Jacob Davies

An American Family, 300 Million Strong

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by Jacob Davies (Transcript.) “So sudden loss causes us to look backward – but it also forces us to look forward; to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. We may ask ourselves if we’ve … Read more

The Wealthiest Nation on Earth

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by Jacob Davies Via Mark Thoma, the USDA reports that 42.9 million Americans collected food stamps last month, or 14% of the US population. In 2001, the number collecting food stamps averaged (pdf) 17.3 million. Between 2001 and 2010, the US economy grew from $39,773 per-capita to $42,247 per-capita (both in 2010 dollars), or $2,474. … Read more

Clarity

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by Jacob Davies What do the two major parties in the United States stand for? What priorities do they put higher than anything else, so high that they are willing to compromise on things they really don’t like if that’s the only way to make it pass? Let’s see: Republican Party Democratic Party Tax cuts for households … Read more

Hope

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by Jacob Davies Well, I sure complain a lot. But I'm an optimist – long-term, planet-wide – even if the day to day politics of the US are wearying. I also like visualizations, and this one describes why I'm an optimist: (5 minute video. If you're impatient, skip to a runthrough of the animation at … Read more

The Dangers of Secret Diplomacy

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by Jacob Davies The cables tell a tale of America being taken for a ride by Georgia’s President Saakashvili in 2008: A 2008 batch of American cables from another country once in the cold war’s grip — Georgia — showed a much different sort of access. In Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, American officials had all but … Read more

Outsourced Commentary on Wikileaks

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by Jacob Davies I’ve been meaning to write something about the Wikileaks leak of diplomatic cables, but Tom Levenson at Balloon Juice pretty much sums up what I wanted to say: What I do know is that this leak is a reminder of what it means to live in a national security state. Not in … Read more

Your Democratic Party

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by Jacob Davies Today we have an announcement of a pay freeze for Federal employees: “The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice and that sacrifice must be shared by employees of the federal government,” Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference. “I did … Read more

Let’s Get It Started In Here

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by Jacob Davies Via Naked Capitalism, the FDIC is starting investigations into 50 executives, directors, and employees at failed institutions: The agency responsible for dealing with bank failures is stepping up its effort to punish alleged recklessness, fraud and other criminal behavior, as U.S. officials did in the wake of the savings-and-loan crisis a generation … Read more

A Futuristic Nightmare Ideology of Computerized Greed and Unchecked Financial Violence

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by Jacob Davies

The story you must read today is Matt Taibbi on the massive fraud by banks and loan servicers in the ongoing foreclosure crisis.

I had a few things to say about this over the last month or two, but I think people had a hard time believing that fraud and perjury on this scale was actually possible; that people were being thrown out onto the street on the basis of affidavits that were forgeries and perjury through and through. Forged, back-dated documents purporting to be contemporaneous records of the transfer of mortgage notes from one party to another. Complete circumvention of the existing legal system for recording real estate ownership – and its associated taxes and fees – and its illegal replacement with an unreliable, understaffed private system. The employees of the corporation running that system passing themselves off as vice-presidents of dozens of banks and servicers so they could foreclose on mortgages. Banks even claiming both that they were and were not the actual owner of the mortage in the very same filings. Failures to convey the actual mortgages to the real estate trusts that backed the securities that were sold to investors. Attempts to convey mortages to those trusts only at the moment of foreclosure. Servicers with a vested interest in the mortages they service going into foreclosure so they can collect fees, and associated failures to collect payments. People given mortgage modifications by the bank, then foreclosed on for failing to pay the original amounts. People without mortgages being foreclosed on. Multiple banks claiming to own the same mortgage foreclosing on the same property.

And at the sharp end of all this, an automated process of perjury and fraud. Notarized affidavits claiming that the signer has personal knowledge of the facts of the case described that were signed by someone else with no knowledge of the facts and not notarized at all. And a court system overloaded with foreclosures unable to and uninterested in examining the facts of the cases in front of it. Families thrown out on the street in the tens or hundreds of thousands on the basis of minute-long hearings in courts where judges refused to consider questions of fraud.

It’s hard to comprehend just how pervasive and serious this problem is. Trillions of dollars have already been lost in the bursting of the real estate bubble, but trillions of dollars more of the remaining mortgage-backed securities may be entirely worthless. Not to mention the massive destruction of households and neighborhoods wrought by a mindless, mechanical legal process.

If you don’t have time to read the whole thing at RS, I’m excerpting the key parts after the fold. But I recommend taking the time to read it.

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The Only Election Analysis You Need

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by Jacob Davies Well, I’m sure we’re about to be subjected to endless nonsense about how America is really a conservative nation and Obama overreached and blah blah blah. I say “nonsense” because this is how Americans actually vote: That’s it. The failure to understand this – and the failure to understand that a too-small … Read more

A Second Porsche Won’t Fill That Hole

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by Jacob Davies A nice short piece on inequality in the NYT: Many economists are reluctant to confront rising income inequality directly, saying that whether this trend is good or bad requires a value judgment that is best left to philosophers. But that disclaimer rings hollow. Economics, after all, was founded by moral philosophers, and … Read more

“One nation, under fraud”

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by Jacob Davies I don’t have much use for the Daily Caller generally, but you should read this. The banks ran their mortgage units like a 1999 dot-com: no paperwork, everyone runs around like chickens with their heads cut off, next week we’re all either millionaires or fired. But mortgage lending is a 30 year … Read more

Not Complicated

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by Jacob Davies Imagine that 310 people reside in the United States of America, and that it's a small village, not a country. Of those 310, 238 are adults not in the care of others.The rest are children, institutionalized elderly and disabled, and members of the armed forces; their needs are taken care of directly. … Read more

The Real Servant Problem

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by Jacob Davies Just a quick note on servants, which we were discussing in the comments to a previous thread. The big problem I have with servants who work directly for one person or family – and especially full-time servants – is not about productivity, and it’s not based on aesthetic dislike for the idea. … Read more

Segregation Nation

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by Jacob Davies Some maps of the racial make-up of American cities by a guy called Eric Fisher. Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, and Orange is Hispanic, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000. New York City: Detroit: The SF Bay Area: Click on any of them for … Read more

Little House On The Playa

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by Jacob Davies

midweek

My idea of a restful, refreshing vacation is to drive hundreds of miles to the middle of a high-altitude desert to a spot where there is nothing but dead salt pan for miles in every direction, no water, no flora or fauna, spend several days working like a dog in the hot sun to build a little camp, spend a couple more days hanging out in it with my friends and whatever lunatics wander in off the street while enjoying day-and-night pounding techno music and explosions, with only the primitive comforts we build for ourselves in a little kitchen and a sun shower, then tear the whole thing down and pack it all away again for next year.

This isn't a post about What Burning Man Means. I have no idea what it means to most people. For me it's a chance to spend some intensive time with some good friends, experience some really weird stuff, watch some big fires and explosions, and enjoy a pretty solid attempt at a total rejection of mainstream culture.

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Hope I Get Old Before I Die

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by Jacob Davies There was a long and widely-discussed piece in the NY Times Magazine on Sunday about the increasing tendency of 20-somethings to move back in with their parents, to fail to find a solid job, and to delay getting married or having children. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s … Read more

Weekend Baby Blogging and Open Thread

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by Jacob Davies What was I saying about no crawling? Yeah, that didn’t last. Crawling, standing… nothing is safe any more. I’m not saying everyone should go have a baby right now… but I am saying this is the most fun I’ve ever had. Anyway, an open thread.

Adult Supervision Required

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by Jacob Davies I’m looking at this Cordoba House business and I really cannot endorse the United States as guarantor of global freedom* if we’re going to run things this way. Aren’t there some aliens that can step in or something? This is the stupidest thing since Terri Schiavo, and that was really, really stupid. … Read more

Post Twentieth Century Stress Disorder

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by Jacob Davies

The twentieth century kicks off with the wizard invention of the concentration camp by the British in South Africa, who are engaged in a battle over Lebensraum with a bunch of Dutch guys, neither side having the slightest interest in the brown people previously occupying the area except as a sort of irritating natural resource to be strip-mined where possible. Whatever the original intent of the British, the key features of the concentration camp rapidly assert themselves, which is to say once you have a whole lot of annoying people gathered in one place and prevented from wandering around by barbed wire and guns, you can make them significantly less annoying to you by sort of, well, accidentally forgetting to feed them.

That’s just a warm up though; we quickly go to the War to End All Wars That Doesn’t, in which approximately one kerbillion soldiers from every civilized nation on the planet are ordered into an unremarkable area of France about the size of Vermont to die by various exciting means including being crushed by tanks, shot, stabbed, starved, bludgeoned, blown up, diseased, machine-gunned, and having the occasional bomb dropped on their heads in an amateurish fashion (they get better at this later). This accomplishes absolutely nothing for anyone and ends only when the Americans get tired of Germans randomly blowing up their stuff.

Everybody learns a Valuable Lesson about the Importance of Peace, which they all put into action in the same way: a determined effort to ensure that this time they will be the ones with the biggest guns, goddammit. Russia has a proletariat revolution which scares the crap out of all the moneybags businessmen in the rest of the world, which just goes to show that their imaginations were a bit limited at the time, since they could have treated them like China today, i.e. a giant source of cheap labor for foreign corporations under a government that doesn’t tolerate any silly talk about worker’s rights because, hello, you live in a socialist paradise – haven’t you read the newspaper today?

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Good Thing We Didn’t Bail Out Detroit

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by Jacob Davies I think we’re all glad that the US federal government passed on the opportunity to bail out the US automobile industry in 2008. After all, that moribund industry stood no chance of making a decent recovery, and getting on with the process of adjustment as early as possible was really the only … Read more

A Quick One, While He’s Away

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by Jacob Davies Paul Krugman takes on some of the issues with the effects of higher marginal taxation that I talked about in an earlier post. He hits some of the same points and comes to roughly the same conclusion: So the way I see it, even quite high marginal tax rates on high earners … Read more