A Comment On My Post – No More X-Rated Searches!!@!

This is my friend, who writes under the name, “islammessageofpeace,” obviously, Islam, Message of Piece.

Wonderful writeup.
Frankly speaking, as a general inhabitant of this world and specifically as a Muslim (trying to spread the Message of Peace, Mercy and justice; the true Message of Islam), I really couldn’t buy any of the TSA Security Compliance. Honestly, there should be a balance between Security & Privacy.

In Islam, covering the Awrah (the intimate parts of the body) is to maintain modesty, privacy and morality. It is unlawful to expose oneself’s Awrah and is regarded as sin. For the Men the Awrah is from the Naval to the Knees and for the Women it is whole of the body.

It is mentioned in the Glorious Qur’an (Chapter 33 Al-Ahzab [The Parties]: Verse 59):
“O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies (i.e. screen themselves). That will be better, that they should be known (as free respectable women) so as not to be annoyed. And Allah is Ever OftForgiving, Most Merciful.”

I respect my friend’s beliefs. I hold to a different standard as a Christian. Nevertheless, I am fully in agreement that there are lines that should not be crossed save for the most dire reasons.

Surely here in the United States, we have some standard beyond which we are unwilling to be humiliated?

Is there no modesty, no dignity, which cannot be easily discarded in the name of security?

The religion of Islam states a clear line. Surely, the citizens can find some standard beyond which the government cannot go?

James Pilant

A Thirty Dollar Fee?

Now you, common middle class citizen, you have to pay a thirty dollar fee at a court house in most states for them to record a change in ownership in property. They have to do paperwork and change that little county map that shows who owns what. Now suppose you change the ownership again. You transfer it your spouse, your child, or you’re paying the fee as part of a sales contract. You have to pay a second thirty dollar fee.

Annoying, right? Of course, but has to be done. You have to know who owns what, right?

What if you don’t want to pay the second time? Well, you are out of luck there too. The state is not going to let you out of the fee. Besides without paying the fee, the records won’t show who owns the property, so it’s a good idea to pay it, right?

Everybody has to pay the fees, right??

No, they don’t.

If you are a bank using the MERS system, you don’t have to pay a second fee. (MERS = Mortgage Electronic Registry System)

You see all the transactions are done by computer therefore there is no fee for any transaction after the first one. The banks often transferred these properties dozens of times, but every transfer after the first one was free. Isn’t that great?

Now, you probably would like to say something dumb like, “Isn’t that state law?” Then you might follow it up with, “Doesn’t that mean they don’t own the property?!”

You silly person, don’t you realize this a is a banking institution? They are not like you.

They just decided not to pay.

See, when you want to change a law, you have to lobby and talk to people and ask the legislature to consider a bill changing the law, then it has to go through both houses and then be signed by the governor.

But when you are a bank, you simply decide not to pay the fees. It makes everything simple.

Now, there are those in this country who are bizarre individuals. Those strange people want the banks to cough up the money. So, the banks, their feelings deeply injured, have run to their friends in the United States Congress who are planning a surprise party for you.

At the surprise party a thinly clad financial industry lobbyist will leap out of a cake and tell you that Congress has legalized all that stuff that the banks have been doing for, Oh, about five years now.

Now you might ask another question at this point and it is not “Why aren’t I getting any cake?” Your question is “Doesn’t those payments to the country, those thirty dollars each time, aren’t those part of my county’s taxes?”

Why, yes, they are.

But remember, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and he just took your county’s money and gave it to the banks.

What a sad story!

And it’s all true!!

From the Associated Press –

It used to be that every time a bank sold a mortgage, the county land recording office received a fee. It wasn’t much — $30 or so — but then real estate boomed in the 1990s and banks pooled millions of mortgages into securities that investors bought and sold.

One mortgage transaction became a dozen or more, and the tab grew ever larger. So the banks came up with a way around the fees. And now they are fighting to avoid perhaps tens of billions of dollars in penalties that have added up over the years.

From further down in the article –

MERS is “an admitted fee-avoidance scheme,” says Robert Hager, the Nevada lawyer who, along with his partner Treva Hearne, is filing the suits against MERS and its bank owners, including the government-backed mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie provide a low-cost flow of funding to the nation’s mortgage markets by buying mortgages from lenders, packaging them into securities and then selling them to investors.

The suits were filed in California, Nevada and Tennessee and 14 undisclosed states where the cases are still under court seal. Hager and Hearne chose the states because their laws allow what are called false claims suits, in which citizens can take legal action against companies that may have cheated the government.

The suits allege that by privatizing public records, MERS enabled banks to circumvent American property law and bypass the counties’ fee and paperwork requirements, costing billions of dollars in lost revenue over more than a decade. MERS says its process is legal, and that the fees are not required under its system.

If only we were all banks!

James Pilant

MERS And Ownership

MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registry System, is a system used by the banks to evade paying fees or having to do the traditional paperwork necessary to change the ownership of property.

To quote the Associated Press -

MERS’ owners are all the big mortgage companies, including Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and GMAC. They are all facing a foreclosure-fraud investigation launched by all 50 state attorneys general, and all took government bailout money after the financial meltdown in 2008.

As I mentioned in my last posting, our lame duck Congress is thinking (if you could ever refer to their processing as having thought) of legalizing this system now, years after the major banks began using it with full knowledge of its legal problems. (Being a bank is very much like being in love in the movie, Love Story, you never have to say you are sorry.)

This is from the Washington Post. It explains why MERS is a problem.

I very much appreciate the Washington Post for developing this little picture and trust it was useful to you.

James Pilant

Congress Leaps In To Protect The Banking Industry?

The web site, Crooks and Liars, has picked up a rumor that the lame duck Congress is planning a huge gift for the mortgage industry. They will retroactively legalize the MERS system to prove ownership.

Bankers Feast

Here is Wikipedia’s definition of MERS -

Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) is a privately held company that operates an electronic registry designed to track servicing rights and ownership of mortgage loans in the United States. MERS asserts to be the owner (or the owner’s nominee) of the security interest indicated by the mortgages transferred by lenders, investors and their loan servicers in the county land records. MERS maintains that its process eliminates the need to file assignments in the county land records which lowers costs for lenders and consumers by reducing county recording revenues from real estate transfers and provides a central source of information and tracking for mortgage loans. MERS’ role in facilitating mortgage trading was relatively uncontroversial in its early days a decade ago but continued fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis has put MERS at the center of several legal challenges disputing the company’s right to initiate foreclosures. Should these challenges succeed, the US banking industry could face a renewed need for capitalization.

The computer program simply transacts exchanges of property. The only problem is that does not the fulfill the requirements of the law in most states. In most states you must actually go through a process and have actual documents. So, some five years ago, MERS went into operation with scant, non-existent or simple illegality.The really neat part about MERS is that no matter how criminally stupid or unlikely or straight up illegal your change of ownership is, it looks just beautiful and all proper on the computer.

So, the Congress of the United States of America is going to retroactively validate a computer system that shifts property five years after the thing began moving property around like pixels in a video game.

Does fairness and obedience to the law figure in Congressional decision making?

I bet if millions of homeowners had their property taken away with scant legal proof Congress would leap into protect them. But that has already happened without Congress acting.

Okay, I bet if hundred of billions, trillions of dollars, were lost by banks playing the world markets using casino chips made of mortgage backed securities, that Congress would punish the malefactors. But no one has been punished unless the homeowners are considered.

I could write about five or six more “already happened’s” and you could probably think of a few more.

But basically it boils down the this. If the financial industry has legal problems, Congress tends to rush in with legislation retroactively fixing the problem.

If a member of the great middle class gets into legal trouble, Congress is unlikely to be unduly concerned.

A society that puts value on fairness and justice should find these matters disturbing.

From the article -

Now it appears that Congress may attempt to prevent any MERS meltdown from occurring. MERS is owned by all the biggest banks, and they certainly do not want it to be sunk by huge fines. Investors in mortgage-backed securities also do not want to see the value of their bonds sink because of doubts about the ownership of the underlying mortgages.So it looks like the stage may be set for Congress to pass a bill that would limit MERS exposure on the recording fee issue and perhaps retroactively legitimate mortgage transfers conducted through MERS private database.

If only, we were all treated as if were banks.

James Pilant

No More X-Rated Searches!!@!

Do you really need to pass through a machine that looks at every square centimeter of your body to make airlines safer? Do you really have to (for all intents and purposes) pose nude for the airline cops? And if you refuse to pose nude, should they be able to grope you like some felon assaulting a schoolgirl on a subway in Japan?

Forbes proposes abolishing the TSA, which is, of course, nonsense. Forbes has never had too many rational thoughts. I consider them finding nude searches to be irrational and demeaning more the accident of them having to ride airplanes than from any actual concern for other human beings. In fact, I am reluctant to quote these doctrinaires but I think you and I will survive this once.

From Forbes -

For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer.

But won’t that compromise safety? I doubt it. The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility. This might be beside the point: in 2003, William Anderson incisively argued that some of the steps that airlines (and passengers) would have needed to take to prevent the 9/11 disaster probably would have been illegal.

The odds of dying from a terrorist attack are much lower than the odds of dying from doing any of a number of incredibly mundane things we do every day. You are almost certainly more likely to die or be injured driving to the airport than you are to be injured by a terrorist once you’re in the air, even without a TSA. Indeed, once you have successfully made it to the airport, the most dangerous part of your trip is over. Until it’s time to drive home, that is.

Boy, these guys can take a matter of personal dignity and come up with, “Let’s get rid of a public agency! We can find a corporation to come to the rescue! Give us public money now! Now!”

Okay, personal dignity. Do these kinds of searches make us safer? Probably not.

These kinds of searches are more the kind of thing we subject prison inmates to. I fully agree that if all airline passenger are convicted felons, the searches are merited. Are we all one step away from being criminals stopped only by a little humiliation? (Okay, a heaping big helping of humiliation.)

We have given up our internet privacy, our financial privacy, been subjected to camera surveillance all in the name of safety. At what point, are you going to say stop? When they mount camera’s in your home? in your bathroom? implant chips in your children?

Let’s stop them. This has become insane, crazy, just plain loco.

Do we want people around the world to decide that Americans are witless cattle willing to undergo any indignity, any loss of rights because of 20,000 scumbags hiding in caves in North Pakistan?

I think Americans are brave and resourceful. I have never believed that we needed to give up any rights at all in this struggle. These criminals are just a small band of criminals. Those that advocate a war with Islam can’t think and can’t count. There are a billion and a half Muslims. A good number don’t like us, that is not a crime. The organization that attacked us is tiny and we can handle this without this kind of surrender to our worst fears and instincts.

We’re Americans! Did the Kaiser, the Nazis, Tojo’s Japan, or Mussolini scare us into naked searches or genital groping?

No, they didn’t. We have courage. That’s why we have been successful as a nation. When we give up courage, what’s left to fight for?

James Pilant