Tomorrow is election day.
Before you go to the polls, consider this posting from The MarketTicker Forums:
"I was in the mortgage business for 23 years. Eight of those years were at Freddie, as an underwriter, Quality Controller/Internal Audit and Senior External Auditor. From 1995 to 2006 I was a Senior Level Contract Underwriter. I worked for GE, PMI, Radian, MGIC and United Guaranty. As a contractor, I worked in Crestar, Countrywide, First Magnus, Wells Fargo, Bank NY, Bank United, Bank Of America. I have been out of work for 2.5 years because I was "blacklisted". I moved from company to company because I just didn't decline the loans, I proved the fraud. My managers would say such comments as, "you cant call them liars", "I can get any property appraised", "We do not decline loans here", "We don't use the word (fraud) here". Unlike Ms. Cooper, I made copies of all the files, hundreds of them. The last 1.5 months I was at Magnus in 2005, I only underwrote 46 loans, each of them fraud from cover to cover. I declined each one of them. And I have a copy of each one of them to prove it.
It did not stop there. After being out of the business for 2.5 years, my home has been written on repeatedly. I was put on the "no fly list" and every rumor from A-Z has been said of me.
I even have e-mails from these people, in "electronic" format. I would send their BS e-mails from my work to my home machine. Each one a "Master Card" moment, "Priceless"."
There are people who don't believe it. Ok. But how about this?
"But as a senior mortgage underwriter at Washington Mutual during the late, great mortgage boom, Ms. Cooper says she found herself in a vise. Brokers squeezed her from one side, her superiors from the other, she says, and both pressured her to approve loans, no matter what.
“At WaMu it wasn’t about the quality of the loans; it was about the numbers,” Ms. Cooper says. “They didn’t care if we were giving loans to people that didn’t qualify. Instead, it was how many loans did you guys close and fund?”
Ms. Cooper is one of 89 employees whose stories fill a voluminous complaint filed against officers of the company by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan board, a big shareholder. Topping the list of defendants is Kerry K. Killinger, the WaMu chief executive who was ousted in mid-September."
90 people with the same story (89 here, one above) and all are liars?
And what are they alleging?
One loan file was filled with so many discrepancies that she felt certain it involved mortgage fraud. She turned the loan down, she says, only to be scolded by her supervisor.
“She told me, ‘This broker has closed over $1 million with us and there is no reason you cannot make this loan work,’ ” Ms. Cooper says. “I explained to her the loan was not good at all, but she said I had to sign it.”
The argument did not end there, however. Ms. Cooper says her immediate boss complained to the team manager about the loan rejection and asked that Ms. Cooper be “written up,” with a formal letter of complaint placed in her personnel file.
Ms. Cooper said the team manager told her to “restructure” the loan to make it work. “I said, how can you restructure fraud? This is a fraudulent loan,” she recalls.
Ms. Cooper says that her bosses placed her on probation for 30 days for refusing to approve the loan and that her team manager signed off on the loan. "
How many times do you need to hear this?
90 times thus far? How many thousands more are there that haven't been reported?
On the forum there are reports from appraisers and others formerly in the business reporting both vandalism to their property and even death threats being made against them - because they dared to speak up.
Ok, now here's the part you didn't hear.
Yet.
In July I purchased a rather expensive ticket to a John McCain reception at the University Club in Washington DC. It included a round table discussion with Governors Ridge and Keating, two of John McCain's top advisers.
I got one question into the round table, which was the essence of the above story - the fraudulent basis of the entire housing bubble and the futility of trying to maintain home prices.
The question was dodged by both Governors Ridge and Keating, but during the photo session (yes, for my money I got my picture taken with Governor Ridge - wow, what an honor) that followed Governor Ridge pulled me aside and said in a low voice "the essential element in all this was greed, you know." I nodded in reply.
Yes Governor, I do know. But this makes quite clear that John McCain and you know too, doesn't it?
What followed was a fusillade of faxes to Governors Ridge and Keating, and multiple requests to their offices for a face-to-face meeting.
The faxes went through, but I never received a reply from either office on my request for a short personal meeting with either individual.
On 10/6 I sent the following letter via email to Alex Lahan in John McCain's "finance" division of his campaign - the people dealing with financial policy:
"October 6, 2008
Alex Lahan
McCain Headquarters - Finance
By Email
Dear Sir:
Please find enclosed a number of faxes (in PDF format) that I have sent to Senator McCain’s office, along with to the campaign via Tom Ridge and Governor Keating.
I was an attendee (at the “top level”, including picture and discussion forum) in July at the DC gathering in an attempt to get through to the campaign that this would be the issue in November.
Nobody wanted to listen.
Now it is the issue and still, nobody wants to listen, despite repeated attempts to get someone's - anyone's - attention within the campaign. If you are one of McCain's advisers and not bringing him this message, you are wrong. Its that simple.
John McCain is going to lose all 50 states in a month unless his message on this issue, and his actions, change immediately, as in today.
There is no “ifs, ands or buts” in that regard.
The solution to the trust problem – and it is a trust problem, not a liquidity problem – involves three elements, along with a 4th – locking up all of the fraudsters who got us here, perhaps including Henry Paulson, who while at Goldman Sachs created many of the subprime, ALT-A and other “liar loan” packaged securities that are now responsible for this mess.
Senator McCain is literally out of time. Come the debate this week he is going to be hammered as a member of the Keating Five from the S&L Crisis (a true allegation) and that, along with the fact that a Republican is currently in office, will destroy him in November.
This is a certainty.
The Senator has exactly one chance to stop this outcome, but that requires that he “act like a maverick” and take action on this matter right here and now. Not tomorrow, not vaguely, not in a week or month.
I have attempted to have this dialogue with the campaign for months now but have been repeatedly ignored. I am a lifelong Republican and in fact have a Gingrich Speaker’s Gavel on my credenza behind my desk. In fact, since gaining the age of majority in 1981 I have not cast ONE ballot for a Democrat.
Should John McCain not take this issue on in a responsible manner immediately, this will all change.
I will not sit by and watch The Republican Party play “parrothead” on a bankrupt policy that is intended to bail out Chinese investors rather than American Main Street, no matter how you try to sell it.
The people have woken up and so has The Stock Market, and both have voted resoundingly NO on the path being walked by both candidates.
Time is running out to do the right thing.
Will Senator McCain step up or is it necessary for me to run a full-page ad in USA Today the Friday or Monday before the election? As the former CEO of an Internet company, now retired, I assure you - I can afford it and the future of our nation is important enough to me to do it. I am developing the copy for that advertisement, along with an order for thousands of yard signs for the panhandle of Florida, right now and intend to issue the placement order for both in the next few days - if not hours.
There is much more, including no fewer than six petitions signed by thousands of voters, which John McCain has received and ignored. You can find these at http://supportedthebailout.org
I can be reached at the number above, or on my cell at 850-XXX-XXXX.
Time is short; if the McCain campaign intends to do the right thing, the favor of an immediate reply is requested.
Sincerely,
Karl Denninger
Enclosed were copies of The Genesis Plan, Our Mortgage Mess (the white paper), and a letter emailed to Kevin Daucher, McCain's National Campaign Coordinator.
This is what I got back on 10/6 at 1:52 PM:
"Thank you Karl. We received your message and your documents. We appreciate your feedback.
Best regards,
Alex"
And despite multiple additional emails, not one further word.
From anyone in the McCain campaign.
Now you are free to vote for John McCain if you wish, of course.
I cannot.
I cannot vote for a man who is well-aware, as are his top advisers, that this entire mess was intentionally concocted through greed and fraud, that fact has been admitted, and yet the candidate has promised to do exactly nothing about it.
I cannot vote for a man who clearly intends to allow the fraud throughout the banking and regulatory systems to perpetuate itself and be bailed out through the expenditure of taxpayer funds.
I cannot vote for a man who had multiple opportunities to get in front of this issue, was fully aware of it, and who's top advisers are also fully aware of it, yet has made a conscious and intentional decision to do nothing.
No, John, I cannot cast a vote for someone who has clearly and publicly countenanced and looked aside at fraud that has coerced millions of Americans to go into debt to the tune of trillions of dollars they have no hope of being able to repay. Then, to add insult to injury, when the music ends, with you having full knowledge of how this occurred you then support and press in Florida and elsewhere a plan to forcibly shift the entirety of this fraud to the taxpayers - including those who were not originally ensnared in the trap and even those who are not yet born.
You, John McCain, your support of the "right to life" obviously don't include a right to freedom. You instead support selling our born and unborn children into debt slavery so that those who perpetrated this fraud will not only go free from punishment but will get to keep their ill-gotten gains as well.
Is Barack Obama perfect? No. He and I have many differences of opinion, some of them very serious, and absent John McCain's attempt to sell my daughter and her yet-to-be-conceived children into debt slavery to satisfy those who committed fraud and now demand to escape with the loot, I would be voting for John McCain.
But I cannot vote for a man who has, through his pubic actions and pronouncements, supports slavery of every taxpayer in America, the children and the unborn - no matter what other positions he holds that I agree with.
For the first time in my adult life, tomorrow I will cast a vote for a Democrat - Barack Obama - and I strongly urge others to do so as well.
Slavery was supposed to end in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd, 1862.
Someone forgot to tell John McCain.
