Bankers like [Bank of America founder] A.P. Giannini made the argument that the thirty year mortgage was a weapon against Marx: if the average American family no longer owned a farm, it could still own a house. . . . pioneered the mass marketed thirty year mortgage. Under his leadership the Bank of America perfected the growth engine that drove this whole country for sixty years. The bank lent money through the municipal bond market to build the infrastructure for new subdivisions. It lent money to real estate developers to build housing developments and lent money to consumers for mortgages and to buy cars.
[His] was a new bank for the hardworking immigrants other banks would not serve. He offered those ignored customers savings accounts and loans, judging them not by how much money they already had, but by their character.
You have to wonder how far he would spew his morning coffee if he were alive to hear this story:
It started five months ago when Bank of America filed foreclosure papers on the home of a couple, who didn’t owe a dime on their home.
The couple said they paid cash for the house.A Collier County Judge agreed and after the hearing, Bank of America was ordered, by the court to pay the legal fees of the homeowners’, Maurenn Nyergers and her husband.
The Judge said the bank wrongfully tried to foreclose on the Nyergers’ house.
So, how did it end with bank being foreclosed on? After more than 5 months of the judge’s ruling, the bank still hadn’t paid the legal fees, and the homeowner’s attorney did exactly what the bank tried to do to the homeowners. He seized the bank’s assets.
“They’ve ignored our calls, ignored our letters, legally this is the next step to get my clients compensated, ” attorney Todd Allen told CBS.
Sheriff’s deputies, movers, and the Nyergers’ attorney went to the bank and foreclosed on it. The attorney gave instructions to to remove desks, computers, copiers, filing cabinets and any cash in the teller’s drawers.
After about an hour of being locked out of the bank, the bank manager handed the attorney a check for the legal fees.
All you really need to know to understand this story is that “estuprador” means rapist, “corta” means cut, “pênis” means penis (fancy that), and “polícia” means police. Oh, and it helps to know that the “estuprador’s” victim wielded the knife.
“Quando ele tentou violentá-la, a mulher cortou seu pênis com uma faca. Ela depois colocou o membro em um recipiente de plástico e o levou para a delegacia de polícia de Jhalakathi como prova do crime”, indicou à AFP o chefe de polícia local, Abul Khaer.
I guess it helps to know that Bangladesh is 89.5% Muslim. We’ll have to wait to see if turnabout is considered fair play in that part of the world.
Interestingly, if we go back to 1990, New York saw 2,245 of its citizens murdered, a rate of 187 a month. Thus, things are much better in NYC. Maybe there’s hope for Rio.
I’m undecided about waterboarding. Is it torture? It certainly must be uncomfortable, and I’ve read all the arguments that it is–Japan did it in WWII, and we went after them, etc. But then there’s the odd fact that guys like Christopher Hitchens willingly underwent waterboarding to see what it was like. (It was like torture, he said.) I have a hard time imagining Hitchens allowing someone to attache electrodes to his genitals or pull off his finger nails.
Anyway, we can debate my moral dilemma another day. My point today is to raise an interesting question raised by an interchange in the comments on Barry Ritholtz’s website The Big Picture. Ritholtz, by the way, is adamant that water boarding is torture. Virtually all of his readers appear to agree with him, judging by the comments.
But then there’s this interchange:
Andy T Says:
May 6th, 2011 at 2:45 am
“Thinking that torture is wrong is not a liberal or conservative value — it is an American value.”
If your wife or child was captured by somebody…and the only way to get really good information out of a suspect/accomplice was to torture them, what would you do?
Tough question…..I know.
Mike Dukakis lost an election with that type of question in 1988.
Keep holding on to your ‘truths’ ….
~~~
BR: Its not a tough question — its a silly piece of rhetoric, revealing the questioner to be a fool. Of course, my personal code of ethics is different than what a great nations’ laws are.
What I would do personally in that situation — ripping someone’s eyes out with my bare hands so I could piss on their brains — is not the same sort of response that is appropriate by a nation.
Why is what might be appropriate for me to do, inappropriate for a nation to do? Discuss.
We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama said. “We’ve got better stuff to do.”
Like releasing your college transcripts?
Save your breath. I’m not a birther. I am someone who wants to know why the man who leads this country is so unwilling to let his followers know who he is. I also want to know why the press has let him get away with it for so long. His stonewalling and their enabling–now that’s silliness.
UPDATE: The “silliness” continues as The Smoking Gun kicks the ball back into play. What Obama could have learned from the Nixon White House.
This past Thursday, a young gunman entered a school in Realengo, a neighborhood in Rio, and killed 12 young students. The story has dominated the pages of Brazil’s newspapers and the coverage of its television stations.
And it led to protests in favor of disarming the Brazilian people.
My sympathies go out to those who lost loved ones and to those injured in the gunman’s mindless rampage. That said, this bumper sticker never spoke more sense, even in Brazil:
Gary Becker, George Schultz, and John Taylor have a plan to bust the budget. It’s worth reading. To me the most obvious gem in the plan, and the one most sorely missing in all the talk in Washington right now is this:
Assurance that the current tax system will remain in place—pending genuine reform in corporate and personal income taxes—will be an immediate stimulus.
Congress and the President (any Congress and any President) have used the tax code to implement policy choices. It’s time to leave the rules be, so that business can plan, something they are loathe to do when there’s no promise that the rules won’t change next week.
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