As we drove toward Ramona, Trotter told me that the “true horror” of MERS was what it could do to homeowners who were current on their mortgage payments—the “good” homeowners who still had a job and who weren’t facing foreclosure. If there was no legal record of which bank owned their debt, and the MERS-mortgaged homeowner nonetheless had been making payments, then who exactly was the homeowner paying? The checks, clearly, were going out each month, cashed by a bank that claimed to own the note. But without the legal record to certify the ownership of the note, it followed that the bank could not legally issue the homeowner a clear title to the home. In effect, a homeowner with MERS on his mortgage could spend thirty years paying a lender that wasn’t the owner of the note. After those thirty years, said Trotter, when the note was paid off, the homeowner would come to an awful discovery: without a clear title issued to stipulate that the home had no claim of debt against it, the homeowner could assert ownership of exactly nothing. “Because you’d always be looking over your shoulder,” said Trotter. “Some other lender could come and say, ‘No, we owned that note. You paid the wrong guy.’ ” When this realization came to him, Trotter was alone in front of his computer—the house was dark; his daughter was asleep—but he said he nearly screamed. “With MERS,” he said, “nobody owns anything. You’re only paying rent.”

i made a thread joking about this not that long ago. capitalism itself has abolished property rights lmao.

You couldn’t sell real estate without a clear title, explained Trotter. Title-insurance companies will not insure the sale of a house when the title’s status is unclear, and without title insurance, there can be no home sales. “It means that the mainstay of our economy, real estate, is no longer viable.” He pointed out the window at the houses in the San Diego hills and spoke about the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. “De Soto says that free enterprise fails in third-world countries because they have no reliable real-property recording system. No one knows who owns what. What do the Israelis do when they take over parts of Palestine? They destroy property records. And the bureaucrats can tell you, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but there’s no record of that.'"

i made jokes about that like a couple years ago--like that exact same obscure Peruvian economist--but this guy is SERIOUS. and then this is just beautiful:

I asked Campbell if he didn’t see a problem in taking cash from homeowners who were already financially distressed. He spun around to face me. “Do you blame us for wanting to make a product and charge a little something from the homeowner and maybe even help them? We have to survive! And maybe we can do it without hurting anyone.” By this point he was yelling so loudly I was worried he would wake the others. After a pause, he continued in a quieter voice. “Because capitalism, you know, is about hurting people,” he said. “It wasn’t capitalism that built this country, it was entrepreneurialism—you made a product and people needed it and it helped them, it made their lives better. The true definition of capitalism is those who seek success by the demise of others. True capitalism is the destruction of your competitor. We’re entrepreneurs.”

He clicked on a link on the NHC website that led to a clip from his favorite film, Network. “You know Network? Prophetic.” On the screen was the figure of the crazed evangelizing newscaster Howard Beale, in his famous freakout scene—Beale in a soaking-wet raincoat over his pajamas. “We’ll start the Mad As Hell Seminars with this,” said Campbell.

it's like reality has started jacking content from LF threads without attribution



e: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

Keane raised a glass of red wine. “So thank you, motherfucking banks. You now have Walt Keane as a crotch-cricket on your ballsack, and I have sunk my fangs. I am the Darwinistic response. The banks have scattered all these corpses across the land—real estate properties where chain of title is broken, where there’s no fucking record—and natural selection has selected Walter the fucking lunatic to clean them up and adapt to this new environment.”

“That’s right,” said Harvey, whose voice was an order of magnitude quieter than Keane’s. “It’s time to adapt. What we’re doing, what Walt is doing, is only forcing the banks to obey the law. Why should they be able to disregard centuries of land-titling statutes? Awareness is the first step of adaptation. How is this country going to evolve if people don’t even know what’s going on?”

I asked Harvey how much he’d paid Keane in attorney’s fees to get his house free and clear. “Thirteen thousand dollars,” Keane answered for him. “I wrapped that cash around my cock and danced around the room. It was the easiest fucking money I’ve ever made. I got into this MERS game because I’m a capitalist and I wanted to make money. There’s nothing altruistic here.” When he finished his steak, though, he did pay for everyone's dinner.

Edited by dm (Jan. 17, 2012 07:50:41)

discipline posted:
Yo dm, do you have anything cool on "Methodological Individualism"? I was thinking about making some sort of cool thread about that but I need to like, plot out my points (there's a lottavem)

not so much on methodological individualism as such but there's the representative agent w/ economics that i have a lot of fun with. i used to compare it to ventriloquy but then this one quote from Wittgenstein struck me:

Contradiction. Why just this one bogy? That is surely very suspicious.

Why should not a calculation made for a practical purpose, with a contradictory result, tell me: "Do as you please, I, the calculation, do not decide the matter"?

The contradiction might be conceived as a hint from the gods that I am to act and not consider.

and i realized that there are a lot of concepts from psychology that apply (e.g. displacement). so idk, i might be able to come up with some stuff depending on the context

discipline posted:
articles

thanks, i'll check them out. your paper owns btw

discipline posted:
Do you wanna like, collaborate

yeah, sure.

dm posted:
oh, ok. basically it comes down to quantification and scheduling. that is how money most likely developed: along with the establishment of other weights and measures. it will probably strike you as obvious that the development of agriculture required planning seasonally (at least now that i said it anyways). in this context, time is cyclical rather than linear (calenders) and it's probably not a coincidence that festivals and holidays often appear at roughly corresponding times across cultures (including the "new year"). this allows for what has been called "time discipline"

ultimately, you have to have some sort of forward planning and the crucial question is the way it's done. as for the present, something like time banking is just a matter of making the units "incommensurable" and hence the activities connected with them. i've sort of wondered about whether or not it might be possible to toy with "temporal organization" along with organization by geography and communication because it could work across distance and would be really hard to detect* without understanding how it works. you could put disparate groups/communities on a separate schedule so that they're organized together, but also have a degree of administrative autonomy from the "capitalist" one. idk, it's just idle speculation

this isn't as insane as it might sound btw: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/science/to-keep-or-kill-lowly-leap-second-focus-of-world-debate.htm

dm posted:
lmao

LONDON — Hedge funds have been known to use hardball tactics to make money. Now they have come up with a new one: suing Greece in a human rights court to make good on its bond payments.

The novel approach would have the funds arguing in the European Court of Human Rights that Greece had violated bondholder rights, though that could be a multiyear project with no guarantee of a payoff. And it would not be likely to produce sympathy for these funds, which many blame for the lack of progress so far in the negotiations over restructuring Greece’s debts.

The tactic has emerged in conversations with lawyers and hedge funds as it became clear that Greece was considering passing legislation to force all private bondholders to take losses, while exempting the European Central Bank, which is the largest institutional holder of Greek bonds with 50 billion euros or so.

Legal experts suggest that the investors may have a case because if Greece changes the terms of its bonds so that investors receive less than they are owed, that could be viewed as a property rights violation — and in Europe, property rights are human rights.

property rights are human rights

human rights are property rights

human(s) rights are property rights

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

lol, thanks for that lucid explanation nyt

aerdil posted:
thinkin' about going to this shindig tomorrow: http://www.citylights.com/bookstore/?fa=event&event_id=1399

anyone got burning questions for the graeb man?

if no one else does ask him how he feels about the petering out of the occupy movement in the west

babyfinland posted:
ask him why he insists on remaining in disbelief after giving islamic history the vigorous tugjob that he did in his most recent book

a religious anthropologist is like a flat-earth astronomer

aerdil posted:
so i went and graeber said that the ideology of free trade originated in medieval sharia islam. IS THIS TRUE BABYFINLAND?

yes

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

....

What the iPad won’t do in an above average way a Chinese worker will. Consider this paragraph from Sunday’s terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China: “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

....

There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average. Here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school degree, 13.8 percent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 percent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 percent; and those with bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1 percent.

In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.

zizek has a point wrt the general intellect