Author Archives: HildegaVigil

Elizabeth Warren Demands An Investigation Of Mortgage Companies

by HildegaVigil Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the Government Accountability Office to investigate non-bank companies that service Americans’ mortgages, noting in a letter co-signed by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) that an increasing number of lawsuits has been filed in recent years against these firms—which are not regulated as strictly as banks.

Mortgage servicers, whether they are owned by banks or not, handle mortgages after they’ve been sold to a customer. That means they take care of administrative business including collecting mortgage payments and dealing with delinquent borrowers. What Warren and Cummings are worried about is that the share of non-banks servicing mortgages has grown astronomically—300 percent between 2011 and 2013—and it appears that the increased workload has led to shoddier service.

The rise of the industry, which typically services lower-income borrowers, “has been accompanied by consumer complaints, lawsuits, and other regulatory actions as the servicers’ workload outstrips their processing capacity,” according to a recent report by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Last December, for instance, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the agency Warren helped create—entered a $2 billion settlement with the nation’s largest non-bank servicer over mortgage mismanagement. Financial industry watchdogs and consumer advocates have charged that the non-bank home loan servicing companies are often unwilling to work with troubled borrowers to modify mortgages and prevent foreclosures.

In their letter, Warren and Cummings also urge the Government Accountability Office to investigate how consumers might be harmed in the event that a large non-bank servicer collapses during a economic downturn. Non-bank mortgage companies are not subject to the regulations governing banks that perform the same functions, such as the requirement that they hold onto a certain amount of emergency funds in case of a financial collapse.

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Elizabeth Warren Demands An Investigation Of Mortgage Companies

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Was Iraq’s Top Terrorist Radicalized at a US-Run Prison?

by HildegaVigil Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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In early July, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the jihadist terror group now known as the Islamic State—formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS—preached on high in Mosul and declared himself the “Caliph Ibrahim” of a new fundamentalist Sunni state stretching from western and northern Iraq to northern Syria. This announcement came after months of fighting over territory and skirmishes with Iraqi forces, as ISIS invaded and captured dozens of Iraqi cities including Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown.

In short order, Baghdadi has become Iraq’s most prominent extremist leader. But for much of his adult life, Baghdadi did not have a reputations as a fiery, jihadist trailblazer. According to the Telegraph, members of his local mosque in Tobchi (a neighborhood in Baghdad) who knew him from around 1989 until 2004 (when he was between the ages of 18 and 33) considered Baghdadi a quiet, studious fellow and a talented soccer player. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Baghdadi was earning a degree in Islamic studies in Baghdad.

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Was Iraq’s Top Terrorist Radicalized at a US-Run Prison?

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A Criminologist Takes On the Lead-Crime Hypothesis

by HildegaVigil Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dominic Casciani of the BBC has a good piece up today about the hypothesis linking lead exposure in small children to violent crime rates later in life. Here’s my favorite part:

So why isn’t this theory universally accepted?

Well, it remains a theory because nobody could ever deliberately poison thousands of children to see whether they became criminals later in life. Lead theorists says that doesn’t matter because the big problem is mainstream criminologists and policymakers who can’t think outside the box.

But Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at the University of Kent, rejects that. He says biological criminologists completely miss the point. “I don’t see the link,” he says. “If this causes some sort of effect, why should those effects be criminal?

“The things that push people into crime are very different kinds of phenomena, not in the nature of their brain tissue. The problem about the theory is that a lot of these researchers are not remotely interested or cued into the kinds of things in the mainstream.

“There has been a long history of people trying to link biology to crime — that some people have their eyes too close together, or an extra chromosome, or whatever. This stuff gets disproved and disproved. But it keeps popping up. It’s like a bad penny.”

If Matthews didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. He plays the role of closed-minded scientist to perfection here. He obviously hasn’t read any of the literature about lead and crime; doesn’t care about the evidence; and is interested only in sociological explanations of crime because he’s ideologically committed to a particular sociological school of criminology. Beyond that, he apparently figures that because phrenology got debunked a century ago, there’s no real point in reading up on anything more recent in the field of neuroscience. All this despite the fact that mainstream criminology is famously unable to reasonably account for either the epic crime wave of the 60s through the 80s or the equally epic decline since then.

In any case, if anyone really wants to know why the lead theory isn’t universally accepted, the answer is easy: it’s not universally accepted because it’s new and unproven. Nor does it pretend to be a monocausal explanation for all crime. However, there’s pretty good reason to think that neurology might indeed mediate violent behavior, and there’s pretty good reason to think that massive postwar exposure to lead may have been a very particular neurological agent mediating a large rise in violent crime starting in the mid-60s. The evidence isn’t bulletproof, but it’s pretty strong. It deserves more than cavalier dismissal.

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A Criminologist Takes On the Lead-Crime Hypothesis

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