Social Sin

I was watching "Sixty Minutes" the other night, they did a story on the fabricating of foreclosure documents. They interviewed people who worked for companies that produced legal documents for banks, these documents were used to take away people's homes. The thing is they fabricated them in droves. One guy estimated he did about 4000 fake documents for this bank. These were not people who were fired when the bank found out, the company they worked for put them up to it. They weren't just making up documents they are signing other names that were not their own. The name the singed that of a bank vice president, and about ten people were claiming to be that person. The original vp was only made a bank vp so they could use her name for the ten people fabricating documents. They had a document fabrication mill that cranked out thousands of forged documents that were used to destroy people's lives.

60 Minutes on Market Scrutinization Document Lapses
and Foreclosure Fraud
Naked Capitalism (blog)
Sunday April 3d 2011

For readers of Naked Capitalism and any of the foreclosure-related blogs, this 60 Minutes report covers familiar ground. However, the fact that the story is coming now shows that even with bank efforts to pretend that there is nothing to see here, in fact the problems are widespread and difficult to solve. This segment, as highlighted in the text advanced release last Friday, includes a discussion of DocX and the practice of using “surrogate signers“, which are temps signing….in the name of robosigners! Having robosigners relying on corporate authorizations wasn’t low cost enough, apparently. Rather than take the time and effort to have more robosigners authorized (which is already not kosher, as we know, since the robosigners were attesting to have personal knowledge when they clearly didn’t), they went beyond providing bogus affidavits to having workers engage in forgery.

It also showed the work of NACA, but didn’t provide the most crisp description of the NACA process and how it addresses servicer bottlenecks (see here for more details). But it does feature Lynn Szymoniak and the procedures of the now-shuttered DocX, the infamous document fabricating subsidiary of LPS.

So consider this an interesting view of the state of play. The MSM is willing to cover practices that banks have been forced to admit they engage in and they claim to be cleaning up. This is helpful in terms of public outrage, as in validating the charges made on specialist blogs for blogs for more than two years, but is still far from the hot button issues now, such as servicer-driven fraud or chain of title problems.

Please read the whole article that I link to there, it's eye opening. We had a million foreclosures last year and there will be a million this next year. A huge portion of them ere fraudulent. I don't think we can know how many. If you want to develop chronic depression read about that one.

Reinhold Neibuhr, probalby Americas greatest home grown theologian, argued in Moral Man and Immoral Society that people can sometimes be moral as individuals, but even when they are they will always join together in groups to promote immoral behavior. When people join together in society the form classes and people identify with the class interest as their own. In America we identify with the class interest of the class above us. The greed of each individual is magnified by the greed of the group making a gestalt of social sin that is far more evil than any sin an individual could commit. Education is not the answer, Neibhur argues, because it can't prevent the individual from rationalizing his complicity in the group behavior since he/she identifies with the interest of the group as his or her own interest. Thus the individual does everything necessary to protect and love his/her own children while supporting government policies that kill thousands of other children whom he/she will never see.

Night I was watching tv again. I saw a strange sight. A group of people in East Texas gathered to protest the removal of the confederate flag from the courthouse. These guys were dressed in confederate uniforms. One of them said the confederate flag is a symbol of freedom to him but the American flag is a symbol of tyranny. I grew up in the south. I am not fooled for a minute. I don't buy any BS about tradition and family and all of this crap. I shouted at the tv "go iron your sheets!" That a flag that stood for slavery and lynchings and Jim Crow laws could be a symbol of freedom is the ultimate mockery. I can see how the American flag might be a symbol of tyranny to a Vietnamese person or a person from El Salvador or Nicaragua. The idea that it is more a symbol of tyranny than the flag of slavery and lynchings is pure idiocy.

What those guys were saying is a perfect example of what Niebuhr was talking about. It's also an example of what I mean by saying we identify with the class above us. Those guys think that they are pushed around because they have to pay taxes. booo whooo! If they made enough money they wouldn't have to pay taxes, but try closing that loophole and the people not in that bracket, in fact far from it, will protest harder than those actually in the bracket. Why? Becuase in America we identity with the rich. WE think if we serve the rich faithfully and support their intersects some day they will let us be rich. that's stupid because they don't want you to be rich, that's more money for them.

In the historical confederacy the odds are extremely high that those confederate flag guys would be poor white stooges of the rich plantation owners. They, or their ancestors, would be the enforcers who went after the escaped slaves but couldn't afford to own slaves themselves. They were really vassals, jumped up slaves. They could not be sold as chattel but they had to obey their masters whose land they lived on whose bidding they did include die for them in war to preserve their property.

We live in a Calv inst society. All those confederate guys are pretty much southern baptists. Baptists are Calvinistic. Calvin taught that the rich have God's favor. If you have money you that's a sing you are in the elect. Actually Calvin meant to fortify the middle class with that view. He wasn't really talking about rich like Carnegie he was talking about very well off shop keepers. That's how the strengthened the middle class of Geneva. We come to the new world get filthy rich as robber barons and we idolize the filthy rich. Americans identity with the interests o the class above them. No one is a working class person, we are all in the upper middle class right on the door step of getting rich. That's why we want those tax free brackets left open becasue some day, if we severe the interests of the murderers of the poor faithfully enough they will make us rich.

Americans identify sin with sex. Sin is not about money, how could money be sin? It's a sign of God's favor. Sex is sin so therefore, social sin is about sex. Thus we deflect the guilt from greed and sacrolize it as a virtue. As long as we sex at bay we are fighting sin but greed and all that is done in the attempted satisfaction of greed is sacred because it's connected to holy money. Thus we lambaste the democrat for 'tax and spend" just conveniently forget the two Vietnams Bush mired us with for so many years (more years then we were in world war II). The war in Iraq has cost us a trillion dollars. The war in Afghanistan is not far behind. Rob Simpson calculated ways the money could have been spent:

He calculates $1 trillion could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with gold _ 23.5-karat gold leaf. It could buy every person on the planet an iPod. It could give every high school student in the United States a free college education. It could pay off every American's credit card. It could buy a Buick for every senior citizen still driving in the United States.

One useful thing that could have been done with it. There is an energy technology called "Ocean Thermal Gradients" where energy is derived from the difference in temperature between the surface and floor of the ocean. I first learn of this in college debate it was a case that won some on the 1973-74 college debate topic about energy. Why back then there was evidence, and a lot of it, that the technology was already sufficient for one plant to light up the west cost. It could work in cold or hot water. The only products of this are water and heat. There's no pollution, no blowing up, no melting down, no radiation and no screw ups. It does have a problem with silt and would be expensive to run but no chance of what's happening in Japan.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion

The oceans cover a little more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface. This makes them the world's largest solar energy collector and energy storage system. On an average day, 60 million square kilometers (23 million square miles) of tropical seas absorb an amount of solar radiation equal in heat content to about 250 billion barrels of oil. If less than one-tenth of one percent of this stored solar energy could be converted into electric power, it would supply more than 20 times the total amount of electricity consumed in the United States on any given day.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion: An Overview is the primary source document used to create the content on this web site.

OTEC, or ocean thermal energy conversion, is an energy technology that converts solar radiation to electric power. OTEC systems use the ocean's natural thermal gradient—the fact that the ocean's layers of water have different temperatures—to drive a power-producing cycle. As long as the temperature between the warm surface water and the cold deep water differs by about 20°C (36°F), an OTEC system can produce a significant amount of power. The oceans are thus a vast renewable resource, with the potential to help us produce billions of watts of electric power. This potential is estimated to be about 10¹³ watts of baseload power generation, according to some experts. The cold, deep seawater used in the OTEC process is also rich in nutrients, and it can be used to culture both marine organisms and plant life near the shore or on land.

We've had 40 years to be developing this, while some people have been working on it, the massive amount of work, money, research has gone into nuclear. Why? Because that's where the put the money up front. We had this amazing new power, and that's they could think of as "power!" Once capitalism makes the capital outlay they have to their money at all cost.

We in Texas are now watching a sad process, thousands of teachers in and around Dallas being sacked, their careers being bought up for a fraction of their planned pensions, programs cut. Everything from libraries to healthy food has been cut; so far the state religion is unscathed, high school football but the soccer tames are cut. We are going from the 45th ranked state in educational excellence to about 132 ranked, in a field of 50. We have a "rainy day" fund but the third time republican Governor wont break into it to save teachers jobs or school's quality. They don't want public schools to survive. Public schools in America have just been relegated to the rubbish been and the denizens educated by them doomed to poverty. Being poor now means being in a third world country where one might killed a death squad or die in the gutter. If you go homeless you cease to be a human being, and there are whole industries dedicated to making you homeless.

Now they are going to shut down the government, anything to preserve the wealth and power of the privileged class, and their lackeys will die protecting a privilege they will never enjoy. The myths they have bought into to preserve the illusion of upward mobility! They were willing to believe the murderers of the poor that the health care reforms would lead to death panels but they totally ignore the current death panels already in place; the insurance companies with their pre-existing conditions. There is no end to what they will do to preserve their wealth and power. The more the social class of privilege does to hang on to power the more they realize it could be done to them if they lose it. Still we go on refusing to see the nature of social sin in front of your faces.

blessed are the assertive, for they get their way.

blessed are they who forget, for they are without guilt.

blessed are the winners for they shall rule the earth

blessed or they who seek material possessions for they shall claim their Cadillac

lay not up for yourself treasures on earth, where democrats and liberals tax and spend, but invest your money in municipal bonds and keep capital gains open.

Announcement: on Need more Shovles this week

On my third blog "Need More Shovels" I look at foreclosure this week.

Friends who were fighting foreclosure finally lost the house.

Time to speak out: We Need More Shovels!

PBS program "Need to Know"(see full show here) centers on the jobless problem; it highlights several examples of people losing homes in forclosure due to unemployment, and shows how they got in that spot; also features discussion with former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich and others. This is an excellent program. Joining Reich is Sara Horowitz, founder and CEO of the Freelancers Union,she has a lot of valuable insight as well.

This episode is very important to me personally becuase I was employed for 2 years, when I did get a job I couldn't make ends meet because it paid chicken feed and hardly had any work. I also lost my house in foreclosure which  a whole saga in itself. I will touch on that latter. Right now it's important to summarize what I got out of the show, but I urge you to watch the episode because the whole things is there (see the link above--and here). Horowitz points out that the social safety net we have is a hold over from the 1930s. It's not geared to modern life and it's not adequate. As Reich points out a third of the work force is independent contractors and thus not qualified for unemployment insurance or age/race/sex discrimination protection. The real question how did we get in a situation where so many people went into independent contradicting and just forgot about the safety net? We have the Republicans to thank for that. I know you don't want to hear it, but we do.

In the early 80's the Reagan administration set us on a course to dismantle the Roosevelt New Deal structure still in place, they harped upon the idea that government spending was the worst thing in the world. The reason you are not rich right now is because the government is taking your taxes. If you would just vote in Republicans so you get tax breaks you wont need social security and medicare and all the government spending because (1) you are have that vast fortune in tax money you pay out; (2) you will invest 401k and get rich from the market (3) the market will go up and up and up as long as you vote republican. This message appeals to people's greed. Many wanted to believe it so they just refuse to accept economics facts. There was another time in history when people thought the market would save them. That's essentially what Reagan and both Bushes preached, the market will save us. The Market will always go up and if you play ball our way you will be rich. That time was the 1920's and that philosophy created the great depression.

All of the examples of unemployed people losing their homes on the Need To Know show are people who were well off, hard workers, ran their own businesses. The allure of being one's own boss and get right from the ground up is just a big propaganda stunt becuase now all of those people are about about to go homeless on the street. Why did this happen? Because they moved out from under the safety net loured by the false promise of being rich by being independent. Regan busted the unions, read about the Hormel strike of the 80s. Read about union local P9 in that strike. Union power was taken apart at the seems with the promise that you don't need unions you need the market and no taxes and opportunity to get Rich that republicans will give you. It's a ridiculous dream becasue capitalism is based upon boom and bust. If there is a boom there has to be a bust. The Republicans have propaganda lines about "you just need to prepare for it." There is no way to prepare for the kind of shenanigans the Bushes unread upon America.One weakness in my view with Horowitz' contribution to the Need to Know interview, she takes a more moderate line than Reich and says "learn to prepare for the down times." Sure do that, but it wont help.

We just had a crisis where the whole banking system almost unraveled. Obama infused money into the system to save it but in the mayley it was totally forgotten that Bush started that the process of bailing out the banks. I've talked to several people who refused to even believe that Bush began the bank bail out but it's true and it's common knowledge. What happened was all the talking heads began criticizing Obama for bailing out the banks and everyone just associated with him. Talking heads went on talk shows saying "we should have let the banks fail" they say that so they could blame Obama. He's bad, he did so wrong by starting the bank bail out, he's a sap (even he didn't start it). Banks are businesses so businesses should fail if they are bad. Guess who would suffer if the banks failed? Do you think the Bushes would suffer/ No, you would. You would die. How would it be if tomorrow your money was worthless? You are out of food, how do you get more? No one will take a check. Cash is worth anything becasue no banking system left.  There's no way to trust the market when the whole banking system is going under. Look at the dominoes. Let's go back to the first domino in the process that led to the near collapse.



The first domino was the housing crisis this has been acknowledge time and time again. We had a bubble economy in the 90s with the rise of internet businesses. One of the major businesses that works great with the net is real estate. The idea of "flipping houses" became the rage. Anyone with some spare cash could buy a house for peanuts spend a little fixing it up and make a bundle. Lot's of people made bundles. The problem is so many people began doing that that people weren't even buying houses to live in anymore they began buying houses they couldn't pay for (when everyone and his dog tries to guy houses with no money down because fancy seminars all over the country say that's how you get rich--everyone wants to be rich) there's no money going around. Soon the banks realized they could get a lot of money by making it easier for people to buy houses. They began allowing "stated income" instead of documented proof of income. So all one had to do was say "I make X$" that's stated and that was fine. They began selling houses to people. Now here is where the story breaks down.

Bush wanted us to believe that all the people who bought houses were lazy poor people who didn't work and didn't try to pay for them. They wanted us to believe the real problem was the people who bought the houses. The press has gone along with this by not telling the truth about the house stealing scam that mortgage companies ran. It's must easier to just blame the evicted after all the paper work supports the claims that they are at fault. After all the banks and mortgage companies do the paperwork. When you are trying to keep form being out the street and dying in the gutter you don't have time or mental resources to worry about your paper work. The truth is the attorneys general in most states have sued the major mortgage counterspies and not just for giving bad loans but for predatory lending, that means they were stealing houses! The company that stole our house was shut down for preditory lending but it was a couple of years too late to help us.

One of things they did to us was obviously designed to be a scam so I'm sure it got a lot of others. The media wont touch it. I've tried to get local reporters to talk about it they wont go near it. Here's the tact they used to steal my house. I had lived with my parents for three years while they died. I took care of them and basically gave up my Ph.D to care for them 24/7. The house was paid for. But the roof literally was caving in. I saw "we think you are an idiot" montage company ( that wasn't the real name but it should have been) on the net I got a home improvement loan. They promises six month lea way if you miss a payment, they would help get a job if I lost mine, all sorts of garbage (the BS piling higher and higher) none of which they meant. I never missed a payment because my parents taught me if the house is dark becasue you can't pay the bills and if you are starving in it  it's still worth it because its better to starve in a dark house than in a dark gutter. I made sure we never missed a house payment. We were doing fine. Nevertheless, at the closing they said "you need to pay the taxes." They didn't tell me "we are going to pay them today." That was the trick. I went down their in my own good time found they had been paid. In the mean time they sold the debt to Mussolini mortgage.  They said 'we have to recoup our huge loss ($200) of paying your taxes" so they raised the house payment three times what it was.

When I  called good old "we think you are an idiot" mortgage company and they said "we sold the debt" so much for all those great promises of help! I said "well let me me pay half now and half next month in addition to next months payment." O no! that will never do! House stealing tactic no 2, the rolling snow ball of debt. If you miss a pay you owe two payments. You can't pay late. I got three payments behind before I gave up totally trying to pay. Then went to through  hell for a year trying to find help. I canted all kinds of  people will kinds of lying bull shit about 'we help people in foreclosure." no they don't! No one does. Once you get that point it's gone. Your house is gone. It almost never works to try and save it. The deck is stacked against you. The laws are set up to make house stealing easy. Hey that's what Regan and Bush did for us. This was 2006 that we actually moved out. We had six years of the guy who stole the election in 2000, remember him? the man who got to be President but lost the popular vote? He helped arrange the laws so that anyone in foreclosure is dead meat. Now I agree that Obama hasn't done anything to fix this. But that is not the same as saying the Republicans will fix it. The Republicans caused it. It's in line with their philosophy of law of the jungle. The garage you about how you going to get by paying fewer taxes and the market always going up is predicated upon clinging over the backs of others. My parents lived through the Great Depression. They knew Republicans do! They taught me the only way to survive a depression is people working together. The Republicans want you to believe that all you need is yourself and your tax money then you are supposed to think of other people as undeserving vermin who too lazy to work and don't deserve your help.

Guess what? now you have no safety. when it's your turn to go into the gutter then you become the piece of shit and the republicans can' wait to murder you.



It took Bush eight years to screw up the country in such a way that we had a depression and the banking industry almost collapsed. Obama hasn't even had two full years and yet people are just livid that he hasn't solved everything. The insurance industries unless a hoard of louts shouting and beating people up because they suddenly realized the old lie we loved to bleieve about the tax money wont be told anymore. We can't have that. I have to have my illusion that I can get rich by paying less in taxes. They saw that Obama was of a certain persuasion (let's just say they saw his "true colors") and they realized he was going to spend tax money on health care they become "mad as hell and we are not going stop  lying anymore." The bull shit keeps piling up. They destroyed the Gulf of Mexico then lie that the oil went away magically, find it hasn't (when did you expect?) so it's Obama's fault because he didn't clean it all up.

I agree Obama has dropped the ball a couple of times. He's thrown a couple of interceptions. Don't let murderess of the poor take back Congress. Those people are not your friends. they do not want you to be rich. They need you to believe their lies, and they are stacking the Bull shit higher. But they don't want you to be rich. They want you to live in a jungle and root for survive and kill your fellow man in a vain attempt to make it, even though the jungle is loaded with hazard set to trap you. The way to survive a depression is to band together. We need a safety net, the market cannot always go up. The market based on boom and bust!




Reagan, Bush Sr, Bush Jr between them had 20 years to screw things up. We had eight years of respite with Clinton and things were pretty good, he reduced the deficit, no republican every did that. The republicans are lying to you when they say government spending is the problem. Even Clinton wasn't able to make real progress because they hounded him every step of the way. Now Obama has only had 2 years to fix it up and he had to focus most of that on the lies they told about health care.

The Big Republican Argument

The Republicans have one big argument this time. They say we are so deeply in hock because of the stimulus package and the health care bill (don't forget bailing out the banks). They quote the stats and they say we can't possibly grow out of it. So they want you to think that if you vote dem it wont do any good becuase nothing the dems do short of dismantling all publish welfare and aid programs and going to totally to the law of jungle will help. Of course we are supposed to believe that the Reps will do something to make it all better. They will feed your feeling that it will be all better by telling you the old lies you love to hear, "you can get rich if we you have to pay so much on those mean old taxes, if you let me get richer I'll help you get rich."

If that's going to happen why didn't it work last time? Why didn't the real estate scam make you rich? why did you lose what you had from listening to Bush if that will really work? Is it true that we can't grow out of the problems? Why would that be true? The said Clinton couldn't reduce the deficit and he virtually emanated it. They are assuming health care wont bring down costs and it will, they are assuming there's no multiplier effect to public employment and there is, there's even a multiplier effect to health  care. So all the money spent on the health care will generate more money in the private sector.

Policy Matters Ohio

There is no evidence of a tradeoff between the size of states’ public sectors and
private sector growth. Across all states, the average state and local government
share of total GSP showed a positive association with private sector GSP growth
per capita in the 1990-1997 period, and no association in the 1997-2004 period.

• There is no evidence of a tradeoff between public sector growth rates and
private sector growth. Across all states, increases in state and local government
GSP per capita showed a positive association with changes in private output in
both the 1990-1997 and 1997-2004 periods.

• States with expanding public sectors experienced more rapid private sector
growth, on average, than did states that reduced their public sectors. This result
occurred in both the 1990-1997 and 1997-2004 periods. States with expanding
public sectors had private sector growth, on average, of 19.6 percent in the earlier
period and 16.9 percent in the latter period. States with shrinking public sectors
had private sector growth, on average, of 11.6 percent in the earlier period and
11.7 percent in the latter period.

• Ohio’s private sector grew faster than its public sector over the 1990 to 2004
period. This trend occurred even in the latter half of the time period, when the
state experienced a recession and a weak recovery. From 1997 to 2004, Ohio’s
state and local government GSP per capita increased by 6.4 percent, while private
sector GSP per capita increased by 10.5 percent. As a consequence, the public
sector’s share of Ohio’s economy declined over time.

These results have important implications for state fiscal policy. Ohio will not receive
economic rewards for arbitrarily restraining its public sector, nor will our economy be
punished if the state budget exceeds the new 3.5 percent annual spending limit. Cutting
back on essential public services will not stimulate economic growth. Policy debates
should not juxtapose the needs of Ohio’s residents for education, transportation, health
care, and law enforcement with private sector economic performance. In order to have a
meaningful discussion about our future, we must break the grip of this false dichotomy.

They want you to think Obama has failed because he spent a lot of money and that's the ultimate sin. Bush began the bank bail out, we had to have the stimulus package, and we really need to spend more. They want you to think that because it cost a lot and the unemployment  is still high. It didn't do any good so putting them in will magically make it all better. It wont make it better and they had no other solution. Their only solution is the law of the jungle and that's what got us here. Every single depression has been preceded by a real estate boom. Every real estate boom has been followed by a depression. The law of jungle is a lie. The market can't keep going up and up, it thrives  boom and bust.

Go out there and vote now. Don't wait for the election  go vote early. Vote Democrat even if you guy is a yellow dog, vote for him. Don't listen to the hysterical tea cup illiterates.  Vote democrat. Most of those tea cup guys can't even read. Go to the Dem hq and do phone banks, call your heighbors and tell them you rare voting Dem. Get a bumper sticker, pass out literature door to door. We have to get busy and work together to have this place then we can get some more shovels and start getting rid of this bull shit the Reps have been piling up.