Category: Corporate Statism

Eminent domain

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Great idea, hope it spreads. Joe Nocera:

There are few counties in America in as rough shape as San Bernardino County in California. During the housing bubble, the good times were very good. But then came the bust.


Today, San Bernardino County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation: 11.9 percent. Home prices have collapsed. Astonishingly, every second home is underwater, meaning the homeowner owes more on the mortgage than the house is worth. It is well documented that underwater mortgages have a high likelihood of defaulting — and, eventually, being foreclosed on. It has also been clear for some time that the best way to keep troubled homeowners in their homes is by reducing the principal on their mortgages, thus lowering their debt burden and more closely aligning their mortgage with the actual value of the home.


Which is why Greg Devereaux, the county’s chief executive officer, found himself listening intently when the folks from Mortgage Resolution Partners came knocking on his door. They had spent the previous year kicking around an intriguing idea: have localities buy underwater mortgages using their power of eminent domain — and then write the homeowner a new, reduced mortgage. It’s principal reduction using a stick instead of a carrot.


I know. When you first hear this idea, it sounds a little crazy. Eminent domain to take a mortgage? But the more closely you look at it, the more sense it starts to make. It would be a way to break the logjam that keeps mortgages in mortgage-backed bonds — securitizations — from being modified. It could prevent foreclosures. And it could finally stabilize housing prices.


[…] The securitization industry is up in arms about this proposal. In late June, after the plan was leaked to Reuters, some 18 organizations, including the Association of Mortgage Investors, wrote a threatening letter to the San Bernardino board of supervisors claiming that the plan would inflict “significant harm” to homeowners in the county. For his part, Devereaux insists that no final decision has been made. But, he says, “this is the first idea that anyone has approached us with that has the potential to have a real impact on our economy.” Other cities are watching closely to see what happens in San Bernardino.


We’re four years into a housing crisis. Nothing has yet worked to stem the terrible tide of foreclosures. It’s time to give eminent domain a try.

The fix

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Taibbi on the Libor scandal:

When the rest of this scandal comes out, and it turns out that up to 15 more of the world’s biggest banks (including Chase, Bank of America, and Citi) were doing the same thing as Barclays, our regulators better start “inflecting their eyebrows” pretty damn vigorously. Because if it comes out that these other banks were all involved with this scandal (and it will come out that way, almost for sure), and their CEOs and COOs get to keep their jobs, that’ll be a sure sign that the fix is in. Let’s hope Ben Bernanke, Eric Holder, and Tim Geithner are listening.

New Jersey

~ susie

Why you can’t trust anything they tell you about charter schools:

This week, the citizens and school boards of Cherry Hill and Voorhees won a major battle against a proposed charter school that neither community wanted nor needed. Blue Jersey has previously detailed the story of Regis Academy’s founder, Pastor Amor Khan, an anti-marriage equity crusader and political ally of Chris Christie.


Khan admitted – and his initial application clearly showed – that he needed the charter funds that would come from local taxpayers to pay off the mortgage on the property he was attempting to buy. The property would have housed both the charter and his ministry’s other operations, a clear conflict of interest the local school boards and parent activists pointed out repeatedly.


But because charter schools in New Jersey need not be approved by their local school boards, the local sending districts – which eventually grew to include over 30 districts all over South Jersey – had to set aside millions of dollars on the possibility Regis would open its doors this fall.
When the deal for the original property fell through, Khan had to scramble to find a new site – a surprise to the local school boards and residents. At this point, even the NJDOE had to admit that there were too many “misrepresentations” in the Regis application; this week, they denied final approval to the charter. Of course, the budget is set in the sending districts; what happens to the money now is anyone’s guess.


Had Regis been the only charter with problems, charter supporters could brush off this unfortunate outcome as an isolated incident. But charters are becoming an embarrassment all over the state:


– This morning, Jessica Calefati reports in the Star-Ledger on a charter school – Adelaide Sanford – that is allegedly paying rent on properties it doesn’t use. The issue seems to be similar to the one with Regis: the school and the landlord are one in the same, allowing tax dollars set aside for charters to be used to pay rent on properties being used for other purposes.

Go read the whole damned thing even if you don’t live in New Jersey, because I guarantee the same mess will be repeated in a place near you.

Bad news

~ susie

What could possibly go wrong?

TRENTON — In a ruling that could affect tens of thousands of contaminated sites in New Jersey, a state appeals court Friday said the Department of Environmental Protection does not have the authority to require owners or operators of industrial sites to certify the land is “clean” before they are sold and redeveloped.


Environmentalists called the decision a “major setback” in cleaning up contaminated sites in New Jersey and said this was an unintended consequence of legislation that was supposed to help less polluted sites get cleaned up quickly.


Acknowledging the gravity of its decision, the three-judge appellate panel said no action can be taken on the sites for 30 days, giving time for a potential appeal to the state Supreme Court.


“We conclude that the department, despite its important regulatory role and its expertise over environmental matters, acted in the present context beyond its legislatively delegated powers,” Judge Jack Sabatino wrote in the 36-page decision.

Spent

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

The Democratic challenger, by contrast, spent $3.5 million on his campaign:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker raised an unprecedented $37 million since taking office in 2011, most of it spent to stave off a bid to recall him after he enacted curbs on public sector unions last year, according to a filing on Thursday.


The 44-year-old, first-term governor, who has become a rising national star of the Republican party, spent more than $35 million to defeat Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the June 5 recall election, according to Walker’s campaign finance report filed with the state elections board.

Most of Walker’s money came from out of state, and from the Kochs and their kind.

Let’s pretend it’s not happening

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Media Matters has done an impressive job, doing that which the corporate media refuses to do: Putting the western wildfires squarely in the context of global warming. More importantly, they’ve documented the fact that the media is indeed mostly ignoring the subject. Gee, I wonder why?

While numerous factors determine the frequency, severity and cost of wildfires, scientific research indicates that human-induced climate change increases fire risks in parts of the Western U.S. by promoting warmer and drier conditions. Seven of nine fire experts contacted by Media Matters agreed journalists should explain the relationship between climate change and wildfires. But an analysis of recent coverage suggests mainstream media outlets are not up to the task — only 3 percent of news reports on wildfires in the West mentioned climate change.

The major television and print outlets largely ignored climate change in their coverage of wildfires in Colorado, New Mexico and other Western states. All together, only 3 percent of the reports mentioned climate change, including 1.6 percent of television segments and 6 percent of text articles.

METHODOLOGY: We searched Nexis and Factiva databases for articles and segments on (wildfire or wild fire or forest fire) between April 1, 2012, and June 30, 2012. News outlets included in this study are ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. MSNBC and Fox News were not included in this analysis because transcripts of their daytime coverage are not available in the Nexis database.

[…] Of nine fire scientists who responded to email inquiries, seven agreed that journalists should explain how manmade climate change could worsen wildfire risk in certain parts of the western U.S. The other two emphasized other major factors that determine the extent of fire damage, or highlighted the regional and subregional variations that make it difficult to draw broad conclusions.
Continue reading “Let’s pretend it’s not happening” →

Fukushima report released

~ susie

Watch Are U.S. Nuclear Plants Ready for a Fukushima-Like Meltdown? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

And just to bring this Fukushima report a little closer to home, there are 23 of G.E.’s flawed Mark I reactors right here in the good old U.S. of A. Add to that the increasing incidence of earthquakes in unexpected places (caused by the injection of fracking waste fluid into the ground), and we’ve got a “no one could have known!” just waiting to happen here.

Maybe someone should do something?

Yes, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima was sparked by the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, but a Japanese parliamentary report said Thursday the disaster that followed was man-made, and suggested more plants were susceptible.

That last bit is probably the most disturbing angle of the 641-page report, which said Tokyo Electric Power Company didn’t take the damage to its nuclear power plant seriously enough quickly enough, and which “accused Tepco and regulators at the nuclear and industrial safety agency of failing to take adequate safety measures, despite evidence that the area was susceptible to powerful earthquakes and tsunamis,”The Guardian’s Justin McCurry reports. Tepco has argued that the tsunami was a “once-in-a-millennium” event, for which they couldn’t realistically prepare, The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi writes.

The scary thing, though, is that the report found that it could have been the earthquake itself, not just the unusually large tsunami, that damaged the plant and sparked meltdowns in three reactors. “By suggesting that the plant may have sustained extensive damage from the quake — a far more frequent occurrence in Japan — the report in effect casts doubts on the safety of Japan’s entire fleet of nuclear plants,” Tabuchi wrote.

In the end, the report concluded that the disaster was “profoundly man-made” and could have been prevented.