When the president does it, that means it's not illegal. - Richard M. Nixon
One of the great things about being one of our masters of the universe is the rule of law doesn't apply to you. If you'r master of the universe, by definition you are the law. It's also really helpful when those supposedly in charge of upholding the law adopt a policy of accommodation. If you can get away with ignoring the law, especially if you made a profit in so doing, it's justified. The past is the past is now official policy for our political class, whether it's holding accountable those who actively misled the country to war or for those who collapsed the financial system and everything in between. However, the growing foreclosure fiasco may make clear to us all there's real value in the rule of law. Again, Yves Smith has been way ahead on this issue and should be read. While Chris Whalen has a nice piece on Bloomberg TV(tx credit writedowns), succinctly explaining the issues, calling the foreclosure fiasco a cancer on the financial system, well worth watching.
We need to quit talking about money in aggregate, such as deficits, debt, GDP, and start talking about what it really represents. There's a lot of bad money out there and we need to get rid of it. In order to do this, for example restructuring the underwater mortgages now representing over a quarter of all mortgages, we need to know what exactly money represents, not abstractly, but concretely. If money was created fraudulently, it's not valid and those who were involved in the fraud need to go to jail, not from a sense of spite, guilt or revenge, but a sense of justice, an understanding of the necessity of the rule of law.
Yesterday, I read one of the most amazing thoughts I've read in the main stream medium in quite a long time. In a LAT book review of one of the members of Pakistan's Bhutto clan, the reviewer writes of Pakistan,
We need to quit talking about money in aggregate, such as deficits, debt, GDP, and start talking about what it really represents. There's a lot of bad money out there and we need to get rid of it. In order to do this, for example restructuring the underwater mortgages now representing over a quarter of all mortgages, we need to know what exactly money represents, not abstractly, but concretely. If money was created fraudulently, it's not valid and those who were involved in the fraud need to go to jail, not from a sense of spite, guilt or revenge, but a sense of justice, an understanding of the necessity of the rule of law.
Yesterday, I read one of the most amazing thoughts I've read in the main stream medium in quite a long time. In a LAT book review of one of the members of Pakistan's Bhutto clan, the reviewer writes of Pakistan,
Though this memoir is undeniably intimate, it also offers a political glimpse into a corrupt Pakistan. Government without checks and balances.Checks and balances. For Pakistan it remains a radical notion, for us it's a conservative one, a practice more important to the success of the American economy than any fairy tale told by our free-market priesthood. While the processes and structures of checks and balances need some updating for the 21st century, it is something for which we can all proudly agree to be American conservatives.
I'm sorry to say that I think I know where foreclosuregate is going to lead the U.S. legal system, and it is toward an ever more complete authoritarianism.
ReplyDeleteArnold Kling, a conservative libertarian, has expressed the controlling view, very well at:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/10/a_few_more_thou.html
"The 'foreclosure scandal,' as I understand it, is that with securitization, the actual noteholder has changed in ways that may not have been recorded properly at the county records office. However, the identity of the noteholder is well defined in the trading systems used by mortgage securities traders.
"Morally (as opposed to legally), the borrower is not really a party to this controversy. That is, the borrower did not abide by the terms of the note. The borrower has no moral claim to anything at this point."
That seems to me to summarize the view of "conservatives": "nothing to see here, move on", and "losers have no rights any corporation is bound to respect".
The public legal system -- the Recorder of Deeds or the equity Court of Law -- has been cut out of the system, by financial innovation, but the (efficient) private corporate administrative system, which has been substitued, doesn't make mistakes, at least not mistakes that concern the individual loser-citizen. The only proper role for the courts is to adjudicate the disputes between corporations and the masters of our universe.
There's an important parallel to claims made by the Bush and Obama Administration about people, accused of being terrorists, and it is not just that they have no rights, including no right of access to the courts, but that bureaucratic, administrative review and decisions should be sufficient and final. If an administrative review determines that a person is too dangerous to release, but there is insufficient (admissable?) evidence to stage a show trial, . . . oh, well.
As in Florida's special-purpose foreclosure courts, due process is satisfied by mechanically checking a box . . . next case.
Maxine Udall had some interesting thoughts on this, as well.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/10/this-land-is-my-land.html