Massive new fraud coverup: How banks are pillaging homes — while the government watches

When financial crimes go unpunished, the root problem of fraud never gets fixed -- and these are the consequences

David Dayen

Joseph and Mary Romero of Chimayo, N.M., found that their mortgage note was assigned to the Bank of New York three months after the same bank filed a foreclosure complaint against them; in other words, Bank of New York didn’t own the loan when they tried to foreclose on it.

Glenn and Ann Holden of Akron, Ohio, faced foreclosure from Deutsche Bank, but the company filed two different versions of the note at court, each bearing a stamp affirming it as the “true and accurate copy.”

Mary McCulley of Bozeman, Mont., had her loan changed by U.S. Bank without her knowledge, from a $300,000 30-year loan to a $200,000 loan due in 18 months, and in documents submitted to the court, U.S. Bank included four separate loan applications with different terms.

An unemployed aid program could help millions. Why aren’t more states using it?

By Ylan Q. Mui
April 23 at 12:34 pm

One of the last drips of federal aid for unemployed workers will expire next summer -- and few people even know it exists.

Under federal legislation passed in 2012, the program provides funding for states that allow workers who have been forced into part-time positions to receive unemployment benefits. The payments are prorated for hours worked, and economists say the benefits encourage struggling companies to keep their employees rather than lay them off. Economists say the program could help millions of struggling, part-time workers.

America’s Surge Toward Oligarchy

April 24, 2014

Exclusive: With the rapid concentration of wealth in a few well-manicured hands and the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court declaring money to be speech, the American surge toward oligarchy has gained what looks like an unstoppable momentum, as JP Sottile explains.

By JP Sottile

Is America an oligarchy? Thanks to a new study from Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University, social media, Op-Ed pages and the blatheri are all atwitter at the implication that American democracy is a sham.

In Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Gilens and Page used a data-set of 1,779 policy issues from 1981 to 2002 to compare actual policy outcomes with the prevailing policy preferences of three income groups: “10th income percentile (quite poor), the 50th percentile (median), and the 90th percentile (fairly affluent).”

Not surprisingly, the policy desires of the 90 Percenters (earning at least $146,000 per year) are the most likely to become policy outcomes.

The Cult of the Boss: Why Do Americans Admire Businessmen? 

John Summers
April 17, 2014

Conservatives invoke Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek in their defense of the free market. Liberals invoke John Maynard Keynes for his defense of government intervention. Only in Thorstein Veblen, however, may a sane person hope to understand the carnival of mendacity that has sent America spiraling into the abyss.

Veblen, nearly forgotten today, grew up in a gilded age disfigured, like our own, by robber barons, predatory monopolies, financial panics, lockouts, strikes, and mass unemployment. Then as now a priestly class of economists rationalized such phenomena while the people, overwhelmed by a swell of ignorance and greed, emulated the pecuniary values of business. A long agricultural crisis devastated the country. Politicians intoned assurances that these were temporary abnormalities in a Sound System, just as our own Depression is cast as a trial of faith, a crisis of confidence.

A Chance to Remake the Fed

David Dayen
April 21, 2014

Two vacant slots offer progressives the opportunity to ensure the Board finally cracks down on Wall Street.

Janet Yellen has only chaired the Federal Reserve for a few months, but you could forgive her if she feels like the new kid in school that nobody wants to sit with at lunchtime. With the resignation of Jeremy Stein earlier this month, there are only two confirmed members of the seven-member Board of Governors: Yellen and Daniel Tarullo. Three nominees—Stan Fischer, Lael Brainard and Jerome Powell, (whose term expired but has been re-nominated)—await confirmation from the Senate. Another two slots are vacant, awaiting nominations. One consequence of the shortage of Fed governors is that regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents, chosen by private banks, now outnumber Board members at monetary policy meetings, allowing the private sector to effectively dictate monetary policy from the inside, and creating what some call a constitutional crisis.

Cow manure harbors diverse new antibiotic resistance genes

Manure from dairy cows, which is commonly used as a farm soil fertilizer, contains a surprising number of newly identified antibiotic resistance genes from the cows' gut bacteria. The findings, reported in mBio® the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, hints that cow manure is a potential source of new types of antibiotic resistance genes that transfer to bacteria in the soils where food is grown.

Thousands of antibiotic resistance (AR) genes have already been identified, but the vast majority of them don't pose a problem when found in harmless bacteria. The real worry is when these genes appear in the types of pathogenic bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses or hospital infections.

US Has A 'Secret Exception' To Reasonable Suspicion For Putting People On The No Fly List

by Mike Masnick, Fri, Apr 18th 2014 7:44am

from the also-known-as-the-'because-we-wanted-to' dept

Over the past few months, we covered the bizarre trial concerning Rahinah Ibrahim and her attempt to get off the no fly list. In January, there was an indication that the court had ordered her removed from the list, but without details. In February, a redacted version of the ruling revealed that the whole mess was because an FBI agent read the instructions wrong on a form and accidentally placed her on the no fly list, though we noted that some of the redactions were quite odd.

However, earlier this week, the court finally released the unredacted version, and we'll have a few things to say about the choice of redactions in a later post. But first, there were three main "reveals" from the newly unredacted version. The first is that Ibrahim was actually put on multiple lists by mistake (and never for any clear reason) and was actually dropped from the no fly list years ago (though the other lists created the same effective problem in barring her from being allowed to travel to the US). The second is that the US government has a "secret exception" to the requirement that there be "reasonable suspicion" to put someone in various terrorist databases, and that secret exception was later used on Ibrahim. And third, that despite the implications from the redacted versions, the fully unredacted ruling shows that Ibrahim is still likely blocked from coming to the US for separate undisclosed reasons, even though the government fully admits that she is no threat. All of these things were hidden by the redacted version.

Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

The Pulitzer-winning author explains why he adapted his classic book "The Third Chimpanzee" for kids: because we need them to fix our mistakes.

—By Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney | Fri Apr. 18, 2014 3:00 AM PDT

Jared Diamond didn't start out as the globe-romping author of massive, best-selling books about the precarious state of our civilization. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, he at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world's foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder.

But then in 1987, something happened: His twin sons were born. "I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world," remembers Diamond on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. "I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050."

Yet Another Reason to Hate SCOTUS: It's Made It Easier for Payday Lenders to Prey on the Poor

By Kathleen Geier

April 21, 2014 | The Supreme Court doesn’t like poor people very much.

Recent rulings by the Court have had a profoundly harmful impact on the health, lives, and livelihoods of poor folks. The best-known example is the Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, which allowed states to opt out of Medicaid. That is an option that 24 states have chosen to take. It will leave nearly six million low-income Americans without health insurance [3]. They would have had that insurance were it not for the Supreme Court. How many people will lose their health, and their lives, because the Supreme Court denied them health coverage? I would love to know.

There’s A Hidden Timebomb In The Senate Rules That Will Go Off If A Supreme Court Justice Retires  

By Ian Millhiser, April 20, 2014 at 11:09 am Updated: April 20, 2014 at 6:55 pm

As Jonathan Chait notes, only five Republican senators voted to confirm Justice Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, and three of those senators — Judd Gregg, Richard Lugar and Olympia Snowe — are no longer in the Senate. If Republicans take the Senate this November, there is a very real possibility that no one President Obama nominates to a Supreme Court vacancy, no matter what their record or qualifications, could be confirmed to the Court.

We made a similar point in 2012, when Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock defeated Lugar in a Republican Senate primary after he attacked Lugar for his support of Kagan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor. As we wrote then, “[i]n light of this incident, it is unlikely that any of the few remaining Republicans who backed an Obama Supreme Court appointee will be willing to risk their careers by doing the same again.”

The Latest "Cosmos" Explains How Corporations Fund Science Denial

Neil Tyson explores the surprising connection between the age of the Earth and the dangers of lead.

—By Chris Mooney | Mon Apr. 21, 2014 1:49 PM PDT

The most amazing thing about Fox's new Cosmos series is that it exists at all. A program that is, at its core, educational, airing at 9 p.m. on Sunday and competing with shows like Game of Thrones…in what universe does that happen?

Today's audiences are not accustomed to this sort of fare, and the show certainly hasn't been a runaway success when judged by the most traditional metric: ratings. Last night, though, Cosmos powerfully demonstrated that those who haven't watched it yet really ought to give it a shot (watch here). Simply put, Cosmos told a magnificent scientific story that drew together (yes, really) the tale of how we determined the age of the Earth (about 4.5 billion years old) and of how one courageous scientist showed, in the face of intense challenges, the dangers of leaded gasoline.

How One Profitable Company Took Home A Tax Refund Equal To All Of The SNAP Benefit Cuts

By NH Labor | April 22, 2014

Last year the Republicans in the House pushed to cuts the SNAP program by $5 billion dollars over the next ten years. These draconian cuts reduced benefits to millions of hungry children. The GOP claims we need to balance the budget and they refuse to make changes to the tax rates, which would lead to higher revenues. “NO NEW TAXES!” Republicans across the country have vowed, even signed pledges, not to raise taxes or create any new taxes. Because the Republicans are unwilling to make changes to our tax system, they insist on making cuts to programs like SNAP, to balance our budget.

Our taxes help to pay for everything from the town snowplow driver to the roads we drive on. They pay for the schools and the teachers who educate our children. They pay for the police officers and firefighters who keep us safe, day and night. That is what our taxes pay for. Taxes are the financial foundation that our community is based on.

Why Economist Thomas Piketty Has Scared the Pants Off the American Right

By Lynn Stuart Parramore

April 21, 2014 | Thomas Piketty is no radical. His 700-page book Capital in the 21st Century is certainly not some kind of screed filled with calls for class warfare. In fact, the wonky and mild-mannered French economist opens his tome with a description of his typical Gen X abhorrence of what he calls the “lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism." He is in no way, shape, or form a Marxist. As fellow-economist James K. Galbraith has underscored in his review of the book, Piketty "explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view" of economics.

But he does do something that gives right-wingers in America the willies. He writes calmly and reasonably about economic inequality, and concludes, to the alarm of conservatives, that there is no magical force that drives capitalist societies toward shared prosperity. Quite the opposite. He warns that if we don't do something about it, we may end up with a society that is more top-heavy than anything that has come before — something even worse than the Gilded Age.

For this, in America, you get branded a crazed Communist by the right. In this past weekend's New York Times, Ross Douthat sounds the alarm in an op-ed ominously tited "Marx Rises Again [3]." The columnist hints that he and his fellow pundits have only pretended to read the book but nevertheless feel comfortable making statements like "Yes, that’s right: Karl Marx is back from the dead" about Piketty. TheNational Review's James Pethokoukis joins in the games with a silly article called "The New Marxism [4]" in which he repeats the nonsense that Piketty is some sort of Marxist apologist.

Don Quijones: “Uncreative” Destruction – The Troika’s Hostile Takeover of Europe

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Yves Smith

By Don Quijones, a freelance writer and translator based in Barcelona, Spain. His blog, Raging Bull-Shit, is a modest attempt to challenge some of the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by our political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media. Originally published at Testosterone Pit
After four long years of “service”, the Troika’s frontline role in sustaining and exacerbating crisis conditions in Southern Europe is finally beginning to attract some of the attention it deserves. In my home city of Barcelona, a coalition of left-wing groups recently held an event to raise awareness about the Troika’s “neo-liberalisation” of Southern Europe. Even Europe’s shoe-shine institution, the European Parliament, has promised to launch an enquiry into the Troika’s operations after the European elections in May.

Since its inception at the beginning of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, the unholy alliance between the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission has visited untold damage on the economies and societies of a long and fast-growing list of countries.

Is America an Oligarchy?

Posted by John Cassidy

From the Dept. of Academics Confirming Something You Already Suspected comes a new study concluding that rich people and organizations representing business interests have a powerful grip on U.S. government policy. After examining differences in public opinion across income groups on a wide variety of issues, the political scientists Martin Gilens, of Princeton, and Benjamin Page, of Northwestern, found that the preferences of rich people had a much bigger impact on subsequent policy decisions than the views of middle-income and poor Americans. Indeed, the opinions of lower-income groups, and the interest groups that represent them, appear to have little or no independent impact on policy.

“Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts,” Gilens and Page write:

Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened

That’s a big claim.

The Corruption of Mainstream Media

Sunday, 20 April 2014 09:35
By Danny Schechter, Consortium News | Op-Ed

The United States' mainstream media still pretend they are custodians of "serious journalism," but those claims continue to erode as the corporate press shies away from its duty to challenge propaganda emanating from various parts of the US government.

First the good news: The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was not only the best covered of its awards this year, but it recognized a series of disclosures that made many media outlets nervous, if not adversarial – the publication of National Security Agency secrets leaked by Edward Snowden.

The award recognized the reporting by the Guardian in England and also Bart Gellman’s work in the Washington Post even as they, did not recognize the work directly of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras whose independent reporting appeared in many newspapers.

You want a good internet economy with lots of jobs? Here’s How.

2014 April 18
by Ian Welsh

I’ve been blogging for a long time, and I was managing editor of both the Agonist, and FDL. While at both jobs, advertising income wasn’t my responsibility, except indirectly (I was responsible for traffic), I kept an oar in and an eye out.

Here’s the deal: advertising revenue collapsed. In particular it collapsed in 2007/8, and it kept collapsing. The reason it collapsed is that in the old days you sold your ads direct, or through brokers who offered good deals. As time went by, however, the percentage offered dropped and dropped and dropped. The brokers consolidated, and one broker took the lion’s share of the market: Google.

The reasons are simple enough: Google can offer the widest portfolio of websites to advertise on, and for all but the best branded websites, it determines more traffic than any single other factor. For people with no brand, it determines almost all the traffic.

Paul Krugman: No Time for Sargent

I’m a little late to this, but there’s lately been some buzz about the unearthing of Tom Sargent’s 2007 graduation speech, in which he briefly laid out 12 principles of economics. For the most part the speech is getting favorable attention. So let me be a spoilsport. It’s not so much that what Sargent said is wrong, although some of his principles are by no means universally agreed upon, even in normal times. What’s so striking about Sargent’s points is that it’s hard to think of a worse time to cite them. And the people citing that old speech clearly have ulterior motives.

So, about the not so time-dependent points: Sargent declared as a principle, “There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.” Well, every economist would agree that Cuban-type equality is bad for efficiency. But would reducing our current level of inequality reduce efficiency? That’s far from clear: there are a number of reasons to believe that high levels of inequality have adverse effects on economic growth – and evidence to that effect is coming not from fringe leftists but from places like the IMF.

Dean Baker: Economic Policy in a Post-Piketty World

Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, has done a remarkable job of focusing public attention on the growth of inequality in the last three decades and the risk that it will grow further in the decades ahead. Piketty’s basic point on this issue is almost too simple for economists to understand: if the rate of return on wealth (r) is greater than the rate of growth (g), then wealth is likely to become ever more concentrated.

This raises the obvious question of what can be done to offset this tendency towards rising inequality? Piketty’s answer is that we need a global wealth tax (GWT) to redistribute from the rich to everyone else. That is a reasonable solution if we’re just working out the arithmetic in this story, but don’t expect many politicians to be running on the GWT platform any time soon.

Paul Krugman: Sweden Turns Japanese

Three years ago Sweden was widely regarded as a role model in how to deal with a global crisis. The nation’s exports were hit hard by slumping world trade but snapped back; its well-regulated banks rode out the financial storm; its strong social insurance programs supported consumer demand; and unlike much of Europe, it still had its own currency, giving it much-needed flexibility. By mid-2010 output was surging, and unemployment was falling fast. Sweden, declared The Washington Post, was “the rock star of the recovery.”

Then the sadomonetarists moved in.

The story so far: In 2010 Sweden’s economy was doing much better than those of most other advanced countries. But unemployment was still high, and inflation was low. Nonetheless, the Riksbank — Sweden’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve — decided to start raising interest rates.

Study casts doubt on climate benefit of biofuels from corn residue

The fuel could generate more greenhouse gases than gasoline


Lincoln, Neb., April 20, 2014 -- Using corn crop residue to make ethanol and other biofuels reduces soil carbon and can generate more greenhouse gases than gasoline, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The findings by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln team of researchers cast doubt on whether corn residue can be used to meet federal mandates to ramp up ethanol production and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Paul Krugman Tells Bill Moyers That Inherited Wealth Is Destroying Our Country

By Bill Moyers

April 18, 2014 | In this clip, economist Paul Krugman tells Bill Moyers that America is on the road to becoming a society controlled not by self-made men or women, but by their offspring. “Those of you who talk about the 1 percent, you don’t really get what’s going on. You’re living in the past. You’re living in the ’80s. You think that Gordon Gekko is the future,” he says, referring to the character in Wall Street, who became a symbol of unrestrained greed.

“[R]ight now, what we’re really talking about is Gordon Gekko’s son or daughter. We’re talking about inherited wealth playing an ever-growing role,” he concludes. Watch the entire show to learn more about what the Nobel prize winning economist has to say about Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

The mentality of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI undergirds today’s surveillance state 

People forget that the FBI is the NSA's primary partner in domestic spying, which allows them to work in secret

Trevor Timm
theguardian.com, Saturday 19 April 2014 10.00 EDT

The new documentary 1971, about the formerly anonymous FBI burglars who exposed the crimes of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, debuted to a rapt audience at the Tribeca film festival last night. As the filmmakers noted in an interview with the AP, the parallels between Nixon-era FBI whistleblowers and Edward Snowden's NSA revelations are almost eerie in their similarity.

But while the NSA connection seems obvious, the movie will actually shed light on the domestic intelligence agency with far more power over ordinary Americans: the modern FBI.

Everyone seems to forget that the FBI is the NSA's primary partner in the latter's domestic spying operations and that, in fact, the NSA's job would be impossible without them. Whenever you see a company deny giving any data to the NSA remember: It's because it's not the NSA asking (or demanding) the information of them, it's the FBI. They use the same Patriot Act authorities that the NSA does, and yet we have almost no idea what they do with it.

Tech Companies Adopt Astroturf to Get Their (Wicked) Way

Sunday, 20 April 2014 00:00
By Toshio Meronek , Truthout | News Analysis

In 2013, the 10 biggest tech companies upped their spending on lobbying by 16 percent over the previous year. Companies like Amazon, Google and IBM spent far more than most pharmaceutical firms, the National Rifle Association, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, and others that we tend to associate with trying to control the conversation in Washington DC. And just like these other lobbiers, tech megacorps are casting a lot of their money toward causes that increase social and economic inequality, like pushing for cheaper labor and tax breaks for the richest of the rich.

To achieve these goals, tech corporations have begun embracing a strategy that is widely known as "astroturfing": Lobbying in a sneaky, roundabout fashion, by setting up their own faux-grassroots organizations. Executives at tech's largest companies, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft spend millions on lobbying indirectly through nonprofit groups that promote a grassroots image, but are in reality the tentacles of corporate interests that are just trying to forward their own agendas.

The Neoliberal Turn in American Health Care

by A.W. Gaffney

The failings of the Affordable Care Act are rooted in a long shift away from the idea of a truly universal health care.

Last year’s three-ring Congressional shutdown circus — for many little more than a desperate rearguard action by an isolated rightwing fringe to undo the fait accompli of Barack Obama’s health care reform — reinforced with each passing day the gaudy dysfunction of the American political system. But we miss something crucial if we construe the perseverance of Barack Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) as nothing more than the overdue victory of commonsense health care reform over an irrelevant and intransigent right, or, even more, as the glorious culmination of a progressive dream for American universal health care long deferred.

Wall Street deregulation pushed by Clinton advisers, documents reveal

Previously restricted papers reveal attempts to rush president to support act, later blamed for deepening banking crisis

theguardian.com, Saturday 19 April 2014 09.28 EDT

Wall Street deregulation, blamed for deepening the banking crisis, was aggressively pushed by advisers to Bill Clinton who have also been at the heart of current White House policy-making, according to newly disclosed documents from his presidential library.

The previously restricted papers reveal two separate attempts, in 1995 and 1997, to hurry Clinton into supporting a repeal of the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act and allow investment banks, insurers and retail banks to merge.

If the GOP's Obamacare Hissy Fit Seems Bad—You Won't Believe the Plot to Overthrow FDR

By Joshua Holland

April 18, 2014 | Every baby step toward guaranteeing American working people a minimum of economic security with new social insurance programs has been greeted with howls of horror and outrage — and predictions that the end of the Republic is near. Every new addition to the safety net has been met with a concerted campaign by conservatives and the business establishment to undermine it. Eighty years after it was signed into law, the Social Security Act, arguably Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s signature piece of legislation, still is under attack from the right.

Last week, historian Harvey J. Kaye told Bill Moyers [2] how FDR created a progressive generation that helped change American society in dramatic ways. Investigative journalist Sally Denton details a darker reality of that period in her 2011 book, FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right [3]. It was a time, she writes, in which radicals of various stripes questioned the viability of American democracy and a group of bankers went so far as to plot to overthrow the president.