Fact-esque

Bankruptcy Reform Defeated, Banking Lobbyists Win Again

Illinois Sen Dick Durbin, one of those antique FDR Dems I go on about all the time, has been trying to get a law passed that will reform Joe Biden's terrible bankruptcy bill. You know, the one demanded by his banker campaign contributors and written by those same bankers' lobbyists? We've sort of had a thing about it around here for a looooog time. We didn't care for it, not from Day One.

But Durbin is, as you might imagine, fighting an uphill battle. On Monday, in frustration, I suppose, he blurted out the truth on a radio show.

On Monday night in an interview with a radio host back home, he came to a stark conclusion: the banks own the Senate.

"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place," he said on WJJG 1530 AM's "Mornings with Ray Hanania." Progress Illinois picked up the quote.

(emphasis added)

Indeed. They proved it today when the Senate defeated bankruptcy reform and the Corporate Tank Dems, most of them BD's natch, handed Obama a significant defeat and the banks yet another significant victory.

Pigs in Space 19: Getting the Hogs Back in the Pen (Updated)

The multiple and egregious credit card abuses by banks have been building for almost 3 decades with few if any checks on the ability of creditors to pick your pocket whenever, wherever and however they choose. Hidden fees, outrageously large late fees, double-dipping, usurious interest rates approaching 30%, and on and on, have been the mechanisms that let them get paid as much as $100 for every dollar they loan.

The Congress (finally!) is about to take some action - if the conservatives and lobbyists let them - with a bill nicknamed The Credit Card Bill of Rights. It isn't by any stretch all that's needed to stop unethical predatory credit card practices but it's a start.

Pigs in Space 18: Death Is Not An Excuse For Not Paying Your Rent

The fish rots from the head down.

There is a lot of collateral damage when you force society into a posture of unlimited selfishness as conservatives have done for the past 30 or so years. Add that to a posture of worship when it comes to $$$ and you've got the makings of a Molochian culture in which there is no room for humanity when teh bucks are at stake.

We've been looking at the top of the totem pole because that's where it comes from, but if you doubt this abominable doctrine has oozed its way down the ladder, you'd better have a look at this: a landlord is dunning the mother of a murdered teacher because he died before his lease was up.

No, this isn't an Onion story. I wish. (Via Norwegianity)

When she opened the letter from her dead son’s former landlord this week, Danelle Eckert thought there had to be some mistake.

The letter, addressed to Eckert and to the estate of her son, Colin Byars, was demanding March and April rent, late fees and an “early termination fee” because he had left his apartment before the end of his lease. Byars, a 24-year-old teacher, was killed Feb. 21 when he was punched in the head on a Kenosha street.

“I thought they must not understand that Colin was killed. But no, they understood completely,” Eckert said.

She said the apartment’s property manager told her that they knew Byars had been killed. But the woman told Eckert the management company had been advised by their legal representative that they should go after the rent and fees.

Every time I think I've plumbed the depths of what the conservatives have done to us - what we've let them do to us - I discover that there's one more layer of shit we've penetrated than I thought.

John Gideon R.I.P.

Voting rights activist, John Gideon has passed away.  Brad Friedman, who was a firend and colleague of John,  has a obituary here.   I did not know John personally but I knew him through my volunteer work with the Coalition for Voting Integrity.  He often appeared on our radio show, Voice of the Voters, to give updates from the world of election integrity.  As Brad's obituary makes clear, John was a dedicated and stalwart worker for a transparent election process.  His passion and his voice will be greatly missed by the movement he helped create. 

UAW Trades More Concessions for Probably Worthless Chrysler Promises

So it seems the automakers' strategy of using their financial difficulties, difficulties brought on entirely by executive incompetence, to weaken the unions to the point of anemia is working just fine, thanks. GM will be laying off 21,000 more union workers (and NO management, I bet) while apparently going right ahead with the construction of its new plant in Brazil, and at Chrysler the UAW basically just traded its contract's pension provision for govt money for the company.

Neither the United Automobile Workers union nor the company released details of the tentative agreement, which would modify the union’s 2007 contract and reduce the amount of money Chrysler must pay into a new health fund for retirees.

So Chrysler gets more bail-out money on top of the $4B they've already pissed away, most likely in executive bonuses so they can keep all that extraordinary "talent" - you know, the same "talent" that put them in this hole in the first place - and union workers get to keep their jobs at yet more reduced pay & benefits as if they were the ones who wrecked the company.

A couple more rounds like this and they'll be down to making minimum wage with a health plan as useless as Wal-mart's employee health plan and not enough of a pension plan to be worth worrying about. At that point, why join a union at all?

Palin-esque Karaoke, or Capitalism as Religion

I don't bother to write much about Sarah Palin because she's a twit and me writing about Palin would be a little like Dostoyevski writing a 1000 page novel about lima beans.

But every once in a while the response to Palin is so egregiously stoopid that it's worth pointing out because it's a sign that we still don't understand what's happened to the Right, especially the GOP. Case in point, Steve Benen, writing about Palin's political self-immolation, writes what has to be one of the Top Five Dumbest Sentences he's ever written. (Via Norwegianity)

There's simply no logic to this strategy.

Steve, sweetie, since when does "logic" have any connection whatever to conservative, especially ultraconservative, thinking? For that matter, what has thinking got to do with it? Hasn't the last 10 years taught you anything at all?

Pigs in Space 17: If It's Convenient for the Banks, It Doesn't Matter If It's Illegal

Here we go again.

Florida has become one of the states with the biggest numbers of homes both in foreclosure and eviction. Turns out there's a small data company behind a sizable majority of those cases, a company nobody's ever heard of up to now. And they want those damn houses.

Judge Walt Logan had seen enough. As a county judge in Florida, he had 28 cases pending in which an entity called MERS wanted to foreclose on homeowners even though it had never lent them any money.

MERS, a tiny data-management company, claimed the right to foreclose, but would not explain how it came to possess the mortgage notes originally issued by banks. Judge Logan summoned a MERS lawyer to the Pinellas County courthouse and insisted that that fundamental question be answered before he permitted the drastic step of seizing someone’s home.

“You don’t think that’s reasonable?” the judge asked.

“I don’t,” the lawyer replied. “And in fact, not only do I think it’s not reasonable, often that’s going to be impossible.”

Judge Logan had entered the murky realm of MERS.

(emphasis added)

Basically, the shabby mortgage scams of the past decade needed a holding company to shift all those sold and the resold and then resold again mortages. That made things convenient for the banks, which never had to track the titles or pay all those pesky public fees.

Corporate Media Still Listening to Cheney Defend Torture Despite His Past History of Lies, Lies, and More Lies

Li'l Dick hasn't allowed a straight honest word past the perpetual sneer on his lip in almost 30 years. He has been caught in lie after lie after lie, virtually nothing he has said in public (and probably not in private) as VP has been true, yet here come the media acting like he may have a point when he is trying to defend his torture policy - a policy that came straight out of his office as VP (Addison worked for him and so did Yoo) - by making blanket claims for its effectiveness.

Senior Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and cheered by many Congressional Republicans, are fighting a rear-guard action in defense of their record. Only by using the harshest methods, they insist, did the intelligence agency get the information it needed to round up Qaeda killers and save thousands of American lives.

***

In a twist this week, Mr. Cheney, a fierce defender of secrecy as vice president, called for the release of more classified memorandums that he asserted prove the effectiveness of the coercive techniques.

The self-serving nature of Cheney's defense and the typically evidenceless assertions that we've gotten so used to from him and other conservative hacks are being thrust at us as if they might actually be genuine. You know, this time as opposed to all those other times. Cheney, of course, claims that the proof is in those secret memos he wants revealed. Apparently he's no longer concerned about "national security". Now that it's his ass on the line at the Spanish War Crimes Tribunal, fuck national security.

Pigs in Space 16: Correcting an Illusion With...More Illusions

Maybe it's just me but it seems like no matter how bad things are, the bankers of the world seem to be convinced it's all just a matter of, you know, PR. The global banking system has lost some $4.4Trillion in value in the last 6 months, according to the IMF, so obviously the fix is to put some Monopoly money into circulation so everybody feels better.

EZ Blog!

Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall Of All US Dollars

More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas