>That's an interesting legal theory, but I'm not sure there's anything to back it up. You mean besides both Dutch and English common-law ? Which states clearly that you cannot transfer a contract without the consent of all parties to that contract. Or the standard rules on standing in court - which says you cannot sue somebody over a contract you are not a party to ? And of course, you cannot possibly be a party to a contract AFTER transferring your share in it to another party. And it's worth noting that several American legislators agreed with me - and actively urged people to refuse to vacate their homes on the basis that the evictions were likely fraudulent. Oh and the fact that, in most cases, if people challenged the evictions in court the banks tended to lose - and very soon, they were more likely to drop the eviction proceedings than to try and pursue the case, which strongly suggests they knew they couldn't win. And that this is an international pattern: home-owners who CHALLENGE repo and eviction proceedings usually win, if they fight hard enough to get past the magistrate judges who tend to rubber-stamp anything a bank brings them because they assume a big bank concerned about PR wouldn't lie in court.
> Adjustable Rate Mortgages are usually indexed to something: banks can't just randomly choose an interest rate. Indeed they cannot - anymore. Thanks to laws like Dodd-Frank which outlawed that.
>Uh......the evictions were for people who weren't making payments. If you're not making payments, you're eventually going to get evicted, and that's not ever going to change.
Sure...sure... but you can ONLY be evicted by somebody who has a legal contract with you. You don't OWE payments to somebody who doesn't. If they sell your bond on to a third party without your consent - then they lose the right to collect payments (since they no longer have a contract with you) but the new party does NOT gain that right - since you didn't AGREE to a contract with them. Legally - if you securitize a loan without the consent of the borrower - you just gave them the house as a gift since there is nobody left to whom they owe money.
Had the banks been interested in acting legally - then each onsold security would require a new contract with each home-owner, in which the new holder of the bond acquired the right to collect (and evict). They could then hire the bank to act as a collection agent again - but all this is ONLY legally possible AFTER you signed a NEW contract consenting to the securitization. This is not a uniquely American problem. South Africa has the same issue but South Africa largely skipped the great recession with almost no local economic damage - we suffered because our trade partners were suddenly poorer but we had no mass reposessions or increases in unemployment - exactly because our banking system is sufficiently regulated to rule out most of the crap that happened in the USA. But in the subsequent years securitization became a big thing here. And there are interesting things to note: in SA it's actually illegal to securitize a bond without the consent of the borrower. The number of borrowers who have ever been contacted by a bank to request they sign a contract with a securitizer = 0. But the banks OWN investment publications state that over 85% of bonds are securitized (investors in banks love securitization because it means the banks aren't carrying much risk). SA law is very clear that if a loan is securitized the bank has NO right to evict or reposess - they no longer have a contract with you. The people they sold the loan to could, they have standing, but they never do (they love the shadows too much). Judges have had a tendency to rubber stamp repo-cases for the banks, but people who do fight back almost always win - because invariably the banks are unable to produce an original contract or proof that the loan has not been securitized (and any judge worth his salt says "if 85% of loans are known to be securitized then the burden of proof is on the bank to show that this is one of the other 15"). ABSA (the largest bank in the country) has been claiming "document was destroyed in a fire" in practically every case for years now - even cases where the loan was taken out AFTER the fire that supposedly destroyed the contracts ! So - same problems, much, much smaller scale - because SA banks are seriously regulated (and I would argue are STILL under-regulated).
More-over saying "people who didn't pay" is a grossly misleading thing - all those people DID pay - then suddenly their payments jumped (sometimes by 600% or more) in a month or two. A legal system that allows banks to randomly change interest rates with no oversight or control is nothing but legalized theft. Any bank that wants your house merely needs to to ramp up the interest till you can no longer pay for it and boom - you're homeless. They could take a house from fucking Bill Gates if they wanted to since there's no control over how high they can raise interest rates. Now normally, this doesn't happen THAT often - simply because the PR is bad - but even that "not too often" is still way too high. In fact the FBI used to have a white-collar crime division that investigated things like home loan fraud (G.W. Bush got rid of it) - agents who used to work in that division have stated that more than 80% of all home loan fraud is committed by the bank.
In sane legal systems - there are laws limiting by how much a
Yes, I'm aware of that subtlety - though I didn't bother with the fine details since they didn't matter to the point I was making.
That said -you chose a terrible example. Drunkeness is generally NOT considered a valid reason to refuse service when you're a taxi-driver. We WANT drunk people to take taxis, anything to keep them from driving (or even walking home - too high risk of stumbling in front of some innocent driver).
When you make drunk driving illegal (which is a good thing don't get me wrong) you really have to ensure that alternatives exist. Governments DO frequently make bad laws of course, here in Cape Town for many years it was illegal to sell alcohol for take-home after 5pm on a Saturday.
That meant anybody who didn't get to the shops in time - was forced to go drink in a bar, which meant more drunk drivers. I'd MUCH rather have people drinking at home. The reason for the law (which stayed active through Sunday until Monday morning) was to ensure that people who wanted wine on a sunday had to go for tastings at wine farms - it was a gift to the wine industry, made with no concern for public safety. Luckily that idiocy has since been changed, but it was always a stupid law. Doing favours for industries, even local ones that are a defining part of the city's culture, should not be done at the expense of public safety.
Oh well I'm sure you're opinion is much more valuable than the overwhelming number of experts who support the law because it was created to prevent EXACTLY THAT. It doesn't exist in a vaccuum of course, things like the CFPB are part of the system - but that was what Dodd-Frank was created to do. To prevent the kind of massive fraud that in 2008 allowed the banks to defraud BOTH the people who bought their 'investment repackaged homeloans' and the home-owners.
Let me give you a little hint of just how corrupt it all was: practically NONE of the evictions in 2009 were legal. It's basic principle: if a bank sells your homeloan to a third-party investor they CANNOT evict you or reposess your house. They lost the right to do so. They are no longer a party to the loan, so they have no standing to bring eviction notices. And since the entire REASON for the crash was them reselling home loans (as more secure than they really were) - they had no right to evict anybody. Yet they got away with it. That means every single one of those eviction notices were served with fraudulent papers.
Never trust a banker further than you regulate his ass.
The deep state doesn't exist. It's a story. There really is no such thing.
But more importantly - I asked you questions. I tried to understand how, despite all the overwhelming proof that Trump doesn't give a damn about anybody but himself - you can still believe he cares about the people.
I made a sincere effort to reach out, and ask questions, and try to understand. You called me out of touch and failed to answer a single question.
The problem is - we didn't lose. We may have lost geographically, but we won numerically. Trump may be the president - but 66% of the country didn't want him - and he is making no effort to reach out to them. And even geographically he won by razor thin margins. Several of the states that put him in the whitehouse he won by a mere few hundred votes. The odds of Trump even finishing his first term is looking exceedingly small - since the evidence that he is a traitor is building so fast, and even if that doesn't do it his incredibly never-before-seen corruption and flagrant unfitness for office and refusal to accept responsibility for anything will give congress more than enough grounds to impeach him. But even if they don't - the odds of this happening again are a million to one. Trump getting another term is unlikely in the extreme - because despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, his victory was a fluke. He won't get two flukes in a row. You think those millions of people who despise him are going to fail to vote TWICE ?
Driver in a cab company is an employee of a public business. Public businesses do NOT have unlimited right of association - and are required to serve all members of hte public the same. It's called the Civil Rights Act.
Companies are not people and do not have, nor should they have, the same freedoms as individuals.
> they must save The Species by getting us off this rock! No. That would be stupid. To save the species it's quite important to ONLY get SOME of us off this rock. The problem is having everybody reliant on one rock. The whole point of space colonization is to have more than one rock so they won't all be hit at the same time.
>Because that other rock is much better. Now NOBODY has EVER made THAT argument. What we have said is that it makes sense not to put all your eggs in one basket - or your whole species on one planet. The other planet will be harsh - but at least the odds of the same ELE happening to both planets at once is really small, so if a rock wipes out either one - they can then repopulate the other.
If you're going to make a strawman... you need to make it at least vaguely resemble the other side's argument.
Now does anybody think this is easy ? Hell no. There's a lot of problems to solve- and some will be VERY hard to solve. It's worth doing even if there wasn't the risk of giant rocks from space though - because in the process of solving them we'd develop technologies which would benefit all mankind greatly (including those who stayed behind). But nobody imagines it would be easy or cheap - there are quite a few problems we have no idea how to solve yet.
I do personally believe we should have a lunar colony before we aim for Mars. Mars may be more earthlike but I don't think it's sufficiently so that the difference in making a habitable area will be significantly reduced - but the massive extra distance will add great cost, travel time and other difficulties. The moon on the other hand - we've actually been to multiple times. WE know we can get people there, and keep them alive for a while. And our technologies have significantly improved since then, we could conceivably start sending up missions to one-by-one build bits onto a habitat, bring soil etc. a water extraction device... until there is enough that a small group can actually live there. Then they can start expanding, we take more things up for them to build with, and expand the population as we do - until we have enough people and tech to start using some local resources. Again there are difficulties. Smelting is hard when you have no wood to make fires, and oxygen is a precious commoddity (the other component for fires). It will take a helluva solar pack to power an electric smelter... so that means you will probably need to build/send up a nuclear generator (but a thorium generator is not too big and can run for a very long time supplying LOTS of energy.
And yes, all this is speculative. It SHOULD have been a lot LESS so. Serious efforts should have started on this in 1972 when appollo was ended. But to pretend the problems cannot be solved is to grossly underestimate human capability. To pretend they needn't be solved is to grossly overestimate human capability. It may be hard to make a viable lunar colony, so hard is to be close to impossible - but surviving (or preventing) a large comet strike - that's completely impossible to the level of "there is literally no conceivable way we to possibly try".
>they are vitriolically angry that a populist hijacked their party and is taking action that favors the people instead of themselves.
Why do you believe that this is the case? Why do you believe that an elite like Trump, was sincere when he claimed to represent the people ? What has he done, so far, that you deem to 'favour' the people ? How do you feel he represented the people when he filled his cabinet with the least representative group in decades, and made it the wealthiest cabinet in history ? Do you really think the large contingent of former goldman sachs executives in the cabinet have your interests at heart ? Do you really think that Pruit dismantling the EPA entirely is to benefit you ? How do you feel you will benefit from him changing the organisation's mission statement to remove the word 'science' ? What makes you feel Trump is trustworthy - I see him lying over and over, about silly things we can all see is clearly wrong and I assume this means that he can't be trusted to tell the truth on anything important. Why do you feel that such lies does not make him hard to trust ? Why do you think "pussygate" was not a big deal ? What is it about somebody who brags that he grabs women's genitals without consent that you did not find incredibly offputting ? How is such a person going to benefit the people (half of whom have pussies and would like to excercise some control over who gets to touch them) ? How you do feel about him ending the administration's support for trans people presumably to protect women from bathroom oglers, when he is a self-confessed bathroom ogler who used to walk into dressing rooms full of naked women to stare at them -and bragged about it ? That makes me extremely doubtful of his sincerity, why do you feel it is not important ? Why do feel that a border tax - which is a price paid by the America's poorest consumers - counts as "making Mexico pay" ? Would you feel okay with being punished for a crime your parents committed when you were 7 years old ? If not, why do you think that it's just to punish dreamers for their parent's crime then ? How does this 'favour the people' ? Are you not worried that the inhumane approach to immigration law Trump now takes (Which is flagrantly in violation of the 4th amendment) could lead to losing 4th amendment protections yourself ? How do you feel about the fact that the administration has on 3 occasions now fabricated terrorist attacks that never happened and on 2 more occasions grossly exagerated ones that did - while being silent about actual serious terrorist attacks that have been planned or executed by it's supporters ? Why do you think being blown up by a christian jihadist while walking past a mosque will leave you any less dead ? Does it not concern you that this administration seems to be desperate for a terrorist attack to justify it's policies ? So deperate that it repeatedly tries to fabricate one ? Why do you not fear that, should one happen, Trump may use it as a Reichstag Fire to allow him to grab far greater power than he normally would ? It was a common fear for 8 years that Obama would use any emergency he could to enact a state of emergency and use FEMA to take dictatorial control. Why do you not fear that Trump may do that - when he has given far more cause for concern ? After hearing for 8 years that Obama wants to take your guns, institute Sha'ria law, become a dictator-for-life, institute death-camps and create a communist state... and seeing how none of these things ever happened or came close to happening - why do you still trust the people who told you that for 8 years ? How do you feel about the image from town-halls across the country showing that the people do NOT want the ACA repealed - and republicans persisting in trying to do so ? How does such persistence in an action despite such massive and bipartisan popular resistance square with 'favor the people' ? How do you feel about the Obamacare repeal in light of Trump's campaign promise to institute universal healthcare ? Remember "I will take care of every
Except that what you just claimed to support is mathematically impossible to ever be true. A bunch of people doing small scale things at cross purposes cannot EVER come CLOSE to solving the actual problems under the "common good".
And pray tell how those individuals are going to convince big corporations to not dump toxins in your drinking water if that's cheaper than the alternative ? That's the common good too. Pray tell me, how you - acting personally - are going to be able to reliable get food that won't kill you tomorrow when you won't stop somebody selling that shit until they go bankrupt because too many people have died ?
Your ideology is flawed because it ignores the size of the world. But I can understand how you can come to this conclusion if you live in a rural area. The trouble is - in cities, the reality is completely different. Government got big because in cities - a small government equals a death toll in the millions. It's the only thing that does, or ever can, stand between us and mass death.
Every city has things that make it unique and different, but there is one thing they all have in common: lots and lots of people in a small space. A city, essentially, is defined as a region with a very high population density. And when you have these millions of people in small area, that creates particular difficulties. All these people need to eat, need to drink, need shelter. They all produce waste and sewage and they all need to get around. The only way to keep all this working is by having some measure of organisation. Roads simply work better when there are things like traffic signals to ensure everybody can get through a crossing with reasonable safety. And a lot of things are simply easier to do collectively than any other way. Sure we could all, individually, drive our sewage to the nearest river and dump it. For a very long time that was basically how London operated... the trouble is that this is extremely unpractical and when everybody handles these things in the personally most convenient way they end up undermining each other's safety - and you get disasters. By the mid-19th century the Thames was nothing but a gigantic, open-air sewer and caused no end of massive disease outbreaks in London. So it makes more sense to combine the management of these common needs with the organisation of the city - by making the government larger and letting it handle things like water provision and waste disposal in a common and standard way for everybody. The problem with having so many people in close proximity is that when things go wrong - the death toll is never less than several hundred and very often it is several milion. Just look at how many people were killed by Hurrican Katrina or the Christmas Tsunami in Asia or the Fukushima meltdown. But what all these examples have in common is this: they were all caused by natural disasters that are relatively rare and unpredictable and so, hard to plan for. Coming up with specific solutions for them is difficult - and we have to rely on generic emergency response systems being large and well equiped enough to scale to a very large variety of different needs. When this works well - you get Hurrican Sandy which killed very few people, when it doesn't - or the emergency management isn't deployed properly - you get Katrina. The thing is though - natural disasters may be the biggest city-killers now, but this wasn't always the case. In fact prior to world war 2 (very recently) the majority of disasters were man-made (and more than anything else - caused by greed). Think of the great New York City garment-factory fire, the Chicago Mollases disaster, the great fire of London. They were second only to war-actions in death tolls - despite individually killing far fewer people, they happened so much more often. But again the trend was in decline. The Great Fire of London killed at least ten times as many people as the New York City Garment Factory Fire. What changed ? Government got bigg
So would you rather have "it's harder to start a new small bank" or "everybody I know ALSO had their houses reposessed because the banks took stupid betts, and committed flagrant fraud" ?
Because guess what - THAT Is what happened when there was NOT a dodd-frank.
Meantime the reps are trying extremely hard to get rid of ANYTHING that may reduce fraud and corruption in the wankster industry - they are currently trying to come up with a way to destroy the independence of the CFPB. Because protecting consumers from fraud hurts their good friends at Goldman Sachs who get rich from defrauding consumers. Merryl-Lynch stole millions from people who weren't even their customers - remember ? That story breaking was only 4 months ago !
But you would rather have shit like that happen - without any recourse for consumers ? Nobody cares how many banks there are - competition has never made a businessman more honest (indeed it tends to have the opposite effect) - what matters is how trustworthy they are. 5 Banks you can trust is better than 5000 banks you can't. And the ONLY thing that could POSSIBLY make a wankster trustworthy is the fear of going to jail if he isn't.
Except that all those things WERE reported in the mainstream media, extensively, and for example Obama's drone program (which you conveniently regret to mention was started by Bush) counts as one of the number one things liberals disagree with him on and chided him for. This includes liberal pundits as much as liberal voters. If not for the pundits- how do you think the liberal voters KNEW about it ?
Our accepting that was compromise - you can't get a perfect president. One of the best presidents the US ever had (a strong contender for best of the best) is FDR -but he's also the evil bastard who oversaw the Japanese Internment camps.
We don't forgive them mistakes like that - we are critical of it, but we would rather have a president who does 90% of the stuff we WANT and live with 10% we think are evil than one who does 90% evil and 10% stuff we want.
And the liberal media bias is an absolutely flagrant myth anyway. Rupert Murdoch's empire is conservative biassed to the core - and represents over 60% of the entire WORLD'S news media. That's one single media empire, hardcore conservative, and it represents the vast majority of all mainstream media - that's before you add the OTHER conservative media companies. The only level where what you claim even looks remotely true is cable news - where there are more liberal-slanted and centered (which to conservatives are indistinguishable from liberal) channels than conservative ones... except the biggest conservative channel has well over 50% of the viewer numbers ! Megyn Kelly is the most-watched journalist in America - and she sure as fuck isn't liberal !
They are at least partly - flat out willing to lie to their constituents faces. And I don't just mean Trump lying about silly things like crowd sizes. At CPAC last week a panel was held that consisted of a bunch politicians telling the crowds that there is zero risk of harm to human health from air pollution.
Literally - they denied that ANY air pollution has EVER made ANYBODY sick. Remember - this is the party that spent four decades opposing a ban on leaded gasoline, 3 of those after there was absolutely conclusive proof that the natural lead level in the atmosphere is zero, 2 decades after there was conclusive proof that the healthy lead level in the human body was "zero".
There are some unscrupulously honest people on the hill. Bernie Sanders exists. So does Elizabeth Warren.
Granted they are hugely outnumbered - but you may notice they are also decidedly on the left. The last person on the right who had a reputation for such honesty was Ron Paul (I was never a fan of his policies, I consider them insane, but I'll grant that he probably deserved his reputation for honesty) - his own son is so much of a classic beltway insider that it's a joke.
Those few who make it, make it in seats where a deep, personal relationship with voters can still outdo big spending opponents - Sanders succeeded in Vermont because his views align with that of the majority of the state and BECAUSE it's the least populous state in the USA (the only real place where you have significant liberalism outside of a big, crowded city - which tends to turn people liberal because of the realities of living in one). But that low population means - it's still possible to get to know the voters individually - they know who represents them, they trust him because he's earned that trust - and so no matter how much somebody else spends there, they are unlikely to change their minds.
That doesn't scale though - the rest of America is just not geographically like that, the only way to let honesty beat money in the rest of the country is to take money out of the equation.
The incumbency rate in congress is over 95% - this is a big part of the problem. It costs a hundred, maybe two-hundred grand to get a congressman elected, but once he is elected - he is likely to stay elected for 18 to 20 years.
That makes buying a congressman one of the greatest investments a corporation can make. And it means anybody who is NOT a large corporations is basically fucked because you can't afford to buy your own congressman.
The only cure is to remove the legal "for sale" signs on the congressional seats - but have you noticed how people who run on that as a platform never seem to get elected. Two different democrats ran on that as a platform in the primaries, one of them never even managed to get on a debate stage (when he reached the requirements for the debate-stage- they changed the rules to remove him again), the other one came close to the nomination but was denied it. Now a big part of that denial was that he was basically unknown to Southern Blacks - but there was definitely flagrant cheating too - like New York city changing their voting rules last minute to keep millions of people who were likely to vote for him from being able to.
The trouble is that the gatekeepers of the process are, themselves, bought and paid for - getting rid of the for sale signs would mean a serious risk of losing their own jobs - at least. They have no incentive to remove them and every incentive to keep them there because it means they'll only ever have to compete with other people who can muster support from the small number of buyers that can afford a hundred-grand purchase. Indeed, that same incumbency rate that makes a congressman such an attractive purchase - is what would be endangered if you take away the for sale signs.
This is not even speculation - and it's definitely a bigger issue on the republican side of the aisle. Bush's speaker of the house got convicted of raping kids remember - then the story got REALLY crazy. See he had bribed the kids to stay silent, quite big bribes too. The kid who reported him and got his ass convicted had gotten a 2 million dollar bribe.
We know... because the good speaker is now suing him demanding his bribe money back because the kid reported the rape and so didn't keep his end of the bribe bargain !
That's politician thinking in a nutshell. Raping children is okay - but welching on a bribe is unforgivable.
In this case the exemption will probably be based on "As members of government we deal with classified matters, often involving national security, and as such our browsing habits are state secrets"
Nobody is allowed to complain about something done for national security remember. You can't possibly question it unless you're an evil terrorist traitor (or, to an older politician, an evil commie traitor).
The agency is appointed by congress - that is congress doing their job. Nowhere, NOWHERE in the US constitution does it prohibit the government from establishing agencies and allowing specialised experts to craft rules on their behalf. You know why it doesn't prohibit that? Because such a prohibition would be flagrantly idiotic. The government would be making decisions on highly specialized knowledge areas - and having it all made by people who have no understanding of the topic they are making decisions over. Regulations would be written by politicians over things they don't understand at all. As it is - that ignorance is part of why lobbyists are so powerful in Washington - the politicians don't understand half the shit they are talking about, the lobbyists 'explain' things the way they want them understood and the politicians parrot the explanations.
You do NOT want politicians to have to know about everything - even if they could, it would leave very little room for them to know about the thing they ARE supposed to be experts at: the administrative duties of running the country. So they establish specialized agencies where experts in the field can draft rules, and take a strictly oversight rule.
This is, not, in fact ideal. It can be better - the best case scenario is where - for certain critical things - the constitution itself establishes agencies which exist WITHOUT government oversight - but has the power to excercise oversight over the government. Politicians may appoint the directors of these agencies but cannot fire them without a super-majority vote of no-confidence, are required to obey their findings as they would a court of law (and if they feel it is wrong have to challenge it in the court system so only judges can overrule the agency). South Africa has such a system, Chapter 9 of the constitution establishes a number of specialized agencies who perform specific oversight roles over government and society with powers independent of the legislative government (essentially parallel in power to courts but with a different focus). Chapter 9 agencies include the office of the Public Protector -whose job it is to investigate corruption, her findings (the last two have both been women) can include remedial action - which has the power of a court order, and can be used as evidence in subsequent criminal charges. The Human Rights commission who has the duty to investigate and mediate human rights abuses (be they by government or private citizens), ICASA which has the duty to perform oversight of telecoms industries etc. etc.
These have, generally, been very successful. Notably the previous public protector Thuli Madonsela is a national hero. Her successor is far less popular so far - lots of people think she's political stooge - but this could also be a case of trying to fill the shoes of an immensely successful and popular predecessor (with a flare for public relations seldom found in serious legal scholars). If anything, the US would be better off if organisations like the EPA, FCC and FTC were established - not by congress - but by the constitution itself and could act INDEPENDENTLY of congress - indeed having the power to veto or force changes to acts of congress within their domains. Much like the supreme court can do - but with specialized expert knowledge which neither congress nor the court has ready access to.
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>That's an interesting legal theory, but I'm not sure there's anything to back it up.
You mean besides both Dutch and English common-law ? Which states clearly that you cannot transfer a contract without the consent of all parties to that contract. Or the standard rules on standing in court - which says you cannot sue somebody over a contract you are not a party to ? And of course, you cannot possibly be a party to a contract AFTER transferring your share in it to another party.
And it's worth noting that several American legislators agreed with me - and actively urged people to refuse to vacate their homes on the basis that the evictions were likely fraudulent.
Oh and the fact that, in most cases, if people challenged the evictions in court the banks tended to lose - and very soon, they were more likely to drop the eviction proceedings than to try and pursue the case, which strongly suggests they knew they couldn't win.
And that this is an international pattern: home-owners who CHALLENGE repo and eviction proceedings usually win, if they fight hard enough to get past the magistrate judges who tend to rubber-stamp anything a bank brings them because they assume a big bank concerned about PR wouldn't lie in court.
> Adjustable Rate Mortgages are usually indexed to something: banks can't just randomly choose an interest rate.
Indeed they cannot - anymore. Thanks to laws like Dodd-Frank which outlawed that.
You mean the supreme court that affirmed the civil rights act in 1965 ? That supreme court ?
How exactly did they "disagree" with me ? When they affirmed the validity of a law that says EXACTLY what I just said ?
>Uh......the evictions were for people who weren't making payments. If you're not making payments, you're eventually going to get evicted, and that's not ever going to change.
Sure...sure... but you can ONLY be evicted by somebody who has a legal contract with you. You don't OWE payments to somebody who doesn't. If they sell your bond on to a third party without your consent - then they lose the right to collect payments (since they no longer have a contract with you) but the new party does NOT gain that right - since you didn't AGREE to a contract with them.
Legally - if you securitize a loan without the consent of the borrower - you just gave them the house as a gift since there is nobody left to whom they owe money.
Had the banks been interested in acting legally - then each onsold security would require a new contract with each home-owner, in which the new holder of the bond acquired the right to collect (and evict). They could then hire the bank to act as a collection agent again - but all this is ONLY legally possible AFTER you signed a NEW contract consenting to the securitization. This is not a uniquely American problem. South Africa has the same issue but South Africa largely skipped the great recession with almost no local economic damage - we suffered because our trade partners were suddenly poorer but we had no mass reposessions or increases in unemployment - exactly because our banking system is sufficiently regulated to rule out most of the crap that happened in the USA.
But in the subsequent years securitization became a big thing here. And there are interesting things to note: in SA it's actually illegal to securitize a bond without the consent of the borrower. The number of borrowers who have ever been contacted by a bank to request they sign a contract with a securitizer = 0. But the banks OWN investment publications state that over 85% of bonds are securitized (investors in banks love securitization because it means the banks aren't carrying much risk). SA law is very clear that if a loan is securitized the bank has NO right to evict or reposess - they no longer have a contract with you. The people they sold the loan to could, they have standing, but they never do (they love the shadows too much). Judges have had a tendency to rubber stamp repo-cases for the banks, but people who do fight back almost always win - because invariably the banks are unable to produce an original contract or proof that the loan has not been securitized (and any judge worth his salt says "if 85% of loans are known to be securitized then the burden of proof is on the bank to show that this is one of the other 15"). ABSA (the largest bank in the country) has been claiming "document was destroyed in a fire" in practically every case for years now - even cases where the loan was taken out AFTER the fire that supposedly destroyed the contracts !
So - same problems, much, much smaller scale - because SA banks are seriously regulated (and I would argue are STILL under-regulated).
More-over saying "people who didn't pay" is a grossly misleading thing - all those people DID pay - then suddenly their payments jumped (sometimes by 600% or more) in a month or two. A legal system that allows banks to randomly change interest rates with no oversight or control is nothing but legalized theft.
Any bank that wants your house merely needs to to ramp up the interest till you can no longer pay for it and boom - you're homeless. They could take a house from fucking Bill Gates if they wanted to since there's no control over how high they can raise interest rates.
Now normally, this doesn't happen THAT often - simply because the PR is bad - but even that "not too often" is still way too high. In fact the FBI used to have a white-collar crime division that investigated things like home loan fraud (G.W. Bush got rid of it) - agents who used to work in that division have stated that more than 80% of all home loan fraud is committed by the bank.
In sane legal systems - there are laws limiting by how much a
Yes, I'm aware of that subtlety - though I didn't bother with the fine details since they didn't matter to the point I was making.
That said -you chose a terrible example. Drunkeness is generally NOT considered a valid reason to refuse service when you're a taxi-driver. We WANT drunk people to take taxis, anything to keep them from driving (or even walking home - too high risk of stumbling in front of some innocent driver).
When you make drunk driving illegal (which is a good thing don't get me wrong) you really have to ensure that alternatives exist. Governments DO frequently make bad laws of course, here in Cape Town for many years it was illegal to sell alcohol for take-home after 5pm on a Saturday.
That meant anybody who didn't get to the shops in time - was forced to go drink in a bar, which meant more drunk drivers. I'd MUCH rather have people drinking at home. The reason for the law (which stayed active through Sunday until Monday morning) was to ensure that people who wanted wine on a sunday had to go for tastings at wine farms - it was a gift to the wine industry, made with no concern for public safety.
Luckily that idiocy has since been changed, but it was always a stupid law. Doing favours for industries, even local ones that are a defining part of the city's culture, should not be done at the expense of public safety.
Oh well I'm sure you're opinion is much more valuable than the overwhelming number of experts who support the law because it was created to prevent EXACTLY THAT.
It doesn't exist in a vaccuum of course, things like the CFPB are part of the system - but that was what Dodd-Frank was created to do. To prevent the kind of massive fraud that in 2008 allowed the banks to defraud BOTH the people who bought their 'investment repackaged homeloans' and the home-owners.
Let me give you a little hint of just how corrupt it all was: practically NONE of the evictions in 2009 were legal. It's basic principle: if a bank sells your homeloan to a third-party investor they CANNOT evict you or reposess your house. They lost the right to do so. They are no longer a party to the loan, so they have no standing to bring eviction notices.
And since the entire REASON for the crash was them reselling home loans (as more secure than they really were) - they had no right to evict anybody. Yet they got away with it. That means every single one of those eviction notices were served with fraudulent papers.
Never trust a banker further than you regulate his ass.
The deep state doesn't exist. It's a story. There really is no such thing.
But more importantly - I asked you questions. I tried to understand how, despite all the overwhelming proof that Trump doesn't give a damn about anybody but himself - you can still believe he cares about the people.
I made a sincere effort to reach out, and ask questions, and try to understand. You called me out of touch and failed to answer a single question.
The problem is - we didn't lose. We may have lost geographically, but we won numerically. Trump may be the president - but 66% of the country didn't want him - and he is making no effort to reach out to them. And even geographically he won by razor thin margins. Several of the states that put him in the whitehouse he won by a mere few hundred votes.
The odds of Trump even finishing his first term is looking exceedingly small - since the evidence that he is a traitor is building so fast, and even if that doesn't do it his incredibly never-before-seen corruption and flagrant unfitness for office and refusal to accept responsibility for anything will give congress more than enough grounds to impeach him.
But even if they don't - the odds of this happening again are a million to one. Trump getting another term is unlikely in the extreme - because despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, his victory was a fluke. He won't get two flukes in a row. You think those millions of people who despise him are going to fail to vote TWICE ?
Driver in a cab company is an employee of a public business. Public businesses do NOT have unlimited right of association - and are required to serve all members of hte public the same. It's called the Civil Rights Act.
Companies are not people and do not have, nor should they have, the same freedoms as individuals.
The struggle is real.
But if we have all that... do you REALLY think nobody would SWAT him ?
If God didn't intend for men to be fried in oil why did he attach eggs and sausage to them ?
>They know the Death Asteroid is coming
This is a statistical fact
> they must save The Species by getting us off this rock!
No. That would be stupid. To save the species it's quite important to ONLY get SOME of us off this rock. The problem is having everybody reliant on one rock. The whole point of space colonization is to have more than one rock so they won't all be hit at the same time.
>Because that other rock is much better.
Now NOBODY has EVER made THAT argument. What we have said is that it makes sense not to put all your eggs in one basket - or your whole species on one planet. The other planet will be harsh - but at least the odds of the same ELE happening to both planets at once is really small, so if a rock wipes out either one - they can then repopulate the other.
If you're going to make a strawman... you need to make it at least vaguely resemble the other side's argument.
Now does anybody think this is easy ? Hell no. There's a lot of problems to solve- and some will be VERY hard to solve. It's worth doing even if there wasn't the risk of giant rocks from space though - because in the process of solving them we'd develop technologies which would benefit all mankind greatly (including those who stayed behind).
But nobody imagines it would be easy or cheap - there are quite a few problems we have no idea how to solve yet.
I do personally believe we should have a lunar colony before we aim for Mars. Mars may be more earthlike but I don't think it's sufficiently so that the difference in making a habitable area will be significantly reduced - but the massive extra distance will add great cost, travel time and other difficulties. The moon on the other hand - we've actually been to multiple times. WE know we can get people there, and keep them alive for a while. And our technologies have significantly improved since then, we could conceivably start sending up missions to one-by-one build bits onto a habitat, bring soil etc. a water extraction device... until there is enough that a small group can actually live there. Then they can start expanding, we take more things up for them to build with, and expand the population as we do - until we have enough people and tech to start using some local resources.
Again there are difficulties. Smelting is hard when you have no wood to make fires, and oxygen is a precious commoddity (the other component for fires). It will take a helluva solar pack to power an electric smelter... so that means you will probably need to build/send up a nuclear generator (but a thorium generator is not too big and can run for a very long time supplying LOTS of energy.
And yes, all this is speculative. It SHOULD have been a lot LESS so. Serious efforts should have started on this in 1972 when appollo was ended. But to pretend the problems cannot be solved is to grossly underestimate human capability. To pretend they needn't be solved is to grossly overestimate human capability. It may be hard to make a viable lunar colony, so hard is to be close to impossible - but surviving (or preventing) a large comet strike - that's completely impossible to the level of "there is literally no conceivable way we to possibly try".
South Africa is mostly tomato sauce - of the thick and sticky variety (which is similar but I think not identical to what Americans call Ketchup).
Though cheese sauce has been growing in popularity in recent years - especially in pubs.
>they are vitriolically angry that a populist hijacked their party and is taking action that favors the people instead of themselves.
Why do you believe that this is the case? Why do you believe that an elite like Trump, was sincere when he claimed to represent the people ? What has he done, so far, that you deem to 'favour' the people ? How do you feel he represented the people when he filled his cabinet with the least representative group in decades, and made it the wealthiest cabinet in history ? Do you really think the large contingent of former goldman sachs executives in the cabinet have your interests at heart ? Do you really think that Pruit dismantling the EPA entirely is to benefit you ? How do you feel you will benefit from him changing the organisation's mission statement to remove the word 'science' ? What makes you feel Trump is trustworthy - I see him lying over and over, about silly things we can all see is clearly wrong and I assume this means that he can't be trusted to tell the truth on anything important. Why do you feel that such lies does not make him hard to trust ? Why do you think "pussygate" was not a big deal ? What is it about somebody who brags that he grabs women's genitals without consent that you did not find incredibly offputting ? How is such a person going to benefit the people (half of whom have pussies and would like to excercise some control over who gets to touch them) ? How you do feel about him ending the administration's support for trans people presumably to protect women from bathroom oglers, when he is a self-confessed bathroom ogler who used to walk into dressing rooms full of naked women to stare at them -and bragged about it ? That makes me extremely doubtful of his sincerity, why do you feel it is not important ? Why do feel that a border tax - which is a price paid by the America's poorest consumers - counts as "making Mexico pay" ? Would you feel okay with being punished for a crime your parents committed when you were 7 years old ? If not, why do you think that it's just to punish dreamers for their parent's crime then ? How does this 'favour the people' ? Are you not worried that the inhumane approach to immigration law Trump now takes (Which is flagrantly in violation of the 4th amendment) could lead to losing 4th amendment protections yourself ? How do you feel about the fact that the administration has on 3 occasions now fabricated terrorist attacks that never happened and on 2 more occasions grossly exagerated ones that did - while being silent about actual serious terrorist attacks that have been planned or executed by it's supporters ? Why do you think being blown up by a christian jihadist while walking past a mosque will leave you any less dead ? Does it not concern you that this administration seems to be desperate for a terrorist attack to justify it's policies ? So deperate that it repeatedly tries to fabricate one ? Why do you not fear that, should one happen, Trump may use it as a Reichstag Fire to allow him to grab far greater power than he normally would ? It was a common fear for 8 years that Obama would use any emergency he could to enact a state of emergency and use FEMA to take dictatorial control. Why do you not fear that Trump may do that - when he has given far more cause for concern ? After hearing for 8 years that Obama wants to take your guns, institute Sha'ria law, become a dictator-for-life, institute death-camps and create a communist state... and seeing how none of these things ever happened or came close to happening - why do you still trust the people who told you that for 8 years ? How do you feel about the image from town-halls across the country showing that the people do NOT want the ACA repealed - and republicans persisting in trying to do so ? How does such persistence in an action despite such massive and bipartisan popular resistance square with 'favor the people' ? How do you feel about the Obamacare repeal in light of Trump's campaign promise to institute universal healthcare ? Remember "I will take care of every
Except that what you just claimed to support is mathematically impossible to ever be true.
A bunch of people doing small scale things at cross purposes cannot EVER come CLOSE to solving the actual problems under the "common good".
And pray tell how those individuals are going to convince big corporations to not dump toxins in your drinking water if that's cheaper than the alternative ? That's the common good too. Pray tell me, how you - acting personally - are going to be able to reliable get food that won't kill you tomorrow when you won't stop somebody selling that shit until they go bankrupt because too many people have died ?
Your ideology is flawed because it ignores the size of the world. But I can understand how you can come to this conclusion if you live in a rural area. The trouble is - in cities, the reality is completely different. Government got big because in cities - a small government equals a death toll in the millions. It's the only thing that does, or ever can, stand between us and mass death.
Every city has things that make it unique and different, but there is one thing they all have in common: lots and lots of people in a small space.
A city, essentially, is defined as a region with a very high population density. And when you have these millions of people in small area, that
creates particular difficulties. All these people need to eat, need to drink, need shelter. They all produce waste and sewage and they all need
to get around. The only way to keep all this working is by having some measure of organisation. Roads simply work better when there are
things like traffic signals to ensure everybody can get through a crossing with reasonable safety.
And a lot of things are simply easier to do collectively than any other way. Sure we could all, individually, drive our sewage to the nearest river
and dump it. For a very long time that was basically how London operated... the trouble is that this is extremely unpractical and when everybody
handles these things in the personally most convenient way they end up undermining each other's safety - and you get disasters. By the mid-19th
century the Thames was nothing but a gigantic, open-air sewer and caused no end of massive disease outbreaks in London.
So it makes more sense to combine the management of these common needs with the organisation of the city - by making the government larger and letting
it handle things like water provision and waste disposal in a common and standard way for everybody.
The problem with having so many people in close proximity is that when things go wrong - the death toll is never less than several hundred and
very often it is several milion. Just look at how many people were killed by Hurrican Katrina or the Christmas Tsunami in Asia or the Fukushima meltdown.
But what all these examples have in common is this: they were all caused by natural disasters that are relatively rare and unpredictable and so, hard to
plan for. Coming up with specific solutions for them is difficult - and we have to rely on generic emergency response systems being large and well
equiped enough to scale to a very large variety of different needs. When this works well - you get Hurrican Sandy which killed very few people, when
it doesn't - or the emergency management isn't deployed properly - you get Katrina.
The thing is though - natural disasters may be the biggest city-killers now, but this wasn't always the case. In fact prior to world war 2
(very recently) the majority of disasters were man-made (and more than anything else - caused by greed). Think of the great New York City garment-factory
fire, the Chicago Mollases disaster, the great fire of London. They were second only to war-actions in death tolls - despite individually killing
far fewer people, they happened so much more often. But again the trend was in decline. The Great Fire of London killed at least ten times as many
people as the New York City Garment Factory Fire.
What changed ? Government got bigg
So would you rather have "it's harder to start a new small bank" or "everybody I know ALSO had their houses reposessed because the banks took stupid betts, and committed flagrant fraud" ?
Because guess what - THAT Is what happened when there was NOT a dodd-frank.
Meantime the reps are trying extremely hard to get rid of ANYTHING that may reduce fraud and corruption in the wankster industry - they are currently trying to come up with a way to destroy the independence of the CFPB. Because protecting consumers from fraud hurts their good friends at Goldman Sachs who get rich from defrauding consumers.
Merryl-Lynch stole millions from people who weren't even their customers - remember ? That story breaking was only 4 months ago !
But you would rather have shit like that happen - without any recourse for consumers ?
Nobody cares how many banks there are - competition has never made a businessman more honest (indeed it tends to have the opposite effect) - what matters is how trustworthy they are. 5 Banks you can trust is better than 5000 banks you can't. And the ONLY thing that could POSSIBLY make a wankster trustworthy is the fear of going to jail if he isn't.
Except that all those things WERE reported in the mainstream media, extensively, and for example Obama's drone program (which you conveniently regret to mention was started by Bush) counts as one of the number one things liberals disagree with him on and chided him for. This includes liberal pundits as much as liberal voters.
If not for the pundits- how do you think the liberal voters KNEW about it ?
Our accepting that was compromise - you can't get a perfect president. One of the best presidents the US ever had (a strong contender for best of the best) is FDR -but he's also the evil bastard who oversaw the Japanese Internment camps.
We don't forgive them mistakes like that - we are critical of it, but we would rather have a president who does 90% of the stuff we WANT and live with 10% we think are evil than one who does 90% evil and 10% stuff we want.
And the liberal media bias is an absolutely flagrant myth anyway. Rupert Murdoch's empire is conservative biassed to the core - and represents over 60% of the entire WORLD'S news media. That's one single media empire, hardcore conservative, and it represents the vast majority of all mainstream media - that's before you add the OTHER conservative media companies.
The only level where what you claim even looks remotely true is cable news - where there are more liberal-slanted and centered (which to conservatives are indistinguishable from liberal) channels than conservative ones... except the biggest conservative channel has well over 50% of the viewer numbers ! Megyn Kelly is the most-watched journalist in America - and she sure as fuck isn't liberal !
They are at least partly - flat out willing to lie to their constituents faces. And I don't just mean Trump lying about silly things like crowd sizes. At CPAC last week a panel was held that consisted of a bunch politicians telling the crowds that there is zero risk of harm to human health from air pollution.
Literally - they denied that ANY air pollution has EVER made ANYBODY sick. Remember - this is the party that spent four decades opposing a ban on leaded gasoline, 3 of those after there was absolutely conclusive proof that the natural lead level in the atmosphere is zero, 2 decades after there was conclusive proof that the healthy lead level in the human body was "zero".
There are some unscrupulously honest people on the hill. Bernie Sanders exists. So does Elizabeth Warren.
Granted they are hugely outnumbered - but you may notice they are also decidedly on the left. The last person on the right who had a reputation for such honesty was Ron Paul (I was never a fan of his policies, I consider them insane, but I'll grant that he probably deserved his reputation for honesty) - his own son is so much of a classic beltway insider that it's a joke.
Those few who make it, make it in seats where a deep, personal relationship with voters can still outdo big spending opponents - Sanders succeeded in Vermont because his views align with that of the majority of the state and BECAUSE it's the least populous state in the USA (the only real place where you have significant liberalism outside of a big, crowded city - which tends to turn people liberal because of the realities of living in one). But that low population means - it's still possible to get to know the voters individually - they know who represents them, they trust him because he's earned that trust - and so no matter how much somebody else spends there, they are unlikely to change their minds.
That doesn't scale though - the rest of America is just not geographically like that, the only way to let honesty beat money in the rest of the country is to take money out of the equation.
The incumbency rate in congress is over 95% - this is a big part of the problem. It costs a hundred, maybe two-hundred grand to get a congressman elected, but once he is elected - he is likely to stay elected for 18 to 20 years.
That makes buying a congressman one of the greatest investments a corporation can make. And it means anybody who is NOT a large corporations is basically fucked because you can't afford to buy your own congressman.
The only cure is to remove the legal "for sale" signs on the congressional seats - but have you noticed how people who run on that as a platform never seem to get elected. Two different democrats ran on that as a platform in the primaries, one of them never even managed to get on a debate stage (when he reached the requirements for the debate-stage- they changed the rules to remove him again), the other one came close to the nomination but was denied it. Now a big part of that denial was that he was basically unknown to Southern Blacks - but there was definitely flagrant cheating too - like New York city changing their voting rules last minute to keep millions of people who were likely to vote for him from being able to.
The trouble is that the gatekeepers of the process are, themselves, bought and paid for - getting rid of the for sale signs would mean a serious risk of losing their own jobs - at least. They have no incentive to remove them and every incentive to keep them there because it means they'll only ever have to compete with other people who can muster support from the small number of buyers that can afford a hundred-grand purchase. Indeed, that same incumbency rate that makes a congressman such an attractive purchase - is what would be endangered if you take away the for sale signs.
If you SWAT a politician is that
1) Civil Disobedience ?
2) High Treason ?
3) Using your tax dollars for maximum effect ?
4) All of the above ?
I have no idea anymore... but I'll tell you this, do that and the law will very soon treat SWAT-ing as the extremely serious crime it actually is.
This is not even speculation - and it's definitely a bigger issue on the republican side of the aisle. Bush's speaker of the house got convicted of raping kids remember - then the story got REALLY crazy.
See he had bribed the kids to stay silent, quite big bribes too. The kid who reported him and got his ass convicted had gotten a 2 million dollar bribe.
We know... because the good speaker is now suing him demanding his bribe money back because the kid reported the rape and so didn't keep his end of the bribe bargain !
That's politician thinking in a nutshell. Raping children is okay - but welching on a bribe is unforgivable.
The GOP's healthcare plan basically consists of "be rich or be dead".
In this case the exemption will probably be based on "As members of government we deal with classified matters, often involving national security, and as such our browsing habits are state secrets"
Nobody is allowed to complain about something done for national security remember. You can't possibly question it unless you're an evil terrorist traitor (or, to an older politician, an evil commie traitor).
The agency is appointed by congress - that is congress doing their job. Nowhere, NOWHERE in the US constitution does it prohibit the government from establishing agencies and allowing specialised experts to craft rules on their behalf. You know why it doesn't prohibit that? Because such a prohibition would be flagrantly idiotic. The government would be making decisions on highly specialized knowledge areas - and having it all made by people who have no understanding of the topic they are making decisions over. Regulations would be written by politicians over things they don't understand at all.
As it is - that ignorance is part of why lobbyists are so powerful in Washington - the politicians don't understand half the shit they are talking about, the lobbyists 'explain' things the way they want them understood and the politicians parrot the explanations.
You do NOT want politicians to have to know about everything - even if they could, it would leave very little room for them to know about the thing they ARE supposed to be experts at: the administrative duties of running the country. So they establish specialized agencies where experts in the field can draft rules, and take a strictly oversight rule.
This is, not, in fact ideal. It can be better - the best case scenario is where - for certain critical things - the constitution itself establishes agencies which exist WITHOUT government oversight - but has the power to excercise oversight over the government. Politicians may appoint the directors of these agencies but cannot fire them without a super-majority vote of no-confidence, are required to obey their findings as they would a court of law (and if they feel it is wrong have to challenge it in the court system so only judges can overrule the agency). South Africa has such a system, Chapter 9 of the constitution establishes a number of specialized agencies who perform specific oversight roles over government and society with powers independent of the legislative government (essentially parallel in power to courts but with a different focus). Chapter 9 agencies include the office of the Public Protector -whose job it is to investigate corruption, her findings (the last two have both been women) can include remedial action - which has the power of a court order, and can be used as evidence in subsequent criminal charges. The Human Rights commission who has the duty to investigate and mediate human rights abuses (be they by government or private citizens), ICASA which has the duty to perform oversight of telecoms industries etc. etc.
These have, generally, been very successful. Notably the previous public protector Thuli Madonsela is a national hero. Her successor is far less popular so far - lots of people think she's political stooge - but this could also be a case of trying to fill the shoes of an immensely successful and popular predecessor (with a flare for public relations seldom found in serious legal scholars).
If anything, the US would be better off if organisations like the EPA, FCC and FTC were established - not by congress - but by the constitution itself and could act INDEPENDENTLY of congress - indeed having the power to veto or force changes to acts of congress within their domains. Much like the supreme court can do - but with specialized expert knowledge which neither congress nor the court has ready access to.
Don't do anything on the internet you wouldn't do on the stage at the NFL halftime show ?
Though, by that analogy, there are a LOT of Janet Jacksons out there.