An audit commissioned by San Francisco county in California of 400 foreclosures (from January 2009 to November 2011) has found that 84% of the foreclosure files contained what appear to be clear violations of law, and that two-thirds of them contained at least four violations or irregularities. Among the common irregularities were failure to notify borrowers they were in default and assigning the same deed to multiple entities, making it unclear who had the right to foreclose.
According to investigators, the recent $26 billion settlement between 5 banks and 49 states does little to address the problems revealed in the investigation.
It is almost as if the settlement was a simple matter of states confiscating money that the banks had earlier confiscated from their customers — that is, nobody’s going to jain from what I can tell, even though it’s a felony in California to knowing file false documents.
Pirate weather coming up in the Indian Ocean. Courtesy of the Office of Naval Intelligence: http://www.oni.navy.mil/Intelligence_Community/piracy/pdf/PAWW_02092012.pdf.
Washington Post — “Thirty-three members of Congress have directed more than $300 million in earmarks and other spending provisions to dozens of public projects that are next to or within about two miles of the lawmakers’ own property, according to a Washington Post investigation.”
From the NYT — David Law and Mila Versteeg are about to publish (in June) a new study describing to what extent countries model their constitutions on theU.S.s one. Not so much, they have leaked early. In the 1960s and 70s, democratic countries increasingly modeled the U.S. a trend that started downward in the 80s and 90s and then collapsed at tyhe turn of the century.
On average, by the way, countries change their constitutions avery 19 years or so. Ours is OLD, and very hard to change. I for one, would like to see a new constitutional convention, if it could be arranged that politicians were not in charge.
Voter integrity advocates worry that Colorado is poised to be at the forefront of a 2000 Bush/Gore Florida disaster if our elections process isn’t cleared up.
The issue is that the Colorado Constitution requires that the person casting a ballot cannot be identified by marks on the ballot, but a group that filed an open records request for scanned ballots in a Boulder election received images that had been redacted, with the explanation that without the redactions, the ballots could have been used, in conjunction with other public records, to identify who cast them. The ballots, in other words can be traced.
Traceable ballots could mean an invalid election. Bad ju-ju.