Treasury Sez Banksters Are Lousy Neighbors Who Broke the Law
The Treasury Department gave Felix Salmon’s response to Crusader against Injustice Timmeh Geithner’s statement on foreclosures more attention than it gave mine–they emailed a response to Salmon’s questions about why foreclosures would hurt property values. And their response is even more telling than Crusader against Injustice Timmeh Geithner’s original statement.
First, at least 40 % of all homes in foreclosure are vacant. Delaying conveyance of title and resale has devastating impacts on neighborhood values and increases demand for municipal services.
Also, a blanket moratorium equally impacts the banks that are acting in accordance with the law increasing costs for servicers and investors. This threatens the safety and soundness of smaller community banks that are not part of the document problem and ultimately limits market liquidity preventing low and moderate income borrowers from refinancing or buying a house as investors are ever more hesitant to lend to all but the most pristine credit borrowers.
First, note this statement very closely: “a blanket moratorium equally impacts the banks that are acting in accordance with the law.” Treasury is arguing that a blanket foreclosure moratorium will also hurt banks that acted in accordance with the law. Necessarily meaning, of course, that Treasury believes that some banks acted in accordance with the law, but some didn’t.
The Treasury Department is logically stating that some banks–big ones–broke the law.
Last I checked, Treasury had a pretty big role to play in law enforcement (just ask the terrorists). So if Treasury is so certain big banks broke the law, has it made referrals to DOJ?
Also note this formulation:
First, at least 40 % of all homes in foreclosure are vacant. Delaying conveyance of title and resale has devastating impacts on neighborhood values and increases demand for municipal services.
At least 40% of homes in foreclosure are vacant. So up to 60%–a majority–are not. So Salmon’s point–that pushing more people into foreclosure will result in more empty homes–still stands, as foreclosures will have the result that up to 60% of foreclosures not already vacant will become vacant.
But that’s not the part I found most interesting. We’ve got to rush conveyance of the title and resale to protect property values of neighborhood properties and limit demands on municipal services. The conveyance of title I get; until the bank officially owns the property, it can’t do anything about maintaining a house. But resale? Is Treasury saying that until the property is sold, it won’t be cared for? That banksters don’t care for the properties they get in foreclosure? Banksters don’t mow the lawn? Don’t keep up the houses? Rely on municipalities to do what homeowners are obligated to do? I mean, yeah, I realize that is, in fact, the case. But why is Treasury simply observing this, and not haranguing the big banksters–the ones who Treasury apparently believes have broken the law–for free-loading on municipalities rather than paying for the things they, as property owners, are obligated to do?
And on top of the fact that an official statement from Treasury admits that banksters are lousy neighbors and broke the law, the entire premise is still flawed. Yes, for the 40%+ of houses that are vacant by foreclosure, postponing the ultimate sale of foreclosures will affect the property values of neighborhood properties. But until someone verifies that foreclosures have clean paperwork, up to and including the note, won’t foreclosures have an even more diminished value on the housing market? If that’s true, rushing more foreclosures onto the market without first ensuring that those foreclosures come with proper paperwork will have an even greater depressive effect on home values (or they should, if people were honest about what was going on).
Finally, note the implicit endorsement. We’ve got to continue to let community banks operate normally so we don’t penalize the banks that played by the rules. Okay, finally something I’m very sympathetic with! But if Treasury knows that the big banks broke the law and the community banks have played by the rules, then why are we spending so much money bailing out the criminal banks? Why not just reward the community banks for doing it right?
The clock is ticking on Geithner…America has found its tar-baby for all that ills US financially, and it’s the Banksters.
He’s not doing anything of substance, imvho, because he knows he’s a goner after the mid-terms.
Well that would be way too much like the natural operation of free-market capitalism wouldn’t it?
That would be creative destruction, the natural selection of the fittest businesses to survive and the weakest to perish.
That would be evidence of the ‘Hidden Hand’ which corrects all the ‘mistakes’ in our economic system without the clumsy intervention of government regulation.
In short, that would be too good to be true.
Yeah, it would be free, you’re right, unlike the rigged market we’ve got now. If our economy was a slot machine, not a even a blind drunk would waste a nickel on it.
BTW, slight correction to your formulation of Darwin’s law. You’re confusing the 19th-century use of fitness with ours, as evident by contrasting it with weakness. That would lead one to Social Darwinism, careful with that, amigo.
It’s fitness as in ‘best fit,’ ‘best match,’ ‘most functionally symmetric over the longest time.’ I once heard evolution described, at its most basic, as survival of the stable. That, as you can see, is different from survival of the most kinetically powerful.
Banks that are acting in accordance with the law ought to be the ones screaming the loudest to get Treasury to go after the banks that are not.
This suggests what might be a good first step under a blanket moratorium: distinguishing banks with sound document practices from those with questionable practices. Does the bank have sufficient personnel to handle the volume of paperwork needed to service and handle their bank’s loan portfolio? Is there proper training of these folks? Is there (at least on paper) proper oversight?
I’m guessing that for many of the TBTF banks, even meeting these simple hurdles would be tough.
Isn’t this essentially what the “stress tests” were supposed to do?
The problem seems to be that the stress tests were rigged to make sure the TBTF banks passed.
Bob in AZ
Exactly, and now we’ve got banks that are affronts to the laws of nature, that aren’t actually touching the ground. IOW, they’re insolvent, yet the skyhook of government backstopping keeps them afloat. Deus ex machina anyone?
Is our political economy in the hands of freakin’ cartoonists, or what?
Riddle me this, o wise firedogs: What do we call it when we keep doing the same thing, no matter what the outcome? No, not insanity, that’s too psychiatric.
It’s our beliefs, our worldview, our mythos, our most basic ideas about how the cosmos is composed, how it functions, and what that means for the proper human role in it. For example, for US, war is just what we do. It’s so unexamined, we don’t recognize it for what it is: human sacrifice on an industrial scale to manufacture the fear of the US god in everyone on earth.
We’re not going to arrive at any fundamental solutions until we start addressing the problems where they arise. Our problems today, I dare say, aren’t merely technological or psychological, they result from our way of forming the way we see things.
Seeing the world through the eyes of Western science is like looking through a windshield so infinitely cracked, it’s got more dividing lines than open space.
Is our political discourse about the lines, about who threw the rock and how to name and survey the boundaries, finally valorizing one narrow view over all others? Or about seeing our way out of this auto-generated hellscape?
The problem facing us is a spiritual one . The fact is that without a paradigm shift the greatest problems facing our species will go unaddressed .
Word, there’s just no technological or even magical solution — no wand to wave, no potion to take, no incantation to rehearse, or even (gasp!) political party to elect, and so on, to absolve us from doing the very human work of improvising human solutions to our human problems.
AAMOF, I often think this Newtonian hangover, of the cosmos as a mechanism, has a lot to do with apathetic American voters. We’ve got the finest electoral machine in the history of the universe, we’re led to believe from early infancy, and we’re conditioned to get in, pull the right lever (or lose your house, or job, or life) every once in a while, then shut up and strap in, we’re getting taken for a ride.
So we’ve sat back and been driven Straight To Hell.
BTW, on this subject, it’s instructive to note that we’ve driven many of our “subjects” in our black site experiments clinically insane. So now we can’t try try, nor can we release them. Voila! Indefinite detention, our gov’t’s way of making life a living hell for the ultimate “sinners.”
Just as laboratory animals are subjected to huge doses and levels of treatments, to induce the pathology of interest, aren’t we, too, being driven nucking futs by our own erstwhile public servants?
This is is getting increasingly ridiculous. I can’t believe they think that they can stop this avalanche. The ‘reason’ they don’t want a foreclosure moritorium is because doing it without hurting banks who obeyed the law would require them to acknowledge that they know which banks broke the law.
They don’t want to do that because it would then become explicit, for everyone to see, that the crooked banks are the ones really in charge.
They don’t actually have compassion for the law-abiding banks and their communities, though they want it to look that way. They don’t want to expose the game, especially right before an election. They need to continue the scam to stay in power. After the election, they’ll find a way to paper over the problem and save their bosses.
Jester, you’ve been reading ahead of the rest of the class, what suppose we just address chapter three when we come to it ok?
snark
I’ve been reading ahead, all right. I’ve been reading everywhere.
These criminal banks have been committing fraud on everyone, from the people they convinced to buy more home than they could afford to the investors who bought securities based on trusts that held no notes, because the note couldn’t be assigned to a tranche until it was paid off, refinanced, or foreclosed.
They committed frauds on each other, which is what seized up the credit market, but the government can’t acknowledge that either. The banks are committing fraud now to cover up the fraud they committed at the beginning and along the way.
The only hope now is that now they are committing a fraud on the courts and only some of the judges are in on it. There are honest judges and state AG’s becoming aware of the true nature of the problem and some of them are offended by the stench.
Also, the big investors are starting to bring suit, as they should.
I think that may be our (we the peoples’) best road through this mess.
It seems clear to me that, at the federal level, we will get nothing but Carnival about the banksters. We will get a showy, flashy parade, but nothing will actually be accomplished.
Therefore, the way through this mess will likely occur at the state level, with the honest state Attorneys General, and the not-so-honest Attorneys General who jump on the bandwagon.
If we have a small bit of luck, the state AGs will start a game of one-upmanship between each other, trying to see who can stick it to the banksters more. Regional, state, and local banks that did business properly will probably benefit if the big banksters suffer a smackdown, and moving money to a regional/state/local level is a good thing IMO.
“After the election, they’ll find a way to paper over the problem and save their bosses.”
Ding! And that will likely involve kicking the can to 2013, or making taxpayers continue a slow-motion bailout of, say, $5 per taxpayer per month for the next umpteen years. And the umpteen years, in the end, will never end. The can will continue to get kicked because that bailout cash is just too sweet. ¥€$ we can!
Unfortunately, this is a nightmare for Obama…who colluded with these banks. I can just hear those tea baggers now…(who were against that bailout!).
I don’t give a damn about Obama’s nightmares. His inability to enforce the laws of this country is what’s causing them. He could change them for justice and righteousness any time he wanted. The fact that he hasn’t probably means he’s sleeping just fine.
And just why are they vacant? Did the owners move out and move on believing that the banks were going to rob them of the homes no matter what? Would they have stayed in their homes if the banks had been honest and re-negotiated? Would the neighbourhood values not have been reduced if the banks had been honest with their clients?
Let’s have some facts Timmeh!
EW, when you say:
You got it partly wrong in at least two ways.
First, I’d be willing to bet that the mortgage/note documents have buried in them somewhere a provision that the bank can step in and demand that the homeowner maintain the property (in the interest of preserving the value of the collateral) and that if the homeowner does not, then the bank can step in and do it. That the banks aren’t doing that is likely the result of three or so things:
Moreover, as an expansion on my comments yesterday about legal and equitable title and about the power of the equity courts to fashion a remedy, one needs to remember there is a part of equity jurisprudence that recognizes and rewards people who, having an equitable interest in property, undertake to maintain the value of that property until a dispute over that property is resolved.
To put it in its simplest form, consider the situation of three feuding siblings who jointly own a house. None of them owns the house outright. As a function of their owning the house, though, they all have an equitable interest in the property. Assume the contour of their dispute devolves to all of them pouting and refusing to cooperate with each other. The property needs maintenance else it will lose value. If two of them remain in their snit and refuse to do anything to maintain the property and one goes ahead and spends his own money on maintaining the property, if/when the time comes for the courts to get involved in resolving their issues and the sale of the property, the Court will give a credit to the sibling who undertook to spend money, maintain the property and its value. The responsible sibling will get back the money he put into the property, out of the shares of his snitty irresponsible siblings.
I tried (and won) a case like that about 15 years ago – a full blown (non-jury) trial and both sides producing Home Depot receipts for everything, down to one for $6.61 for frickin’ bannister parts.
There is no reason for any bank – which has to have an equitable interest in the property to foreclose in the first place – to believe it would not get its money back out of maintaining the properties its foreclosing on, particularly the vacant ones, because the courts would be (very much) inclined to reward that kind of responsible behavior. Of course, being responsible means the bank has to pony up its own cash and get it back later, which would doubtless hurt like needles under the banksters’ fingernails and make banks being responsible an event unlikely to occur.
Doesn’t that assume you’re going to be in a court where a judge will spend enough time to look at bannister receipts.
Until about 2 days ago, the banksters were sure they’d never be in such a court.
They’ll look. Bank comes in and presents a list of stuff they did and how much it cost and the judge will look.
Of course, it means the judges will actually have to work instead of whipping out a rubber stamp, but they should have to do something for their nice salaries and pensions, no?
For banks, homes they own outright through foreclosure are non-producing assets on their books. They have some value, but produce no income — indeed, until they are sold, they suck income and they likely lose value.
Back when the housing market was functional, banks could easily turn these homes around with minimal time lags. Thus, they didn’t have to worry about much more than mowing the lawns. Now, however, they hold so damn much property for such long periods of time that they need to have property managers to handle it (either in-house or contracted out), and many banks don’t want to add that expense to the costs of holding these properties if they can get away with not doing so.
Hiring a property manager is yet another expense, and an admission that the banks’ dreams of the market righting itself quickly are an illusion. For too many banks, I suspect that when a midlevel manager tries to address this, it doesn’t go well:
Which is why I said:
I have few illusions about the relation of bankers and common sense – they don’t go together. What we need are judges who will take it out on the bankers for not exercising common sense to preserve value.
Not to mention that curb appeal will affect sale price– if buyers actually take the time to inspect the property.
Just like there developed a market for pooled mortgages, there is now a market for pooled houses in foreclosure: Some companies will buy them up in bunches, at discounted prices, with a business plan for turning them into marketable assets (such as rentals).
Bob in AZ
Renters: “””Shudder”””
Tenants have rights. Some tenants know tenants rights better than attorneys. Those are the tenants to fear.
Selling a tenant oocupied house? Pain in the ass. Hard to show. Hard to get the tenants to cooperate.
The banks don’t want the liability that come with tenants, either.
Rentiers — shudder harder!
Get real freakin’ jobs, rentiers, stop living off the backs of the people who pay your bloated incomes.
And another thing! It’s odd that landlords often show such disdain for the people without whom they wouldn’t be able to lord their land (however it was obtained, by hook or by crook; see also Israel-Palestine) over anyone but themselves, and lord knows there’s no profit in self-dealing, right?
At least, there’s not supposed to be, but then there’s the self-consuming snake we call the Treasury and Fed, of which mythical monster no one, not even those in its belly, can tell head from tail.
And y’all thought mythology pertained only to past events in past places by passed superhumans.
It’s the best humanly possibly way to comprehend and stand within, at the ever moving immovable spot “where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of Life, to get the feel of Life, from jazz and cocktails,” as Johnny Hartman sings to the ethereal sounds of Coltrane’s sax, and be the eternal dancer from within.
Maybe we need to dance our way outta hell, instead of fight? Just sayin’.
Your scenario assumes the property has sufficient value to repay the maintaining bank. Chances are the property is so far under water the bank will not get its principal returned let alone maintenance costs. That’s why it is better to let occupied houses remain occupied. The bank isn’t going to collect anything (or extremely little) on a deficiency judgment. The only sensible thing is for the banks to bite the bullet and take the loss. Trouble is bankers aren’t sensible. They refuse to take losses until reality bites them in the ass.
To the bank, the key thing to remember is this: it’s not officially a loss until they sell the property.
They can still try to carry the property on their books at the value of the earlier mortgage, but you and I and they all know it would not sell at that value in today’s market.
If they sell it fast, they minimize the costs of maintaining it and are able to clear it off their books as a non-performing asset, but they have to immediately take the hit for the actual loss in value.
If they hold it, they can avoid re-valuing the property in their portfolio calculations (to a certain degree), but face choices about maintenance. They can try to maintain the property (thus incurring costs but preserving value), or they can let it slide and pray that the value doesn’t fall too much. This kicks the actual loss problem down the road, during which time the bank also prays that the market will recover and they’ll get something closer to their original price for it at sale.
Pay the piper now, or bet that things will improve in the market faster than that house will deteriorate? Most banks seem to be going with the latter option.
The simple solution would be for the banks to leave the houses occupied and have the delinquent owners maintain the property in lieu of mortgage payments. Win-win. Just a variant of Right-to-Rent. What seems not to be stressed enough is that the vast majority of delinquent mortgagees DON’T want to be deadbeats and try their damnedest to pay.
Ah Scribe, who knows much!
A little detail that has escaped you eye…
When a Bank lists a REO (foreclosed or Bank Owned) house the bank asks (demands) the listing agent reach into the listing agent’s pocket and maintain the house, subject to reimbursement for expenses on sale.
This needs phones ringing off the hooks at the WH and Reps offices too.
“but the most pristine credit borrowers.”
or the most pristine clear titles. The chopped mortgages aren’t only the ones in foreclosure but quite a few ticking time bombs in performing chopped mortgages. When people, in the future, try to sell their house or present a satisfied mortgage note they will have to untangle a can of worms.
Ew, you buried the lead sweetheart.
Or you need to turn this into an additional post.
Basically, he’s saying that the community banks who played by the rules are being used as hostages so the big banks can escape?
Like the community bank is a child with a gun to it’s head heald in front of a big bank who says “the first copper who makes a move to try to stop me from escaping, and the kid gets it in the head”
Oh, this is rich. Fine, temprarily exempt all the community banks from the blanket moratorium, and review their practices individually.
You are talking about a small fraction of the the total active foreclsoures and defaults.
Rather than saying “limit the foreclosure moratorium to the non-community banks”, why not exempt from the moratorium those banks (and/or mortgages) which were not run through the securitization scheme. The local community banks which loaned in their community and kept the loan in-house ought to be rewarded for their probity (by getting to keep their right to foreclose if necessary), and the clowns who got into the slice, dice and swap securitization schemes should be the ones penalized (by not being able to foreclose).
Not that it will make much difference, because I suspect (A) those banks that kept their loans in-house instead of securitizing them are few and far between and (B) there aren’t that many defaults on loans like that b/c the bankers making them used responsible underwriting criteria to make the loans in the first place.
Nice. Call their bluff. At the same time, calling out Geithner’s lies.
Here’s a great comment by klhoughton at 3:07 pm Oct. 13 under the Felix Salmon diary that EW linked to:
The commenter prefaced that hilarious ending with a multi-graf logical syllogism. Worth checking out.
Bottom line, Geithner is a lying weasel, or he’s just painfully stupid.
@23 was a reply to Cynthia @20
waxpeac:
I found this paper yesterday and think, if you haven’t already seen it, it may be of assistance to you:
beautiful abstract. when I visit papers(dot)ssrn(dot)com I do not see an option to download the full article. What am I missing?
I couldn’t figure that out either. But if you look about an inch down from the top centered there is a blue one-click download link.
thanks, but I think the one-click only gives the abstract. Also, delivers file in .CFM format, which is Cold Fusion Markup language, requires a separate player. maybe later ….
OT? JPMorgan (JPM) was off 2% at 10:30 (down over one dollar).
Wells Fargo (WFC) was down over 4% (down about a dollar) at 10:45.
More excuses and finger-pointing from the banks about hiring Burger King kids to service mortgages. Mostly just propaganda concealing blatant criminality. One key factoid: JPM is now claiming it stopped using MERS two years ago, some time in 2008.
Actually I’ve talked to my community employee owned bank, and they are actually fine with a moratorium on foreclosures, even if it would effect their own ability to foreclose.
They actually don’t have too bad a problem with mortgages, and for them foreclosure is something they practically have to be forced by the property owner to do.
They are actually hurt by foreclosures done by large and unscrupulous mortgage companies and outside banks, in their community, which hurt their deposit holders and investments, which are largely in the same community.
Fractal @ 26
You’re failing to notice the “One-Click Download” option at the top! Click it, and the paper will open in your default pdf application.
wavpeac: sorry I misspelled your name, and if you missed it, go to my prior comment 24 for the abstract of a paper about the servicers’ habit of padding with bogus fees.
Thanks…validating. Certainly the complaints online in regard to this are many. I understand, also, that suing someone to get out of the protection of bankruptcy is a common way to run up the fees. This happened to lots of other people besides me. It’s a ruse, to haul me in to court. Some folks are so demoralized they don’t fight it, and lose protection and then the bank forecloses on the house. In other cases, they just put the fees on the end of the loan like they did in my case. All the lawyers knew they would do this, but fighting them back in 2006 was risky. (I think because the Republicans had the courts, and A.G’s all tied up).
Hmmm waxpeac…that has a ring to it…wax peace, wax war, wax peace,….
It is better to let 10 banks illegally foreclose on a home, then to block 1 from legally…
In European cities ,Germany for instance or the case of Christiana in Denmark , alternatives expressed themselves by squattering vacant buildings, houses and in the aforementioned case of Christiana, an abandoned military base and set up communes in them .
Seems like a good way to bring attention to the issue get some free press and provide housing to the homeless and dispossessed !
Here’s a youtube video of Christiania .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuF-3lPo3b8&feature=related
Report criticizes TARP contracts to Fannie and Freddie – 11 hours ago
The report by the congressional panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), said that the $437 million in Treasury contracts to Fannie Mae, …
WASHINGTON | Thu Oct 14, 2010 6:49am EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Treasury Department has relied heavily on private companies and troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to manage the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, a report released on Thursday said.
The report by the congressional panel overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), said that the $437 million in Treasury contracts to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and private companies to manage critical aspects of the bailout program raised a number of concerns about public oversight and conflicts of interest.
“Treasury may be less likely to expedite meaningful reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when it has employed them for combined arrangements of $240.5 million and when these firms agreed to provide their services at cost, receiving no profit from the deals,” the report said.
When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed under government conservatorship in late 2008, officials blamed poor credit choices and bad risk management for their losses.
The Treasury contracts to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to manage the Treasury Department’s foreclosure mitigation program have problems, the report said.
“Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a history of profound corporate mismanagement,” it said. “Further, both companies have fallen short in aspects of their performance, as Fannie Mae recently made a significant data error in reporting on mortgage redefaults and Freddie Mac has had difficulty meeting its assigned deadlines.”
pataphysician’s comment @32
needs to be underlined twice in red.
– treasury has made an argument.
– it is the argument treasury sec gaithner has made in one form or another since he took office – don’t mess with the workings of big banks.
– as set out, the successfulness of this argument hinges on our feelings of fairness to banks who have behaved fa
properly (“community” banks here).
– this is just a play on our emotions (and jist for endless dumb-assed teevee serious-stuff talk shows).
– the real question: who and how many banks are being/will be actually harmed by NOT continuing geithner’s beloved status quo?
imaginative treasury policy:
invite all dispossessed homeowners who so choose to re-occupy their houses free in return for custodial care
until each unsold foreclosure is examined and re-certified as legally compliant.
Some mistakenly assume that filing for bankruptcy means they will lose their home. While this is possible, many states allow homeowners to keep their homes under certain exemptions. For instance, in the state of New York, homeowners can keep the first $10,000 of their home’s equity. If the individual has more than $10,000 in equity, the property would have to be sold, but if the equity is less than $10,000, it cannot be touched. Many homeowners do lose their homes in the bankruptcy process, but it is not a guarantee.
Chapter 13 Bankruptcy
Why? Because the community banks aren’t the ones shoveling shit-loads of money at the politicians.
In case this hasn’t been posted yet:
“Where’s The Note?; Did the big banks lose your mortgage?”
Greenwald provides a perfect example of my point (The Wars on Drugs and Terror: mirror images)::
Two bogus holy wars, one underlying myth: of the cosmos as the creation, and thus private property, of a cosmic tyrant-engineer, imaged as an angry father, he who brought us into the world and just might delight in taking us out. For our own good, to preserve us from the hell he’s got in store for us, of course.
Why are we so effed in the head? Is it the fluoride in the water? No no no, no! Is it teh scawy Muslims? No no no, no! It’s the mythology! (h/t Nat E. Dred)
All I’m saying is that we need to look up past APA-style psychology, to the field from which our psyches arise, to properly understand our “human, all too human” craziness. Reducing us to mechanisms is so last century.
Community banks are forced to work through the big banks. Is there a reason to assume that they have not taken the same actions as their mentors?
Dunno ’bout that, but my local bank has been acquiring other local failed banks. So I’d say some have been more lemming-like than others. Broad strokes and fine ones, as the masters would say, eh?
I contend however that the wisdom traditions of the West contain the truth but concede that it is so buried in myth that it is exceedingly difficult to ferret out , a problem which by and large Buddhism is unencumbered by.
Here’s an example , if you’ll permit me .
Jesus said , all the prophets can be summed up in two ideas ,”love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself” .
In the Mahayana , the Arhat (Hinayana) , having freed himself from attachments enters back upon the wheel of birth and death for the sake of all beings .
I contend this is the same idea .
We’re nearly singing the same tune, freeman. It’s not myth that hides myth from us, it’s that veiling function we call religion.
The denotations (having a good credit score, having a McMansion and vacationing in all the right places, or number of drone rockets fired and “militants” killed), have come to overshadow the connotations (pursuing happiness, promoting the general welfare, forming a more perfect union, and all that).
Jung once said, a religion is that which insulates and protects the human psyche from mind-blowing realizations. It takes at least a small measure of ignorance, for me to sit here and pretend that doing this to a wireless keyboard is a meaningful act.
In films, we know it as the suspension of disbelief. If we weren’t able to suspend disbelief at the crazy things we do on a routine basis, we wouldn’t be able to do things like drive at 70 plus on crowded freeways, at one level.
That’s the veiling, screening, insulating power of maya, the projective power of the sensaround cinema of our minds’s eyes. It’s the power that blinds us, for example, when we go looking for things we have in our hands. On other levels, there are truths we dare not admit even to ourselves. That’s what I’m on about.
In psychobabble, we call it “target-image interference.” An epiphany is the shattering or cleansing of the screen on which we project our worldview.
The religious function is only one of four major functions of myth.
A) Awakening the human psyche to the tremendous mystery of being aware of our own role in our own becoming. Like putting mirrors together, it is thus we have multidimensional awareness.
B) Describing the order of the cosmos. How was the earth made? What is the sequence of the greatest patterns? How does nature behave?
C) Maintaining a particular social order at a particular place during a particular time. This is religion. Note that it’s indistinguishable from a country club.
D) Guiding us humans through the grave and constant events of a human life, and on through into death with grace and dignity.
In light of these, you can see why I don’t think let’s say, oh Bill Maher, among other zealous atheist fundamentalists, has a fucking clue what he’s talking about on this subject.
My 10 year old son (who today is 24 and affectionately referred to as “the Budda”) once said of religion…”religion was created for people who cannot handle the fact that loved ones die and bad things happen”.
How awesome is that! I love kids. Basho, the 17th-century Zen poet who brought haiku to its modern formless form, taught that one should best learn poetry from someone about 3 feet tall.
IOW, religions, like dogmas of all sorts, such as the oh so unquestionable dogma that we’re all just a bunch of lifeless, soulless Newtonian automata, just so many atomized consumers, workers, voters, taxpayers — anything but self-sovereign citizens (no ref to the legalistic tax-evading trick of declaring yourself a country of one, but to the fundamental unit of our political economy), are for people who can’t handle, or at least haven’t yet experienced, the truth for themselves.
Poor lost souls, wandering around Eden as if in Hell itself, making life worse for one and all along the way. They’re just going on what they think they heard someone in authority once say, and competing with others to ape it best. Busting their self-deluding myths is at one and the same time cruel and kind.
That’s what Thomas Mann meant by erotic irony. In Mann’s aesthetic, the true author anoints the tips of barbed words with the healing virtues of the balm of compassion.
Shorter Mann: Erotic irony is da balm!
etc. etc. ad nauseum.
I don’t appreciate your attempts to hijack discussion of a good post to serve your own agenda.
Bob in AZ
Oh, pardon me, it looks like there’s something about my comments you don’t get. Maybe I can explain myself further.
Is it the know? I assume you know what know means. Same goes for u. So it appears you don’t get the buddha, do you?
O brother, my Brother, if you can’t see that I’m relating damn near every comment back to the topic at hand (ie, modern day self-appointed robber barons are robbing us blind, to tunes of mythic proportions, and it’s by the weaponized power of myth, those systems of beliefs that shape the world stage long before we take it), then words fail me. But don’t worry, I’ll have another power surge again soon.
Hijack? No, not hijack, this is how artists jam together. What, we can’t do multiple lines in the same thread?
I’ll cop to this agenda: to form a more perfect, as opposed to infinitely crackered, union.
Please, Brother Bob, just because you’ve probably never heard words like these in a thread like this doesn’t mean they are essentially discordant. How many other living Zen poets do you know, not counting me?
Doesn’t hijacking infer unwilling participation?
And an overwhelming use of force, I’d think. But really, who needs to understand that from whence we arise, in seeking to solve our most dire problems, when we can just jawbone (of an ass, even) each other to death?
Riddle me this, o brother, my Brother Bob in AZ: how do words work? Fear not, I wouldn’t ask if I couldn’t explain it.
If we don’t understand this most rudimentary technology (yes, language is a technology), how are we to rectify those TBTF edifices we construct with it? Where do our ideas come from, and what’s that got to do with repeating our past mistakes anew every freakin’ generation?
What beliefs do we hold so dear we never examine them or their effects, and what’s that got to do with that giant crashing sound, our economy falling back to earth even as the planet is rejecting us, we hear day and night?
I don’t need the entire bandwith of this thread to consider these questions with like-minded adults, or your explicit permission, do I, Brother Bob in AZ?
Must say that for someone who is claiming to not be derailing the thread, these past couple of comments have had nothing to do with the thread topic and sure seem designed to derail the thread.
As always, YMMV
BTW, I mean that as a rhetorical question, no explicit reply expected. Let’s not hijack the thread with this side discussion, shall we? Besides, every time I check, I expect it to have died out. So “sue me if I play too long. This brother is free. I’ll be what I want to be….”
Without getting in anyone’s prosaic way, I might add. ; }
I’d better bow out now.
I bow in all y’all’s virtual directions (btw, it’s easy, when you know we’re all one from within: you just bow in a circle; or, if immobile, just kick back in the knowledge that that which bows, bows to itself).
Indeed, there IS a disconnection between that is what is said and that what is what is HEARD….or that which is written and that which is understood.
Thanks, BobS.
EW, it’s taken me well over an hour to catch up on your foreclosure-related posts this week, and I’ve no idea whether this comment will be of interest to you or anyone else, but here goes…
In 2000, “The Mystery of Capitalism: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else” was authored by Hernando de Soto. Now, I happen to be interested in writing of all kinds: computer codes, alphabets, syllabaries, pictographic systems, yaddaYadda… so this book captured my interest in part because he argues that the process of writing, the process of recording written documents, of re-presenting information, of identifying (then abstracting and recording) information is the fundamental understory of capitalism.
I think his insights are intriguing, and they make quite a lot of sense to me. Although as near as I can tell, a lot of right-wingers and neoliberals went gaga over this book, which tends to raise my alarm bells (because in my view their economic assumptions are daft).
I also agree with de Soto’s view that a **LEGAL SYSTEM** arose to define, specify, protect the ‘assets’ that were created (essentially by the act of writing clear, specific descriptions to create ‘assets’, and these re-presentations (‘documents’) were then archived administratively — and by that process of being archived, were legally sanctioned — in banks, businesses, and recording offices.
But if you don’t have properly recorded, described, documented ‘assets’, then you don’t have capitalism. It no longer exists.
Who killed capitalism? The hedge funds. The big banks. The Carlyle Group. The politicians who removed oversight from derivatives markets. Former Sen. Gramm of Texas. The Enron mark-to-market bogus accounting tricks.
How is it that the very people who claimed to oversee a capitalist system, which is premised on the actions and processes involved in writing, recording, archiving, could have failed to uphold the **processes and procedures** that ‘are’ capitalism?
Because capitalism isn’t just a boat in a harbor.
It’s the set of social relationships, the documented description of that boat (who ‘owns’ it, what it is made of, its size, etc, etc) that are the fundamental undergirding of capitalism.
Yet we read of banks that forge documents in order to hide the fact that the original loans were b.s. based on inflated prices that couldn’t meet Federal standards.
That’s radically anti-capitalist.
I think the big bank-small bank hullaballoo is a sideshow and a distraction.
The scale of the criminal activity is horrifying.
The fact that any bank, of any size, would even claim the moniker ‘bank’, yet fail to engage in the activities related to reading, writing, re-presenting, recording, archiving, etc, etc, that underlie capitalism is like watching a cannibal feed on itself.
Stupifying.
But it does underscore your point: why would the big banks be aided? Why, of all the players in this mess, would the least economically responsible parties be given the Golden TARP Money?
I can only assume that the clowns so busy ‘securitizing’ thought that they were taking de Soto’s findings to a whole new level, that they were somehow ‘creating’ new capital because they could slice-and-dice the mortgage pools with yet another complex algorithm. These were Sorcerer’s Apprentices.
The wealth they sought to create, they actually destroyed.
I think you’ve highlighted an important facet of this problem that in the end will lead to its resolution.
Capitalisms penchant for creating with the pen, is countered by the Law, which is rooted in reading, (remember that until recently the path to becoming a lawyer was called “Reading the Law”)
In light of what you’ve described, and the situation we’re facing, I’d offer up this tidbit I found while reading;
It’s California law pertaining to CDOs based on real estate.
From Wikipedia on CDOs
The ability to create with a pen must be limited by rules suficient to prevent the ‘creators’ from writing the illusion that what is ours is theirs, because human nature is such that eventually that is what they will do if left to their own devices.
The fact that California law-makers had the foresight to create this rule means that they’d seen enough of the machinations of the financial ‘writers’ to know this was a possiblity that had to be countered.
Thank you, Watt4Bob. I think you well describe a phenomenon that occurs when people no longer think clearly enough, nor have the mental toughness, to care about whether they are accurately describing and re-presenting reality. “If I can write it, then it must be real” seems to have been the sinkhole into which these fools stumbled and hauled the rest of us.
wavpeac, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve thought of you the past week or two reading around the web and particularly Yves’s excellent NakedCapitalism. In my mind’s eye, you must surely wear a superwoman cape! My personal ‘hook’ for much of this was the extremely unnerving, despicable experience of identity fraud some years ago; it’s truly an experience of finding yourself ‘DownTheRabbitHole’, as it were. That was horrendous enough; the idea that you’ve had to fight these fiends for your house is just mind-boggling to read about. Honestly, I couldn’t even get my head around some of your comments, but you are surely being vindicated in a breathtaking fashion.
Be well.
When you are unattached to things, your own suffering and outcomes yet continue to act ( the lesson of the Gita ) then you are an unstoppable force of nature .
Om ah hum vajra guru
padma siddhi hum
Sleeper awake !!!
“Bodhisattva, bodhisattva, won’t you take me by the hand?” I would, but there’s no one here to hand you a hand, you’ll have to hand yourself. ; ]
That word is very instructive. It means, literally, ‘one whose essence of being is that of the light of knowledge.” So, just as in the wave-particle duality theory, we are both photons, and endlessly self-propagating waves. Just depends on your time-space scale. Cool, huh?
Which makes me wonder, what is the sound of one hand handing oneself?
DADT! Furthermore, I don’t wanna know. Never was ignorance more blissful. (See above r/t the veiling power of maya. ; )
Maybe my perspective is wrong not to mention my common knowledge, but what about the property tax issue? From what I understand property taxes can be put on the tab for up to four years and sometimes five depending on the state or municipality. This, I’m assuming knocks the hell out of state and local cash flow. There seems to be no discussion on this issue considering the importance of maintaining essential services.
This is also one of the scams that I have read, often complained about on the complaint web sites for mortgages. They will not pay the taxes per the escrow agreement. The mortgage servicer lets the debt on the tax rise…by the time the client is served by the state, the house is being auctioned. The mortgage company gets the notifications until the debt gets very high. Then the client is left trying to prove that the bank was supposed to be paying it. From my understanding, this was more complex than time would allow. Some folks lost their homes to this “procedure”.
Let’s Not Start Lionizing the Real Foreclosure Fraud Deadbeats – the Banks
By: David Dayen Thursday October 14, 2010 6:15 am -FDL
Posts @23,25 and #27 may be of interest.
EW, Kudos to your insightful contributions to exposing foreclosuregate. I tend to agree with your sentiment that the Obama administration, i.e. Treasury, is not doing many of the things they should be doing. Two howevers though.
I’ve concluded the debate over the national moratorium is a useful distraction that is obfuscating the real fraud that has taken place by sucking oxygen from the news coverage. It tends to frame the debate in a way in which casual observers immediately assume their ideological positions, well before knowing practically anything about what is going on. I.e., “lefties want a federal government-imposed solution so that deadbeat homeowners can keep their home without paying for it just because the bank screwed up some paperwork.” This BS takes hold before the MSM can explain the issue is one of fraud perpetuated by the banks long before any deadbeat homeowner went into default.
Secondly, I believe a question just as interesting as “How is Obama going to handle the banks on this one?” is “How is the battle between state attorneys general and the banks going to play out?” After all, the state and county courts have jurisdiction over these property right disputes; the federal government regulates the banks, but Holder’s DOJ is not the primary party with whom the banks are going to be doing legal battle. Would be very interested in your thoughts on how the A’sG vs. the banks battle is going to play out.
I agree. There are many players in this game whose ox may be gored, and they’re all going to be suing each other– except for the homeowners, unless someone finds standing for a class action lawsuit. At least these various players will be using *the law,* so that those who committed fraud should be the ones holding the short stick in the end. One can only hope.
Bob in AZ
namaste
jesus,
what a metaphysical midden.
Anyone else starting to worry that the Congressional response is going to be to find a way to retroactively legalize all the MERS title follies? If they systemically fix that root fraud, then much of the rest of the damnably interrelated network of problems heals itself. The notarization-recognition bill would have done the trick, don’t forget, and very very nearly became law; surely that won’t be the Banksters’ last and best shot at recapturing their Paradise Nearly Lost. So I guess I’m seeing all the time and talk being spent on the foreclosure moratorium concept as potentially just buying time for new bills to be written to legalize MERS, reaching back into the past. Wouldn’t exactly be our first retroactive legalization experience, now would it?
It has been surreal to live it. To literally see your mortgage statement change before your eyes, with added fees that you cannot control. To have them not answer your phone calls or faxes. To talk to lawyer after lawyer who clearly fears that they cannot win a fair fight with these corporations. And most of all, the utter silence when those of us living with these bullies in our homes would speak. You must have done something wrong? Banks don’t want your house. Just file a complaint with the FDIC. Just file with your state A.G? Just file chapter 13 bankruptcy? Just give up your home? If it’s on the statement you must owe that money.
Surreal. It’s not hard for me to imagine that this thievery is happening in every area of our lives…right down to the elections.
And…I must add that I have been very cynical about the idea that any American might have been behind Sept 11th. But I have to tell you, the arms of this shadow government have been long enough and powerful enough to silence millions of us, as we lost our homes. It’s not hard for me to imagine that they could bully many others in to believing an alternate reality or that they have people in power who could pull off the illusion. We’ve all been living this illusion. The illusion of free elections. The illusion that Obama could change anything. The illusion that we have power over this mess.
We cannot change what we don’t accept.
Fascinating conversation. Thank you all.
Just for the sake of the record, the MERS entry in Wikipedia is pretty interesting.