The web site Firedoglake put this little video together. They really don’t like Joe. Of course, I loath him, so I have no problem with putting this up.
Once again, Lieberman supports intrusions into your privacy.
Do you like what you saw?
Don’t let the government treat you like this. This is insane.
James Pilant
Dan Edstrom is a specialist. He performs securitization audits.
He decided to use his specialized training to discover who owned his mortgage.
The chart below is the result.
Do you know who owns your mortgage? Could you figure it out like he has?
The following flow chart reverse engineers the mortgage on the Ekstrom family residence. It took Dan over one year to take it this far and it clearly demonstrates what happens when there are too many lawyers being manufactured.
You can click on it and it gets bigger.
Do I need to point out to you that with what has been happening with mortgages over the last five years, it might be unwise to allow banks to have someone sign off that they understand the account?
James Pilant
I met Jason Michael McCann online. He teaches in Ireland. He is a philosopher. Here he is commenting on my blog post – “No More X-Rated Searches!!@!” (He has a wonderful blog, homophilosophicus, and if you don’t read it you are missing out on the works of a learned and thoughtful man.)
As Christians also, Dear James, we have a moral obligation to preserve the dignity of others. Without doubt there is the question of a trade-off between the perceived need for security and human dignity. My fear is that this too may be related to the circle; a refusal on the part of security keepers to acknowledge respect to the human person may fuel the need for security.
Jason Michael
He is absolutely right. There is a Christian duty here. We have a duty to God and man to act with respect and kindness to blameless others. We are failing in this.
These searches are indicative of a wider malaise in our society. Our willingness to accept any means to thwart a possible terrorist attack is turning us into shadows of human beings. We are so frightened we are unable to say stop without being attacked for “strengthening” the terrorists.
These searches are wrong.
These searches are an example of this nation losing its way.
We are better than this.
Tell me, if there is a terrorist attack at a grade school, are we going to pat down every six year old, run them through a magnetic resonance machine? What about at a federal building, the Statehouse, the Governor’s Mansion, County Courthouses? Are we going to get “felt” up everywhere we go? every bank? every factory? Where does the fear end? ever?
Should we start building bunkers in our backyards, stocking up a years supply of canned goods?
Is that where I live? Is that the moral fiber of my fellow citizens? To be led around by the nose like cattle because we’re afraid?
Are we like the cowardly lion, possessed of a half trillion dollar defense, but never feeling safe?
When do we start living with courage?
We don’t have to live like this.
James Pilant
First up, a blog by and about an educator, Jennifer Thomas’ Portfolio and Blog.
She can be quite reflective as here in this piece –
For myself, I think I struggle with creativity the most out of the list of 21st century skills. When I am forced to come up with something creative, I immediately get nervous. If the word creative is even mentioned in an assignment description, I immediately think I will not do well. I mostly don’t even know where to start, and being a math/stats person for so long, I have internalized a stereotype somewhere along the line and have never really viewed myself as a creative person. This is not necessarily true, but I often squash the creative side I do have.
She posts a few times a month. If you are a teacher or planning to be one, here is a kindred soul.
Next, we come to Emma Harger’s Portfolio. She has a lot of material on her blog and is in no way shy to say what she thinks. I find her work appealing. Here, read this post –
Women’s magazines are not known for being very progressively-minded. Their main focuses tend to be on looks, dieting and getting men. Although some magazines have started to take baby steps into the pool of reality—for example, plus-sized model Crystal Renn on the cover of Glamour, wearing a bikini—some magazines, or people working for them, are nowhere near this pool. In fact, they’re sitting on a deck chair beside the pool, shuddering in disgust when anyone with even a little bit of body fat walks near.
She is a journalist and intent on success. Give her stuff a read and leave a note of encouragement. (Remember she doesn’t like it when women are referred to as girls!)
Balloonland features some fervent political writing. Actually, all of its is fervent. I don’t this guy has any soft beliefs. I like him. We don’t live in a time for the “soft” believer.
Here’s a sample of his writing – (He also draws!)
I suppose I can understand why the “good past” is so seductive to many – it appears to be such a clean and understandable story, with lots of firmly closed plotlines and happy(ish) endings, compared to what they find themselves embroiled in now. But it’s old news, and old information can never truly apply to a new and evolving situation.
Now this is from the Computer Education Blog and from this post.
Today, I got to lecture to first year students in CS1315, our Introduction to Media Computation course. This was the first time since 2006 that I’ve been in that class. I’m not teaching the class, unfortunately — I was encouraging those students to go beyond their requirements to take a second computer science course. I’m going to be teaching CS1316, our Media Computation data structures class “Representing Structure and Behavior,” in the Spring (for the first time since 2007). CS1315 is required for all Liberal Arts, Architecture, and Management students at Georgia Tech. CS1316 meets some degree programs’ requirements for technical electives, but is mostly an elective course. So, my job this morning was to encourage a group of non-CS major undergrads to consider taking more computer science.
It was such fun! I am so pumped-up afterward, in spite of the rainy Monday morning. I told them that the course explained how the Wildebeests charged over the ridge in Disney’s “The Lion King,” and that the same techniques underly how video game characters are rendered and their behavior is realized. I explained that the ideas of modeling and simulation that underly the course can be used to answer a wide variety of questions, from how do ants forage for food to what happens in human emigrations.
This teacher is still fired up after what must have been a long career. (If you are not teaching first year classes you’ve been climbing the totem pole for some time.) I’m impressed. This computing blog is written by Mark Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.
This guy is a major honcho in the computing field. So if you’re interested in computers and/or teaching, don’t pause for a moment, put this one on your favorites.
Well, I hope you enjoyed my little internet visiting. There’s a whole world out there to explore and it changes every day.
Please remember, the average blogger is seldom read by anyone. When you visit a site, it is important to leave encouragement.
James Pilant
Jim Russell writes in an article posted on “Media Center,” the web site of Tom Gyepes, Loan Doc Originator & Broker. He addresses a question that has also been on my mind. How is the mortgage industry going to change in the face of this, at the very least, public relations disaster?
He has several suggestions but I like this one best. Make the mortgage “originator” a long term actor in the deal than just a one time salesman.
Mortgage originators have long been compensated just for getting loan applicants to the closing table. After funding many mortgage originators simply lose interest in the borrower’s financial situation until they see another opportunity for origination income. The insurance industry dealt with this issue long ago. Today every insurance agent is tied to his/her client with a golden rope…
Most insurance companies do not fully compensate independent agents at the time of sale like the mortgage industry. Instead agents are partially compensated at the time of sale while the remainder of their income is paid out at a later date depending on the performance of the insurance policy they sold. This compensation practice is called “contingent commission” and it creates an incentive for every agent to act in the insurer’s best interests because if they don’t, they won’t be paid.
Let me share an example. There are two active groups of golfers at my club; mortgage originators and insurance agents. These two groups have very similar economic profiles, they are all high net worth income earners and they all constantly manage their book of business. There is one big difference in the way these two groups maintain their lifestyles though; the mortgage originators are highly dependent on landing new deals while the insurance agents are dependent on the long-term performace of the deals they’ve already written. This forces insurance agents to fully understand the risk profile of their clients before they close the deal and it also forces agents to maintain contact with their book of business.
If you are a business student, this is a great topic for a paper. But beyond this it is an idea that needs to be taught across our society, to think and act in the long term. Thinking only of the next quarter is an excellent way to convert a successful society into an apparently successful one, just as long as you believe the numbers.
There are a lot of areas in our economy where thinking in terms of the long haul would be in the best interest of all the players as well as our nation as a whole.
James Pilant
This is my friend, who writes under the name, “islammessageofpeace,” obviously, Islam, Message of Piece.
Wonderful writeup.
Frankly speaking, as a general inhabitant of this world and specifically as a Muslim (trying to spread the Message of Peace, Mercy and justice; the true Message of Islam), I really couldn’t buy any of the TSA Security Compliance. Honestly, there should be a balance between Security & Privacy.
In Islam, covering the Awrah (the intimate parts of the body) is to maintain modesty, privacy and morality. It is unlawful to expose oneself’s Awrah and is regarded as sin. For the Men the Awrah is from the Naval to the Knees and for the Women it is whole of the body.
It is mentioned in the Glorious Qur’an (Chapter 33 Al-Ahzab [The Parties]: Verse 59):
“O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies (i.e. screen themselves). That will be better, that they should be known (as free respectable women) so as not to be annoyed. And Allah is Ever OftForgiving, Most Merciful.”
I respect my friend’s beliefs. I hold to a different standard as a Christian. Nevertheless, I am fully in agreement that there are lines that should not be crossed save for the most dire reasons.
Surely here in the United States, we have some standard beyond which we are unwilling to be humiliated?
Is there no modesty, no dignity, which cannot be easily discarded in the name of security?
The religion of Islam states a clear line. Surely, the citizens can find some standard beyond which the government cannot go?
James Pilant
Now you, common middle class citizen, you have to pay a thirty dollar fee at a court house in most states for them to record a change in ownership in property. They have to do paperwork and change that little county map that shows who owns what. Now suppose you change the ownership again. You transfer it your spouse, your child, or you’re paying the fee as part of a sales contract. You have to pay a second thirty dollar fee.
Annoying, right? Of course, but has to be done. You have to know who owns what, right?
What if you don’t want to pay the second time? Well, you are out of luck there too. The state is not going to let you out of the fee. Besides without paying the fee, the records won’t show who owns the property, so it’s a good idea to pay it, right?
Everybody has to pay the fees, right??
No, they don’t.
If you are a bank using the MERS system, you don’t have to pay a second fee. (MERS = Mortgage Electronic Registry System)
You see all the transactions are done by computer therefore there is no fee for any transaction after the first one. The banks often transferred these properties dozens of times, but every transfer after the first one was free. Isn’t that great?
Now, you probably would like to say something dumb like, “Isn’t that state law?” Then you might follow it up with, “Doesn’t that mean they don’t own the property?!”
You silly person, don’t you realize this a is a banking institution? They are not like you.
They just decided not to pay.
See, when you want to change a law, you have to lobby and talk to people and ask the legislature to consider a bill changing the law, then it has to go through both houses and then be signed by the governor.
But when you are a bank, you simply decide not to pay the fees. It makes everything simple.
Now, there are those in this country who are bizarre individuals. Those strange people want the banks to cough up the money. So, the banks, their feelings deeply injured, have run to their friends in the United States Congress who are planning a surprise party for you.
At the surprise party a thinly clad financial industry lobbyist will leap out of a cake and tell you that Congress has legalized all that stuff that the banks have been doing for, Oh, about five years now.
Now you might ask another question at this point and it is not “Why aren’t I getting any cake?” Your question is “Doesn’t those payments to the country, those thirty dollars each time, aren’t those part of my county’s taxes?”
Why, yes, they are.
But remember, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and he just took your county’s money and gave it to the banks.
What a sad story!
And it’s all true!!
It used to be that every time a bank sold a mortgage, the county land recording office received a fee. It wasn’t much — $30 or so — but then real estate boomed in the 1990s and banks pooled millions of mortgages into securities that investors bought and sold.
One mortgage transaction became a dozen or more, and the tab grew ever larger. So the banks came up with a way around the fees. And now they are fighting to avoid perhaps tens of billions of dollars in penalties that have added up over the years.
From further down in the article –
MERS is “an admitted fee-avoidance scheme,” says Robert Hager, the Nevada lawyer who, along with his partner Treva Hearne, is filing the suits against MERS and its bank owners, including the government-backed mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie provide a low-cost flow of funding to the nation’s mortgage markets by buying mortgages from lenders, packaging them into securities and then selling them to investors.
The suits were filed in California, Nevada and Tennessee and 14 undisclosed states where the cases are still under court seal. Hager and Hearne chose the states because their laws allow what are called false claims suits, in which citizens can take legal action against companies that may have cheated the government.
The suits allege that by privatizing public records, MERS enabled banks to circumvent American property law and bypass the counties’ fee and paperwork requirements, costing billions of dollars in lost revenue over more than a decade. MERS says its process is legal, and that the fees are not required under its system.
If only we were all banks!
James Pilant
MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registry System, is a system used by the banks to evade paying fees or having to do the traditional paperwork necessary to change the ownership of property.
To quote the Associated Press –
MERS’ owners are all the big mortgage companies, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and GMAC. They are all facing a foreclosure-fraud investigation launched by all 50 state attorneys general, and all took government bailout money after the financial meltdown in 2008.
As I mentioned in my last posting, our lame duck Congress is thinking (if you could ever refer to their processing as having thought) of legalizing this system now, years after the major banks began using it with full knowledge of its legal problems. (Being a bank is very much like being in love in the movie, Love Story, you never have to say you are sorry.)
This is from the Washington Post. It explains why MERS is a problem.
I very much appreciate the Washington Post for developing this little picture and trust it was useful to you.
James Pilant
The web site, Crooks and Liars, has picked up a rumor that the lame duck Congress is planning a huge gift for the mortgage industry. They will retroactively legalize the MERS system to prove ownership.
Here is Wikipedia’s definition of MERS –
Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) is a privately held company that operates an electronic registry designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans in the United States. MERS asserts to be the owner (or the owner’s nominee) of the security interest indicated by the mortgages transferred by lenders, investors and their loan servicers in the county land records. MERS maintains that its process eliminates the need to file assignments in the county land records which lowers costs for lenders and consumers by reducing county recording revenues from real estate transfers and provides a central source of information and tracking for mortgage loans. MERS’ role in facilitating mortgage trading was relatively uncontroversial in its early days a decade ago but continued fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis has put MERS at the center of several legal challenges disputing the company’s right to initiate foreclosures. Should these challenges succeed, the US banking industry could face a renewed need for capitalization.
The computer program simply transacts exchanges of property. The only problem is that does not the fulfill the requirements of the law in most states. In most states you must actually go through a process and have actual documents. So, some five years ago, MERS went into operation with scant, non-existent or simple illegality.The really neat part about MERS is that no matter how criminally stupid or unlikely or straight up illegal your change of ownership is, it looks just beautiful and all proper on the computer.
So, the Congress of the United States of America is going to retroactively validate a computer system that shifts property five years after the thing began moving property around like pixels in a video game.
Does fairness and obedience to the law figure in Congressional decision making?
I bet if millions of homeowners had their property taken away with scant legal proof Congress would leap into protect them. But that has already happened without Congress acting.
Okay, I bet if hundred of billions, trillions of dollars, were lost by banks playing the world markets using casino chips made of mortgage backed securities, that Congress would punish the malefactors. But no one has been punished unless the homeowners are considered.
I could write about five or six more “already happened’s” and you could probably think of a few more.
But basically it boils down the this. If the financial industry has legal problems, Congress tends to rush in with legislation retroactively fixing the problem.
If a member of the great middle class gets into legal trouble, Congress is unlikely to be unduly concerned.
A society that puts value on fairness and justice should find these matters disturbing.
Now it appears that Congress may attempt to prevent any MERS meltdown from occurring. MERS is owned by all the biggest banks, and they certainly do not want it to be sunk by huge fines. Investors in mortgage-backed securities also do not want to see the value of their bonds sink because of doubts about the ownership of the underlying mortgages.So it looks like the stage may be set for Congress to pass a bill that would limit MERS exposure on the recording fee issue and perhaps retroactively legitimate mortgage transfers conducted through MERS private database.
If only, we were all treated as if were banks.
James Pilant
Do you really need to pass through a machine that looks at every square centimeter of your body to make airlines safer? Do you really have to (for all intents and purposes) pose nude for the airline cops? And if you refuse to pose nude, should they be able to grope you like some felon assaulting a schoolgirl on a subway in Japan?
Forbes proposes abolishing the TSA, which is, of course, nonsense. Forbes has never had too many rational thoughts. I consider them finding nude searches to be irrational and demeaning more the accident of them having to ride airplanes than from any actual concern for other human beings. In fact, I am reluctant to quote these doctrinaires but I think you and I will survive this once.
For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer.
But won’t that compromise safety? I doubt it. The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility. This might be beside the point: in 2003, William Anderson incisively argued that some of the steps that airlines (and passengers) would have needed to take to prevent the 9/11 disaster probably would have been illegal.
The odds of dying from a terrorist attack are much lower than the odds of dying from doing any of a number of incredibly mundane things we do every day. You are almost certainly more likely to die or be injured driving to the airport than you are to be injured by a terrorist once you’re in the air, even without a TSA. Indeed, once you have successfully made it to the airport, the most dangerous part of your trip is over. Until it’s time to drive home, that is.
Boy, these guys can take a matter of personal dignity and come up with, “Let’s get rid of a public agency! We can find a corporation to come to the rescue! Give us public money now! Now!”
Okay, personal dignity. Do these kinds of searches make us safer? Probably not.
These kinds of searches are more the kind of thing we subject prison inmates to. I fully agree that if all airline passenger are convicted felons, the searches are merited. Are we all one step away from being criminals stopped only by a little humiliation? (Okay, a heaping big helping of humiliation.)
We have given up our internet privacy, our financial privacy, been subjected to camera surveillance all in the name of safety. At what point, are you going to say stop? When they mount camera’s in your home? in your bathroom? implant chips in your children?
Let’s stop them. This has become insane, crazy, just plain loco.
Do we want people around the world to decide that Americans are witless cattle willing to undergo any indignity, any loss of rights because of 20,000 scumbags hiding in caves in North Pakistan?
I think Americans are brave and resourceful. I have never believed that we needed to give up any rights at all in this struggle. These criminals are just a small band of criminals. Those that advocate a war with Islam can’t think and can’t count. There are a billion and a half Muslims. A good number don’t like us, that is not a crime. The organization that attacked us is tiny and we can handle this without this kind of surrender to our worst fears and instincts.
We’re Americans! Did the Kaiser, the Nazis, Tojo’s Japan, or Mussolini scare us into naked searches or genital groping?
No, they didn’t. We have courage. That’s why we have been successful as a nation. When we give up courage, what’s left to fight for?
James Pilant
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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