We don need no stinkin limits, or, JPMC: What Becomes a Super Predator Most?

You'd think in the midst of all the ill-feelings toward the mega-banks that they'd let up on the gas. Well, you and I would think. They don't think, they prey, and, fittingly enough, that preying doesn't involve them, but you and I and the rest of the plebes who've built this country on our knees.

No, in fact, mention to jerkoffs of this strata that they should "ease up" and instead they jerk up and cinch the noose a bit tighter. Think Eli Wallach's Tuco standing atop the grave marker - a crucifix - in Leone's The Good, the Bad & the Ugly. But the ending's different in the EM08 version; Clint doesn't mercifully shoot the noose in the end and thus free Tuco, nor does he leave any gold. He just takes it all and rides off.

Now, guess which character you are and which one JPMC (or Goldman or Wells or BofA..) is in that scenario?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfred-gingold/chase-home-finance-rabid_b_664109.html

Alfred Gingold
Writer, actor
Posted: July 29, 2010 03:54 PM

CHASE HOME FINANCE: RABID WEASEL

Our mortgage bank says we have to pay our next door neighbor's water bill.

Last month, we got a letter from Chase Home Finance stating that we were delinquent in our payments. So Chase paid our neighbor's water bill and established an escrow account into which it plans to collect and store such money as it says we owe--at that moment, a cool $82.91, but increasing as Chase adds its "expenditures" towards our actual taxes and water bills, which we have already paid in what is referred to in mortgage circles as "timely fashion."

We were not surprised. This is the third time-the third time that we know of-that Chase has tried to make us pay our neighbor's water bill.

We refinanced with Chase in 2004 at a rate that was, and still is, pretty good, not to mention that it was and still is a fixed rate mortgage. Perhaps it's the fixed rate thing that gets under Chase's corporate skin, because unlike any of the eight other banks who've held our mortgages over the years, Chase keeps trying to make us pay it more money than we owe. The vehicle for this petty larceny is escrow for tax and insurance payments which are, to put it politely, enhanced.

At first, we had no problem with paying our taxes and insurance through Chase. We've had the arrangement with other banks and none of them ever tried to filch more than we owed, or at least not this obviously. My wife and I share bill-paying and check-writing duties, so neither of us noticed the creep of our escrow payments, nor did we connect it with the regular letters from Chase requiring notification of insurance, which we duly sent along. In 2006 we realized something was amiss; our monthly escrow payment was huge. There were phone calls, some of a highly emotional nature, with the affectless warriors of Chase Customer Care. Eventually a polite lady called to tell us in silvery tones that there'd been a mistake, can you imagine, something about unacknowledged notices of coverage, and that we'd shortly receive a check for $4000 and change-funds, we gathered, Chase had been hanging onto for our own good. We allowed as how we'd like Chase to waive our escrow requirement, so we could pay our taxes and premiums ourselves, and the lady told us we could do that.

What she didn't say was "if you dare." To Chase, a home loan with an escrow waiver is an unexploited resource, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Since this is the third time in two years Chase has created tax delinquencies that don't exist, we know the drill: We faxed a note to Customer Care illuminating our "concerns," pointing out that our address is not the same as our neighbor's, the water account number is different, the houses are different, the mortgages are different-you know, we're different fucking people. We included copies of the receipts for all the timely tax payments we've made. We referred to, but did not include, the last letter we sent Chase about our neighbor's water bill, from December '09, but we didn't mention the one we sent on the same subject in October '08, as we didn't want to burden Customer Care with too much to think about, much less read. And we ended stirringly by requesting, insisting, demanding that this escrow grift cease immediately.

Reliably, Chase took our remonstrance in stride and ignored it. Our new payment coupon already has a healthy chunk of escrow added, for taxes we've already paid and which Chase claims to have paid too, or intends to pay.

The last time this happened, in 2008, we went through a telephone gauntlet, repeating the story endlessly, receiving assorted "work case numbers," which were never recognized by anyone we spoke with, and collecting the names of every Customer Care Representative we spoke to, which got confusing because they only offer first names. And we continue to pay our principle and interest on time. No response. Zilch.

Eventually we sent certified letters, return receipt requested, to assorted Chase departments-Customer Care, Tax, Escrow Removal-and personally to David B. Lowman, CEO of Chase Home Finance, and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the mother ship. We made our case, included our documentation and declared that if we did not receive satisfaction we would file reports with the Attorney General's Office, the CAC, the Better Business Bureau and Santa.

Lowman's receipt didn't come back to us for three months, so we were not surprised to hear Dennis Kucinich snap at him for Chase's spectacular foot-dragging on mortgage modification. Yes, foot-dragging seems to be the Lowman Way, except last April, when he told Barney Frank of the House Financial Services Committee hearing that aggrieved Chase mortgage holders should come to him with their concerns, then hot-footed it the hell out of there when a group of them actually did.

Someone evidently read the one we sent to Dimon, because we got a call from an oberleutnant of the Executive Resolution Center (Orwellian, no?), who made it chillingly clear that the only way to get rid of the escrow was to pay it off. Could we find out if we're still paying for the neighbor's water? How about copies of the numerous delinquency alerts Chase claims to have sent us and we never received (maybe the neighbors did)? Not a chance.

Far be it from us to suggest that Mr. Dimon, a man the New York Times calls "a financial superstar" and Huffpo calls "The Most Dangerous Man in America," tells the troops to squeeze a few extra bucks out of non-risky mortgages. I mean, JP Morgan Chase controls 44% of the derivatives market, whatever that may be. $82.06 doesn't even qualify as chump change.

It's the principle of the thing, we suppose. Whether it's billions in dicey investments or just a few bucks of funny escrow, take a shot and if no one's the wiser, no one's the wiser.

It's very different from the attitude Matt Taibbi captured so brilliantly in his description of Goldman Sachs, the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, etc." Chase Home Finance is less squid than weasel: a rabid weasel, wrapped around my house, pointy little claws relentlessly poking-behind the sofa cushions, in our wallets, next door on the neighbor's water meter-for any spare change or folding bills it can sweep into its fetid maw before someone shoos it away with a broom.

It is a busy weasel. We thought paying our neighbor's water bill was a mistake too stupid to be anything but honest, but it turns out Chase pulls this stuff all the time. At the ample Chase Home Finance section on the Complaints Board Website, there's a post from a guy Chase is escrowing for taxes on property he doesn't own. On the Chase Home Finance Sucks Facebook Page, we read of a man escrowed for taxes due (and paid) for the year before his mortgage was taken over by Chase.

The Los Angeles Better Business Bureau awards Chase Home Finance an F for reliability, which makes us think Chase really doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of it--which is exactly the attitude we would recommend to Chase if we were its therapist or mother. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, but it somehow is, that the same banks and bankers that thought big enough to drive the whole economy over a cliff also think--and behave--really, really small.

To paraphrase Lady Bracknell: To swindle someone once may be regarded as a mistake; to swindle the same someone in the same way repeatedly looks like a business plan.

I'll be chronicling this episode of our ongoing struggle to pay Chase no more than we owe it on my blog, Joy Buzzer, where this is cross-posted. This time we're hoping to keep our postage expenditures down and to avoid hyperventilating on the phone. My prediction: they'll escrow us for David B. Lowman's water bill.

The Decline of Western Civilizaton

When I first heard of the ESPN special telecast, "The Decision," where LeBron was basically going to get a pr nozzle and make it into the Guinness Book of World Records by administering a mass enema to America, my first thought was, "bad move." My second; "What a fucknut." Oh, and I thought LeBron was lookin' bad too. (cue: rimshot)

Honestly, I can see how tiring it must be for Others to be subjected to the endless and constant stream of bullshit uncle scam spews. Whether spinning about wars in west Asia to just stupid talk about "recovery" I gotta hand it to unc scam; he's a marathoner in it for the long haul. To crowbar in another sports analogy, he's like the Bronx Bull, Lamotta; he can absorb any amount of punishment, but he won't go down.

But something did bring Jake down, and we all know it was the enemy within. (cue: intro, Beethoven's Fifth)

Now, the problems of the dispossessed in America are, in general, not on a scale to match the hell kids in Palestine or Congo or any other region that's been left out of the great "scale up on capitalism or die" race for a two-car garage and a lawn. But it is weird for those of us here in the belly of the beast who know better, sitting on the sidelines and watching this parade. Nero's fiddling has now been displaced by sheer mass, a population marching in lock-step toward the cliff, so engorged on delusion that the biggest threat to us is our own, steady as the sun rising diet of mis-direction. It is weird to watch; and exhausting.

So, here's the hilarious Matt Taibbi doing his thing, this time not about those other douchebags, Goldman Sachs or JPMC, but ESPN and LeBron. "King" James, indeed; King of douchery.

The Five Funniest Things About the "LeBron James: Global Superdouche" Broadcast
by Matt Taibbi
7/11/10
Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/179533/83512

"The Decision" was simultaneously the most painful and most hilarious television show I've seen in a long time. Its entertainment value rested almost entirely in its scope — the same way a person goes to the Niagara Falls or to the Grand Canyon for that take-your-breath-away moment when the heretofore unimaginable vastness of the vista is first perceived, I watched "The Decision" in breathless awe of the sheer scale of the narcissism involved.
By any measure it was a landmark moment in the history of human self-involvement, eclipsing previous peaks in the narcissism Himalayas (Nero's impromptu fiddle concert as Rome burned, the career of the prophet Mohammed, Kim Jong Il publishing "The Popularity of Kim Jong Il") mainly because it was a collective effort. You can understand the citizens of Tsaritsyn cheering the decision to rename their city; if they didn't like "Stalingrad," they were getting lined up and shot.
But what was our excuse? The weird thing about this LeBron story is that seven or eight years ago, he seemed like a nice kid. All he did was step into a media machinery designed to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes. He was raw clay when he went in, and now he's everything we ever wanted him to be — a lost, attention-craving narcissistic monster who simultaneously despises and needs the slithering insect-mortals who by the millions are bent over licking his toes (represented in The Decision by the ball-less, drooling sycophant Jim Gray).
I'm sure there's a larger point to make in all of this about how the insane pathology behind the LeBron spectacle (read: a co-dependent need to worship insatiable media-attention hogs gone far off the rails of self-awareness) is what ultimately is going to destroy this country and leave us governed for all time by dingbat megalomaniacs like Sarah Palin. But for now I think it's important to just enjoy "The Decision" on a pure humor value basis, since we're unlikely to see anything that funny for a good long while. To me, the Top Five moments:
1. So here's LeBron James, sitting in a gymnasium full of children from the Boys and Girls Club, the charity that was to receive the proceeds from the event. Let's note the first thing: LeBron had a full hour to say anything he wanted, and might perhaps have used that time to talk about the Boys and Girls club, which was conceived for the express purpose of helping kids who don't have enough parental guidance — kids like LeBron, for instance (whose biological father was an ex-con who was never there). LeBron instead chooses to have a show entirely about himself filled with navel-gazing commentators raving over his highlights, followed by Gray and his idiotic questions about whether or not LeBron bites his nails. Then, when Gray finally gets to a question about whether it might be hard to share the spotlight with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, LeBron answers, "It's not about sharing. You know, it's about everybody having they own spotlight." That's his message to the Boys and Girls of America: It's not about sharing! I exploded in laughter when he said this. Even funnier, nobody commented on it. I mean, what's the problem? The kids got the proceeds, didn't they?
2. The day after the show, I woke up and checked the Internet to see if "It's about everybody having they own spotlight" had already made Bartlett's quotations or something — it seemed primed to be turned into a famous line that encapsulates the mood of a country for a whole decade, sort of like "Tune in, turn on, drop out" or "Greed is good." But when I Googled it, I found less than a full page of hits. Why? Because ESPN not only spent the whole evening shamelessly deep-throating LeBron, they fixed his grammar post-factum. In the official transcript, LeBron sounds not like stammering, uneducated buffoon he sounded like on live TV, but just like any other ordinary, more or less literate mass-media dickhead. Some of his malaprop gems will survive ("I want to win into the future"), but otherwise... apparently, fame is now its own spell-checker. Obviously this isn't all LeBron's fault — the guy didn't go to college, after all, and he's not being paid to be a public speaker — but this is part of the story, the fact that sports stars don't need to go to school really at all anymore and can get to the pros by going to sham high schools that exist solely to crank out basketball players. But even that part of the story gets whitewashed.
3. Gray isn't visible during most of the interview — thank God — but about five minutes into their talk LeBron glances down slightly, and suddenly I was conscious of feeling Gray's off-camera eyes locked on LeBron's crotch during LeBron's answers. I burst out laughing. Overall, the whole scene was an uncanny replay of the Hot Tub Time Machine sequence in which the balding white Rob Corddry is forced to suck off black comedian Craig Robinson after losing a football bet. This has to have been the absolute low point in the whole history of the "interview," right? Charlie Gibson's 2008 Bush interview is a candidate, I guess, but this has to be the worst ever — especially when you throw in the fact that Gray was a) paid by LeBron to do the interview, and b) chosen because he has a "special sales relationship" with one of the sponsors, the University of Phoenix.
4. When Gray asks LeBron, "Was it always your plan to play with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh?" watch as he hedges for a second in between the words "Well," and "I mean," before answering, "Well, I mean, I'm looking forward to it. To say it was always in my plans, I can't say it was always in my plans because I never thought it was possible." In that one little hedging moment he starts, ever so slightly, to smile. And everybody knew what that smile meant: it meant, "What the fuck do you think? Of course, we've been planning this for years." So he smiles, giving the deal away completely, then instantly switches gears and just turbo-lies right into the camera. I thought: this is just like politics! A terrible, totally unskilled liar, telling a completely transparent lie, who then improbably gets let off the hook by the sycophantic moron interviewing him. What is it about this story we love so much?
5. The camerawork was spectacular. The slow zoom-in leading to the EXTREME LeBRON CLOSE-UP during the key question — You've had everybody else biting their nails. So I guess it's time for them to stop chewing. The answer to the question everybody wants to know: LeBron, what's your decision? — if you'd asked a great comic film director to spoof reality-show direction, that's what it would look like. But here's the question: was this a spoof of reality-show TV, was it reality-show TV, or was this a society that can no longer tell the difference? Several times during the ESPN broadcast I got the sense that the network itself had lost track of where "reality" was. Were we really supposed to believe that this thing wasn't decided ages ago, that Wade was seriously considering going to Chicago at one point, that the Knicks were ever in it, that LeBron was trying to convince Bosh to come to Cleveland? Of course not, it was all bullshit, designed to snare viewers, the grownups among us all know that. But the ESPN anchors looked like they were hanging desperately on every tweet, almost like they really believed this stuff. Poor Stuart Scott, he's been podded completely, if you chopped that dude's head off, nothing but little plastic balls containing digitized "Boo-yah" chips would fall out of his skull. It's the prototype for all future news coverage — one or two dominant news networks pushing sensational fairy-tale versions of reality in a race for ad revenue, competing with a few scattered hacks on the Internet covering the much less important parallel "real story," i.e. the truth. In order for the networks to push their version most effectively, they have to genuinely believe that what they're spinning is real. Which is why you see them starting to mistake fake drama for real drama from time to time — they're beginning to drown in their own bullshit.
Watch and see if that doesn't become the template for presidential campaign coverage in 2012. See if those reality-show zoom-ins don't start to creep into interviews with candidates. This is the beginning of our big Lost in Space journey together, where news and reality-show programming fuse completely and we all end up complete morons, voting strippers and X-games athletes into the White House. I'm psyched. Are you?