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Photos by: joanneleon. October, 2013.
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You can't make these things up. The woman who is taking the fall for this (as if it was not a systemic problem and as if the Wall Street banks were not clamoring for more and more mortgages!) still has a job and guess who she works for now? JP Morgan. Rebecca Mairone started out as a chemical engineer with a degree from Drexel, a good engineering school in Philadelphia. Then an MBA from Villanova. She worked for some companies in my area in the 90's and then went with JP Morgan in 2001. Glass-Steagall had been recently gutted and from my experience, that's when the fundamental change in old, solid investment banks, brokerage firms, began to show. There were other big things going on at the time too, as online banking took off and more importantly, the models, quants and high speed trading were changing everything. The walls between commercial, investment and insurance were down. Everybody was off to the races and even the most stolid execs (I doubt there were many) jumped in to keep up with profits of their competitors and to join in the huge feeding frenzy. Anyway, Mairone still has a job with JP Morgan. Before she went to run some operations at Countrywide, she had been with JP Morgan for five years, during the high times from 2001-06. Then Countrywide from 2006-08 and a few different positions at Bank of America after they acquired Countrywide. And in 2012, she went back to New York, to JP Morgan.
Jury Finds Bank of America Liable in Mortgage Case
During the trial, federal prosecutors accused Rebecca Mairone, a top manager at Countrywide at the time, of having opted for quantity over quality in its mortgage-writing program, which resulted in the bank’s churning out to unqualified buyers housing loans that were destined to fail.
Federal lawyers claimed that Ms. Mairone, who now works at JPMorgan Chase, led a program nicknamed the “hustle,” derived from the initialism HSSL, or the “high-speed swim lane.” The program linked bonuses to how fast bankers could originate loans and as a result, the credit quality of the borrower was given short shrift, the government contended. When the loans were sold to mortgage giants like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they failed, generating more than $1 billion in losses.
[...]
Countrywide, the troubled mortgage originator that Bank of America bought in 2008, has been a morass of problems. While the bank bought Countrywide for $4 billion in 2008, analysts say they believe it has so far already paid close to $50 billion in fines and settlements. In light of Wednesday’s decision, that figure is likely to continue to rise.
The bank faces other investigations and lawsuits stemming from its mortgages. In August, federal prosecutors in North Carolina sued Bank of America, accusing it of understating the risks of the mortgages underpinning some $850 million in securities.
I don't have any comment on this. Offered strictly for discussion.
Doomed From the Start
Why Obamacare's Disastrous Rollout is No Surprise
But the fact that the White House is having trouble implementing Obamacare also should not come as a particular surprise. It is not that the Obama administration is especially incompetent. Rather, the program it is charged with executing is a complex public-private hybrid that has no real precedent elsewhere in the world. The blend is purely American: Policymakers in the United States have a history of jerry-rigging complicated programs of this sort precisely because they have little faith in government. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy that fuels only deeper public cynicism about the welfare state.
Among the advanced industrialized countries there is no real parallel to Obamacare. In part, that is because most countries established universal health insurance long ago, some fairly gradually. By contrast, the United States is abruptly expanding coverage to millions -- probably around seven million people will be purchasing insurance coverage through the new exchanges by 2014. Even the closest precedents fall far short of this. In the mid-1990s, Switzerland boosted health-insurance coverage to try to reach the four percent of the population that was not yet covered. But that was in a country whose entire population was seven million. In 2006, the Netherlands adopted a health-care system in which individuals could choose their coverage from competing health plans. Yet, unlike in the United States, virtually all individuals and their families were already covered, and the vast majority opted to keep the plan they had.
The real source of Obamacare’s current problems lies in the law’s complexity. A straightforward way to assure coverage would have been to extend an existing, well-worn program to more people. This is how most other countries guarantee health insurance. In the British National Health Service, there is little that beneficiaries need to do in order to receive health insurance, as all residents are automatically entitled. Other countries rely on private intermediaries that provide insurance -- nonprofit insurance funds in Germany or Switzerland, for example, or a mix of proprietary and nonprofit insurers in the Netherlands. Even in those instances, benefits packages and entitlements are highly standardized, making these health-care systems relatively uncomplicated from the standpoint of beneficiaries.
Well, now we know why Bandar and the Saudis are freaking out, or at least one of the big reasons.
White House Meeting With Congress On Iran Thursday, May Ask For Delay In Sanctions
One source says the administration is asking Congress to hold off on a new sanctions bill during Iran’s charm offensive.
WASHINGTON — The White House has asked senior Congressional committee staff to come to a briefing tomorrow in which staffers expect they will be asked to delay a new Iran sanctions bill, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
The source said senior committee staff from at least the Senate Foreign Relations and Banking committees have been asked to come to a meeting in the White House situation room on Thursday. The staff will be briefed by Phil Gordon, the National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region, and according to the source will be encouraged to delay an Iran sanctions bill that is due to be marked up next week.
A very conveniently timed leak to Woodward! Hero or traitor? Tap his phones! Take him to court like James Risen! Looks like a major league threat to national security was created by this leak! Not to mention the kind of chaos it's going to cause in Pakistan. But hey, if Obama's advisors think he needs some damage control, what's a few riots and chaos and blowback?
Secret memos reveal explicit nature of U.S., Pakistan agreement on drones
Despite repeatedly denouncing the CIA’s drone campaign, top officials in Pakistan’s government have for years secretly endorsed the program and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts, according to top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos obtained by The Washington Post.
The files describe dozens of drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal region and include maps as well as before-and-after aerial photos of targeted compounds over a four-year stretch from late 2007 to late 2011 in which the campaign intensified dramatically.
Markings on the documents indicate that many of them were prepared by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center specifically to be shared with Pakistan’s government. They tout the success of strikes that killed dozens of alleged al-Qaeda operatives and assert repeatedly that no civilians were harmed.
I've been wondering when we'd get some kind of analysis about where that $1.5 Billion came from. I'm still gobsmacked that a sitting president would even need to spend so much money to get reelected. It's astounding. I'd love to see an analysis of what he really spent, when you take into consideration the government funded transportation and security, the free air time any time he wanted it, and some estimation of the other advantages an incumbent in the White House has. There are other things to consider too, but they are unmentionable, of course.
This is a must read. I don't think many of us will be surprised. There's already a new meme floating: Big Brother Democrats. Yeah, between the obsessive quest to cut Social Security and Medicare and now Big Brother, this isn't your father's Democratic party. And I don't see much of an appetite from our hyperpartisan allies for any kind of real reform. I guess we'll find out what their numbers really are in the not too distant future, especially when the NSA reform legislation gets moving.
Quelle Surprise! National Surveillance State Companies Were Huge Obama Donors in 2012 Election
By Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at University of Massachusetts
Long before President Obama kicked off his 2008 campaign, many Americans took it for granted that George W. Bush’s vast, sprawling national security apparatus needed to be reined in. For Democrats, many independents, and constitutional experts of various persuasions, Vice President Dick Cheney’s notorious doctrine of the “unitary executive” (which holds that the President controls the entire executive branch), was the ultimate statement of the imperial presidency. It was the royal road to easy (or no) warrants for wiretaps, sweeping assertions of the government’s right to classify information secret, and arbitrary presidential power. When Mitt Romney embraced the neoconservatives in the 2012 primaries, supporters of the President often cited the need to avoid a return to the bad old days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld National Security State as a compelling reason for favoring his reelection. Reelect President Obama, they argued, or Big Brother might be back.
But that’s not how this movie turned out: The 2012 election proved to be a post-modern thriller, in which the main characters everyone thought they knew abruptly turned into their opposites and the plot thickened just when you thought it was over.
[...]
Even now, the suggestion that the Obama administration embodies a distinctively new form of extensively privatized National Security State organically linked with the famously contentious Bush-Cheney structures takes some getting used to. In particular, many readers are likely to wonder what a bitter, partisan stalemate such as the U.S. just witnessed over raising the debt ceiling can possibly mean in a situation where Big Brother and Big Money are working hand in hand through it all.
[...]our quantitative analysis of presidential election funding invites closer scrutiny, particularly of the finding that we had already settled upon as perhaps most important: In sharp contrast to endlessly repeated claims that big business was deeply suspicious of the President, our statistical results show that a large and powerful bloc of “industries of the future” – telecommunications, high tech, computers, and software – showed essentially equal or higher percentages of support for the President in 2012 than they did for Romney.
Though documenting the claim would take us far beyond this post, we believe that the emergence of these new industries is a key factor in transforming the old National Security State into its new, even more sinister twenty-first century model. They are not the only important influence in that transformation, of course. These would include not only 9/11, but the rapid growth of the rest of the homeland security “industry,” including private prison companies and many other non-obvious players focused on data collection in particular domains, such as the vast infrastructure built out to service and support U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The policy of macroeconomic austerity, which made privatization of the old National Security State so seductively attractive to policymakers under pressure to cut government expenditures, has also played a significant role. [...] But the point that our findings document is perhaps most instructive of all. Many of the firms and industries at the heart of this Orwellian creation have strong ties to the Democrats.
Fed Gives Middle Finger to Congress, Commodities Customers, and Public, Proposes to Allow More Banks to Participate in Commodities Business
Nothing like watching a captured regulator like the Fed use a public hue and cry to execute a big bait and switch. Here the ploy is to change rules to further disadvantage the parties making complaints. But it takes finesse to make the finger in the eye look plausible and reasonable, so that when the well-understood bad effects show up later, the perp can pretend to be mystified.
The issue at hand is commodities speculation and price manipulation by major financial firms. In 2003, the Fed relaxed the rules that had formerly prohibited depositing-taking banks from trading commodities. In the early summer of this year, four members of Congress wrote to Bernanke asking whether the Fed had given adequate consideration of the systemic risk of letting major banks participate in the physical commodities. What, for instance, if a systemically important bank had its commodities trading operation fail? And these questions were raised in the backdrop of more general concerns about bank participation in the commodities business leading to other troubling outcomes, such as increased financialization and price volatility, which works to the detriment of real economy users.
The Man Who Won a Nobel Prize for Helping Create a Global Financial Crisis
By James R. Crotty, Professor Emeritus of Economics and Sheridan Scholar at University of Massachusetts. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
Eugene Fama just received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the theory of “efficient financial markets,” the dominant theory in financial economics that asserts that markets work ideally if not constrained by government regulation. The fact that economic “science” teaches that unregulated financial markets work effectively helped financial institutions and the rich accomplish their goal of radical financial market deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s. Deregulation, in turn, not only contributed to the rising inequality of the era, it helped cause the global financial market crisis that began in 2007 and the deep recession and austerity fiscal policies that accompanied it.
More of what the administration, the military, the defense contractors don't want. Real stories about real people, not just "bug splat" or impressions that drones only kill horrible terrorists who have been carefully vetted.
8-Year-Old Girl on Drones: 'When They Fly Overhead I Wonder, Will I Be Next?'
The innocents killed in U.S. strikes in places like Pakistan are their biggest victims. But the human cost is also exacted on thousands who live in their shadows.
"When children hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so they're always fearful that the drone is going to attack them," an unidentified man reported. "Because of the noise, we're psychologically disturbed, women, men, and children .... Twenty-four hours, a person is in stress and there is pain in his head." A journalists who photographs drone strike craters agreed that children are perpetually terrorized. "If you bang a door," Noor Behram said, "they'll scream and drop like something bad is going to happen."
[...]
A few relevant excerpts from the report:
- The presence of drones is awful even when they don't attack. "While the frequency of drone attacks has reduced over the last two years," the report explains, "the aircraft remain ever present in North Waziristan skies. 'Local tribal people generally live in fear and stress and feel psychological pressure. They think they could be the target of a drone attack because wrong information might be given to drone operators,' a resident of Tappi village, the population center next to the village of Ghundi Kala where Mamana Bibi was killed, told Amnesty International. 'Everyone is scared and they can’t get out of their house without any tension and from the fear of drone attacks. People are mentally disturbed as a result of the drone flights,' said a resident of Esso Khel, one of the most frequent sites of drone attacks. 'We can’t sleep because of the planes’ loud sound. Even if they don’t attack we still have the fear of attack in our mind.'"
- Some families feel forced to put themselves in harm's way: "'If a foreign fighter or Taliban is living with a local family, they are scared of a [drone] attack. The host family lives in fear,' explained Fauzia, a student from Edak. Many said that they did not choose to host members of armed groups but dared not refuse them out of fear of reprisals and social pressure in areas with a strong presence of Taliban and al-Qa’ida-linked groups like Mir Ali and Datta Khel."
- Residents avoid gathering in large groups for innocent activities like a prayer gathering or a community meeting. Local culture is severely disrupted.
An incredibly weak defense from the White House that basically answers the claim that these strikes broke international law, were perhaps war crimes, by saying "no it didn't, no they weren't". Everybody is tiptoeing around the term "war crimes" too.
White House Defends Drone Operations
WASHINGTON—The White House on Tuesday rebuffed suggestions from two human-rights groups that the administration doesn’t adhere to its own standards when it carries out drone strikes.
“U.S. counterterrorism operations are precise, they are lawful and they are effective,” said Mr. Obama’s chief spokesman, Jay Carney. He also said the administration was reviewing the reports carefully.
Hmm. Make sure you go see the Digital Attack Map in the article.
Mapped: What Global Cyberwar Looks Like in Real Time
On Monday, Google rolled out three new initiatives to ensure the openness of the Internet and access to the service -- even in the face of government crackdowns on the web.
One of those tools is a proxy plug-in -- creatively titled uProxy -- that uses a peer-to-peer system to create secure Internet connections. By linking a user in, say, China with her trusted friend in the United States, the browser plug-in allows the user in China to access her American friend's Internet via an encrypted connection that should, in theory, allow her to bypass the Great Firewall.
Another tool, Project Shield, promises to protect human rights organizations and NGOs from so-called DDoS attacks, which take down a website by directing a flood of traffic toward it and overwhelming it or rendering it unusable. DDoS attacks have become the preferred method for knocking out a pesky, unwanted site, and while big sites like Google are able to protect themselves from such attacks, independent groups, including media organizations and election monitors, frequently find themselves unable to fight back when targeted. "If you think about all of the organizations around the world that use a website as their modern-day office -- NGOs, businesses, governments -- it's not OK to have this many digital office raids shutting them down," Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, told Time in an interview.
The last project rolled out this week is something called the Digital Attack Map, which is embedded at the top of this post. It's a fascinating, interactive map that monitors DDoS attacks around the world -- an effort Google hopes will raise awareness about the problem. The map, which draws on data collected by the network security firm Arbor Networks, provides a nifty visualization of an issue that's been in the headlines constantly over the last year or so.
Don't Be Fooled: No Split Between Tea Party & Corporate Agenda
NYT Op-Ed. Another sign of the coming, perhaps epic, battle between the corporate Republicans and the Tea Party Republicans that will play out between now and 2016 so that they can rein in their fringe and Chris Christie can be their candidate. This one is written by a member of the Taft family.
The Cry of the True Republican
Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do — position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.
Speaking through the night, Senator Ted Cruz, with heavy-lidded, sleep-deprived eyes, conveyed not the libertarian element in Republican philosophy that advocates for smaller government and less intrusion into the personal lives of citizens, but a new, virulent strain of empty nihilism: “blow it up if we can’t get what we want.”
[...]
There is more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the Tea Party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party. The Republican brand is (or should be) about responsible behavior. The Republican party is (or should be) at long last, about decency.
What a long way we have yet to go.
Another NYT Op-Ed by Thomas Edsall. I'm not sure what I think of this op-ed. There's a paragraph on the second page that says this might be a sign that the whole country is moving to the left, or just that the left-wing of the Democratic party is gaining in strength but then he says that would be a "development that may actually work to prevent this wing from leading the entire country to the left" because fracturing will occur along economic lines. I'm not sure about that, but what comes to mind is the fracturing that we've seen here on dkos. It wouldn't be the first time that dkos was a bellwether. I've often wondered whether some of the fracturing here was along class lines.
Bill de Blasio and the New Urban Populism
In an era of Clintonesque caution, when Democrats typically mute any expression of their leftward leanings, Bill de Blasio, who will almost certainly be elected mayor of New York City two weeks from now, does not concede an inch to the right.
He talks about sharing the wealth. He is pro-tenant and anti-landlord. He wants to tax the rich to help the poor. He stands solidly in support of undocumented immigrants. He sides with workers over employers. He backs the teachers’ union in its struggles with the charter school movement. He supports programs to ensure that every New Yorker eligible for food stamps, health care, income security and social services gets on the rolls, effectively resurrecting the welfare rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The de Blasio platform, “One New York, Rising Together,” is a remarkable document, a statement of left principles rarely heard of from a major politician in recent decades.
Battling inequality will “be at the very center of our vision for the next four years” de Blasio, who leads his Republican opponent, Joe Lhota, 68-24, in recent polling, says in his platform.
[...]
THIS then leads to a broader question. Does the advent of a new era of urban populism under de Blasio suggest that the country is moving in a decisively liberal direction?
It may be, rather, that the rise of de Blasio signals the growing strength of liberal forces within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, a development that may actually work to prevent this wing from leading the entire country to the left.
In addition to the growing leverage of minority and low-income voters in the Democratic Party, the center-left coalition includes many upscale, well-educated social liberals, who have found common ground with their less fortunate allies in shared animosity toward the Republican Party.
The stronger the pro-government poor-to-lower-middle class wing gets, the more likely the coalition will fracture along class and economic fault lines.is.
[Emphasis added]
And here's Mr Greenspan again, this time
Foreign Affairs.
Never Saw It Coming
Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise
It was a call I never expected to receive. I had just returned home from playing indoor tennis on the chilly, windy Sunday afternoon of March 16, 2008. A senior official of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors was on the phone to discuss the board’s recent invocation, for the first time in decades, of the obscure but explosive Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. Broadly interpreted, that section empowered the Federal Reserve to lend nearly unlimited cash to virtually anybody: in this case, the Fed planned to loan nearly $29 billion to J.P. Morgan to facilitate the bank’s acquisition of the investment firm Bear Stearns, which was on the edge of bankruptcy, having run through nearly $20 billion of cash in the previous week.
The demise of Bear Stearns was the beginning of a six-month erosion in global financial stability that would culminate with the failure of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, triggering possibly the greatest financial crisis in history. To be sure, the Great Depression of the 1930s involved a far greater collapse in economic activity. But never before had short-term financial markets, the facilitators of everyday commerce, shut down on a global scale. As investors swung from euphoria to fear, deeply liquid markets dried up overnight, leading to a worldwide contraction in economic activity.
The financial crisis that ensued represented an existential crisis for economic forecasting. The conventional method of predicting macroeconomic developments -- econometric modeling, the roots of which lie in the work of John Maynard Keynes -- had failed when it was needed most, much to the chagrin of economists. In the run-up to the crisis, the Federal Reserve Board’s sophisticated forecasting system did not foresee the major risks to the global economy. Nor did the model developed by the International Monetary Fund, which concluded as late as the spring of 2007 that “global economic risks [had] declined” since September 2006 and that “the overall U.S. economy is holding up well . . . [and] the signs elsewhere are very encouraging.” On September 12, 2008, just three days before the crisis began, J.P. Morgan, arguably the United States’ premier financial institution, projected that the U.S. GDP growth rate would accelerate during the first half of 2009. The pre-crisis view of most professional analysts and forecasters was perhaps best summed up in December 2006 by The Economist: “Market capitalism, the engine that runs most of the world economy, seems to be doing its job well.”
Bob Dylan, Nirvana Among Back to Black Friday's 10 Must-Have LPs
Record Store Day compaion event set for November 29th
As part of "Back to Black Friday," a vinyl-focused event organized by the people behind Record Store Day, artists such as Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga and Nirvana are putting out exclusive vinyl releases on November 29th, according to Billboard. Of the 100 or so new releases coming out, there are a number of standouts. Some groups, including Metallica, Stone Temple Pilots and Jethro Tull, are choosing to either issue or reissue some of their classic albums on LP. Others, including the Rolling Stones, Harry Nilsson, Sly and the Family Stone and the Grateful Dead are re-releasing previously hard-to-find records. A full list of the day's exclusives is available here, but below is an alphabetical list of the records we're most excited about.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/...
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Action
October 26th, 2013 in Washington, D.C.
A Rally Against Mass Surveillance
Right now the NSA is spying on everyone's personal communications, and they’re operating without any meaningful oversight. Since the Snowden leaks started, more than 571,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S. Congress that we want them to rein in the NSA.
On October 26th, the 12th anniversary of the signing of the US Patriot Act, we're taking the next step and holding the largest rally yet against NSA surveillance. We’ll be handing the half-million petitions to Congress to remind them that they work for us -- and we won’t tolerate mass surveillance any longer.
12pm Eastern, Saturday October 26th
Gather at Columbus Circle in front of Union Station, then march to the Capitol Reflecting Pool
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Arcade Fire - The Suburbs