You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you.I'ma copy that into the clipboard and just paste it everywhere in the right Cheddarsphere.
Interviews with two dozen former employees, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and appraisers reveal the relentless pressure to churn out loans that produced such results. [. . .] According to these accounts, pressure to keep lending emanated from the top, where executives profited from the swift expansion--not least, Kerry K. Killinger, who was WaMu’s chief executive from 1990 until he was forced out in September.One of the most amazing aspects of watching the present financial crisis unfold, for me, is the degree to which conservatives and Republicans refuse to place any share of the blame for the calamity on the people who actually caused it. The private sector is holy, and the saintly CEOs are mere victims of a grand scam perpetrated by the people who are now living in homeless shelters or cardboard boxes. Privately held banks and mortgage brokers were mere rubes in a fantastical scheme concocted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (who were not even making subprime loans for most of the boom time) via Jimmy Carter and the aforementioned CRA. Truth is, there was big money to be made, personally and institutionally, by aggressively pursuing risky loans and securitzing them. The private sector followed that trail of money with abandon, and now, with tight credit throughout all markets, we are seeing the results.
Between 2001 and 2007, Mr. Killinger received compensation of $88 million, according to the Corporate Library, a research firm. He declined to respond to a list of questions, and his spokesman said he was unavailable for an interview.
During Mr. Killinger’s tenure, WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers’ incomes and assets, according to former employees. The bank set up what insiders described as a system of dubious legality that enabled real estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers, sometimes making the agents more beholden to WaMu than they were to their clients.
WaMu gave mortgage brokers handsome commissions for selling the riskiest loans, which carried higher fees, bolstering profits and ultimately the compensation of the bank’s executives. WaMu pressured appraisers to provide inflated property values that made loans appear less risky, enabling Wall Street to bundle them more easily for sale to investors.
“It was the Wild West,” said Steven M. Knobel, a founder of an appraisal company, Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson, that did business with WaMu until 2007. “If you were alive, they would give you a loan. Actually, I think if you were dead, they would still give you a loan.”
Should a Jewish clerk be forced to say Merry Christmas to his/her customers? We seem hell bent on allowing Catholic pharmacists the right to not only refuse to give out birth control, but not even forward the prescription onto another pharmacy, so why should a Jewish or atheist clerk be forced to acknowledge your religion? And more importantly, why do you have the need to have others acknowledge it? I mean, it's nice when they do, and Owen tells a nice story of being wished Merry Christmas by a waitress. But he's not just talking about those random well wishes in the spirit of the season. He's also suggesting that the lack of those wishes constitutes a war on the season itself!To paraphrase Nick's last paragraph, it appears that those asserting that there is a war is satisfied with the right to celebrate their holiday, but are demanding that others acknowledge and follow in line, at least for the season. In other words, they are asking for the equivalent of Affirmative Action for their religion, even though they are in the majority in this country.
The footwear that robbed George W Bush of his dignity and landed its owner Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi — who hurled them at the US President at a press meet in Baghdad — in prison, has yielded an unexpected bonanza for its maker. Ever since the incident, Ramazan Baydan, the owner of the Istanbul-based Baydan Shoe Company, has been swamped with orders from across the world.
In fact, Baydan has recruited an additional 100 staff to meet orders for 300,000 pairs of Model 271, more than four times the shoe’s normal annual sale, following an outpouring of support for Zaidi’s act, ‘The Guardian’ reported. Orders have come from the US and Britain, and from neighbouring Muslim countries, he said.
Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter whose absurdist and realistic works displayed a despair and defiance about the human condition, has died, according to British media reports. He was 78. [. . .] Pinter, who had been suffering from cancer, died on Christmas Eve, according to the reports.It may in part have been Beloit College's resident theatre folks' obsession with Pinter, but I read a whole lot of his plays in my young, formative years. I acted in a dramatic reading of The Homecoming and one of his shorter plays. I have enjoyed Mamet and Stoppard and all the other playwrights that followed Pinter, influenced by that distinct style of writing. Pinter's is a voice that will be sorely missed.
In any case, it’s certainly weird that the areas most affected by the crisis are centers of populations and finance. You’d think the deep South would be the first to crash, with the Franklin Mint bubble taking out Waffle House and Cracker Barrel, whose collapse would wipe out the rustic knick-knack manufacturers, dropping the floor out from under the Beanie Baby speculators, and so on down the line until you reach John Deere, at which point it’s game-over for Amway, Carhartt, Philip Morris, Mary Kay, QVC, Bob’s Big Boy, and the whole line of dominoes leading from Bally/Midway and the rest of the video poker manufacturers to Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly, and from there to one Branson concern after the next, wiping out Winnebago before toppling various Indian tribes and their casino buffet and dream-catcher keychain suppliers, landing subsequently on Disney itself, at which point the coastal elites would notice something missing but not be able to put their finger quite on what it was, until 3AM one night when they sat bolt upright in bed, saying, “Oh my God, whatever happened to the Jonas Brothers?”It's so much better in context, but I felt it needed to be preserved here for posterity.
About 68 homes on Milwaukee's south side are without water while city crews repair a water main break this afternoon.This is literally my neighborhood; my house is within the boundaries described here, but I guess we're on a different trunk line or something. Wow.
Resident are affected in an area from S. 13th to S. 15th Streets and Oklahoma Avenue to Ohio Street, according to Cecelia Gilbert, spokesperson for Milwaukee's Department of Public Works.
I think we made the right decision in spite of the fact that the original [intelligence estimate] was off in some of its major judgments.It is more likely that Cheney wanted to invade Iraq and would have done it even if the intelligence showed Saddam Hussein was Mother Teresa. Again he makes the fine men and women working intelligence who are doing the job of protecting us out to be the fall guys. Valarie Plame was not exceptional in this case. What a class act Cheney is.
Rep. Jeffrey Wood, an independent from Bloomer, was arrested early Friday by the Wisconsin State Patrol. [. . .] Wood became the first independent elected to the Wisconsin Legislature in decades in November after he quit the Republican Party. Democrats who took control of the chamber recently made him a committee chairman.
Vendors produce about 70% of the parts that go into a new car, and they are almost always better managed than the automakers. In many cases, automakers outsourced parts to get away from the union and management problems of the car assemblers.
Companies such as Strattec and Johnson Controls are among the leanest and best manufacturers in the world. They are good enough to supply Asian and American car companies.
Yet top-quality vendors will suffer the most collateral damage from a meltdown in Detroit, a crisis caused in large part by mismanagement on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C., of the financial and housing industries. The same politicians wearing angel wings in the debate over the future of the auto industry were presiding when the financial crisis was being created.
It should be emphasized that many of the suppliers radiate beyond Detroit and a good number of them are here in Wisconsin. The car makers go into backruptcy and these fine companies will see pennies on the dollar for goods and services bought over the past months, blowing holes in the already fragile finances of these companies. The fresh start for Detroit would be fatal wounds for their suppliers.
This is yet another example how divorced many conservative, so-called "business-friendly," politicians are from not just from reality in general but business reality in particular.
The government has not yet aided struggling homeowners directly, but the Fed is considering relief for credit card holders. The Washington Post reports the Fed will vote on Thursday "on sweeping reform of the credit card industry that would ban practices such as retroactively increasing interest rates at will and charging late fees when consumers are not given a reasonable amount of time to make payments." The proposal includes a ban on raising the interest rates on credit card debt unless the customer was more than 30 days late in paying the minimum. If the Fed approves, it will be, say consumer advocates, the biggest overhaul of the credit card industry in decades. "It covers a lot of issues and is really unprecedented in its scope," said the CEO of the American Bankers Association. "You add them all up, it's going to mark the beginning of a new market."About time isn't it?
"I don't know what Sen. Vitter has against GM or the United Auto Workers or the entire domestic auto industry; whatever it is, whatever he thinks we've done, it's time for him to forgive us, just like Sen. Vitter has asked the citizens of Louisiana to forgive him, " said [Morgan] Johnson, president of Local 2166. Otherwise, Johnson said of Vitter, it would appear, "He'd rather pay a prostitute than pay auto workers."I'm looking forward to Fred Dooley's support of Vitter's Democratic opponent in 2010.
The failure to reach agreement on Capitol Hill raised a specter of financial collapse for General Motors and Chrysler, which say they may not be able to survive through this month.Union-killing is a severe Republican fetish; it's among the strongest knee-jerk reactions they have to anything. The right of workers to band together collectively for their own common good is anathema to them; the right of corporations to screw their workers at will is sacred. How this is rational or healthy I just do not understand.
After Senate Republicans balked at supporting a $14 billion auto rescue plan approved by the House on Wednesday, negotiators worked late into Thursday evening to broker a deal, but deadlocked over Republican demands for steep cuts in pay and benefits by the United Automobile Workers union in 2009.
Imagine that a Congressional bailout effectively pays for $10 an hour of the retiree benefits. That’s roughly the gap between the Big Three’s retiree costs and those of the Japanese-owned plants in this country. Imagine, also, that the U.A.W. agrees to reduce pay and benefits for current workers to $45 an hour — the same as at Honda and Toyota.Got that? The Republicans are blaming the union and the $800 per car for the financial woes of the Big Three. It shouldn't be that much of a surprise, I guess, as these guys are dumb enough, it seems, to believe that poor, inner-city African Americans buying houses under the Community Reinvestment Act somehow had the collective ability to sink the multi-trillion international credit market--despite the facts.
Do you know how much that would reduce the cost of producing a Big Three vehicle? Only about $800.
That’s because labor costs, for all the attention they have been receiving, make up only about 10 percent of the cost of making a vehicle. An extra $800 per vehicle would certainly help Detroit, but the Big Three already often sell their cars for about $2,500 less than equivalent cars from Japanese companies, analysts at the International Motor Vehicle Program say. Even so, many Americans no longer want to own the cars being made by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
In these days of longer commutes and simmering tempers, nothing seems to set off already-testy motorists like the left-lane camper -- the guy or gal who drives in the passing lane and bars faster drivers from easily passing.
There oughta be a law? Hogging the left lane is an infraction in some states:And not just legally:
Some states are cracking down on left-lane campers, both to keep traffic moving and to tamp down the road rage that goes from zero-to-60 faster than ever before.
"Any moving violation that applies points to a driver's record could affect that driver's car insurance rates," says Susan Gallik Rouser, a spokeswoman for Progressive. "And because left-lane driving would be considered as such an infraction, we would take that into account when renewing a driver's policy."But Wisconsin has no law against dozing in the passing lane. And maybe it shouldn't, but this is an issue of courtesy that seems to escape some people. Not that drivers should speed, but this mindlessness translates needless frustration and sometimes into road rage when someone lets a parade assemble behind their car while yakking on the cell phone and caring less about their driving.
Still, if most bloggers are anything like me, we blog when we feel like it and then we go on vacation, try to give up the habit or our computer crashes. If the "Army of Davids," as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds describes the blogosphere, were all like me, Goliath often would fail to be slain.Leslie earlier makes references to the "Start" menu which, combined with the noted reference to "computer crashes," makes me think we should all chip in and buy her a Mac. On the other hand, she has earned a place on the blogroll, soon as I get around to updating it. Time to take down the Wasserman banner, you know.
I want professional journalism to prosper. I want its honorable goals and traditions to grow richer and become more widespread. I think our world will be better if this happens and much worse if this tradition declines.
But for now, I'm not willing to give up the Wigderson Library & Pub or folkbum to slow the decline.
The whole farrago of illogical justifications makes no sense. Iraq had not done anything to the US in the way of terrorism and it was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction. So you can't put the Iraq War under this rubric unless you are being dishonest. Which Bush is.
In among the reasons and slogans used to defend the war, there are a few doozies more than all the other B.S. that grate against my common sense and clear memory. I'll give you three:
Doozy no. 1: We are winning in Iraq.
Clarity on no. 1: The saintly and infallible Gen. David Petraeus himself has said that the word "victory" will probably never apply to our dealings in Iraq. The Bush White House started one war to overthrow Hussein after clearly predicting the war would be short and that we would be warmly welcomed by Iraqi citizens. Bush even declared the mission accomplished.
After Hussein's government fell, then another war -- really, a number of wars from a number of nationalists and/or radical islamist groups such as Al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia -- disgorged blood and misery upon Iraqis and Americans for another four years. This second war was something our leaders never prepared for and never told us ahead of time that we would have to fight. That second phase is what is now subsiding. As others have also pointed out: If you are going somewhere and then accidentally drive into a ditch, the fact you finally extract yourself from the ditch is no cause for strutting and crowing.
Doozy no. 2: We have made the Arab and Muslim world better.
Clarity on no. 2: Despite high-flying goals of democracy, freedom or women's rights used to justify the Iraq War, the only fact used now to defend a claim of victory is a reduction in casualties. Most political outcomes are still too murky to predict, but one result already seems clear: That Iran will emerge as more powerful thanks to our help in substituting a fellow Shi'ite regime for Iran's secular enemy Saddam Hussein. Bush's staunch ally Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan now looks to be a major source of trouble for large swaths of the world. Bush also likes to cite Libya as one of the success stories under his watch. Yes, Libya has renounced terrorism, but, no, this change had nothing to do with our invasion of Iraq. It was largely Britain that brought Qaddafi into the light.
Doozy no. 3: Bush was wrong about Saddam's weapons, but many others including Bill Clinton and Europeans also mistakenly claimed he possessed more than he did.
Clarity on no. 3: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, and Wolfowitz wanted a war with Hussein in the worst way. They got one that way.
UPDATE: Digby today also rebuts the claim that Bush "kept us safe."
Milwaukee moved up two spots on MarketWatch's best 50 U.S. metros areas for business, and outpaced cities like Austin, Texas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Ore. The area moved up to 16th place in 2008, from 18th a year earlier.Sykes--along with his bosses at the WPRI, Belling, the local conservative bloggers, the WMC, the MMAC, and many more--have all been hair-on-fire screaming about the business climate in Wisconsin and particularly in the the tax-island/ tax-hell of Milwaukee. Apparently, the numbers suggest otherwise, and MarketWatch recognizes that.
ctually, that's not even close to true. Obama opposes the idea, Pelosi hasn't "openly stated" anything about pursuing this, and Reid's office told Salon that the Senate Majority Leader "is not contemplating anything like that." The "groundswell for reinstatement" exists only in the overactive imaginations of paranoid right-wing activists.Later, when the Democrats (who never promised to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and, in all earnestness, insisted they would not do such a thing) don't pass the Fairness Doctrine, this coalition will declare victory and insist they prevented the thing (which was never going to happen in the first place). In the meantime, the MRC has collected the names and email addresses of thousands of people that, during the next fund drive, they will hit up for dough, citing as proof of the organization's effectiveness the death of the Fairness Doctrine. Beautiful con, really.
And yet, here we are. The [Media Research Center] is not only railing against a policy proposal that doesn't exist, it's created an organization committed to fighting a policy proposal that doesn't exist. To help in the endeavor against the imaginary foe, the MRC has roped in Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Women for America, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, among others, to help.
The Christmas ornaments for sale at the Miller Park Zoo's gift shop are partly manufactured by reindeer. Honest!Staffers make decorations out of droppings from the zoo's two reindeer, Ealu and Rika. The droppings are dried, then clear-coated and either painted or rolled in glitter.
Zoo marketing director Susie Ohley has named the products "magical reindeer gem ornaments," and each comes with a label of authenticity. They cost $5 at the zoo gift shop.
Staffer Katie Buydos, who makes jewelry as a hobby, donated wire and beads, saying, "Susie asked me to bring some creativity to the table."
It would also make the perfect gift for the would be martyr in your family (we all have at least one). Imagine how happy the martyr would be going back to work or school after the holidays and seeing his or her friends. I can just imagine the conversation:
Martyr: So, how was your Christmas?
Coworker 1: Oh, it was wonderful! I got a lovely sweater and a new Playstation. There was hardly any blood on them at all!
Coworker 2: Meh. It was OK. I got some socks and a wallet. But the food was good. How was yours?
Martyr: Mine? Oh, sheesh, I got sh*t from my family again.
Business profits are down throughout Wisconsin and many businesses are reducing their workforce. In this environment should state lawmakers increase the tax on businesses?Shockingly, most people said no. Of course, anytime anyone asks a question about raising taxes, the answer will be no.
Do you think that they should raise the taxes on businesses or on property owners?Michael Rosen, at Mid Coast Views, has an interesting post up about what economic measures due for each dollar put into it. The chart he has in his post shows that giving big tax breaks to companies and to the wealthy actually cost more than doing something like investing it into repairing the infrastructure. These same tax break cost more than they return to the economy:
Zandi’s analysis also shows what doesn’t work as stimulus: a variety of tax breaks for corporations and wealthy individuals which cost over twice as much as they return to the economy. Yet, these are the very breaks that Congressman Ryan and President Bush support.I have a suggestion for WPRI's next survey. Maybe they could take a poll about whether people think, in this troubled economic time, that property tax payers and personal income tax payers should have their taxes raised to pay for wealthy CEOs.
So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.I would be less hard on the first part of this conga line and was just an excuse to kick off the rest of the action, but it is obvious that this house of cards fell under the weight of greed and incompetence and lack of rules and regulations.
This, as Brian C. Anderson told me, would kill talk radio as we know it [. . .]. Anderson has written about this, in the New Criterion along with Adam Thierer, his co-author on a new book on the subject.Yes, friends, someone is out there trying to sell a book opposing the fairness doctrine. Like Hugh Hewitt's How Sarah Palin Won the Election ... and Saved America, a book on the return of the fairness doctrine is a book about an imaginary thing, and won't sell very well unless the authors' allies can really gin up the fear for them. Bravo, authors Anderson and Thierer, for working the market like pros. Boo McIlheran, for shilling for them.
