Category Archives: Current Events

At Least They’ve Got the “Einigkeit” Part Back, Mostly

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Today is the Day of German Unity, the Tag der deutschen Einheit.  Effective October 3, 1990, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the DDR, or the GDR in its English rendering (but also known among a certain generation of Germans as the “Sowjetische Besatzungszone,” the Soviet Occupation Zone, or sometimes simply “die Zone”) merged with and into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Federal Republic of Germany.  Once again, for better or worse, Europe had a single, compact (much more compact than used to be the case) mass of German united into one social and economic unit.

It would be idle to pretend that this development was welcomed universally outside Germany.  I still recall a college professor of mine, who as an infantry grunt had fought his way into Germany during the war, sort of wistfully (and not without an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice) observe that, “When I think about a divided Germany I get a very peaceful feeling.”  Even before 1990 West Germany was the economic powerhouse of the continent; what, one could be excused from asking, would be the effect of adding to them the further human and economic resources of a crew that had been conveniently sealed off behind barbed wire (literally) for 45 years?  Still today the notion of Germany as the 400-pound gorilla in the room makes some nervous.  The Italian prime minister as recently as this past week was actually suggesting Germany’s departure from the Euro zone would be desirable.  Too hegemonic.  Too prone to throw its weight about.  Pay attention to the Greeks and you’ll hear much the same thing.  Those dastardly Germans!  You ask them to foot the bill and the next thing they’re telling you that you can’t retire with full pay at age 55!  How dare they!!  And so forth.

What West Germany actually got was the headache of dealing with socialism’s corrosive effects on an entire chunk of their country.  The Ostzone has been at best slightly better than an economic wash for the west for 22 years now; at worst it’s been a sump hole.  For starts the public infrastructure was in a disastrous condition.  In February, 1986 I spent a week or so being herded around East Germany.  We visited Eisenach (home of the Trabant, a two-stroke powered (if that’s the right word to use) econobox piece of crap that was the best the east could do for a “car,” and you still had to get in line for several years for the privilege of hating your very own), Leipzig, Dresden, and finally East Berlin.  I paid attention to things.  Paint peeling, rust icicles hanging down, busted rivets, patchwork everything:  it was obvious that no one had been keeping the joint up since 1945.  Even the places they shepherded us (and you must remember that the commies spared no effort to impress western visitors; they very, very much put their best foot forward, shod as best they were able) were, with the exception of re-built historical structures, distinctly seedy.

You can sand-blast bridge girders (which I paid particular attention to) and paint them.  You can drill out rusted rivets and bolts and replace them.  You can wash the windows.  Etc.  What has proven harder, I will suggest, is undoing the effects of two full generations grown up under socialism, almost three.  The children born in, say, 1938 or later have no practical recollection of anything other than Nazi or Soviet rule.  They would have reached adulthood in 1958; their children would have reached adulthood in 1978; that generation’s children could have been as old as 12 by the time of reunification.  Twelve isn’t too late, but it’s deep into the third quarter of forming a person’s character.

Last year I went back to the former Ostzone for the first time since 1986; specifically, I wanted to visit the re-built Frauenkirche in Dresden (teaser: future blog post coming).  So I grabbed me a train and headed thither.  Ended up staying in a hotel just a couple of blocks from the train station, in a building that was one of the very few in that entire part of the city to survive the bombing intact.  But that’s not germane to this post.

Part of the attraction for me of riding trains is that you get to see folks’ back yards.  Drive down the road and you get to see the fronts of their houses.  There’s something inherently Potemkin village about the fronts of properties.  Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing; it prompts people to cut their grass, after all.  But if you want to see a better reflection of how people actually live, peek around the corner.  And no one who can avoid it builds his house or his business to face out onto the train tracks.

For those who’ve never visited Germany, at least the western part of it, one of the strongest impressions is how well taken care of the place is.  You don’t see broken windows, or boarded up windows, or obviously broken things just left as they are, or stuff left out to rust or rot in the weather.  The overgrown fence line or the barn thirty degrees out of square is a sight you don’t see in Germany (or, by the way, in parts of the U.S. that were settled largely by Germans . . . cultural DNA lasts, folks).  Even in the backs of farm houses you won’t see piles of miscellaneous Stuff lying about.  If they can’t move it indoors they’ll stack it neatly and lash a tarpaulin over it.  If it’s a vehicle or large equipment that can’t be put up they’ll park it, neatly and out of the way.  If something breaks they’ll either jump on it and fix it as good as or better than it was, or if they can’t they’ll tear it down and do something else.

The former border facilities (auf deutsch:  Grenzanlagen) — the watch towers, barbed wire and electric fences, tank traps, mine fields, and so forth — are long gone of course.  But it was still possible to note when one was in the old Ostzone.  Gaping windows with broken glass still in them.  Sheets of metal tacked over holes in roofs.  Roof lines as sway-backed as any broken-down nag.  Obviously vacant buildings surrounded by over-grown weeds.  Stuff and Junk left to lie wherever it fell out of the hands of the last person to drop it.  Things, in other words, that just screamed no one’s taking care of this.  Well, you can write some of that off, surely, to economic depression (but seriously, for 21 years it’s been there?) and the sheer cost of trying to fix things that were built pre-1945 and scarcely modernized since (just ask some university facilities manager what it’s like dealing with that wonderful august building that Joe Alumnus built for the school in 1915).

What you can’t write off is people’s behavior.  There are two market squares in downtown Dresden.  The Neumarkt, or New Market, is where the Frauenkirche towers over everything, and that’s a hustling, bustling, over-run with tourist activity venue.  They’re still building back the streets and buildings destroyed in February, 1945 and so a good portion of it is construction site, fenced off appropriately.  The Altmarkt, or Old Market, is several blocks away (the site of the Frauenkirche was originally outside the city’s walls, and of course the original market square would have been within them; hence the two markets so close together).  It’s much larger than the newer square, probably close to 100 yards on a side; among its features is a rectangular outline in red-colored stones, maybe forty or fifty feet by twenty or so (I didn’t measure it, so don’t hold me to that).  Between some of the pavement stones within the rectangle they poured molten metal, with an inscription: 

“After the attacks of 13 to 14 February 1945 on Dresden the corpses of 6,865 people were burned at this location.”

That location was one of dozens where they burned the corpses, but that’s also not really relevant to the post.  What’s really relevant is that at 7:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, on the entire Altmarkt there were a total of six vendors, hawking cooked sausage and similar things.  At that same hour in any sizeable city in western Germany you can’t swing a cat without knocking over someone’s stall of fresh produce, typically from all over Europe, fresh meats, flowers, local crafts, etc.  I mean, even in a city of starveling students like Freiburg you can’t take more than a few steps in a given direction for all the people buying and selling stuff.

Twenty-one years after reunification, in the capital city of Saxony, six measly guys flogging over-cooked sausages is the best they can do?  That can only be attributed to a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and that lack can only be attributed to 45 years of ruthlessly crushing anyone who dared to climb out of the place where the central planners had shackled him.  Folks, the existence of two Germanies for 45 years is as close to a perfect experiment as you’ll get (the Koreas aren’t even as good because North Korea is a hermit state, sealing itself off even from its fellow commie states, and East Germany was the Warsaw Pact showplace).  Same society, same culture, same history, similar levels of destruction. Two different economic systems for a prolonged period.  How’d it work out?  How is it still working out?

So yes, Virginia, Germany has achieved once more the “Einigkeit” (unity) of the Deutschlandlied that remains their national anthem (one does not sing the first verse any more, of course); however picayunish some of their laws may appear to Americans (particularly the laws relating to freedom of expression and affiliation, which are aftergrowths of the Nazi era), they’ve got their Recht (justice) and their Freiheit (freedom).  But 80 years on they’re still working through the consequences of their embrace of state-controlled collectivism and tyranny.  Cultural DNA lasts, and so does social trauma.  It took America almost exactly 100 years to begin lurching past the living impact of the Civil War and slavery.  A good bit of Germany’s history in the 20th Century has strands tracing back to the Napoleonic conquest and subsequent liberation, and in some cases even further back, to the Thirty Years’ War.

Ideas have consequences.  We should be very careful about which ones we embrace and how quickly we let ourselves be tempted by someone’s promise to “re-forge” us, to “transform” us, to guide (and it’s always guiding us, as if we’re not capable of finding our own way into our future) us to the sunny uplands of some utopian vision.  We should be profoundly skeptical of such as promise those things, lest they mean them, lest our remote descendants spend their lives suffering their effects.

Ringling Bros. Republican and Democrat

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Or, why the last thing you’ll learn about watching the forthcoming “debates” will be anything of substance about either candidate.

What will happen will be that mainstream media folks, pretty much every one of which is in the tank for the incumbent, will lob meatballs to him and will expend enormous effort to prevent the challenger from addressing any of the administration’s failures over the past four years.  I’ll go ahead and hazard a list of topics that will either not be mentioned at all, or if they are mentioned, will be brought up in a fashion that presupposes the validity of Dear Leader’s favorite pastime of it’s-someone-else’s-fault (e.g. “Mr. President, as we’re all aware the former Republican administration is ultimately the cause of why gasoline prices are almost $4.00 per gallon over much of the country; could you elaborate about to what extent Dick Cheney was in the pocket of the oil industry all along?”)  So here goes my humble little list:

  1. The 43 consecutive months that nominal unemployment has exceeded 8%;
  2. The 2009 promise that with the $780+ billion “stimulus” program unemployment would not crack 9% and by now would be back down in the 5-6% range;
  3. The U-6 unemployment measure, which includes the involuntarily under-employed, and which is in the 14% range, where it has been for months;
  4. The current labor force participation rate of roughly 63%, the lowest it’s been in 35-plus years;
  5. The assertion by a sitting president that he has the unilateral authority to order the targeted killing of even American citizens overseas; 
  6. The failure to secure the Benghazi consulate notwithstanding six months of known deteriorating security conditions and repeated requests by the (now-murdered) ambassador to Libya to beef up security at Benghazi;
  7. The crony capitalism of “loans” such as the $535 million to Solyndra, owned by major campaign bundlers for the administration and its party, to whose equity in the company the administration’s Department of Energy subordinated the taxpayers’ “loan,” which has now gone bad to the tune of over a half-billion dollars;
  8. The administration’s implementing, without the knowledge or consent of the government of a neighboring sovereign state, a program of intentionally permitting illegal sales of firearms, with the expectation and even desire that they be used by drug cartels within that neighboring state, but without making any arrangements to track those weapons past the common border;
  9. The administration’s claim that it has the right and power to compel private citizens to purchase any product or service the federal government decrees, through the device of a tax to penalize the failure to make the purchase;
  10. The wholesale selective enforcement of laws, such as granting “exemptions” from the new healthcare law to . . . surprise! wealthy entities in political allies’ home districts (e.g. the numerous swanky restaurants and bars in Nancy Pelosi’s district which have received ObamaCare waivers from Kathleen Sibelius’s office);
  11. The announcement that the administration will simply refuse to enforce those provisions of duly adopted statutes which might, theoretically, have the result of depressing the numbers of anticipated political supporters (e.g. refusing to enforce immigration laws against entire classes of illegal immigrants);
  12. Any inquiry into what, precisely, the president meant when he asked Vladimir Putin to go easy on him until after the election, after which time he would have “more flexibility” to accommodate Putin’s wishes;
  13. Any inquiry into why Iran has been permitted to continue its nuclear weapons development when its announced intention is to obliterate a United States ally (Israel) from the map;
  14. Whether there is a point at which the Federal Reserve ought to discontinue infinite expansion of the money supply by unlimited purchases of Treasury paper, and what are the administration’s plans to deal with the inflation that is headed this way now;
  15. What exactly are the environmental reasons that the Keystone XL pipeline ought not be constructed, when that portion of the country is already a spider-web of long-distance oil and gas pipelines;
  16. Why the federal government has refused to issue any new drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico for over two years now, notwithstanding a court’s order that it do so; or,
  17. Why the federal government has gone over three years now without a federal budget.

Of course, one could go on almost indefinitely.  No.  What we’re going to hear about is how the wife of a fellow who didn’t even ever work for a steel company that was sold by Bain Capital after Mitt Romney had left active management in that company, but rather who was a union organizer sent to organize the workers at the company, had a wife who had her own medical insurance through her own employer and who well after Bain sold the corporation her husband did not work for was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and died less than four weeks later.  Of course, that’s not how it will be presented.  We can anticipate questions like this:  “Governor Romney, exactly why did you kill the wife of that man who used to work for your company?”

Knowing he was in for that sort of treatment, why in the world would Mitt Romney, or anyone else in his position, agree to a “debate” that is to be “moderated” by people who consider themselves unpaid operatives for the other side?  That’s just crazy.  Irrespective of which side one supports, that’s just a kooky tactical decision.  Poor coaching.

One has to wonder what would have been the upshot of this response by the Romney campaign:  “We will agree to debate the opposing ticket upon terms and in a format identical to the Lincoln-Douglas debates.”  I mean, if it was good enough for the consensus greatest president we’ve ever had (barring possibly Washington), certainly it’s good enough for this fellow, even if Dear Leader doesn’t really consider Lincoln his equal.  Lincoln and Douglas debated on six or seven occasions; the first speaker had 60 minutes, the response was 90, and the reply 30.  If you really wanted to dumb it down shorten it for the attention span of several generations raised on television, you could cut it to 30, 40, and 10.  That would still give one hour and twenty minutes of solid, substantive debate.  Debate that could not be papered over with a Telepromptr (in fact one could ban them from the format), debate that could not be run past a focus group.

And I think the format is appropriate to the times.  Lincoln and Douglas were debating first and foremost the subject of slavery and its extension into areas of the country outside its origins.  This was, to put it mildly, a subject that went to the very heart of what the United States was supposed to be about.  It really, honestly did raise implications for whether Americans would “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of the earth.” 

This administration and its allies in Congress have proposed a fundamental alteration of the relationship between citizen and federal government.  No longer is the citizen to be a free agent who merely hires government to accomplish certain ends which he cannot attend to himself.  He is now to be a client of the state in the most intimate details of his physical existence.  Citizens no more have any colorable claim to sovereignty left, now that the government can by virtue of adopting a “tax” force the citizen to do whatever government decides he needs to do for his own good or that of his fellow citizens.  The citizen is now merely a marker, a bargaining chip, a utensil in the pursuit of whatever a governing faction happens at that moment to deem to be “social justice” or whatever label one wishes to slap on it.

Every human requires clothing (I’ve put on my pants quite a bit more frequently than I’ve dropped them at the doctor’s); clothing is therefore self-evidently a human right.  Textiles and clothing are therefore extremely important industries.  Congress decides that, in order to ensure that the American textile and clothing industries can operate at economical levels of turnover, every American must buy 15 new “eligible shirts” per year from — oh, let’s define this in language you might find in the Internal Revenue Code — “qualifying domestic clothing providers,” and then Congress defines what is an “eligible shirt” and what a “qualifying domestic clothing provider.”  It reserves to the Secretary of HHS the right to grant waivers to manufacturers of clothing as to what is or is not an “eligible shirt,” or to waive some portion or all of the number of shirts any individual or group must purchase.  But wait!  People need shoes, too.  And so on.

People need personal transportation (99% of the population needs to get from point A to point B a helluva lot more urgently than they need a health insurance policy).  The United States happens to own an automobile manufacturer that’s already gone bankrupt.  The administration stole that company from its secured creditors and handed it over to its labor union supporters.  It can’t very well steal it again.  The government’s hopelessly upside-down in its “investment.”  It will never get well unless the stock price rises, which will never happen until the company begins consistently to operate at a profit, which will not happen so long as people are free to choose a competing product.  Think about it:  Congress has established a principle, and the Supreme Court has blessed it, under which each American can be forced to buy a “qualifying domestic automotive product” from Government Motors ever two or three years, under penalty of, say, a $30,000 per year surtax for every year beyond two or three since the last “qualifying purchase.”  And of course government can now simply decree that since it’s really swell to have such things in a car, and for some people actually necessary, every “qualifying domestic automotive product” must have certain features, like, oh, say, heads-up display, or all-wheel drive, or a minimum of X cubic feet of storage space, or premium sound packages, or whatever.

The above situation is now perfectly possible, and legal.  There is no way, simply no honest way, to argue that this relationship of the state to the citizen, as such and upon the mere premise of existence (and not as the pursuer of a particular livelihood, e.g. merchant seaman), is not new.  The American people deserve to hear both sides of the argument about why this new state of affairs is or is not desirable.  If life in a European-style top-down world is truly preferable to what we’ve known for 220-plus years, then make the case for it.  We’ll listen, no kidding; some of us will even agree with you, whichever side you argue.  Americans can listen and decide for themselves (subject to any tax Congress may decide to impose for voting the wrong way).

And that’s just not going to happen in tomorrow’s debate or any other.  It will not happen because those “moderating” the “debate” have determined that the question should not be put to us.

A Bit of Healthy Bigotry

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By which is not meant what most Americans assume it to be, viz. racism (or as the British would term it, racialism).  Racism is only a small subset of bigotry (go into an Irish pub and propose God Save the Queen! and see what happens next).  “Much may be made of a Scotsman, if he be caught young,” is another relatively famous example of it, but who calls Dr. Johnson a bigot?

I mean here to speak a word in favor of a bit of healthy bigotry, of the sort which begins with an assumption that whatever the speaker is (as self-defined), is absolutely the bee’s knees, and then draws from that the implication that every member of that identity group has an iron-clad duty to live up to the ideal.  The condition of “superior” is inseparable from the obligation actually to be, you know, superior.  One may fall short in one’s duty, and if one does one merits a double measure of shame, not only because whatever one did fell short, but because one’s falling short demeaned and damaged all other members of the identity group.  This sort of bigotry begets traditions like that of the U.S. Marines; show the yellow streak and not only are you a coward, but you have introduced cowardice into “my Marine Corps” (and it’s always the speaker’s Marine Corps, as if he personally bore the sole burden of maintaining its reputation for integrity, bravery, and sacrifice).

I will suggest that such an outlook is not an attitude to discourage.

Yet we do discourage it nowadays.  We have adopted as one of the few articles of public faith the dogma that No One is Better Than Anyone Else, a proposition which a moment’s reflection ought to reveal to be what P. G. Wodehouse would call unmitigated apple-sauce.  Get caught cheating in school?  It’s OK; no doubt you were feeling over-pressured.  Update (01 Oct 12; did I nail this or what?):  Amherst professor resigns after getting-caught red-handed (but notice all the exculpatory nonsense smeared throughout the article).  Get caught stealing $1.2 billion in investors’ money, like Jon Corzine and his firm did?  But he’s so smart, you see, and he does after all provide so much valuable support to the Messiah president, so we won’t investigate too hard.  Torch the neighborhood because a couple of bad cops beat a criminal rap when they roughed up a druggie?  We understand your pain; here’s a few hundred million dollars to funnel into our pet contractors’ pockets (whence it comes right back in the form of campaign contributions, all distributed to the right folks).  Cut your 16 year-old daughter’s throat and watch her bleed out because she was foolish enough to get caught slipping out to see her boyfriend, who just didn’t have the right kind of prayer rug?  We respect your religious scruples.

Gone are the days of General Napier.  He was governor-general in India, and one of the quaint local practices he took a shine against was suttee.  You remember, don’t you?  That’s that Old Time Religion where when the husband dies you tie the wife up and burn her on the pyre as well.  Nowadays the Deep Thinkers (indebted to Thos. Sowell for the phrase) assure us that such things are just their faith and heritage and besides “Racism!!”  Genl Napier had a different take.  Some of the locals protested that it was their custom.  Replied Napier, “Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

And so today, September 30, we remember the birth of Lt. Col. Alfred D. Wintle, MC, of the British army in both wars.  He rejoiced that he had been born an Englishmen and not, by way of comparison and contrast, “a chimpanzee, a flea, a Frenchman, or a German.”  He wangled his way into the army underage, and served at the front until severely wounded in 1917.  Told his war was over, he replied, “It may have escaped your attention, but there is no fighting to be done in England.”  And so back he went, without a kneecap, several fingers, and an eye, doing himself proudly enough that he won the Military Cross.  Coming across a severely wounded Trooper Cedric Mays, Wintle ordered him, “Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut.”   Mays did so and lived to be 95.

Early in the Second War he finagled his way back into uniform and, convinced he had to get to the front in France, attempted to hijack the airplane of an air commodore, from the commodore in person.  Was arrested and tried at the Tower for, among other charges, treason and threatening the air commodore (he’d told him he deserved to be shot, and proposed to perform that office himself).  At his trial he not only didn’t deny having told the air commodore he ought to be shot, but produced and read aloud a list of others who merited similar attentions.  The charges were all dismissed.  Wintle finally did made it back to France where he was captured, and insisted on inspecting his German guard, whom he roundly ticked off for their slovenly bearing and poor turn-out.  Did the same thing when he was finally imprisoned by the Vichy regime.  He told the prison guards that he was going to escape (which he did), and that if any one of them was man enough they’d join him.  According to later accounts all 200-plus guards at the prison later joined the Resistance.

Wintle held that a gentleman never left the house without an umbrella, and a true gentleman never unfurled his.  His own, never unfurled, contained a note wrapped up in it that informed the reader that it had been stolen from Col. A. D. Wintle.

Wintle was a bigot.  But observe.  Once the landlord of a posh-ish London watering hole went to eject, upon entry, a West Indian laborer . . . a black patron, in plain language, who had mistaken the place for an ordinary pub.  [Jim Crow may have had a Southern accent, children, but he got around quite bit back in the day.]  As he was hustling the unfortunate towards the door, a voice from across the room barked out, “That gentleman is a friend of mine. I have been expecting him. Kindly show him to my table.”  Unable to refuse, the landlord showed the no doubt by this time thoroughly confused worker to Wintle’s table, where Wintle ordered them a glass of wine each, upon finishing which each went on his way.

Maybe what we need is a touch of that old-fashioned healthy bigotry.  The all-join-hands-in-a-circle approach doesn’t seem to be doing too well.

Fannie Mae Needs a New Day Job

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Within the past few days I’ve come to understand something more about exactly how Fannie Mae managed to blow a whacking great hole in the American housing market and crash the world’s largest economy into the bargain.

Our firm has run a title company since the mid-1960s. Knock on wood, but not a single policy we’ve ever written has had to pay or defend a claim. A large measure of that is attributable to the fact that we’ve always done our searching in-house, and for 38 or so years we had a title searcher with a nearly photographic memory for deeds, titles, and people. She also had the kind of personality that is nearly impervious to tedium. A further reason is that our philosophy has always been that land titles must be like Caesar’s wife; “Oh let’s get it closed and we can take care of that later,” as a point of departure has been a non-starter in our office (and yes, it’s lost us a lot of business over the years, but either you do your job right or you’re an ass-hat). All of which is to say that, very humbly, I submit that we in our office know just a bit about land titles in our state and how to convey them correctly so everyone knows what he’s getting and gets what he’s been wanting. 

A few years ago two things happened, more or less simultaneously. 

The first things was that some bureaucrat at HUD who had obviously never practiced law – and more to the point, never searched a title anywhere outside the cookie-cutter subdivisions of northern Virginia – decided that he knew how to set up and close a residential real estate transaction better than the people who’d been doing it for several generations. The upshot was new regulations for closing real estate transactions subject to the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), which if anything made the process less transparent for the borrower/buyer, provided an incentive for everyone to mark up his prices and generally put his thumb on the scale, and slowed down the loan approval process measurably. Whoever this pin-head of a government employee was required a bank to promise a hard number for “title services” within 72 hours of loan application. “Title services” was to include title examination, title insurance, closing agent’s fees, document preparation, and several other things that should never have been lumped together, and which in fact the “old” Form HUD-1 – the settlement statement – broke out, so that you could actually tell, you know, what you were paying for. The new HUD-1 required it all to be lumped in together and forbade anyone to break it out. 

Now, maybe you can reliably get a good title examination back on a cookie-cutter subdivision in northern Virginia in less than 72 hours. Folks, outside those sorts of environments that just doesn’t happen. You get all manner of cock-eyed legal descriptions, estates that either were never opened or nor properly administered (like having a personal representative without authority executing a deed), multiple chains of title that split, join, and split again, minors’ interests, gores in multi-tract parcels, unrecorded conveyances . . . just all kinds of stuff that can take days to do, if you do the work correctly. And of course until you know what’s out there you can’t quote a fee for what it’s going to cost. You just can’t assume that every title search will take your searcher 45 minutes. But that’s what the new RESPA rules required the bank to state to the borrower. Oh, if you discovered something in the search you could drag the borrower back to get a new good faith estimate, but then your borrower begins to get cold feet. So the situation HUD created was to pit lenders against title service providers, with the lenders having an incentive to low-ball and lean on the service providers to cut every corner they could to get it done as cheaply as possible. How’s that likely to work out? 

The second thing that happened was that our three senior staffers took one look at the new RESPA regulations and retired. As in we all attended a seminar on the new rules and within three weeks we had their letters on our desks. They took 45, 40, and 38 years experience with our firm out the door and left us majorly under-staffed. 

So we quit doing RESPA closings for a while until the dust settled (HUD kept changing the RESPA rules and the HUD-1 rules for months after they were supposed to have taken effect). But now we’re doing them again and finding out what’s changed while we were out. 

Fannie Mae, the clowns who brought you the sub-prime crisis, have a set of uniform instruments which it promulgates and requires be used for loan transactions in which it is buying or guaranteeing the paper. Those instruments vary by state, but the whole idea is that someone can buy several billion dollars of bond backed by thousands of these notes and deeds of trust (or mortgages, if your state rolls that way), and every note and security document in the package that backs those bonds will grant to the beneficiary of the note and security documents rights which are in all material respects uniform, no matter in which state the land happens to lie. Makes a great deal of sense, and in fact if were it not for the uniform instruments, the secondary market for residential loans would not exist, meaning much, much, much less home mortgage lending could occur. The secondary market is, after all, a good part of how the money gets into the system. 

Life is simple as long as you have married couples who both own the property and who both sign the note. Drop out one or the other and things get interesting. 

The instructions for our state-specific Fannie Mae uniform instrument set out those local alterations to the form document that must be made or that may be made, each depending on the precise circumstances. F’rinstance, if the trustee(s) of a “living trust” is to be the property owner, Fannie Mae wants certain portions of the document phrased certain ways. Again, makes sense. But their instructions contain no guidance at all to the situation in which both spouses are owners, but only one is the borrower (happens all the time, too). 

The instructions do contain language that applies when you have only one borrower spouse and one owner spouse (presumably the same spouse, but that’s not necessarily the case, is it?). The instructions tell you to provide that the non-debtor spouse “signs as Borrower solely for the purpose of waiving dower rights without personal obligation for payment of any sums secured by this Security Instrument.” There are several things wrong there. For starts, one does not “sign as Borrower” unless one is actually the borrower (I cannot sign “as” the president of a corporation if I am actually the janitor). Secondly, the uniform instrument contains a raft of affirmative obligations, many of them requiring financial imposition, but which are completely extrinsic to and unrelated to paying “any sums secured by” the instrument. The only sums “secured by” the instrument are those payable under the promissory note. Thus, the non-debtor spouse who “signs as Borrower” is in fact signing up for all manner of personal obligation. You as a closing agent dare not tell that non-debtor spouse that “Oh, honey, you’re not signing up to pay any money; they just need you to sign here to make sure the bank gets a good lien on the property.” Can you say, “consumer fraud,” anyone? 

But the most hilarious thing about this form document and its instructions is that “dower” as an estate in property was abolished in our state . . . in the spring of 1977. And by the way, males had “curtesy,” not “dower.” We now have “marital rights” in property, including especially property used as one’s principal residence, but those rights are very much distinct from the rights an owner has in that property (e.g., an owner has her own homestead exemption; a non-owner has only the inchoate right to her husband’s homestead exemption, should he die first). 

So if you have a non-debtor owner spouse sign the Fannie Mae uniform instrument, using the language they provide, you’ve just created an invalid lien on the property, and one which can’t be insured. The non-debtor spouse may have waived, for example, the right to claim the deceased spouse’s homestead exemption in the property, and waived the right to an elective share in the property on the first spouse’s death, and waived any right to participate in the property’s division in divorce (that, too, is a marital right against the property). But actual ownership as a cotenant far exceeds any of those inchoate interests – the tenant by the entireties owns an undivided whole interest in the entire property. 

So Fannie is only about 35 years behind the power curve, and of course does not understand the distinction between marital rights and ownership rights, it seems, at all. 

Is anyone still wondering how these muddle-headed imbeciles managed to get the housing market so wrong?

 

The Won’s UN Speech Summed Up

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By the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which while sharing the inexplicable fondness of the chattering classes for Dear Leader, in fact has not drunk the Kool-Aid.

They’ve got the speech’s failure nailed in two sentences:  “Containment of a nuclear-armed Iran, threatening Israel, the Gulf states, and the world’s economy, would not be possible.”  And, “Obama proposed no new ideas for resolving the conflict.”

And there you have it: platitudes without action, endless platitudes while a new Holocaust is prepared.

O’zapft Is!

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Dieses Jahr hat er’s mit Schlägen geschafft; letzes hat er drei benötigt.  Hauptsache ist, daß angezafpt worden ist und ausgeschenkt werden darf, auf der Wiesn und auch in aller Welt.  Bedauernswert ist nur, daß bei uns hierzulande die Tradition des gemeinsamen und gemeinschaftlichen Genußes von dem heiligen Gerstensaft niemals Fuß gefaßt hat.  Sitzt man auf der Bank vor einem langen Tisch, einem völlig Unbekannten auf der anderen Bank gegenüber, verzehrt das frische Hendl und bestellt sich abermals eine Maß und noch eine, so steigt man am Ende mit einem neuen Nachbarn und Dutzfreund auf, egal ob sicher ist, daß man sich nie wieder sieht.  Man hat doch — wenn auch nur für eine kurze Zeit — wieder die menschliche Verbindung verspürt, das Zusammensein mit Händen gegriffen, das Menschliche überhaupt für diesen Moment, an diesem Ort, wiederhergestellt und damit der argen Welt getrozt.

Drum reichet Freunde euch die Hand, damit es sich erneuet.

Wanting it Both Ways

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In India.  Seems that large portions of the industrialized/commercialized areas are in the grip of massive strikes, brought on by proposed fiscal and economic reforms.  The government is proposing to cut the subsidy to vehicle fuel, and is also proposing to open India to big-box retailers.  The small operators are livid.  And so transportation especially is being hard-hit, with large segments of the rail network idle.  It’s not uniformly spread about the country, though; from the admittedly brief reports it seems as if some large cities are more affected than others.

India is of course the world’s largest democracy.  Not perfect, but then who is?  It’s got massive problems with corruption, over-regulation, and inefficiency, and desperately needs to address those problems (as was demonstrated earlier this summer when hundreds of millions of people were without electricity for a prolonged period).  It can try to do so through governmental action, but the government appears to be a good part of the problem and besides, if the government could by fiat change the rules of the game, would it not already have done so?  What to do?  I’m going to suggest that introducing into the economy large players who have no mind to put up with that sort of nonsense, either from their customers, their vendors, or officialdom are a relatively efficient way to begin the process of cultural transformation which is what really needs to occur.  Perfect?  No, but there’s no ideal way to change traditions that run back generations upon generations, in a population of a billion-plus.  And by the way, enlisting private actors lets you shift some of the unquantifiable but all-too real costs of the effort onto them.

Here’s hoping that India figures out a workable way forward.

Friends of Free Speech, Bustin’ Out All Over

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Brought to you by the same folks who brought to the world the concept of Gleichschaltung as government policy, this observation by the German interior minister:  freedom of opinion is not without boundaries.  And because Beschimpfung of religions is prohibited there (understandably, given the particulars of their history), the government’s just going to have to examine very carefully whether this hack-assed film about Mohammed is going to be permitted to be shown in Germany, either on a nation-wide basis or locally on a case-by-case basis.  For the moment at least they’re not thinking in terms of a blanket prohibition.  But locally, where “Sicherheit” (security) and “Ordnung” (jeez; talk about dog whistle words) may be endangered by permitting the film’s showing, there may be implications from the perspective of German law on freedom of assembly.

Well, that’s a comfort.  Got that?  We’re not going to restrict your speech; we’re just going to prohibit you from speaking publicly to more than a person or three at a time.  Gotta have our Sicherheit and Ordnung, after all.

And here’s where the word Beschimpfung (the noun) and its definition become rather important.  Duden, Germany’s analogue of the OED, a copy of which I happen to have in arm’s reach, gives two definitions for beschimpfen, the verb.  The first is to denigrate “mit groben Worten” — “with coarse words”; the second is simply “beleidigen” — “to insult.”  But the latter is not, in practice, synonymous with the former.  To illustrate, if one publicly observed that the present occupant of the White House is with the arguable exception of Warren G. Harding the least qualified — experientially, mentally, and morally — person to hold that office ever, that he only holds it by result of a very concerted effort to blot from the public sphere all hard information on his personal actions, associations, and background, and that in office he’s run an administration that is every bit as personally corrupt as Harding’s, that’s an insult.  Happens to be true, but it’s still defamatory (remember that untruth is not an element of defamation; truth is an affirmative to defense to what’s unquestionably defamatory).  But if one were to go all amended to read: Sen. Byrd on our present Dear Leader, using every epithet that 300 years of racial animosity have cooked up, that’s to denigrate with coarse words.

It is easily understandable why Germany would prohibit the Beschimpfung of particular religions.  We did, after all, hang the editor-in-chief of Der Stürmer at Nuremberg, and that little rag was about little other than Beschimpfung of Judaism and Jews.  But it is simply logically indefensible to equate a film showing in an unfavorable light a specific historical personage who’s been dead for nearly 1,300 years with Der Stürmer or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  If that were true then every book, film, play, or speech denigrating Jesus (and those are enormously popular, in Germany as here) would likewise need to be suppressed.

Oh, but there’s a difference, you see.  Piss Christ can stay on public display until it rots, and the Christians of any country will not slice off anyone’s head, nor burn anyone’s embassy, nor torch any quarter of a city.  The difference is that the adherents of one particular religion, and only one, will do all those things and more.  When they annihilate Ordnung, it’s not they who ought to be rinsed off the streets with water cannon, it’s we who should shut up, stay at home, and mind our p’s and q’s.

What this sort of reaction from the forces of public decency does is teach a lesson:  The lesson it teaches is not “respect for all peoples and cultures.”  It teaches the much simpler lesson that Violence Works.  Two words, very easy to absorb and utterly destructive of civil society.  Violence Works.  If you teach it long enough, and provide full-color, live-on-your-television-screen tutorials in it often enough, you get entire slices of your population who internalize it, for whom a nice riot in the streets is precisely the way to get what you wish from someone who’s not legally or morally obliged to give it to you.  When the slices of the population carrying that lesson in their souls get big enough, you get 1933.  You get the Sicherheitsdienst (the SD, which was the SS’s foreign-service counterpart to the Gestapo) and the Ordnungspolizei, a key player in the domestic surveillance culture.

You get Gleichschaltung.

So It’s the Copts’ Fault

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. . . According to the Egyptian state’s attorneys, as quoted in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.  Well good.  I was afraid they’d tar them Jooooossssssss with it.  They may yet, of course; there just aren’t enough Copts in Egypt that killing the rest of them would satisfy Mohammed’s honor, and once they’ve killed all of them the Brotherhood may just have to reach for the ol’ tried and true.

It seems that the film, made by an American from Egypt who happens to be Coptic, was sponsored and propagated in the Arabic world by an organization of what is described as a Coptic nationalist-separatist organization.  They even have their own website, complete with proposed national flag, anthem, shadow cabinet, and more importantly, proposed division of the area.  The muslims will get to keep a portion of Egypt, but the Copts are to get the bulk of it, with Alexandria as the capital.  The Jews of Egypt will also get to wet their beaks with a slice of territory.

The article characterizes the participants in this exercise in fantasy as “extremists,” a label not, so far as I’m aware, recently applied to Hamas, the PA, the President of the United States, who is on record as calling for Israel to be partitioned and pared back to its 1967 borders, or one of the two major American political parties, which recently expunged reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel from its official platform and whose delegates from the floor greeted an effort to return that plank with boos and catcalls.  And yet the logical and moral distinction is . . . what?  Two minority groups, neither of which is terribly happy living in a land in which the majority is of an entirely different religious tradition.  Both groups have histories going back centuries.  Both groups ended up in their positions through the conquests of third parties who are no longer there.  Both dream of a land which is purged of the “other.”  Of course, there are a few tiny little differences:  No one in Israel is organizing the burning of mosques, or the random slaughter of muslims.  An Arabic citizen of Israel can go to the polling booth on election day and freely cast his ballot for whomever he pleases, without having to worry about having his wife’s throat slit.  And no bona fide terrorist organization has its paws on the Israeli levers of power.

The Egyptian law enforcement officials have pending arrest warrants for the persons identified on the Copts’ website.  Should they ever stray into Egyptian territory they may count on arrest and the usual tender mercies which the Religion of Peace reserves for those who fail in their submission.

Someone explain to me, again, exactly what there is to be “relieved” (our dear leader’s expression) about in the Muslim Brotherhood’s attaining power in Egypt?

 

Paging Mr. Solzhenitsyn! Mr. Solzhenitsyn!

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So let’s see where today finds us:  (1)  Someone from within our State Department is familiar enough with the movements of a United States Ambassador that they know precisely where to find him, viz. in a “temporary,” largely unsecured facility, on (2) the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.  By the most curious happenstance (3) several hundred “protesters” show up at that self-same “temporary” facility, armed with rocket-propelled ordnance.  Even though (4) the same State Department has had 48 hours’ advance notice that our facilities in the region are likely to be targets of violence, (5) the ambassador is permitted to be at that largely-unsecured “temporary” facility, and while there is left to the care of native security “forces,” perhaps the single most vulnerable security measure imaginable.  Events unfold as pretty much anyone (at least anyone outside the administration) could have predicted.

But wait!  There’s an explanation!  Some guy with more time and money than talent put together, months before, a film in which there are portrayals allegedly less than wholly flattering to the peculiar religious views of certain people.  Mind now, this film has been floating about out there for months and months, but it’s not until — will wonders never cease? — the anniversary of the September 11 attacks that the wounded sensibility of these “protesters” finally cries, “Thus far and no farther!” and 400-odd of them, all at once coincidentally, grab an RPG and head on down to the “temporary” U.S. diplomatic facility where — well, who woulda thunk it? — the U.S. ambassador just happens to be.

Now folks, just ignore the Al Qaeda pronouncement that these attacks are retaliation for a specific hit put on a named individual.  No, what our administration, the folks with their hands on the levers of what is at least on paper the most powerful single organization in world history — the executive branch of the United States government — elects to do is publicly buy in to the “protesters'” assertion that this is about some made-in-the-back-bedroom-closet movie.  Administration has a range of choices with that public stance.  It can confine itself to the facts on the ground, namely an act of war perpetrated against high United States officials, and take a position on that basis.  It can tell the “protesters” that, really you know, it’s about time y’all grew up to be a Big Boy Religion and learned to take a damned joke, and if this high-school drama department-level production is the worst your faith has to fear, y’all can go home, put the dogs up, crack a cold one, and watch you some pornography after the fashion of your jihadists over in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Or the administration can go all legalistic and say that, well, over in America under our laws we simply don’t recognize the validity of your demands.  If this guy wants to call your religion’s founder everything in the book and then some, that’s between you and him, and we utterly reject any suggestion that his actions can legitimize yours.  Go pound sand, and oh by the way, stand by for a special delivery of 150-175 tomahawk missiles, delivered right to your front doors.  Please wait 25-30 minutes for delivery.

Or the administration of the most powerful goverment on the planet can do what it in fact did.  It can deliver itself of a well-there-are-arguments-on-both-sides load of dishwater, and earnestly regret that an American citizen’s exercise of a right guaranteed to him by our nation’s founding document upset some folks who have made grievance-mongering into an art form (tacky thought:  Our dear president may well envy them the artistry with which they practice “community organizing”; I mean, did O ever manage to put RPGs out in support of new flooring in the projects’ elevators?).  It can demand of a private party (YouTube) that it suppress this movie (bravo! to YouTube for giving the feds the bum’s rush on that one).  And it can lean on county officials (since when does Washington give instructions to the sheriff’s department of Bugger Anywhere, by the way?) to appear, literally in the dead of the night, but not without first arranging for maximum media coverage, at this guy’s door and drag the schmuck in for “questioning” about . . . what?  That’s right: a “possible parole violation” relating to a two year-old conviction for . . . bank fraud.  Yup.  The federal probation officer out in Los Angeles does business late at night, it seems.  The white-collar crime boys in the U.S. Attorney’s office out there likewise keep late hours.  None of this could have been arranged with a morning phone call to the guy or his lawyer, course.  Drive around back, old fellow, and tell the guy at the gate you’re here to see Dept. U.S. Atty Schmuckatelly.  Nope; let’s put more American firepower on the ground (every one of those deputies is packing, notice) to haul in some two-bit amateur movie-hound than we did to protect our ambassador to Libya; let’s have more rounds in the clip than the U.S. Marines defending our embassy in Cairo were permitted to carry.

I have just a few questions:  Did the vehicle they shoved this guy into, for his “voluntary” midnight ride to the Lubyanka sheriff’s department (why the sheriff’s department, if it was a federal rap?), have on its side an advertisement to “Drink Soviet Champagne”?  Who’s going to play Vyshinsky in this guy’s show-trial of a parole violation hearing?  Who’s going to play Yagoda to soften him up and rehearse his lines before they trot him before the cameras in the court room?  Will there be places reserved on the front benches for Al Quaeda to seat its operatives?

Every couple of years I read through, just to refresh my recollection, the entirety of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, all three volumes of it.  The last sentence in the last book of the last volume:  “There is no law.” 

This is where we find ourselves today, September 16, 2012.