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Trouble, trouble everywhere, not just with notorious big cases like Madoff.

Today’s wave of dubious deals is more pervasive and grass-roots in nature than the S&L debacle, which primarily involved thrift executives and their borrowers. Developers, mortgage brokers, appraisers, bankers and borrowers alike are under the microscope of state securities regulators and federal prosecutors.

“We’ve always had people fudging the numbers on their loan application to buy the home they wanted to live in,” said Joe Boyer, supervisory special agent for the FBI in Portland. “During the boom, we had people trying to do 50 homes. It was all about the real estate appreciation.”

Boyer is a key member of a mortgage fraud working group in Portland formed among local, state and federal investigators to combat real estate and mortgage fraud.

It’s good that law enforcement is finally taking action, I guess. The horses are out of the barn, down the road and on a plane to an offshore location, sipping tropical drinks and laughing, but hey, it’s something. Basically huge portions of American society became a kleptocracy, and with nobody enforcing existing laws or lending standards to any great extent, it seems like it became socially acceptable to do wrong.

Thus shall the disastrous neo-liberal epoch of 1980-2008 be remembered. Both parties shared in this, and to a certain extent many politicians seem not to have learned a great deal. This is TWICE in the last twenty years this has happened. It’s inexcusable, and more importantly, downright stupid and unnecessary.

While it’s true that proper regulation must be neither too burdensome nor too lax, we’ve lived through an age where the reflexive attitude of most bidness guys and gals, especially in the house building, buying and selling industry, is to oppose regulation just ’cause they wanna. It makes ’em mad and so they run lying third party expenditure ads and so on, kind of like a child holding its breath. And like a naughty child, they are now very, very sorry that they got caught and everything is all messed up.

Babbling about the invisible hand is all fine and dandy, but it’s neither realistic nor much of a policy. The automatic response to anyone still claiming markets will police themselves should be a belly laugh.

Even the Wall Street Journal has taken notice of Washington DOT’s innovative, home brew road de-icer:

The mix consists of molasses from a local supplier, calcium chloride and brine donated by a local dairy company. Mr. Simonsen had been experimenting with the right proportions and ingredients for several years, blending them in a 1,000-gallon vat and dispersing the liquid with the same salt trucks. He first used it last year on a busy mountain pass in southwest Washington.

This season, the state’s department of transportation has been spreading the solution throughout 11 counties, up from one last winter, with the help of a new automated system that can churn out 5,000 gallons of it in an hour. It has come in handy during a particularly heavy winter.

DOT is brewing the concoction at a Darigold farm in Chehalis, and the savings to taxpayers have been significant… only about $0.48/gallon for the home brew mixture compared to $1.30/gallon for commercially available de-icer.  Transportation officials are new considering building production facilities in each of the state’s six regions.

But wait… is de-icer production really the proper role of government?  Isn’t the private sector always more efficient than the public sector, and doesn’t this amount to unfair, taxpayer subsidized competition to the hard working folks in the de-icing business?  Perhaps all you free marketeers out there can explain this to me?

I slept in this morning, emptied my bladder, brushed my teeth, let the dog and cat out, made myself a pot of green tea, let the dog and cat back in, mixed up a yeast dough, ate a banana, fed the dog and cat, started cooking a split pea soup, drank some more tea, and wrote this post.

So far, that’s about it.

UPDATE:
I just updated this post.  Not much else is doing.

Okay then. Sounds like the northwest Nazis are kind of losing it (as if being a Nazi isn’t a sign in and of itself of insanity.)

The New Year was scarcely two hours old when Seattle police were forced to shoot an apparent neo-Nazi wearing a German military uniform in the Ravenna-University District.

Police say he aimed a rifle attached with a bayonet at them and refused to put it down.

The wounded man was taken to Harborview Medical Center with life-threatening injuries but was still alive shortly before 7 a.m., police spokesman Jeff Kappel said.

—snip—

Inside the residence from which the armed man emerged to confront police was Nazi regalia and alcohol, Kappel said.

It all happened shortly before 2 a.m. when a call from alarmed residents was made to 911 about five men in their 20s with guns, dressed in military uniforms and other dark clothing, who were firing shots in the west end of the alley on the 5200 block of 17th Avenue Northeast.

Police reached the caller and talked to witnesses who said two of the men had been firing guns. One was believed to be carrying a rifle and the other a shotgun.

According to the article, police are still on the lookout for a second man who might be armed and also wearing a similar uniform.

Happy New Year! And watch out for those Seattle Nazis, that’s just flipped out.

UPDATE Fri. Jan. 2 11:20 AM– At Slog, Jonathan Spangenthal-Lee reports that the man who was shot (and later died) was a University of Washington student majoring in German studies and a WWII buff. Some of the deceased’s friends are saying the Nazi aspect “is being blown out of proportion.”

A sad situation anyhow you slice it.

Seattle area house prices continued to fall:

House prices in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties dropped 1.4 percent from September and 10.2 percent from October 2007, according to Standard & Poor’s S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. Area prices now have fallen 11.4 percent from the July 2007 peak and are back to where they were in the spring of 2006.

The year-over-year decline was the first double-digit annual drop for S&P’s Seattle index, which goes back to the start of 1990, and put Seattle eighth among the 20 areas S&P tracks. The monthly drop was unchanged from September’s and good for fifth place.

The Portland area seems about the same:

The Portland-Vancouver area saw housing prices decline an average of 10.1 percent in the 12 months ending in October, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index report Tuesday.

The region’s price decline was not as bad as many other parts of the U.S. with urban areas such as Phoenix, Detroit and Las Vegas down more than 20 percent. Prices in the 20-city index have plummeted more than 23.4 percent from their peak in July 2006.

It’s good that our region might not be facing the kind of insane declines in value as some other places, but high inventory and economic uncertainty means more bumpy sledding lies ahead. It may be a “great time to buy a house,” as industry advertising suggests, but only for those with stellar credit. Not sure there are enough of those folks left to really stabilize things right now.

I would like to use my extra second to note that Samuel J. Wurzelbacher is an uninformed, hypocritical right wing douche and he can eat me. Just for the record.

God bless 2009.

No doubt the snow storms and sub-freezing temperatures that iced over our roads for much of last week were frustrating to a region unaccustomed to and unprepared for ice and snow, but in the end, it was only a week, and it was only the first time since 1990 that such wintry conditions survived for more the a few days, before being melted away by our typically warmer and rainier weather. So while I was as inconvenienced as anybody—not even the Postal Service was willing to brave it up and down my hill for seven days—I’m not particularly angry or concerned about the way the city responded to the mess.

Shit happens, and as Mayor Nickels acknowledged today, the city is ready to reevaluate its snow clearing procedures and work with Metro to provide more reliable service during future storms.  But if it’s another 18 years before shit like this hits the region again, I’ll be neither surprised nor disappointed if the city’s performance isn’t any better.

But those of you demanding truckloads of salt and an army of steel-tipped snowplows to scrape the streets clean the next time a couple of inches of white stuff blankets the region better be prepared to deal with the consequences, because even the city’s minimal response has created or exacerbated damage that will take months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair.

Case in point, the hundreds of reflective “turtles” lying dead and dismembered on the sides of our roads, their shells cracked and broken in the wake of even rubber-tipped plows.  As a transplant, I’ve learned to love these turtle markers, visible even on rainy nights, and ready to provide a rumbling warning when you  stray over the line.  We had plenty of salt and snowplows back in Philadelphia, but few turtles, as few would survive a typical winter of frequent plowing.  Given the rarity of extended snow events here in Seattle, I’d choose the turtles over the plows, and while I don’t have any numbers to support my assertion, I’m guessing so would traffic safety statisticians.

You don’t get something for nothing, and there are costs to salt and plows beyond the cost of the actual salt and the plows.  Of course we could do a better job clearing the roads, but I’m just not sure it’s worth the tradeoffs.

Time Warner and Viacom are behaving badly:

Viacom Inc. (VIA) and Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC) appear unlikely to reach an agreement on carriage fees before the New Year, according to a source familiar with the talks, meaning popular networks Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon may be pulled from the cable company’s system, which include large parts of New York City and Los Angeles.

And now the Insight Bowl is on the lame-ass NFL channel, which gives customers a handful of crappy NFL games (and now a bowl game!) for an extra $380 or something.

As it is, Beck plans to watch the game from his home with family members. For other KU fans and alumni eager to watch their college football team trounce (they hope) Minnesota, they’ll have to settle for watching it at a subscribing friend or family member’s home, at a sports bar that carries the network, or they can just pony up and purchase the Cox sports tier before the game begins.

And of course there is Comcast and the Portland Trailblazers. This is from Dec. 11 but I saw a whiny Comcast ad the other day, so I suppose they are still being wieners about their own lame-ass sports channel.

Since there was quite a bit of talk in the Blazers Forum the other day about Comcast Sports Net and the satellite companies striking a deal, I fired off an email to CSN to find out whether or not this was true. Tim Fitzpatrick of CSN says that while there is nothing new to report, negotiations continue.

We used to have a concept in this country called “anti-trust laws.” Guess not so much any more. Why cable companies should be allowed to use their market position to threaten each other while punishing consumers is beyond me. Right now all the Viacom channels are running crawls about the dire threat posed by Time Warner, as if it’s some kind of 9-11 of the airwaves. It’s absurd.

I never have understood why there is an artificial distinction made between over the air broadcasters, who are considered to be using the public airwaves, versus satellite and cable providers, who are also granted the use of public resources in the form of other radio frequencies and rights of way.

The cable tee-vee industry far too often winds up resembling those old photos of New York City when a hundred phone companies all tried to string their own lines. It’s a basic regulatory function of government to bring and maintain order in markets where monopolies and oligopolies tend to exist.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced today that the city has reversed its policy against using road salt to combat ice and snow.  Sorta.

The mayor set certain conditions for using salt: on hills, arterials or snow bus routes, and on routes to hospitals and other emergency facilities when at least 4 inches of snow is predicted, if ice is predicted, or if extreme cold is expected to last more than three days.

So they’ll use salt on some roads, every few years or so, when the conditions warrant.  There.  Is everybody satisfied?

A final decision due this week on replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct has been postponed, so that transportation officials can reconsider the option of a deep-bore tunnel.

“I think the governor would say that if we could make the numbers work, that is probably the most viable option,” Judd said. “But that option is going to mean that there has to be a real meaningful partnership with the city and county and Port [of Seattle] to make it happen.”

Meaningful partnership? In other words, Seattle taxpayers are going to be asked to pony up the extra bucks needed to pay the extra cost of a tunnel over the less expensive surface/transit option… which I suppose would be fair, if Seattle taxpayers actually preferred the tunnel… which they don’t.  Whether the money comes from the county, the city or the port, it still comes from us taxpayers, and I betcha if you put the two options on the ballot with the cost to local taxpayers clearly stated, the pricier tunnel option gets buried in a landslide.  That’s why, if chosen, you won’t see this on a ballot.

Oh, but wait… the Discovery Institute’s Bruce Agnew, the main advocate of The Big Bore, says the tunnel would actually cost less than engineers have previously estimated:

“We’ve always felt that, given the advances in deep-bore tunnels and the ability to build a deep-bore tunnel without interfering with the economy downtown and, given the experience we have in the region with deep-bore tunnel, specifically Beacon Hill, it would be a real tragedy to take it prematurely out of the running.”

Yeah, but then again, these are folks who don’t believe in evolution, so forgive me for taking their claimed scientific and technical expertise with a grain of salt.  As I wrote on this subject over a year ago:

In a city where completion of a 1.3 mile vanity trolley line is feted like some transportation miracle, the very notion that local voters might commit more than a half billion dollars a mile to an untested technology is a dramatic tribute to Discovery’s primary mission of promoting the exercise of faith over reason.

Of course, what Discovery really has faith in is the invisible hand of God—ie, the divine power of the free market to make gobs of money for themselves and their well-heeled friends—and buried along with their tunnel proposal is the notion that the extra cost will be paid for via some sort of “public-private” partnership… you know, taxpayer money heavily subsidizing a for-profit venture.  So now that we’re seriously talking about a deep-bore tunnel, get ready for the talk about privatizing it.

Get your New Years Eve drink on one day early tonight a the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, which meets every Tuesday night from 8PM onwards at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. As always, some folks will show up earlier for dinner.

If you’re not in the Seattle area, no worries. check out the Drinking Liberally web site for dates and times of a chapter within snowshoeing distance from you.

Sweet…

… Maybe it’s just me, but aren’t editorials supposed to express an opinion?

A sales tax for thee but not for me.

Adding, Brunell is probably right that it’s bad to excessively tax capital and research investment with a sales tax.

So what does that tell you about the tax system in this state? That’s right, it’s so stupid, regressive and beyond broken that we have to create special tax exemptions to lessen the stupid brokenness. It helps a lot if you have lobbyists.

It’s not just the bidness guys and gals who are impacted by the regressive nature of our tax system, it’s everyone. Now go to the Legislature in January and see if they will give you a sales tax exemption to invest in your house or car, and good luck with that. What, your personal lobbyist is not available? Sucks to be you.

Shhhhh! I know you’re thinking “gee, there must be some other kind of tax that isn’t regressive, could apply to both individuals and corporations and be graduated based upon how much money an individual or business actually earns.” For shame.

You’re not allowed to think about that, because then we might wind up having a realistic discussion of the tax system rather than the usual “divide and conquer” situation pitting labor versus business, private versus public and so on. What kind of Legislative session would that be?

BORING.

I’m looking forward to whatever sex offender-NASCAR stunts the Republicans will dream up this time, like tying public sector unions to the Tate murders or High School Musical 3.

Besides, our sales tax should work wonders in a continued deflationary spiral. As prices and wages fall, sales tax revenue takes a double hit!

Rinse, repeat.

The Obama-Biden Transition team has come around for Round 2 of Open Questions at change.gov. Which drug policy question will they dodge this time?

UPDATE: I just submitted a variation of my question from the last post. You can find it by searching for “challenge that decision”.

UPDATE 2: In related news, thank God for Senator Webb.