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I was listening to the Mike Church show on Sirius Satellite this morning, and the topic was the mortgage crisis. His take was that we have not yet reached a bottom (I agree) and that the bottom is being delayed because of the technicalities that homeowners are using to delay foreclosure. He also complained that the few hold outs were prolonging the recession for the rest of the country.

That “technicality” is the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees due process to each of us. That includes, among other things, the right to have my day in court. The right to demand that the government can’t take my property:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Before any of go off about how the 4A only applies to the government seizing your home, ask yourself who owns your mortgage. It is likely FNMA (Fannie Mae), which is owned by the government.

In order to take my home in foreclosure, the bank needs to prove:

1 That I fall under the court’s jurisdiction (the land being foreclosed on is in the court’s jurisdiction)
2 That the bank has the capacity to sue me for foreclosure
3 That I owe the bank money (where is the original note? If they can’t produce it, how can the court know if they sold it or not? What if they did sell it? What would stop the other party from trying to collect later?)
4 That I failed to pay that money (can they prove how much I owe?)
5 That the loan is secured by my property (is the mortgage and note proper?)

I leave you with this quote:

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

It seems like today was the day for everyone in my town to have a yard sale. There was a guy down the street who had a sign out, saying he was having a yard sale that included a gun collection. I had to go check it out. There were a lot of “quality” pieces, including several revolvers from Miami Firearms, a couple of HiPoints, a Jiminez, and other total pieces of crap. He had a Taurus .357, which he tried to sell me by telling me that it was even better than Smith and Wesson. He did have a single Smith, but the cylinder would not lock up. In other words, junk.

He wanted top dollar, though. He was asking $400 for the Smith, and $500 for the Taurus. The Hi Points? $350.

There is no way I would buy that crap unless I could get for cheap enough to take it to the local “gun buyback” for a profit.

“No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”

Many people refer to the Third amendment as useless. They claim that no one has to worry about the Army turning your home into a training barracks. The prohibition on the quartering of troops in people’s homes was not about people getting upset over rumpled sheets. In the colonial era, the practice of billeting British troops in private homes was a widespread. One of the complaints against King George III in the Declaration of Independence was “for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”

Why do you suppose King George III did this, and why do you suppose the colonists were so upset about it?  It is a fairly effective form of intimidation: putting an agent of the State inside the houses of people whom the State considers “troublesome.” Having an agent of the State live with the troublemakers has an absolutely chilling effect, and most especially when the agents start abusing the power—”pushing the envelope,” as such agents so often do. This would have been known to the authors of the Bill of Rights. The Third Amendment was put there to prevent just this sort of thing.

It was impossible for the founders to foresee the advent of electronics, video cameras, microphone “bugs” and the like, but the fact remains the same: the presence of agents of the State present in people’s homes, intimidating them by their very presence, and by their presence also enforcing the State’s policies, as well as reporting (to a superior rank or office) any opposition towards the State. Whether the actual person is present, or the person is “virtually” present, the effect is the same: a chilling of the rights of the people to oppose the policies of their Government.

With the advent of computer networking, the Government no longer needs to put troops in your home. They can simply monitor you remotely- a virtual soldier present in your home.This is why I find today’s article so troubling. It seems as though we are seeing a constant erosion of our rights and liberties, inching ever so much closer to a police state. One day, we will wake up, and it will be too late.

Maybe it already is.

This is simply unbelievable. A sitting Judge promised the chairwoman of the Commodities Exchange Commission that no complainant would ever win a case in his court. For nearly 20 years, he has kept his word.

Read This:

Judge Painter Notice and Order.dcpdf-1

The Chairwoman who made the judge promise this? Wendy Gramm: key Enron player and wife of Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm is the sponsor of the Gramm/Leach/Bliley Act, the law that made our current real estate mess possible. You know, the same real estate scam that destroyed our economy.

What are citizens to do when there is no justice under the law?

Bank of America, like many other banks, was charging people fees of they overdrew their accounts- $35 for each event. This would mean, with the advent of debit cards, that a $3 purchase could put you in the red and cost you a $35 fee. It wasn’t long before customers fought back by taking their business elsewhere.Eighteen percent of checking accounts were closing each year, as customers voted with their dollars and their feet. Bank of America eliminated the policy and reduced account closures to 13% In other words, the free market worked.

That wasn’t good enough for Congress. They passed a slew of regulations that eliminated these charges. In other words, price controls. Since Bank of America saw 12% of its revenue from the charges that were just outlawed, they responded by spreading the costs among all account holders.

“Customers never had free checking accounts,” Bank of America spokeswoman Anne Pace said. “They always paid for it in other ways, sometimes with penalty fees.”

TANSTAAFL.That is something that I taught my children from a young age. Nothing is free, everything comes with a cost. Either it is pay per use charges like overdraft fees, or there will be some other fee, but I don’t go to work for free, neither do you, and someone has got to pay the bills.

In my continuing attempt to understand the amendments to the state constitution that have been placed on the 2010 ballot, I am posting my research and thoughts on this blog. This post concerns Amendment 4.

Amendment4, called the Florida Comprehensive Land Use Plan, proposes to require a taxpayer-funded referendum for all changes to local government comprehensive land-use plans. This means that voters will decide every time a WalMart or new development is to be built.

People favoring this amendment claim that the people will be able to control development and claim that Amendment 4 is needed because “our homes and communities are too important to leave in the hands of crooked politicians.”

I would point out that instead of voting on every development because we don’t want “crooked politicians” making the decision, perhaps we could vote those politicians out of a job. Remember that a land use plan that would build a Walmart on one end of the county would be voted upon by people in the other end of the county.

Looking at the financial backing of the Amendment, we see that the following contributions have been made to the cause since 2003:

It seems like Lesley Blackner has nearly a million invested in this. Why? I don’t know, and I could not find out, even after an extensive search.

Vote yes if you think that voters should decide in a direct vote, vote no if you think that the voters should decide through their elected representatives.

Edited to add: I have decided to vote no on Amendment 4. Lisa (in comments) has made me see that there is a real problem here: Other people are presumed by the supporters of this amendment to know better what I should do with my property than I do. It doesn’t matter to me if a commissioner decides what I should do with my property, of if my neighbors decide. Either way, I do not get a choice. At least when the commissioner decides, I can talk to him and try to make him see my side of things. If the public is to decide, then I must cough up millions of dollars to run political advertisements to get my message out.

How about an amendment that lets me do what I want with my lawfully purchased property without having to beg for the permission of others?

This IHOP restaurant not too far from my home was robbed at gunpoint just after midnight last night. It isn’t even in what I would consider to be a particularly bad area of town. Robbed at gunpoint while eating a meal, if you are unarmed, you are completely at the mercy of the robber. Many will tell you, “Just give him what he wants,” and have you depend on the mental stability and good will of an armed felon. Your choices are limited.

If I am armed with a weapon, I have a choice. I can choose whether or not I will hand over my wallet. I can choose whether or not to be herded into the back room. I can choose whether or not to watch as the gunman kills others in the restaurant. Or forces the women to strip naked, and cuts the throat of the cook.

People ask me whether or not I would kill someone over the $50 or so that is in my wallet. My answer to them is that the robber is willing to, or he wouldn’t have a gun, and I am not shooting to take his life, I am choosing to shoot in order to save my own.

Others tell me that carrying a gun won’t help, that I will probably get killed anyway. Perhaps, but if nothing else, I have at least marked my killer in a way that will help him get caught. He will be the guy that you find somewhere between the scene of my murder and the closest emergency room with at least one 200 grain, .45 caliber hollowpoint lodged in his chest cavity.

The US saw a drop in its AAA credit rating on October 12th, with the rating falling to AA+. Now, AA+ is still a respectable rating, but the trend is disturbing. It isn’t like we didn’t see this coming. Since 2008, we have been getting warned about this. From the October 12th announcement:

“You can see an indication of concern about the easing course the Fed is likely to continue on,” said Sean Egan, who runs the Egan-Jones credit rating agency in Haverford, Pa. “There’s a number of items that are going to be difficult to reverse as we get down that road, starting with the dramatic underfunding of state pension funds.”

The government has run two straight budget deficits of more than $1.4 trillion, with more to come for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the Fed is making noise about printing more money to pay down the debt, which will have the effect of devaluing the dollar. Paying the debt with devalued dollars is certainly a way to get rid of debt, but if you are a creditor, this is not good news.

Comments by the Fed have sent the dollar tumbling and helped increase gold prices by over $125 an ounce in the last month. Gold is currently selling at $1378 an ounce, almost double what it was on Obama’s inauguration day.

With this development, it is safer to lend to Warren Buffet than it is to lend to the US Government.What this means is that there will be considerable pressure on the interest rate that the government will have to pay in order to attract “lenders.” People traditionally buy savings bonds and treasuries, which pay relatively low returns, in exchange for the security offers. As the risk you are taking gets closer to the odds of winning at a Vegas roulette table, the payoff must increase to compensate for that risk.

This means that interest on the debt will begin to take up more and more of the budget, as the cost of borrowing increases. This will increase deficits, and cause the rating to be reduced at an increasing rate. Anyone who has ever gotten into credit trouble can tell you that your credit score goes down as your credit card balances increase.