Robo signing is about fabricating legally required signatures (source: Science.NASA.gov)

We’re going to have to endure this line of argument from those savvy business reporters, and Diana Olick is at the head of the pack, so we might as well take on this argument about the foreclosure fraud settlement directly.

Let’s take a step back for a second to remember the fall of 2010, when “robo-signing” came to light. The idea that one low-paid guy sitting in a room was signing his, or perhaps somebody else’s, name to thousands of foreclosure documents was appalling. It is appalling, no question. But let us not forget that the vast, vast majority of those foreclosures being processed were in fact legitimate foreclosures; it was the documentation process that was fraudulent. Banks didn’t foreclose on borrowers for no reason, they foreclosed because borrowers weren’t paying their mortgages.

It continues to amaze me how this “no harm, no foul” argument gets employed, when it would not fly in any other context in jurisprudence. Let’s rewrite that claim slightly, with a different scenario but the same spirit.

The idea that one rogue cop sitting at the police station was fabricating evidence was appalling. It is appalling, no question. But let us not forget that the vast, vast majority of criminal suspects are in fact legitimately guilty of some crime; it was the evidence gathering that was fraudulent. Cops didn’t pick up suspects for no reason, they picked them up because they did something wrong.

This flies in the face of hundreds of years of established law, and the cop, as well as the police department, would be rightly condemned by everyone for allowing a systematic process of evidence fabrication to go on. Practically nobody would make the argument that the suspects were guilty anyway, evidence fabrication be damned. But that’s precisely what Diana Olick is saying with a straight face.

So fast-forward to 2011 when the housing market is still in deep despair. Home prices are still falling, eleven million borrowers owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, home construction sees its worst year ever, and government relief programs are doing very little to help. Cries arise that the only way to help housing is to reduce the principal on all those underwater mortgages, give borrowers their equity back! But how does government force the banks to do that? Robo.

On the point that government leveraged the illegal actions of robo-signing and servicer abuse into principal reductions, I don’t totally disagree. Clearly that’s what state and federal regulators wanted over, say, prosecutions, or the dissolution of the Wall Street firms that caused the mess. But those actions did in fact cover up a series of crimes that perpetuated the housing bubble. And the bubble is the main driver of negative equity. So nobody should act like there isn’t a causal relationship here. Borrowers were often duped into purchasing homes, sucked into a mortgage business that consistently fed a monster that artificially drove up prices. By the accident of history, those borrowers bought at a height that deprived them of their home’s value when the bubble popped. And it was all done fraudulently. I’d say principal reductions are quite an appropriate remedy.

Getting the housing market back on track. Restoring stability in the housing market. That’s what [banks] want. They’ve already stopped “robo-signing” long ago. Now what they need is closure. Move the foreclosure process along again, so that the housing market can clear all the distress and move ahead. Let the bank black eye begin to heal. Sure, they will get hit with plenty more lawsuits over mortgage securitizations, but that has little to do with their customers on the street, the average consumers. That has to do with investors, and federal regulators and all kinds of complicated Wall Street products that are lost on average Americans. Robo-signing was more personal; it had to do with real people’s mortgage papers that they signed at their kitchen tables.

How does Diana Olick, exactly, know that the banks stopped robo-signing? I found a Wells Fargo job listing of robo-signers that’s only two weeks old. As recently as last July, Reuters found copious evidence suggesting that robo-signing is ongoing. American Banker found more evidence in September. There’s no reason to believe that robo-signing, and at a larger level mass fabrication of documents, has ended. Diana’s own media outlet, CNBC, reported that Goldman Sachs and Ocwen Financial only agreed to stop robo-signing last September, after an agreement with New York financial services superintendent Benjamin Lawsky. Is five months ago “long ago”? And considering all the other evidence, why should we think that any other bank has put an end to the practice?

Olick states that “Robo-signing was wrong.” Good for her. But she distorts so many of the other issues around this settlement, using the familiar trope that people “bought too much home” and that the ones with negative equity are getting off easy while “the rest of us who didn’t buy more house than we could afford” get nothing. The analysis from the business media on this is almost laughable.

pic by ssoosay at flickr.com

And then just a week ago it was another Murdoch paper, as the Sun was implicated.

And now, it is yet another Murdoch publication, the Times of London, Rupert’s most prestigious British publication.

On Thursday, Mr Watson, a member of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said on Twitter: “The Met police have confirmed to me they are investigating [Rupert Murdoch's] newspaper The Times over email hacking.”

Rupert has repeatedly said no such hacking of phone calls or email has happened in the United States. But then he has always been so honest and forthright.

On 26 January [2007] Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s former royal editor, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire are jailed for illegally accessing the royal phone messages. … In March, Les Hinton, a senior aide to Rupert Murdoch, tells a Commons committee that a “rigorous internal investigation” found no evidence of widespread hacking at the paper.

I’m going to have more about housing today because, you know, it’s Thursday. But before I do I wanted to put into context one reason why we’re not getting the housing policies we need in this country. We can talk about official malfeasance or conservative demonization but a lot of this has to do with the fact that the traditional media, the sources where most people get their news, don’t understand pretty much anything about housing. I mean not even the most basic stuff.

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s White House press briefing with HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. This question comes from Fox News’ Ed Henry.

Q: Just a quick — you were saying at the top that basically to make the President’s plan work you’re going to tell financial institutions that they can’t say no to refinancing. How do you actually — how does the federal government tell private institutions, you can’t say no?

SECRETARY DONOVAN: You misunderstood.

Q: Okay.

SECRETARY DONOVAN: Single-family loans in this country are prepayable, so any homeowner already has the right, even if they’re — if you owe $300,000 on your house and it’s a $250,000 house and you have $300,000, you can go and pay off your mortgage today — right? The issue is they can’t get a new $300,000 loan.

So what this plan would do, the way it breaks through this barrier for these families is to allow them to refinance that loan, to get a new loan that allows them to pay off their existing loan. There’s nothing the existing lender can do today — we’re not changing this at all — the existing lender today can’t stand in the way of a family paying off their existing loan.

Q: You’re saying if they have $300,000 laying around to pay it off — or how do they do that? I don’t understand.

SECRETARY DONOVAN: They’re going to go get a new loan, and that new loan for –

Q: — the lender is okay with that, is just going to say, this is the rate you’re at right now, it’s fine if you just want to change it?

SECRETARY DONOVAN: No. What they would do is they would refinance into a new FHA loan and that would allow them to pay off their old loan. That’s what this plan would do.

So Ed Henry doesn’t know how a refi works. He doesn’t know what prepayment means. He doesn’t understand how a refi extinguishes an old loan and opens up a new one. He doesn’t understand that the FHA is not a bank. He doesn’t understand that a lender cannot deny the full payment of a loan.

This is the gatekeeper, someone explaining White House housing policy at the largest cable news network in America. And we expect people to understand and approve of, or have any opinion on, that policy? I mean, you can get to a place where housing policy is fairly nuanced. But Ed Henry isn’t able to grasp the very basics. There’s really no hope to get a full understanding of, say, why a $25 billion settlement for foreclosure fraud is a pittance or how the securitization machine led to mass chain of title problems.

We’re doomed, to sum it up.

Video here.

GOP House Committee deletes 1st Amendment free press (graphic: Mike Licht-Notions Capital)

Meet your government, ladies and gentlemen. Josh Fox, the Academy Award-nominated director of the fracking documentary Gasland, was arrested today on Capitol Hill for attempting to film a public hearing.

In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice [...]

Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Gasland” was taken into custody by Capitol Hill police this morning, along with his crew, after Republicans objected to their presence, according to Democratic sources present at the hearing. The meeting of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment had been taking place in room 2318 of the Rayburn building.

Approximately 16 officers entered the hearing room and handcuffed Fox amid audible discussions of “disorderly conduct” charges, according to Democratic sources present at the arrest.

In the initial Gasland documentary, there is a long sequence near the end documenting a House committee hearing. Now that Fox has critical acclaim and a wider audience, and when Republicans hold the gavel, they throw out cameras and detain filmmakers. Fox was charged with “unlawful entry” into the hearing. [cont'd.]

Fox applied for credentialing and never received it, but Democrats on the committee attest to the fact that journalists very rarely get thrown out of hearings in Congress.

The rules requiring pre-approval for film crews are designed to prevent hearings from being disrupted by hordes of camera operators. That was not the case for this hearing. Only two cameras requested entrance to the event, which was not crowded.

Subcommittee Chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.) was unavailable for comment, but several Democrats on the committee voiced outrage with the GOP’s press blackout.

“I was chair of the Subcommittee for four years, and we frequently had people show up the day of a hearing to film,” Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) told HuffPost. “We asked for their name, but they were told if they would not disrupt the hearing, they were free to record. A couple of times staff said, ‘You’re getting in the way, don’t stand there,’ but other than that, I do not ever recall anything like this. We certainly never turned anyone away for not providing 24 hours’ notice.”

“It’s an outrageous violation of the First Amendment,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told HuffPost. “Here we’ve got an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and it’s an important subject and the subject that he did his prior film on for HBO. And they put him in handcuffs and hauled him out of there. This is stunning.”

The Republicans would not even let another crew film on Fox’ behalf at the hearing. C-SPAN did film the event, which concerned fracking.

I suppose the good news here is that Fox is making a sequel to Gasland, and seeing how autobiographical the first film was, he will probably use this arrest as part of the documentary.

Occupy Supply was able to buy five new command post tents worth $5000 each for a fraction of that price, but when it came time to decide which occupations got them, we opted to do it in the most democratic way possible: allow people to nominate occupations based on their activism history, and then let our community decide where they should go.

Vote your top 10 choices for outstanding activism in the Occupy Movement to win a command post tent or laptop with webcam for the occupation!

This is by no means a complete list, but rather represents the actions for which people felt moved to nominate their local occupation. So if you see a journalist repeating the “occupy is dead” meme, be sure to forward them this list to let them know that reports of Occupy’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

See the list of nominated actions and vote for your favorites below the fold.  [cont'd]

So, you may ask, what exactly is wrong with a candidate using a segment of a newscast to present a piece of relevant history it wants voters to learn from the ad? The fact is, thousands of political campaign ads routinely use news headlines, highlighted quotes, charts, photos and everything else the media prints or broadcasts all the time. And thousands of blog articles routinely use snippets of the same media every day under well recognized fair use policies.

Is there something factually wrong or morally unethical about the ad? If there is, I can’t figure it out. The entire point of the ad seems to be to remind viewers of the uncontested and widely reported fact that a rival candidate, a former Speaker of the House, was cited and fined by his own colleagues for ethical violations. Did this not happen?  [cont'd.]

But NBC and Tom Brokaw don’t want the Romney people to run the ad. Why? They don’t claim the Brokaw broadcast was in error, or misleadingly edited, or later rebutted, or taken out of context, or is any way untruthful. The ad does not claim or suggest that NBC or Mr. Brokaw have a position one way or another about the choice for the GOP nomination today. So how is the Romney campaign’s use of this historic footage objectionable in any way?

Sadly, NBC’s reasoning is not very convincing. According to The Hill:

“I am extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad,” Brokaw said in a statement. “I do no want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign.”

NBC’s legal department said it had written a letter to Romney’s campaign asking that it remove all NBC News material from the campaign’s ads. NBC added that it has issued similar requests when other campaigns have “inappropriately used Nightly News, Meet the Press, Today and MSNBC material.”

Well, boo hoo, Tom. Your job was to report the news. You did. How is reshowing what you reported compromising you in any way? The ad shows you doing your job. The fact that the news from back then has become politically relevant in a hot political campaign doesn’t change a thing. And it’s not for you, Tom Brokaw, to determine what news may or may not be used by political candidates to explain their positions. And what, NBC, is “inappropriate” here?

You’d think the media would, for once, praise a candidate for putting out a factually correct, undoctored recording of the news as a means to reveal the historical truth in a political ad. But Tom Brokaw is “extremely uncomfortable,” not because there’s anything false about the ad but because, I suspect, it shows the media doing its job at a time when NBC doesn’t want to remind GOP voters about that, and just after Brian Williams in the last debate did everything he could to cower in a foxhole. Get out of the foxhole, or go home.

NBC Anchorman Brian Williams

We can now add NBC and its anchor Brian Williams to the growing list of cable/broadcastnetworks and hosts who should never be allowed to handle a presidential debate.  Williams’ cowardly performance last night at the latest GOP shamefest was beyond embarrassing; it should be career ending.

The execs at NBC had no doubt watched Newt Gingrich bully the hapless John King last week after the CNN host foolishly framed a question about Newt’s moral hypocrisy and lack of human empathy as though it were an opportunity for a serial wife beater to punish an exwife again.  And despite David Gergen’s consoling, CNN still doesn’t get what he did wrong.

One lesson might have been, you’ll need to think harder than the goofs at CNN about what you’re trying to get at, rather than walk right into the predictable buzz saw of conservative victimhood.  But you still have to get to the issue.

The belief that it’s the liberal media’s fault that today’s conservatism is terrible when put into practice and its advocates are worse defines the modern GOP’s reaction when presented with facts inconsistent with their alternate universe view of reality.  Instead, NBC’s execs thought and thought and thought and concluded that the best policy would be to hide in the corner and hope the bully would not do what bullies do:  humiliate their anchor (really!!) as much as Gingrich shamelessly humiliated CNN’s.

NBC’s cowardice was evident from Brian Williams’ first question to the last.  Too many questions were at the intellectual level of, “why are you such a wonderful person?”  or “list the things you’ve done to make the conservative movement so intellectually coherent.”  That cowering was interrupted only briefly when reporters from NBC’s cohosts were allowed to ask a couple of questions about Cuba and immigration, but alas, neither questioner was allowed a follow up, so the topics were simply dismissed with fog and demagoguery.  We never learned that the folks on that stage would happily dismantle Medicare and undermine Social Security, while cheerfully taking food stamps out of the hands to mouths of people otherwise in abject poverty.

Earth to media: you’re under assault.  the bully and the people cheering on the bully are authoritarians who would smash the First Amendment in a heartbeat.  The bully on that stage wants to blame you for the failures of their own policies, the viciousness of their own statements, the hypocrisy of their own lives and the dishonesty of their mind-numbing campaigns.

It’s not your job, NBC, to cower in the corner to avoid getting beat up by bullies. You represent the American people’s belief in democracy and accountability.  It’s your job to confront the bullies with their lies, their hypocrisy, their viciousness and every other matter that might question their qualifications for office.  And if you can’t do that, then you’re just the bully’s pimps.

Photo: lev radin / Shutterstock.com

An alternate reality (Photo: ryan king, flickr)

For most of its history America has had a two party political system. It now appears we also have  a two realities system, illustrated by our perceptions and trust of Fox News versus other major media. From PPP survey on TV media trust:

-Democrats trust everything- except Fox News. NBC does the best with them at +50 (67/17), followed by PBS and CNN at +49 (66/17 and 65/16 respectively), ABC at +38 (57/19), CBS at +35 (58/23), MSNBC at +33 (56/23), and even Comedy Central at +4 (36/32). Fox News comes in at -36 (25/61).

-Republicans meanwhile don’t trust anything except Fox News. PBS comes the closest to breaking even among non-Fox outlets, although not very close, at -30 (26/56). It’s followed by CNN at -49 (18/67), MSNBC at -51 (18/69), NBC at -52 (17/69), CBS at -54 (17/71), ABC at -56 (14/70), and Comedy Central at -59 (12/71). But Fox News comes in at a stellar 73/17.

Independents are with the Democrats. They trust everything except Fox News.

For good or ill there was a long period of time when there were only a few television networks that shared a more or less common viewpoint. Most everyone shared in the same set of “facts” presented by a limited number of major news sources. Much of the country shared this view of reality, even though the two parties had different ideas of how best to deal with the nation’s problems.

It now appears we are getting a two reality system on top of our two party political system. Each partisan group has it own set of facts, its own truth, and its own set of news sources for describing and interpreting its respective views of facts and truth. The two parties don’t just disagree on how to fix a problem; they often no longer agree even on what the problems are.

Suffice it to say, it seems a pipe dream to expect a bipartisan compromise on some bold plan of action to address the nation’s problems. That’s inherently impossible if you can’t even first agree on what reality is.

The Associated Press and 28 news organizations, including The New York Times Co. and The Washington Post Co., are launching a company that will measure the unpaid online use of their original reporting and seek to convert unauthorized websites, blogs and other newsgathering services into paying customers.

The company, called NewsRight, brings together efforts started by the AP and its partners in October 2010 to track the use of stories on websites, blogs and other Internet forums through what it calls the News Registry [...]

NewsRight encodes original stories with hidden data that includes the writer’s name and when it was published. The encoded stories send back reports to the registry that describe where a story is being used and who is reading it. The technology can even locate stories that have been cut and pasted in whole or in part.

What I just did there has been called “Fair Use” in the courts. It includes a link and an excerpt, usually just a few paragraphs. The link is provided so people who want more information can go to the source for further reading. There’s a limitation on how fair use can be applied, and a fine line between fair use and copyright infringement. But in general, what I just did above falls under the auspices of fair use.

But now, we’re told, copying and pasting anything from a story will also suck up metadata that NewsRight can use to gauge, like a meter reader, how much news online writers have excerpted. For now, NewsRight says they will use that information for “ensuring those who republish content do so with integrity.” Reading further, this means pushing aggregators into content agreements with the media outlets, where NewsRight gets a fee for the content creators and the aggregators can keep excerpting. But it’s a small step from that to taking anyone who excerpts an article from AP or WaPo to court for copyright infringement.

I’m wondering if any venture capitalists are interested in creating BlogRight, a monitoring service that scans the wire services and major papers for stories that they clearly ripped off from blogs without attribution or compensation, particularly those stories where the origins are described as “a blog first reported the news.” Considering the frequency with which this happens, and the possibility for major embarrassment among the media gatekeepers if that information were recognized widely, I would consider the BlogRight business model to be quite lucrative.

As for the rest, often I will read news articles and can pinpoint the press releases where the bulk of the news came from. If a press conference is held at the Pentagon, and we all saw it in public, and the New York Times transcribes a quote from it, and I want to use the quote, how in the world is that “infringement”? Bloggers use media articles sometimes, but they also provide another level of analysis. If there are actual copyright infringers there are existing laws to deal with them. This NewsRight model, essentially tagging articles with metadata, strikes me as obscene. But in a country where Internet censorship bills could get passed by Congress, I cannot say I’m all that surprised.

(photo: Minerva Studio/Shutterstock.com)

That is after all what Democracy is supposed to be about at least, right?

Apparently not for the folks that really matter:

Actual voters are mere speed bumps.