week about selling securities tied to $500 million of debt, according to people briefed on the matter.

 American Homes 4 Rent, which went public in August, has tapped JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo as its bankers for a debt deal that is expected to be sold by the end of the first quarter, these people said.

This will not end well.

Another complex deal that will leave banksters richer, and rest of us stuck with the f%$#ing tab.

Linkage

No Comments

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the screen capture of the FB dialogue.