Wells Fargo in the crosshairs

Here is an example of the difference between the State perspective on the fraud committed by the mortgage banks and the federal one. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray is clearly not buying the “technical error” line of defense:

“The big mortgage servicers and financial firms continue to demonstrate their belief that they do not need to play by the same rules as everyone else who uses our court system. The suggestion by Wells Fargo and its colleagues at several other national firms that they can cure fraudulent testimony by simply refiling new affidavits and continuing to proceed toward foreclosures shows they do not recognize the seriousness of the problem they have created. There is no simple ‘do-over’ for false testimony that will be likely to avoid sanctions and penalties imposed by the courts. Their brazen efforts to minimize their financial exposure by sweeping these problems under the rug are an insult to the justice system in this country. These disclosures by Wells Fargo will now become the focus for a new prong of our on-going investigation.”

That giant crack in the wall keeps growing….

UPDATE: I’m not generally a fan of politicians, but I find that I LIKE this guy. A lot. He appears to be about as focused as The Terminator. Here’s hoping he isn’t merely angling for a revenue-enhancing settlement, but actually intends to pursue the fraud to its core.

Women oppose freedom

There is no way to avoid this obvious conclusion. The vast majority of women are absolutely and diametrically opposed to every form of freedom unless it happens to align with what she happens to want to do at the moment. One of the latest feminist calls to arms is this direct assault on the freedom of speech:

Whistles, catcalls and lewd come-ons from strangers are all too familiar to New York City women, who say they are harassed multiple times a day as they walk down the street. Now lawmakers are examining whether to do something to discourage it. A City Council committee heard testimony Thursday from women who said men regularly follow them, yell at them and make them feel unsafe and uncomfortable. Advocates told stories of preteens and teenagers being hounded by adult men outside city schools and pleaded for government to address the problem.

Problem? What problem? A man is merely exercising his Constitutional right to free speech in a public place that happens to make a woman feel unsafe and uncomfortable is a problem that the state must solve? I feel a lot more than a little unsafe and uncomfortable when a man is exercising his Constitutional right to free speech in a public place in order to advocate higher taxes, more bank bailouts, more gun laws, and more government intervention. If we’re going to throw out the freedom of speech and ban the dangerous sort, let’s ban that kind of talk first and then we can worry about whistles and catcalls.

Men who value human freedom must staunchly oppose all forms of equality, particularly sexual equality, for three reasons:

1. Equality does not exist in any material, legal, or spiritual form.
2. Equalitarianism is the primary reason for the material decline of the quasi-democratic West as well as its decreasing freedom.
3. Most women do not believe in equality themselves and have historically used the concept as a stalking horse for imposing statism in order to ensure privileged female status through government force. For example, consider the female opposition to DNA-based paternity testing:

“DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves…Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them. The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not… Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter…in making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.”

I should be very interested in seeing anyone attempt to make a rational case for how human freedom can be expanded by ensuring that a sizable portion of the electorate is vehemently opposed to nearly every aspect of it.

Republicans will fix nothing

There is the evidence. It also proves MPAI, needless to say, as 92% of Republicans believe Congress or Obama are to blame for the current economic slump, (wait, aren’t we in a recovery?), and only around six percent understand that the bankers are to blame. The worst thing is that about 50% of them genuinely think Obama is to blame, when there is no possible way he can be held responsible for it. While he has most definitely exacerbated the situation by his Hooverian response to it, the die was not only cast, but the results were known before he even took office! We already know that the Republican elite has zero desire to force the banks to take responsibility for their criminal and economically destructive actions; this poll indicates that there will be very little grass roots pressure on them to do what they don’t want to do because the voter anger has been successfully redirected to date.

Remarkably, the Democrats are somewhat better in assigning the blame where it belongs. Nearly 25 percent of them hold the bankers responsible, although they clearly don’t recognize that their hero Obama is completely owned by Goldman Sachs. (When the guy is appointing ex-Goldmanites to administration positions outside the Treasury, you know it’s completely out of control.) And at least Bush was in office when the meltdown began, although if he can be blamed for pushing TARP, he can’t reasonably be blamed for the Fed keeping interest rates low and blowing multiple financial bubbles.

Anyhow, it is quite clear that the electoral devastation about to be wreaked upon Democrats by Republicans (which, you may recall, I was one of the first to predict), is not going to have a salutary effect upon the situation because the Republican Party and the greater part of the Tea Party insist on believing that the perpetrators of the primary causal factor were among the victims. They will surely dig in a different part of the hole than did the Democrats, but we can be confident that they will continue making it deeper. The battle between Republicans and Democrats is an internecine battle between the Keynesians known as Neo-Keynesians and the Keynesians known as Monetarists. Both sides subscribe to a false economic theory and both are beholden to the banks, and as both the names and the polls indicate, the Republicans are more strongly beholden to them than are the Democrats.

This means that Obama and the new Republican majorities, (or if I am only half-correct, House majority) will be eager to announce bipartisan cooperation in finding a means of saddling the taxpayer with TARP II, in which the cost of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security put-backs is shifted from the banks that committed the fraud to the taxpayer while their myriad of proven crimes are swept under the carpet. And the passage of that heroic, bipartisan, and much-publicized “reform” will mark the effective end of the Tea Party, even if its zombie corpse remains an animated political identity for decades to come.

Proving MPAI

Most certainly including the neocon portion of the Tea Party:

The need to reinvest in the military is not an ideological sentiment but rather a baseline statement about urgent national-security needs. But don’t take my word for it. A recent blue-ribbon commission chaired by President Clinton’s secretary of defense Bill Perry and former Bush administration National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, released a report this summer that “represents a striking bipartisan consensus that the United States must do more when it comes to national defense if we are to continue to play the international role we have and pursue the interests that have animated American grand strategy since the end of World War II.”

American strength comes at a price, to be sure. But there is a price to weakness as well, one that the commission notes “in the long run would be much greater.” Thankfully, Americans are telling pollsters of all stripes they agree — cutting defense is not an option.

You’re bankrupt, you morons. Lofty and ambitious words about a historically illiterate grand strategery that has not only failed, but has actually weakened the American military position, aren’t going to pay many soldiers’ salaries or buy many guns. Talking about “national security” is absolutely and utterly ridiculous as long as millions of immigrants are permitted to invade the country at will, and no amount of bases in Afghaniraqistan are going to make the nation any more secure.

It’s pretty simple. More money != better. Conservatives seem to understand this when it comes to welfare, so why don’t they understand that government spending isn’t any more effective when it comes to defense?

Training in action

This is an interesting little clip of four clueless guys attempting to take on a guy who appears to possess a moderate amount of boxing experience. Notice how he keeps moving sideways and backward into open space, only occasionally stepping forward when the opportunity, or in one case, the need, presents itself. The most important thing is that he limits himself to short, quick jabs and crosses; by doing so he avoids committing completely to a strike and thereby leaving himself open. He stays focused on defense throughout and does an excellent job of throwing his opponents down to the ground in order to buy himself more time and clear space whenever he can.

Now, imagine if the guy’s training had incorporated some jujitsu and he’d been throwing some elbows and the occasional low kick of his own instead of only punches… more than the one guy in the white would have been down. Of course, the four guys should have surrounded him from the start, but they had no way of knowing he was a boxer and in the heat of the moment, it’s almost impossible for more than two people to coordinate their actions anyway.

For me, the best moment is when he steps into the white-shirted guy’s second attempt to kick him, catches him off balance on one leg, and puts him down. It reminded me of how one fights a Tae Kwan Do kicker; the minute they plant and start to move their rear leg, step in hard. It’s harder to do than it sounds, because the instinctive reaction is to step back. And Mr. White Shirt is a perfect example of how not to fight. He’s aggressive, but hapless, consistently leading with his face and telegraphing his moves so badly that not a single one of his five attacks even lands, let alone does any harm.

Compare that guy with this man defending his girlfriend. He also shows obvious signs of training, but demonstrates less situational awareness and fighting experience as well as inferior technique. Part of this is because he is taking a more aggressive approach, but he makes the mistake of repeatedly extending himself and twice leaves himself open to an attack by the unengaged opponent, at one point even turning his back on the first guy he attacked. He also leads with his rear hand twice; although he gets away with it here thanks to his opponents’ lack of training, trying that against the first guy would have almost surely met with the rude interruption of a jab to the face.

I was also surprised at his lack of finishing, as I was completely expecting him to kick the first guy in the face when he turned around at the end. But then, the guy had gestured at him, so perhaps he was taught to go to submission rather than incapacitation.

The honest atheist

And there goes Richard Dawkins’s argument, presented in The God Delusion, that atheists are more moral than theists. Clearly he is an exceptional judge of human character and well-suited to pronounce judgment on morality, given his superior personnel skills demonstrated in selecting people to run his web site and now his charity.

Josh Timonen was one of a small coterie of young protégés around Richard Dawkins, sharing his boss’s zealous atheism. But now he and the evolutionary theorist have fallen out spectacularly. Professor Dawkins’s charity has accused Mr Timonen of embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds. The two atheists had become close in recent years, with Dawkins, the best-selling author and Emeritus Professor of Biology at Oxford University, even dedicating his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, to him. But Mr Timonen and the Dawkins foundation are now preparing for a legal wrangle.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, has filed four lawsuits in a Californian court alleging that Mr Timonen, who ran its online operation in America, stole $375,000 (£239,000) over three years. It is claiming $950,000 in damages, while Mr Dawkins is suing him for $14,000 owed to him personally.

With the exception of the hapless Sam Harris, atheists repeatedly insist that despite having no externally imposed morality, there is no reason for them to behave worse than those who do possess a morality imposed upon them by their gods. And yet, again and again, we see that their moral behavior, (as measured by the theistic systems in which they do not believe), is completely dependent upon the circumstances in which they find themselves and the temptations they face.

In the same way that an atheist leader with sufficient power is more likely than not to murder at least 20,000 people, we now know that atheist charities, (if I recall Dawkins’s claims correctly, the foundation for Reason and Science was the first explicitly atheist charity in Britain), are one for one in corruption. But I suppose that’s what happens when you turn yourself into the godless version of a big-haired televangelist.

On the art of the “technical mistake”

It’s amazing how quickly these little “mistakes” and “errors” are popping up now that the lawyers for the fraudulent securities are on the hunt. And so many too!

Wells Fargo admitted Wednesday it made mistakes in the paperwork for thousands of foreclosure cases and promised to fix them. The San Francisco-based bank said it plans to refile documents in 55,000 of the cases by mid-November. The company said not all those cases included errors and didn’t say how many did. Wells Fargo described the mistakes as technical and said it has no plans to halt the foreclosure process.

Oh, well, so long as it’s only 54,999 technical mistakes… meanwhile, the bankers’ little game of ex post facto minimal admission doesn’t appear to be playing well with anyone but the media.

“Mortgage servicers have been reworking investor-owned loans while not seeking amendments on debts they hold themselves, a misstep investors can use to bypass trustees or force them to act, Bill Frey, the head of Greenwich Financial, said at the conference. The four largest U.S. banks, which service a majority of U.S. mortgages, own more than $400 billion of home- equity debt, Goodman said. “We found servicer defaults in 100 percent of the trusts,” Frey said.”

100 percent servicer defaults? Probably just a technical mistake, I’m sure. It will be interesting, of course, to see the attempts to explain away the magic rotating vice-presidency of MERS as yet another technical mistake.

“In the instant action, Ms. Johnson-Seck claims to be: a Vice President of MERS in the March 16, 2009 MERS to INDYMAC assignment; a Vice President of INDYMAC in the May 14, 2009 INDYMAC to ONEWEST assignment; and, a Vice President of ONEWEST in her June 30, 2009-affidavit of merit. Ms. Johnson-Seck must explain to the Court, in her affidavit: her employment history for the past three years; and, why a conflict of interest does not exist in the instant action with her acting as a Vice President of assignor MERS, a Vice President of assignee/assignor INDYMAC, and a Vice President of assignee/plaintiff ONEWEST. Further, Ms. Johnson-Seck must explain: why she was a Vice President of both assignor MERS and assignee DEUTSCHE BANK in a second case before me, Deutsche Bank v Maraj, 18 Misc 3d 1123 (A) (Sup Ct, Kings County 2008); why she was a Vice President of both assignor MERS and assignee INDYMAC in a third case before me, Indymac Bank, FSB, v Bethley, 22 Misc 3d 1119 (A) (Sup Ct, Kings County 2009); and, why she executed an affidavit of merit as a Vice President of DEUTSCHE BANK in a fourth case before me, Deutsche Bank v Harris (Sup Ct, Kings County, Feb. 5, 2008, Index No. 35549/07).”

Now here’s the punchline: “Johnson-Seck admitted she was not employed by MERS and didn’t know who its president was or the location of its headquarters.”

Brothel or burqah: the reality

You can’t say I didn’t warn you about the choice an increasing number of Western women are presently making:

Tony Blair’s sister-in-law announced her conversion to Islam last weekend. Journalist Lauren Booth embraced the faith after what she describes as a ‘holy experience’ in Iran. She is just one of a growing number of modern British career women to do so…. According to Kevin Brice from ­Swansea University, who has specialised in studying white conversion to Islam, these women are part of an intriguing trend. He explains: ‘They seek spirituality, a higher meaning, and tend to be deep thinkers. The other type of women who turn to Islam are what I call “converts of convenience”. They’ll assume the trappings of the religion to please their Muslim husband and his family, but won’t necessarily attend mosque, pray or fast.’…

For a significant amount of women, their first contact with Islam comes from ­dating a Muslim boyfriend.

Although this may be shocking to the typical half-sapient and maleducated secular mind, numbed as it is from between 12 and 27 years of unmitigated feminist and multicultural propaganda, it was entirely predictable. And was, in fact, predicted by numerous parties. The primary reason neither the Greeks nor America’s Founding Fathers permitted women to vote is because they are much more intellectually malleable than men. Even the most fervent feminist will enthusiastically embrace the submission of Islam if a man is able to inspire her rationalization hamster to spin in that direction.

Osama bin Laden was correct in stating that Islam is the strong horse in comparison with secular post-Christian America. Secular post-Christianity is both rootless and pointless; it has neither raison d’etre nor does it provide anyone with objectives beyond the momentary and the material. While the abstract thinkers of the cognitive elite can come up with higher purposes of their own, (most of which involve placing themselves in control of other people and wind up getting a lot of people killed), such self-serving intellectual ephemeralities are incapable of satisfying the spiritual hunger of the masses.

In turning away from its historical identity as Christendom, the West has created a vast spiritual void and already the weaker souls are drifting into the pagan madness that Chesterton, Lewis, and other Christian savants predicted in the previous century. There will never be an atheist society, because human society can no more abide a spiritual vaccuum than nature can abide a material one.

The WSJ in defense of Wall Street

An ostensibly conservative media is still trying to blame borrowers for the multiple frauds that were committed by the banks. And it’s still not working:

Millions of Americans have stopped paying their mortgages, creating a giant paperwork snafu and legal crisis, and yet… Funny how many media accounts begin with that rarest of creatures, a homeowner fully paid up on his mortgage, or better yet a Florida man who paid cash for his house, and who was foreclosed on anyway thanks to a paperwork error by some confused bank. This poor shmuck then is made to symbolize the larger phenomenon when in fact the larger phenomenon is precisely the opposite.

You can’t understand the latest mortgage mess without understanding the powerful appetite to cast borrowers as victims and banks as villains in the housing bubble. This tendency is present in claims that minorities have been especially victimized, that people were sold loans they didn’t understand.

The battle of the narratives is reaching its climax in the robo-signer controversy, with lawyers seizing upon technicalities to let people go on living in homes they’ve stopped paying for.

We hasten to add that technicalities are important; the rule of law is nothing but a profound commitment to honor technicalities. But let’s understand that in the absence of the snafu, we’d have a faster, smoother-working foreclosure process, in which more Americans would more quickly be shoved out into the street in perfect compliance with the law.

It is really remarkable how the self-appointed defense attorneys for the mortgage banks keep dancing desperately around the word FRAUD like wildebeest at a crocodile-infested waterhole. There was no “snafu”. There were no “clerical errors”. There were no “paperwork mistakes”. There was only the mass and ongoing commitment of FRAUD. The loans were FRAUDULENTLY made in the first place. Then the titles were FRAUDULENTLY transferred, after which they were utilized to sell FRAUDULENT securities. When the loans went bad, as many of them were specifically designed to do, the banks then produced FRAUDULENT documents to replace the originals that were either destroyed or showed evidence of the previous FRAUD committed by the bank.

The bankers are the villains here. There is no “elusive search” to be conducted, in fact, there is no debating this! And many, if not most of the defaulting borrowers were one of the many victims of the multiple frauds committed by the villains. The ironic thing is that this disingenuous Wall Street tool complains about politicians having “moved heaven and earth to prop up the self-same banks” when his entire column is yet another feeble attempt to downplay the criminal activity of the banks and shift responsiblity away from them.

A portrait in conservative cluelessness

Can someone just get this chick the job she obviously wants on Fox already? I have absolutely nothing against attractive blondes babbling nonsensically in ignorance, I just don’t think it belongs on the op/ed page:

What have we come to when we believe drunken college students over police officers? That is exactly the case in Boston. Several “eye witnesses” claim the authorities overreacted when they shot at 20-year-old D.J. Henry’s car in front of a local bar, which resulted in his death and the injury of his passenger. It has been reported that D.J. was supposed to be the designated driver and was only there to pick up some friends. I find that hard to believe considering his blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.

Understandably, D.J.’s parents are outraged and devastated, calling for an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. I can’t imagine the pain they must be going through. This is a tough one because on one hand you have parents who just lost their son, and on the other you have a drunken kid who allegedly fled from the cops when he was approached and hit two of them with his car as he accelerated. It’s not like D.J. was just minding his own business and the cops walked up to the car and shot him. He put himself at risk when he knowingly got behind the wheel while he was intoxicated.

Where does personal responsibility come into play? D.J.’s blood alcohol level was .13. He was in the driver’s seat and the cops were called to the bar due to an “unruly crowd” outside. Should they have let him drive home? Of course not; they’re going to do their job and approach him. If the authorities hadn’t gone up to the car and instead just let D.J. drive home, what would the consequences have been? Driving under the influence could have resulted in an accident….

The cops were doing their job. It seems like when they do that, their investigations are “fatally flawed,” as D.J.’s family put it – but when they don’t do their job they’re incompetent and negligent. Are we to blame police officers when they try to protect and serve?

Americans will stop believing “drunken college students over police officers” when police officers stop destroying evidence, lying about what happened, and exonerating themselves of any wrongdoing after leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them. Someone needs to explain to little Chrissy Chatterfield that “protecting and serving” does not involve murdering men who happen to be lightly intoxicated behind the wheel of a car. Or legally carrying while shopping at CostCo. Or sitting at home minding their own business with a door left open to provide a breeze on a hot summer evening. There are no shortage of unjustifiable police murders for which none of the responsible cops were even prosecuted.

What passes for her logic is darkly hilarious; it’s good for the police to kill a man in order to prevent the highly unlikely possibility that he might kill someone else in an accident. By this reckoning, police snipers should be stationed outside every bar and nightclub parking lot in America, picking off anyone who looks like they might have had more than two drinks. And more importantly, the police had absolutely no idea that the guy was drunk. They didn’t shoot him because he had a BAC of 0.13, which despite the absurd legal limits is barely into the range that is even detectable without testing, they shot him because he didn’t follow their confusing and imprecise orders. (At his body weight, D.J. Henry had probably had all of 5 drinks that evening.) Randy Moss would be dead if the Minneapolis police were similarly inclined to homicide.

Take note of the scare quotes around “eyewitneses”. Does little Miss Chatterfield not believe that these people were there on the scene? Does she have any reason to doubt their eyewitness testimony, which just happens to be the primary foundation of every legal system dating back to the Old Testament? Of course not, she’s just a clueless, conservative cop-lover who believes that providing a psychopath with a blue uniform and a gun magically transforms him into a heroic and faultless doer of good.

Miss Chatterfield may be on the cops’ side, but what she is too young and foolish to understand is that they are most certainly not on her side. Since her interactions with the police are probably limited to Norman Rockwell paintings and crying to get out of the occasional speeding ticket, she has no idea of the extent to which the police departments of America have been militarized, corrupted by drug war money, and populated by criminals. This asinine article is exhibit A in the mindless conservative support for the police that must come to an end in order to restore legitimacy to what is presently little more than a lawless government badge gang.

UPDATE: I missed the fact that WND’s cheerleader for the police state didn’t even manage to get the right state, let alone city, in her rush to defend a police shooting. D.J. Henry was shot and killed in Thornwood, New York by the Pleasantville police. The case, exactly or otherwise, had no connection with Boston.

UPDATE II: Well, I suppose this would be one effective means of addressing police brutality: “The entire police force of a small town in northern Mexico resigned after gunmen attacked their recently-opened headquarters with grenades and assault rifles, local news agencies reported quoting the town’s Mayor on Wednesday.”

I suppose it’s not so fun to wave your badge and your gun when the people start shooting back.