*Transcendental *Logic

HELP - DROWNING IN TABS - SEND SPARE BRAIN IMMEDIATELY

Here’s the goods!  (Maybe one of these days I’ll start doing this part more regularly, yah?)

-  Great stuff from WikiHow; my favorites are How to Define a Problem, and How to Create an Abundance Mentality.  It’s amazing how well a short article can handle a relatively abstract mental concept, I’m discovering.

-  The Working Group on Extreme Inequality (quite a find in itself) has a great piece on Auto Executive Compensation, which is quite eye-opening in light of the money they want to avoid completely trashing Michigan’s economy (at least).  The long and short of it?  US Auto Execs don’t make very much compared to, say, US banking execs.  But all US executives are racking up orders of magnitude more money than foreign executives, thanks to our clever lack of wage parity laws.  So one GM executive made $10.2 million in the same fiscal year that the top 32 executives at Toyota (including the CEO) made less than $20 million, BONUSES INCLUDED.

Oh yeah, but it’s the Union’s fault that they’re going out of business now, you know.  ::facepalm::

Anybody who finds that interesting will probably also like at least following the thinking in this Treehugger piece on three possible New-Deal-Like ideas to jumpstart the U.S. economy by building spiffy high-speed rail lines all over the place (not to mention solving the problem of how revolting air travel has become).  Say what you like about the New Deal, but those railroads are still a huge economic benefit today…

-  This is just cool, if you do Xmas presents:  Pangea Organics has gift sets packed in boxes that are not only biodegradable, but will grow into a spruce tree if you plant them.  Yup, open the gift, get the spiffy hippie-soap and stuff out, then soak the box and grow a tree out of it!  Big bonuses for creative thinking on that one.

-  In other hippie news, I found a neat site for people in the city who, like me, are seriously eyeballing the option of raising chickens.  It’s generally pretty badly written (seriously, "you’re here because you’ve been bit by the chicken bug"??  you make it sound like a parasite!), but the info is pretty darn helpful overall.

-  And there’s a weirdo in Michigan doing some downright disturbing face-paintings.  Not that I’m too surprised (though I am a bit surprised at the "self-described drag queen and born-again Christian" bit…wut??).  Looks like it takes talent, though!

-  "The End of Wall Street" is a really, really, really good article about the recent Crash.  I wish it didn’t end where it did — I want to know more! — but it was probably the best read on the topic I’ve seen so far.

-  Also, in the area of Things You Probably Didn’t Realize Would Be Interesting, the Book Design Review has a page up with their favorite designs of the year…and I have to admit, it was pretty fascinating to page through, and some of them are really, really cool.  If you know nothing about book design, this is a really fun way to burn five minutes.  ;)

Lastly, if none of that was weird enough for you…THIS IS REAL:

EEEEK, right?  How long do you think before some crazy religious nut donates Fetus Cookies for a bake sale near you?  (Thanks, again, to Cake Wrecks for the image.)

Whew!  Now that I’m not staring at fifty tabs, maybe I can get back to work!
 

Okay, back into my Financial Advice Hat one more time, because yet again an informational injustice is giving me hives of rage. 

Here’s the injustice:  If you follow financial news at all, you’ve probably heard at least once about how some mortgage companies are "freezing foreclosures", and you’ve almost certainly heard that phrased as good news for the people in trouble with their homes.

It’s not.  In fact, it’s very bad news — by stalling or ceasing foreclosure proceedings, banks are actually only saving their own skins.  They’re playing a trick on the system that lets them out of the worst of the mortgage fallout they face right now, by putting already-desperate homeowners into a much, much worse situation later on.

Now.  SERIOUSLY.  Is anybody actually surprised?  Because, no kidding, if you heard "foreclosure freezes" and actually bought the media slant that this was somehow good for homeowners — now, after everything that’s already gone down — you need your head checked.  Seriously.

Now, the details of why stalling or stopping foreclosures is actually a nasty and evil and not-at-all-homeowner-friendly thing to do … I’ll put them under the cut in case you’re developing an allergy to bad financial news, not that I could blame you…

Read the rest of this entry »

When trying to rectify society’s many ills, how important is policing the use of sensitive words?

Concepts is one thing — I’m all in favor of dragging bad thinking out into the light and making everybody watch while you shoot it in the face.  But what about words, just words, not used as a part of any particular concept; for instance, when a sensitive word is used as slang to refer to something completely different from its normal usage?

Recently, on The Consumerist, an article about credit cards had in its first sentence the phrase, "So-and-so is getting raped with a 24% interest rate…"  …And many of the feministas went ballistic.

I’m caught in the middle on this one.  I care deeply about issues surrounding rape, but I think those issues are things like "dismally bad prosecutions", "negligence in reporting", "lack of victim support", "lack of education for both sexes on the topic", and "perpetuation of concepts that portray women as inherently submissive and men as forgivably aggressive". 

Much as I ponder it, I just can’t see "rape used as a slang term for egregious violation" being something that, if addressed, will make any positive impact at all in the frankly disgusting way much of our society views and deals with the obscene crime that is the real thing.  At best, it will make people recoil from the word itself , as we do with all societally-unapproved words — but what good has the national recoil from the N-word done for civil rights?  What impact on extramarital sex has been made by our societal repugnance of the f-word?  I tend to think that focusing on the word is diverting focus from the issue.

I don’t like being the person who tells anyone trying to speak up about an important topic to shut up and quit making those of us who are serious about it look bad, I really don’t.  My hometown is a racially-charged area, which is probably part of where I get both that tendency, and the phobia of giving in to it.  But I can’t help it:   I do think the women going on about how awful and inappropriate and insensitive it is to use the word "rape" in a way they don’t approve of sound whiny, over-emotional and generally ripe for a good Ignoring The Hell Out Of.  Plus, I have a good bit of knowledge about the language, and "rape" has been used as a hyperbolic term for violation for so long, and by so many people, that in some dictionaries that particular usage isn’t even listed as slang anymore.  I’m also a writer — to me, all usages of all words are permissible if they work, and a word itself can’t really be guilty of anything.  It’s the concepts that are dangerous, and I confess openly that I don’t see anything wrong with the concept that usury in the form of a 24% monthly interest rate is akin to a terrible, nonconsentual violation.  It’s not an exact comparison, but nor is it supposed to be…it’s called a metaphor, and darnit, people who overreact to metaphors (assuming the concept itself isn’t harmful) just strike me as dumb.  Now, if the sentence had been about how women shouldn’t manage their own finances, or how everything started going to shit when women started buying sex-toys, or about how so-and-so was so angered by this interest rate that he might just have to rape a customer-service rep, well, that’d be different!

Based on those arguments, I’m mad at these women for potentially making people who might otherwise listen more likely to roll their eyes the next time someone brings up rape.  I really think it cheapens the severity of the real issues to act like a traumatized kindergartner every time someone says a word that makes you cringe.  Not that I can’t understand why it’d make you cringe — to this day, I can’t watch even a mild rape-scene on TV or in a movie without feeling sick to my stomach — but learn to separate your emotional reaction from the issues that people who don’t know you need to be educated about, eh? 

Now.  Whenever I get angry like this about, say, complaints about what seem like minor or overblown aspects of racism, delivered by people of color, I default to "shut up you don’t know what you’re talking about" mode — as a person of little pigment myself, I feel I don’t really have the right or the background to say who should be speaking up and how.  But I am a rape survivor, as are many (close to most) women I know, and that makes me all the more anxious that the topic receive the treatment it deserves, and not get derailed by childish nitpicking. 

So, I honestly can’t tell if I’m right or wrong here. 

What do ya’ll think?

America the Banana Republic: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it. The most you can say is that some people have had to take a slightly early retirement, but a retirement very much sweetened by the wherewithal on which to retire. That doesn’t quite count. These are the rules that apply in Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea or Venezuela, where the political big boys mimic what is said about our hedge funds and investment banks: the stupid mantra about being “too big to fail.”

Learned something today…

MERS (the Mortgage Electronic Registration System), or more properly “MERS Inc.” as it is a private corporation (.org address notwithstanding; I hate it when companies do that!), was created by a group of big mortgage-industry players, including Fannie Mae, in 1997; it went fully operational in 1999.  Its mission is “to register every mortgage loan originated in the United States”; as it stands, 50% or more of all new mortgages are in that system.

And really, “to register” sounds pretty benign, if the only effect of it is to digitize and organize information on mortgage loans.  But what MERS actually does is more complicated and way more sinister, as I recently learned.  I was pretty shocked, after discussing MERS with some of the professionals I work with, to find that MERS doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, and that none of the information I could find on it addresses the truly icky implications it has, both for consumers and the economy.

So here, then, is why I, and at least a few other people I know, think that this whole MERS thing is one of the greatest cons perpetrated on the mortgage market yet.

MERS is a “membership”-type organization — mortgage originators (”lenders” for now) pay to be part of it.  For that fee, they and their many attendent shady investors get to wriggle out of a seriously annoying bit of transparency and consumer protection that’s supposed to be part of the system on a Federal level.  This is openly admitted everywhere, including on MERS’ own website’s front page, but no apology is made for it.  Apparently no-one in the “real estate finance industry” really sees a problem with just shuffling off that pesky assignment-recording requirement, like so many twelve-year-olds cleaning their rooms by shoving it all in the closet.

But there definitely are consequences.

First, something about mortgages, if you didn’t know it:  A mortgage is actually two “instruments” or, simplistically, documents — one promissory note (”note”) that obligates you to pay your lender back, and one mortgage note (”mortgage”) that contains the lien on your house and other provisions.  It is the law in this country that whenever a mortgage changes hands, the borrower must be notified — the idea being that 1) people have a right to know who has a lien on their house, and 2) it’s fundamentally unfair to hide information about how to contact/research/etc. the entity that owns your mortgage.  One could also, I think, make a good argument that obscuring the paper trail of who-transferred-what-to-who is fundamentally bad for a trading market that includes mortgages as a securitized commodity.

Well, that’s where MERS comes in.  See, MERS will, for a fee, allow you to transfer the mortgage into their name, “completely” legally, while you retain the note.

Think about it:  You, Mr. Big Lender Man, still hold the paper that says you get paid.  And that’s the paper that you can sell on the market, or assign to a servicer to collect on if you’re the old-fashioned type.  But the mortgage is owned by MERS, and it remains owned by MERS no matter how many times the note gets bundled, packaged, sold, resold, washed, rinsed and repeated.  So, no matter how many times that loan changes hands, you, the lender community, no longer have to write it all down, or notify the consumers of any change.  Their mortgage company may have changed a hundred times, but the mortgager on paper remains the same.

In a nutshell, MERS takes on the legal veil of being a mortgage lender, allowing lenders to abdicate some of their responsibility for how they handle mortgage “paper”, while MERS takes on none of that responsibility because they don’t have to, see, because they’re not collecting money or anything!  So the responsibilities lenders had, to homeowners and the taxpaying public who deserve transparency about the market, just sort of…disappear.

Oh, but it’s okay because MERS is keeping track of all those transactions, see?  Lenders don’t have to do all that onerous paperwork tracking those sales anymore, because the trustworthy industry-created private company will just handle it for their paid members, and of course everything will be done in the best interests of the public.

That’s why members of the mortgage-holding public get all those letters in the mail, notifying them every single time their note is sold. 

Oh wait; no they don’t.  I talk to people all the time who don’t even know how to find out who their mortgage company is; they pay a “servicer” and weren’t notified of anything, in spite of the loans having changed hands who-knows-how-many times.

That’s why people like me, who are more-than-reasonably educated mortgage consumers who read every single bit of the paperwork for their recent refinance, are totally informed about MERS and know how to call them and find out who currently owns their mortgage note. 

Oh wait; no we aren’t.  Professionals use MERS all the time to look up who owns a loan, but the experienced one who came to me today with this was genuinely shocked to have figured out what exactly the company was up to.  And even though I personally know just about everybody involved in my refinance, and had detailed talks with them about it on several occasions, MERS was never brought up at any time.  (Also, when I went looking for my data, I found that while it was eventually findable, what wasn’t findable was the “paper-trail” — who owned what when, and when it was sold.  Apparently that’s industry-only information, fellow taxpayers who just paid $850 billion in bailouts…)

That’s also got to be why the market isn’t having the slightest bit of trouble ironing out who owns what, who sold what when, and how things got so massively f’d up in the mortgage-trading business. 

Oh.  Wait…

[Warning:  I'm about to go off about companies insisting on using Social Security Numbers as unique identifiers for consumers, because it's illegal and stupid and MERS does it too.  You can safely skip this last bit if you don't care.]

Lastly, just to put the cream in the firehose we’re getting beaten with here?  If you call MERS’ voice system at (888) 679-6377 and give them the special 18-digit Mortgage Identification Number you mayr or may not be able to find, they’ll tell you who owns your mortgage.  Wait–don’t have that number?  No problem — just use a different, completely neutral and safe number instead…like the borrower’s SSN. 

[EDIT:  You can also search online here, a system which will find mortgage lenders based on either 1) address; 2) name/details and address; or 3) name, SSN and zip code.  Somebody tell me what possible good using the SSN in there does, unless you're deliberately courting hackers maybe?  ...Ironically though, I put in quite a few addresses and it wasn't able to find anything at all.]

That’s right; not only are they breaking the provision of the Social Security Act that forbids using SSNs as identifiers, they’re hella endangering people’s private information by storing all those SSNs on a VIR system.  (And that’s without even wondering how easy it probably is to social-engineer their help desk, which cheerily offers to provide mortgage information with just the name and/or address if you don’t have the MIN or SSN, to give you whatever information you might be missing once you have an SSN.  Remember, your name and SSN as a combination virutally is your identity, so guard it…sorry, off my soapbox-tangent-thing now, heh.)

In closing, Wow Ripoff and Gee, Thanks A Lot and What A Bunch of Scumbags We’ve Got Running The Mortgage Industry, Are We Sure Regulation Is Enough And Can’t We Just Shoot Them, Please?

——————-
My Sources For This Writeup Are:
The MERS Website
“A Brief Summary of ‘MERS’” by Kemp Law Office (no, I don’t know those lawyers)
Fannie Mae’s Info Page on MERS
Foreclosureforum.com’s info page on MERS