Grrr. Are we Americans really such ignoramuses? This is freaking CNN. Not the Beeb, but *still*.
Rep. Alan Grayson on the escalating foreclosure scandal
Nothing apparently has changed since the beginning of the real estate crisis. Fraud abounds as the regulators sleep.
Mobile wind turbine
Situated on the back of a hybrid carrier – that also uses electricity generated by the turbines to run – the Mobile Wind Turbine can be transported to any area to harness the wind. And should the wind drop or the vehicle’s batteries completely drain, a diesel generator will kick in to ensure that it’s not completely stranded.
It’s ideal for concerts, natural disasters, military, and more. Decentralizing power is the way to go, especially when you can bring it with you.
Horrific home invasion trial goes to jury
Alleged human Steven Hayes could get the death penalty in a Cheshire CT home invasion where he and his human detritus accomplice Joshua Komisarjevsky murdered a mother and two daughters and savagely beat the husband. Hayes raped the mother then killed her. Komisarjevsky raped the eleven year old daughter. They then doused the daughters in gasoline and set them and the house on fire in an attempt to destroy evidence only to find the police waiting outside.
The father survived the beating and has been steadfast in demanding the death penalty. Hayes and Komisarjevsky tested negative for drugs and alcohol which means they did it clean and sober, which is even more horrific if anything could be.
I doubt even Lucifer wants these two.
So, is the death penalty a worse punishment than letting them die in prison decades from now? Their guilt has been established, the only question is whether they get the death penalty or spend the rest of their lives in prison with no possibility of parole.
We lived in Connecticut when this happened. the impact was huge. A police officer wrote to the Hartford Courant saying
I have been a police officer for 25 years, and I’ve seen plenty of monsters while working on homicide, sexual assault and pedophile cases. It’s probably what led me to go back to school for a master’s in theology. I needed the spiritual world because my daily contact with crime had weakened my trust in human beings.
Dr. Scott Peck, the renowned psychiatrist who wrote “People of the Lie,” came to the conclusion after years of working with people in therapy that some human beings are born evil and stay that way. Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes are two such people.
I too asked where was God when those two monsters beat Dr. William Petit unconscious, strangled his wife, poured gasoline around a terrified 11-year-old little girl and her 17-year-old sister and then lit a match.
I tell my son that monsters don’t exist. When he gets older, he will find out that they do indeed walk this earth.
Alcohol and guns. Don’t do it!
Intoxination ponders the wisdom of recent decisions by four states to allow loaded handguns in bars.
Men. handguns. whiskey. What could possibly go wrong with that???
One million foreclosures halted
Real Estate Channel has a useful recap. Some highlights
BofA officials say their staffers signed off on about 10,000 foreclosure actions without actually reading them. Other lenders admit doing the same.
The Florida attorney general “is investigating four law firms, two with ties to GMAC, for allegedly providing fraudulent documents in foreclosure cases.”
“We have had thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of foreclosures around the country by entities that did not have the right to foreclose,” said a lawyer.
The NYT reports that some documents were notarized before they were prepared, that the same person’s signature sometimes appeared in radically different ways suggesting forgery, and that multiple banks have on occasion tried to foreclose the same property with all claiming ownership.
A recently filed class action suit alleges racketeering.
While attempting to circumvent Kentucky recording Statutes, the MBS Trust created for itself a situation wherein it had no legally recognizable interest in the loans for the benefit of the investors. The investors were invested in nothing. The MBS possessed nothing on the date the REMIC [Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit] closed and perpetrated a fraud on the investors and the American taxpayer through its fraudulent qualification as a REMIC with the SEC.
If so, then mortgage backed trusts could lose their tax exempt status, with disastrous effects – and more.
As previously set out, often the MERS held the Mortgage as “nominee” for a lender who was out of business and/or liquidated in bankruptcy. There could be no party legally able to Assign the Mortgage on behalf of the dissolved lender. The only party who could authorize the Mortgage Assignment for a bankrupt lender would be the Bankruptcy Trustee. In these cases where a MERS mortgage has been assigned on behalf of a bankrupt entity, a criminal violation of the bankruptcy code had occurred.
The Big Picture says homeowners without mortgages have been foreclosed, adding
“Defective documentation has created millions of blighted titles that will plague the nation for the next decade.” — Richard Kessler, an attorney in Sarasota, Florida, who conducted a study that found errors in about three-fourths of court filings related to home repossessions.
Called Foreclosure mills, many of these firms employ illegal methods to their legal practices. They use robo-signers instead of reviewing documents reviewed by lawyers; they hire process servers with histories of fraud and criminality. In the pursuit of foreclosure profits, they have tried to turn the practice of law into a clerical act of foreclosure, repossession, and resale — consequences be damned.
Where were the regulators?
Focusing on Polizeros
I’m putting my little personal / tech blog on hiatus for a while so I can focus on Polizeros. Those posts will now appear here, so you’ll be seeing more tech and humorous posts along with the political content.
I tweaked some things here lately and the result has been substantially more readers (and ad revenue is going up too.) More in future posts about what I did, maybe other bloggers will benefit from it too.
What would you like to see here? Let me know. Thanks!
Did the dog eat Florida foreclosure summons filings?
Homes in Florida seized without Notice of Foreclosure: Suspiciously large number of “the dog ate my summons” filings
What are the odds that these “lost” notices reflect legitimate lost documents, as opposed to failure to provide proper notice at all and lying to the court after the fact? The sheer volume strongly suggests the overwhelming majority are the result of the utter disregard of the foreclosure mills for due process.
Make no mistake about it: the nature and scale of these frauds cut at the very heart of our judicial process. We didn’t call the Florida courts “kangaroo courts” lightly. A home is most people’s most important asset; shelter is a bedrock of personal security. Both the Fifth and the Fourteenth amendments enshrine the notion of due process, yet we see increasing evidence of it being violated on a routine basis in the Sunshine State.
4ClosureFraud and ForeclosureHamlet are all over the fast-developing multiple stories of fraud and deception in Florida mortgages and foreclosures. Where are the regulators? Deliberately asleep and/or compromised, I’m guessing. It would be so nice to get back to Rule of Law in this country, wouldn’t it? Instead, our obviously corrupt financial system is permitted to apparently do whatever it wants without fear of prosecution.
Renewable power for frontier markets. Fenix
2.6 billion people don’t have reliable access to grid power. Old car batteries are often used instead to charge cell phones, power lghts, etc. Fenix has developed ReadySet, a portable device with a lead-acid battery that can recharge from solar, bicycle, or the grid, with lots of outlets to power whatever. They are partnering with telcos and NGO’s to get ReadySet out there by the millions. Cost is $150.
Gigaom has more.
Mormon leader apologizes for legacy of Prop. 8
After meeting with LGBT Mormons about Prop 8 and LDS views on homosexuality, an elder of the church said “To the full extent of my capacity, I say that I am sorry… I know that many very good people have been deeply hurt, and I know that the Lord expects better of us.”
An apology. An apology from a General Authority. A rare thing—no, an exceedingly rare thing—in an institutional LDS culture that prefers to leave its historical missteps and mysteries quietly behind. It was not, to be sure, an apology for Proposition 8 itself. It was not a renunciation of Mormon doctrine on homosexuality. But it was a significant acknowledgment of the experience of gay Mormons and their allies, an instance of dialogue between Church leadership and membership. It was, in short, a reason for hope.
As a non-Mormon who spends considerable time in a heavily LDS area, I get the feeling that change is coming, slowly, painfully, but it’s coming. You might not know, but the official stance of LDS on polygamy is zero tolerance. Practitioners are excommunicated, period. Is there still a wide range of opinion within LDS on polygamy. Sure. But they have changed.
So let’s encourage this change too. (LDS is clearly more capable of change and introspection than the Catholic religion I was raised in even if the change will come hard.)
California mandates renewable energy grid storage
TVA Racoon Mtn pumped hydro
Renewable energy will now be required to be stored in California so it can be used in off-hours. The most common method is pumped-hydro, with batteries an obvious choice too. With pumped hydro, water is pumped uphill to a holding area. When power is needed, the water is released and used to create energy.
California also just increased its renewable energy goal to 12% by 2012 and 33% by 2020.
Did the One Nation rally on Sat. get jacked by Democratic Party
I hate to be a spoilsport, but I have to agree with Chris Floyd. Not to mention the bait-and-switch done with this rally, which was originally stated as meant to “demand the change we voted for” instead of a GOTV rally meant to “show support for Obama.”
The best way to mobilize the Democratic base is by delivering on the change they voted for. Seems simple enough that maybe even the out-of-touch ‘leaders’ of the Democratic Party could figure it out, but apparently not.
The Unrepentant Marxist agrees
Accepting beforehand that this would be a pro-Democratic Party event, I was amazed at the flabbiness of the speeches. Mostly there was a pleading quality to them, along the lines of imploring the Republicans to play fair. There was nobody like Bill Maher or Michael Moore who was capable of hitting below the belt. God knows with all of the cretins running for office on the GOP ticket, there’s plenty of cannon fodder.
Much of this is because Democrats have no idea what they stand for. So how can they fight for it?
We are condemned to live in a period of history when liberals have lost their ability to rouse their base either through raw emotions or through political education and analysis. But on the upside, this vacuum creates a possibility for the radical left to get a hearing. Let’s hope that as the crisis deepens, we find it in ourselves to rise to the occasion.
As I’ve oft-mentioned, the radical left has been so comatose lately that we need to ask why. The capitalist crisis they say they’ve waited years for is here, yet their response has been crickets. The really incisive analysis of the financial crisis has come from mostly libertarian blogs like Zero Hedge while the socialist left, I think, really doesn’t understand what’s happening or what to do about it.
I hope we can rise to the occasion.
Donald Duck meets Glenn Beck. “Right Wing Radio Duck”
This is totally brilliant
Charles Schwab: The Fed should stop bailing out banksters
Helicopter Ben now only gives to the already rich
Schwab’s op-ed in the WSJ is phrased more diplomatically than that. Let Business Insider translate.
It’s time for the Fed to stop screwing savers and bailing out banks and borrowers with 0% rates
The Fed policy of near-zero percent interest rates is ostensibly supposed to spur lending by banks and grow the economy. Instead banks borrow from the government at near-zero then lends it back at about 3%, making a guaranteed no-risk profit. So, the banksters make billions and the economy at large gets no help. How cozy. And compromised.
Instead, the Fed needs to let interest rates rise to normal levels so banks start private sector loans again. Besides, you can’t borrow your way out of a debt recession. The only way out is by paying down debt and not by giving banksters sweetheart deals, something the Obama Administration does way too often.
Leftists should take credit for bringing down Democrats
Look, if the left is so powerful that is is responsible for Democratic fortunes, well, that’s not something we should shrink from. We should say “Yes, we can destroy Democratic prospects. If you don’t do what we want, we WILL do so.”
Don’t run from this, embrace it, wrap yourself in it. You are part of the left, and the left is capable of destroying governments which don’t do what it wants. And this is good, because objectively Obama has not fixed the economy, has presided over further destruction of civil rights, has reduced access to abortion, and so on.
Maybe if liberals and progressives stayed away from the polls out of protest and disgust with the do-nothing Democrats and their endless compromising, it might wake that party up. Something sure needs to.
The same thing is happening on the right too. Increasing numbers of conservatives are frustrated with the Republican Party. The time is now for the creation and strengthening of third parties.
