Gravitar Speaks!!! Live on Progressive Blend Radio, Jan 3, 2012, 9PM EST

That's right folks, I'm coming out of hiding to appear on the round table for Progressive Blend Radio's election year special, Stupor Tuesday. I'll be among the luminaries discussing the results of the Iowa caucuses, what they mean, what they don't mean, and where things go from here.

You can join in to but to do so, you need to tune in live starting at 9PM EST to http://pbradio.net. Hope to chat with you or see or read your feedback somewhere.

You can seek me out on Facebook by going here: Gravitar Profundus: The Mighty Liberal.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN!!!

Why Occupy Wall Street (or any other street)?

Below is a response I wrote to a Facebook friend about an article she wrote yesterday explaining why, despite being a very intense liberal and rabid supporter of President Obama, she feels almost completely disconnected from the Occupy Wall Street and related protests springing up across the country. And so it goes...

Interesting read, Erin. I get where you're coming from but I have to say that I think you are exhibiting the same sort of attitude towards the OWSers that I've seen you decry against folks (like me) who are avowed liberals but have become utterly fed up with Obama and his way of attending to his job.

This is indeed an entry level protest for a lot of those folks and a fair number of them couldn't explain with any clarity what it is precisely they're protesting and there are also a whole bunch (which is typical of any liberal gathering of issues) who only have their own discrete issue in mind regardless of the larger purpose for being there. Nothing unusual about that.

That said, it seems to me that the true larger purpose, if really there is one, is one so mundane that it IS exotic: enforce the goddamn law! Yesterday I linked a blog by Matt Tabbi where he explained for the umpteenth time what happened in the banking/mortgage/investment industry. I also happen to BE in the RE business as a title lawyer in South Florida so I saw this garbage happening pretty much first hand. You can blame people all you want for applying for loans they had no business getting, but you can only blame the mortgage brokers and the lenders themselves for actually GIVING these loans to people. It was out and out fraud from beginning to end with every bait and switch and strongarm scare tactic you can imagine and I don't blame customers for not knowing their nice broker or banker was selling them shit without a care. Anyone can apply for a loan. But only the genuinely qualified should be APPROVED for one. And that authority is fully with the brokers and lenders.

It's the 1% (maybe a slightly higher %age) who preyed upon the rest, who were told they deserved a place in an ownership society. A degree of foolish gullibility can be applied to the masses on this, but the great great direct, knowing, and intentional (important conditions to be met in fraud) blame can be laid at the feet of the lenders, who then did it again in all manner of ways when they sold these loans up the ladder, increasing the risk of loss countless times and which we haven't yet seen the end of by a long shot.

The repealed regulations and government exhortations may have created the incentive to get into the business the way they did, making it technically legal to OFFER a product, but the accounting standards and fraud laws were and are still on the books.

Apply the law as it is. That's all I ask. And then OWS has meaning. Obama makes a lot of noise saying that it's up to Attorney General Eric Holder at the Department Of Justice to decide what to prosecute. He chooses pot dispensaries in California instead of the criminals at the commercial and investment banks. WHY?? THAT is why my support for the administration is as thin as it is. THAT is why our economy is still in the toilet. The nation that made it big by enforcing the rule of law, doesn't do it anymore. Hence there is no confidence in the world of dealmaking even though the dollar remains strong relative to the rest of the moribund world. The money boys will keep their money here but they won't use it because they can't rely on the system and its enforcement mechanisms to keep everyone honest and the economy stable.

Enforce the goddamn law Mr. Chief Executive. That's your JOB. If he won't do it I'd love to find someone who will. But no one seems interested. That means we're done doesn't it?

I look forward to your further thoughts and appreciate your work and intensity. I wish I had more time to do this myself.

peace
GP

The Fix Is Nearly In And You Will Be Left Broke

Earlier today I read this piece in the AOL/Huffington Post and immediately heaved a sigh of resignation. The article summarizes a Fed review panel regarding improper foreclosures and concludes that there haven’t been any. Let me repeat that: the Fed says there have been no improper foreclosures. Anywhere. Under any circumstances. To say that this is mind-boggling to me underestimates the notion of mind-bogglement by orders of magnitude conceivable only through the measurements of cosmology.

According to the report, a foreclosure is justified simply if a borrower has failed to make their payments and has gone into default. Period. No consideration is given whatsoever about who then has the right to foreclose on the property in question despite the fact that rightful possession of property is pretty much fundamental to the existence of the country and most of the developed world.

Among the basic precepts of the founding of the United States was that anyone (well except people of African heritage and most women at first) could own their own property, their own land and use it to their own benefit. The free flow of property was a relatively new thing in the western world and it is among the major reasons that the notion of liberty entered the minds of colonists and early Americans. But with the free flow of property, came a need to keep track of who owned what in order for the entire process of property transfer to remain stable and reliable. Knowing who has a right to a piece of land, to use it, enter upon it, do work on top of or under it, build something on it, live on it, sell something on it, get a loan using it as collateral, and sell it, among many other things, is the hallmark of the United States and the entire system of American individualism. The “American Dream” is to own your own home.

The idea that it doesn’t matter who can take that home away when payments go late completely overturns the whole system. From at least 2002-2008 (and probably before if you follow the stories about MERS), the great majority of the American banking system has routinely failed to maintain records of who owns what when it comes to real estate in this country. They took the low risk, low yield, genuinely conservative notion of compound interest and superheated it into the high risk, high yield notion of securitized investments. And they did so without the permission of the people who were put at greatest risk: the American homeowner.

Without detailing it here, a great number of home loans, especially the ones that weren’t standard 30-year fixed interest rate loans, did not meet proper guidelines for offering such loans. They then got sold off to investment agencies under false pretenses and with false ratings regarding the quality of the loans. And then got split up again with more false ratings. And at nearly every point along the way, nothing ever got filed to state who it was that bought these loans and therefore had a right to collect them, or go after the collateral if they weren’t paid. What that creates in law is a problem of standing. The question is: do you have a right to say I owe you money? If so, prove it to me and I’ll pay you otherwise get lost. Without proper documentation, it’s hard to prove who owes what to whom. And there are rules and deadlines for filing some of this paperwork. For most people who own a home, it is their most important possession so it should be taken equally seriously by the entity that can collect money on or claim to take away that possession. If someone is going to be thrown out in the street, then a court better be damn sure the people doing it have a right to do so. But so far, that isn’t happening, and this Fed report suggests that the banks are working towards getting away with it (which shouldn’t be surprising).

The line that states that negotiations may be underway to settle the matter for $30 billion effectively means that the banks will get an oops (on top of all the other ones they already got), and then they are off the hook for failing to keep track of everything. For creating a Gordian Knot of the entire country's real estate market it is entirely likely that they will actually get paid multiple times for their transgressions for what will amount to a small fee (the $30b). They got reimbursed through TARP. They got paid one hundred cents on the dollar via claims run through AIG (because of TARP). And they will now get possession of the original asset and get to sell it again, often for cash, and otherwise with loans that they give and earn interest on again, or possibly even use to start the whole friggin’ process of fraud all over again!!!

If this happens, if the banking system gets a mulligan for a decade of thievery, then the United States as we have known it has truly ended. The rule of law will be a farce and there will no longer be any reason to rely on anything unless you happen to be a member of the 1% club. The 1%ers are the ones whose total wealth equals most of the rest of the 99% combined. The Roman Republic will be the Roman Empire and the Goths will be sniping at the edges most egregiously.

Sarah Palin: The Dangerous Moron, Shouldn't Reload, She Should Rebrand

Well really, she should just go away and enjoy her recently made millions and spend the rest of her days signing moose pelts for curious tourists dropping by to meet the curiosity from the inconveniently far north. But she's too egomaniacal to do that.

Sarah Palin has a following which is religious in its fervor and willfully ignorant in its understanding of the wider world and how it works. The biggest problem, of a size they cannot comprehend, is that the scale of the nation, economy, and world, and it's amazing complexity are simply beyond the scope of their reasoning. This is not to say that her followers are too dumb to manage their own lives and those of their families and immediate communities, but at a certain point, things get so abstractly beyond their personal experience that they, as they so often say about others, "don't get it." The problem of understanding scale is certainly not limited to Palin's followers, it pretty much hounds most regular people because absent experience with scale and complexity, the world can become a very abstract place very quickly.

Awareness and context are available more now than ever before because of the omnipresence of information through the internet and other explosively expanding media sources, but until porn is displaced as the number one internet activity, the use of that information will remain restricted. We are indeed in the midst of an information revolution which hasn't been seen in human history since the invention of the movable type printing press, but we're real early in the process so it will still be quite a while, a couple generations by my reckoning, before kids brought up in it from the start will be used to using it for purposes beyond acquisition of the next orgasm.

But I digress...

For once, Sarah Palin was made a patsy unfairly by mainstream and definitely by the left punditocracy for the massacre in Arizona a few weeks back and true to form she shot back at her critics with an even more incendiary blast that made her a headline again for another week. Her "blood libel" reference confirmed the religious tone of her communications to her followers. It was a foolish metaphor to use but right in line with her mode of operation. She is a publicity hound, not a leader and this incident demonstrated that reality as starkly as anything else she's done since being brought thoughtlessly onto the national scene following a John McCain hissy fit over not getting his own VP running mate choice, douchebag Joe Lieberman.

If she was a leader, she would have responded to her accusers with a message that upbraided them for their jumping to false conclusions, but recognizing that there was, nevertheless, a point about nasty, non-substance language in political campaigns and its marketing, and that she would be an example to others by refraining from it going forward. She could have rebranded herself into a genuine force of substance in American politics. She then could have been justified in calling out others from all points of the political spectrum for their bad language and actually led us into discussions over the genuine difficult issues of the day and the assorted ways they can be addressed. But she didn't. This, because Sarah Palin is STILL a dangerous moron and has too many people following her for no good reason and her continued presence in our national political scene remains a problem for whatever the future holds.

This is not a 1st Amendment issue. Of course a politician can say whatever s/he wants in furtherance of whatever it is they are trying to further. This is about being a responsible adult in the world. There are appropriate and inappropriate ways to communicate to people. Sarah Palin communicates like a petulant child or an adolescent artist interested only in shocking and getting publicity for its own sake, not for contributing anything useful to the human experience. She doesn't need to reload. She needs to rebrand or retire.

Foreclosure Fraud: The Next Threat to the US Economy

Last night (Sunday Oct. 17) I had the pleasure of taking an extended segment on Progressive Blend Radio to discuss some of the issues that are going on regarding the latest crack of thunder in the real estate market. The courts have discovered the tip of what they will eventually discover is an incomprehensibly large iceberg mountain of fraud in their currently open cases, and that discovery should lead to even bigger icebergs of fraud in the entire industry at every level for at least the past ten years and possibly longer.

In a half hour of very rapid discourse on my part, I covered only the most immediate problems in the system. But there's much more to it which I hope to be able to discuss further on the station or maybe even write about here at some point. In the meantime, please check out the podcast for the show, which was the first half of the third hour for the Oct. 17, 2010 show. If it's not directly linkable at the PBR podcast box below, go to the station website and look for the podcast for The More Me Show for that day and hour.

Those of you who are regular readers or listeners to anything I have to say on such things will know I am no doomer and go to great lengths to seek rational explanations for seemingly intractable problems. But this one is big stuff and could bring us back over the edge of financial collapse for the major banks if the whole thing unravels before any controls or solutions are put in place. Stay tuned and keep your wits about you boys and girls, this ride may stat to get bumpier again.

Neglect and Distraction

I have spent the entire summer posting nothing here and that reality has not gone unnoticed by your author. So much has happened since the few days before the BP oil spill (the last time I posted) that I've been too busy following it all to gather together the larger thoughts I try to pull together on this blog. That's no excuse. I'm working on regularizing personal scheduling and minimizing distractions so that I can get back to posting here more often. Getting more commentary from a wider variety of commenters would help but that's still not an excuse. I don't write for self-glorification or it would obviously happen more often.

Anyway, just wish me luck...

Another Moment For Something Big

Presidents usually reserve Oval Office addresses for something big or important. Tomorrow night I have a feeling we may finally get one of these from my friend Barry. I've been waiting for it ever since he gave his speech on race relations from Philadelphia during the campaign for the Democratic nomination. I've had hints of it here and there but he since taking office, he's been a rather cautious operator despite the seemingly big things that he's accomplished. None of them, the stimulus, health care, the Cairo speech, Afghanistan, have all felt somehow obvious or merely middling to me. No bold strokes in a dangerous era when bold strokes of a sort might be warranted (as opposed to those of the former resident which, Afghanistan at the time aside, rarely seemed necessary for all the macho bravado).

But after watching the northern Gulf of Mexico gradually turn to the color of a really good gumbo, I think we may be in for a genuinely bold move. I think we may be about to see a rallying cry and serious effort to change our nation's ways in the realm of energy production and use. As an oilman, I often thought GWB after 9/11 would have made the perfect character to have a sort of Nixon in China moment as the right guy to really understand oil while at the same time recognizing how important it was for the US to begin weaning from the oil teat, particularly as it related to importing from the middle east. But then I remembered that for the most part, GWB didn't understand anything so it could never have happened.

So here we have the worst environmental disaster in US history unfolding daily before out eyes not but a few weeks after Barry declared that oil drilling was pretty safe. We see some new footage every day as the devastation spreads further along the coast and wonder how far it will go and when the gusher will finally be stopped. We see a company in charge that effectively lied about the amount spewing and controlled the information so well that the administration failed utterly to recognize the lies. The result of that failure was incredible delay in preparing for inevitable landfall of oil on the one hand, and enabling the imposition of the still questionable tactic of spraying thousands of gallons of an untested dispersant in the oil as it spewed from the depths to keep it from ever reaching the surface; and hence land as well as our eyeballs. Now we wait while the reality sets in that from the beginning, only relief wells have a chance of stopping the gusher and that it will be mid-August or so at the earliest before we see if they work. If any problems intersecting with the 7 inch pipe at approximately 18,000 feet below sea level crop up (and gee what are the chances of THAT at this point?) we could be seeing Christmas as a worst case scenario for an end to the gusher. Keep in mind as well, that the relief wells are subject to the same risks that this initial well was subject to.

So the Something Big. First, the moratorium on new deep drilling will be extended until some new technologies are in place. The existing wells will be restarted under the condition that relief wells are started now until ready for emergencies. A similar rule was only recently and inexplicably watered down for deep water operations in Canada. Next, oil companies will need to invest directly in R&D for new technologies to protect against and deal with accidents of the sort we now see in the Gulf. Why? Because since we've sat on our fat asses for 30 years as a nation following the warning we received (from the Oval Office) from that pill of a president Jimmy Carter in 1977, we have greatly increased our oil usage while doing almost nothing to make it a more efficient method of generating energy or less damaging to the environment. For now, we have to continue drilling in the Gulf because it is the only viable source for our own oil in any useful quantity, but it HAS to be safer.

39% of our energy comes from petroleum. Of that, 60% is now imported. This means about 25% of our oil-based energy comes from overseas. Much of it from places filled with people who don't like us and want to harm us. We use a lot of energy to live the way we do. We use 25% of the world's energy, have 22% of the world's GDP and 5% of the world's population. We are hardworking, rich, and wasteful. We use almost twice the energy per person in the US as in Japan and Germany. And we use about 20 times more energy per person as those up and coming economic powerhouses, India and China. We have the ability to do what we have done so often in the past century, lead the world in something important.

We need to get away from the foreign oil teat specifically and all oil in general. I look for Barry to declare an effective equivalent to JFK's New Frontier, a challenge that may seem impossible for Americans, or anyone for that matter to do. Make massive investments in currently non-existent technologies. These will be in all sorts of diversified renewables and cleaner energy producers together with building the infrastructure to bring the supply from the generating source. And there will be more nuclear facilities, but these still take many many years to build.

This is not an easy task and it's complicated by the fact that we have waited til well beyond crisis range to start a serious discussion about it. Jimmy Carter exhorted us to get control of our energy habit before it got control of us. We didn't listen. I hope that after tomorrow's speech, the energy will be on the side of changing our ways once and for all.

Gravitar Lives on Facebook!!

In order to reach more folks more immediately I created a site on Facebook. Just look up "Gravitar Profundus" and hit the "like" button. Whether you agree or disagree with the shorter posts that will appear there, I hope you actually do like it and will please comment freely when there.

Giving Them All the Rope They Need

I've never thought that Barry was a progressive activist. I read The Audacity of Hope and saw in it the approach of a measured, thoughtful lawyer/politician who had studied American social and political history pretty deeply. His successful political campaigns featured unbelievable acts of self-destruction on the part of nearly all of his opponents, and other than that, some tasty rhetoric on his part. In practice, he seemed always a pragmatist when it came to getting things done and relied mostly on the behavior of his colleagues and adversaries to determine where he would eventually land. Unprincipled as it sounds, it's practical politics and regardless of the fawning appreciation of the non-Fox mainstream media and DailyKos left during the campaign, he never behaved as anything other than a politician slightly left of center of where Bill Clinton ever was, which was only nominally left of center.

I suspect that in a different environment he'd be further left than he has acted while in office but that is simply not where we are today. We have been in a gradually rightward political shift ever since Reagan came to office. Much of the shift has been in the rhetoric rather in the actual policy because during much of this period, we still had oldline liberals in Congress capable of fending off the noise coming from the right. But because of the unusual ability of the Rove-led GWBush political machine to force the GOP congress to toe the presidential line, things took a fairly wild swing during that administration.

It's not normal for Congress and the President to work together as well as it did during the GWB years. Our Constitutional system of checks and balances was designed to assure that a certain degree of human ego would inevitably lead the members of the branches of government to jealously cling to every shred of power and influence that could be gathered. In practical terms this means one branch refusing to go along with what the other wants without a substantial degree of give and take and compromise.

In today's American government, we have a generational shift in the White House but we are still living with the Congressional detritus of the previous political generation. In other words, Congress is heavily laden with loud-mouthed rightwing Repubelicans who think they still represent a majority of opinion in this country while the Democrats fail to behave as if they actually represent the majority. For a pragmatically minded President, a very young and generally inexperienced one at that, this is not fertile land for growing a progressive program; even with the current extreme economic conditions he was bequeathed. So what's a dude to do?

Barry laid out some goals and pretty much let the congressional democrats create the roadmap to get there. The result is that at each and every point: stimulus, healthcare, banking regulation, environmental/energy policy, we end up with heavily watered down versions of what one would expect for such programs following the apparent sea-changed represented by Barry's ascension to the White House. This is because the still-existing democrats in congress have never had the stones to play hardball against their bloviationary colleagues to the right.

Accordingly, Barry has been in no position to force himself on Congress the way Rove and Bush did, so he's essentially gotten the best deals available and taken the credit for it, while congressional democrats get faulted for being pussies and the repubes get trashed by their own teabagging base for caving to the dems (as if there was any choice when in the minority). What does this all mean??

It means that Barry's tactics have essentially given all of Congress enough rope to hang themselves in the upcoming midterm elections. Barry himself is still wildly popular and his goals are as well (and yes, above 50% popularity this deep into a first term is defined in American politics as wildly popular). He gets popped now and again for not playing hardball, but ultimately congress gets blamed for how it all turns out -- intransigent, corporate-owned, out-of-touch buffoons that they can be.

It means that come the second half of his first term, when he has to crank it up for his own re-election, we are likely to see a congress with a lot of new faces, many of which are more likely to go to the further ends of their policy rhetoric than we've had for quite some time. But the dems will still hold sway and Barry and the slightly more left of centers, are likely to have their way.

Putting My Mouth Where My Money Is

A lot of what passes for punditry here can seem rather abstract or remote from daily existence. I try to keep things tangible but it doesn't always work. Tonight, however, things couldn't have been more direct for me as far as politics and real life. As close as my own front door.

I just came in, at about 12:15 in the morning, from a local city commission meeting that started at 6pm. The issue at hand involved the proposed rezoning and land use of a golf course, one of which's holes is effectively an extension of my front yard. My kids play there daily after the last round of duffers pass through.

Like so many other businesses, golf as a business is not doing well these days (it is here that I will refrain from digressing into a George Carlin rant about golf courses and the land they waste). The owners of the course, longstanding and respected members of and employers in the community that I live, came up with a plan to close the lesser of the two courses in town, the one I live across from, in order to get financing to refurbish the main course on the other side of the main road. A decent enough plan under the circumstances. But sale of the individual course was not possible so they applied to have the land rezoned for a new use. The new use was primarily for residential construction. Without getting to the obvious details, folks in range of the course were outraged that new development was on the table in this era of extreme hardship and excess in the housing market. And I didn't want a new row of townhouses built a hundred feet away from my door over the course of the next several years.

I've never been to a city commission meeting and I didn't expect much. But after running a little late I came around the corner to see the city hall mobbed. But not entirely with the red shirt-wearing fellow protesters of the plan. No, there seemed to be many more people there in green shirts saying YES to the plan. I got a sinking feeling. It was a great deal for the company but my home value, already slashed in half since the peak in 2005, would likely take another ten percent hit the moment the plan was approved. Green space around here is a rare commodity and private land or not, the communities had a stake in keeping it that way.

The company's attorney gave an excellent presentation that made lots of good points about what to do with a piece of "defunct" green space. But suddenly one of the neighborhoods came through with an attorney representing our side and slice by slice proceeded to take down the previously unchallenged plan. Then the public comments came in, at which time, most of the green shirted folks suddenly disappeared. But those who remained became more real to me. They weren't paid shills for a corporate behemoth. They were the employees of a large but locally run family operation, and over 60 of them stood a good chance of losing their jobs if the plan failed.

I had a prepared statement for when my turn came along. It was a bit folksy, a bit sarcastic, and a bit analytical (just like this-a-here blogitty thang), but I was among the last to speak and I'd realized that most of my analytical points had been covered extremely well by our attorney. And it was closing in on 11:30 by then. After talking briefly with one of my neighbors, I hit on a change of approach. I still didn't come close to thinking there were any good reasons to approving this development plan, but I did realize that, regardless of the truth of the owner's claims of poverty, there were at least 60 people sitting there with me who would be hit hard by a losing decision. That was how I addressed the commission. In short, business is tough, but home values are tougher. Hard as it might be these days, folks who lose jobs can go anywhere to find another one. I can't move my house.

Surely my ego played a role, but the reporter from the local paper didn't run up to anyone to get their name except mine. If she runs my statement then I'll post a link as a post-script.

Suffice to say, going in, I thought this entire process was pretty well in the tank for the golf course owner long ago. He has genuinely solid and long connections to the town, and despite the 500 or so homeowners directly affected, this is a town of 60,000 in a region where development has always been the answer to all social ills. But we had to try.

Would ya believe it,,,, we WON!!! Unanimously at that. It really felt like democracy in action and a set of elected officials who appeared to change their minds over the course of the night. And finally, as happy as I was for myself and my neighbors, I feel for the employees of the golf course, a few of whom I caught choking back some sobs. And a strange thing,,, a feeling of community, not just with my neighbors, but with the folks who lost too. Some of them have worked at that course much of their adult lives. What I hope is that I and my neighbors can continue to work together to maintain what now seems like it will be one really big extended park, and be sure we can take care of it for ourselves, our kids, our city, and hopefully employ the folks who have always worked that space and kept it looking good. We were on opposite sides of a contentious issue. Now we must work together for all of us. Can we? Stay tuned.