Funny how history has a way of turning back on itself.

Remember when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and Republicans claimed that Ronald Reagan's aggressive  policies toward the Soviet Union had won the Cold War. In particularly they claim that Reagan's fabulously expensive "Star Wars" anti-missile system had forced the Soviets to spend so much on their own military projects that it bankrupted them.

Well, there's truth in that. Between trying to compete with Reagan's military spending and their own misadventure in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union went bust. Decades of over-spending on its military, under-spending on critical domestic needs and saddled with a flawed and increasingly corrupt economic dogma all collided at once, ending in utter and complete collapse.

Nearly 20-years later America is building its own wall along our southern border, spending $12 billion a month fighting twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while not investing in our aging, crumbling infrastructure and -- finally -- free-market radicals in this administration allowed the economy to be run into the ground by increasingly corrupt and self-indulgent players.

Add to that $3 trillion in tax cuts skewed towards America's richest citizens, and now another $1 trillion (likely more) to bailout companies run or owned by the very recipients of those tax cuts. Add it all together and what you get is what the Soviets got twenty years ago -- a reality-round right between the eyes.

In the days and weeks ahead you're going to hear a lot from Washington about how they've got a handle on all this. But they really don't, not even close. Because, you see,  there's no money in the national bank account and our favorite lenders, the Chinese, Japanese and, increasingly, Middle East oil producing states, have been dragged into this economic morass too. The last thing of those lending nations need or want right now are a few hundred billion more USA IOUs.

But even if those lending nations were willing to continue to drop spare change into America's tin cup, there's not enough dimes on earth to fill the hole that's been created by Wall Street's Frankenstein creation called "derivatives."

I'm not going to waste your time trying to explain derivatives... because they can't be explained. Warren Buffett calls them ,....Weapons of financial mass destruction.'' (According to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the notional value of CDS totaled $63 trillion at the end of last year.  Estimates for this year are more like $67 trillion.)

Alan Blinder, the former Fed vice chairman, who holds a doctorate in economics from M.I.T. admits that even he doesn't understand derivatives. "I know the basic understanding of how they work," he said, "but if you presented me with one and asked me to put a market value on it, I'd be guessing."

The point everyone misses," wrote economist Robert Chapman a decade ago, "is that buying derivatives is not investing.  It is gambling, insurance and high stakes bookmaking.  Derivatives create nothing."

Today, the outstanding "value" of just derivative swaps stands at about $50 trillion. (By the way, that's up from $900 billion in 2001.) But the values investors and institutions placed on their books for these derivatives bears little connection to their actual value. And no one -- I mean NO ONE -- really knows what those things are really worth. First regulators and investors will have to determine a current real market value for each of them. To do that they have to untangle each of these Rubic Cubes; how they are amortized, who has claims on all or part of each, when they're due, etc.  Only then will they learn what all these underlying assets are truly worth. They may be worth only pennies on the dollar. In many cases regulators -- and taxpayers now backing these instruments-- will learn they are not worth the cost of the electricity to put them through a document shredder.

All the activity you see at the White House in recent days has only one goal; to avoid a total collapse on Bush's watch. By the time the next President takes office the current administration will have eaten all the nation's  remaining seed corn, leaving the next administration virtually nothing to re-grow the economy.

And then there's America's exhausted military. The surge succeeded, but not in the way the administration likes to claim. The surge succeeded putting off the inevitable collapse in Iraq until after Bush leaves office.

With the US consumer and financial system gutted and our military stretched far beyond its limits, the next Commander-in-Chief will be left with only one choice; to end military operations in Iraq and let the chips fall where they will between waring Sunnis and Shiites. And then to move some of those military resources to the real threats to the world, Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Even then it will be difficult to maintain full-scale military operations there unless our NATO allies increase their commitments. Unfortunately Europe also finds itself being dragged down by the US financial market collapse.

Finally, don't even think about universal healthcare. As job looses hit and hit and hit again in the months ahead, the 50 million Americans currently without healthcare will mushroom. But there will be no money left to address this national shame.

So who do we need in the White House next January? Again look back to see ahead.

Bush has been compared with Herbert Hoover, and not without good reason. And even now, he follows in Hoover's failed footsteps.

In 1930s the nation found itself in the same fix. Wall Street had been allowed -- even encouraged -- to run wild by Republican President Herbert Hoover. And, surprise, surprise, when left to their own devices Wall Streeters fouled their own nest, and everyone else's.

Hoover's response was, first, to assure everyone that 'the fundamentals of the American economy are sound."

October 2, 1930: "During the past year you have carried the credit system of the nation safely through a most difficult crisis. In this success you have demonstrated not alone the soundness of the credit system, but also the capacity of the bankers in emergency."

—Herbert Hoover, Address before the annual convention of The American Bankers Association, Cleveland

Hey, peeved hippie! Stop your hatin' and learn to love the (McCain) bomb!

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, September 5, 2008

"Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will."
-- George W. Bush, RNC '08

Aww, just look at you. You seem a little upset. A mite peeved, even.

Heck on a hot pancake, I'd even go so far as to say you were downright angry, given how I can see the ripples of general upsettedness and waves of appalledosity coursing through your hot liberal body like fresh biodiesel through a converted VW van. Really now, that can't be good for your chakras, can it?

What's wrong, buttercup? Right-wing politics got you down? RNC '08 making you gag? Toxic and inexcusable events of the past eight years make you deeply sick to your stomach, spleen, heart, mind, spirit and even your kneecaps? Or is it the wretched notion that the bizarro-world McCain-Palin agenda wants to continue more of the same?

Or maybe it's this: Maybe it's all this terrifying new evidence that there still seems to be this huge pile of Americans who aren't all that concerned with -- or even aware of -- just how violently the GOP continues to dump all over their very heads. Is that what's making your blood boil? Aww, there, there, now.

Really, I have to say, what nerve you libs have, daring to be angry at a time like this. This is a time of optimism and change! This is a time of true, red-blooded American mavericks, of hot Alaskan redneck babes and giant phallic guns and military fetishism and zero birth control, of teen pregnancy and God and freshly slaughtered moose on the dinner table!

Can't you sense the patriotism? Hell, McCain-Palin is so damn American it might as well be a McDonald's McRib sandwich dipped in Crisco and cooked over a Chevy Tahoe's exhaust pipe at a tailgate party in Kid Rock's bowels. Feel the jingoism, hippie!

You know what you should do, angry lefty? You should take a page from the Republican Convention. Just look how perky they all are, doing that incredible dance of the true blind American, completely blocking out the pain and misprision of their party's leadership -- the failed war, the fiscal disaster, the least popular president in a lifetime, the secrecy and scandal and historic ineptitude -- much in the same way an insane cat lady blocks out the all the cold lumps of fur piling up in the freezer. Really, why can't you be more like that?

I'll tell you this, peeved liberal: The GOP is laughing at your expense. Don't you see how they're tossing about "the angry left" catchphrase as though progressives are the only ones who've been molested by Bush's horrible policies and McCain's lust for more war, by illegal wiretapping, torture, environmental ignorance, the raping of the Treasury?

Oh sure, you and I both know there are plenty of angry Republicans out there too, furious at how Bush and now McCain have ruined their once-noble party and trashed the heart of the nation for the sake of oil cronyism and war profiteering. But there is simply no room for them at this particular table.

Right now, you get to be either one of two things: A furious lefty to be equated with North Vietnamese torturers, lured in by the "sham" of Obama's deep intelligence and potential historic greatness, or a deeply drugged conservative, numb to the world, lacking a foothold on a single issue you can defend but nevertheless shooting for the rafters with a giant rifle of gall. Take your pick.

Here's a fun fact: Do you know why Bush and others get to call you "the angry left" and lightning does not strike them dead on the spot? Simple, lovebug: because they know something you don't.

Here it is: Repubs know -- or rather, desperately hope -- that there remains a simply huge number of very ill-informed, reactionary Americans out there who are still operating on the lowest possible intellectual and cultural strata -- who are, for example, totally turned on by seeing Governor Palin in a power skirt wielding a rifle and a knocked-up teen daughter and a fetish for Creationism and oil and sexual ignorance, a woman who has called the war in Iraq "a task from God."

This is McCain's apparent message to these effortlessly terrified throngs (aka "Bush's base"): You know who should be running this country if and when I don't make it through my first term? Hot chicks with guns! Check that: Hot neocon MILFs with guns who can skin a moose and who reject condoms and who don't know a Shia from a Sunni from an Eskimo pie, but who know lots about foreign policy because she can see part of Russia from her desk. Yay America!

So I ask again, why so livid, liberal? Is it because it wasn't exactly "the angry left" who shoved institutionalized torture, pre-emptive military violence, or a complete disregard for science down the throat of American domestic policy? Is it the 4,000-plus dead U.S. soldiers, 10,000-plus wounded and brain-damaged, and tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians? Oh, you bleeding heart. So silly you are.

But don't you worry, because there's an even bigger secret looming that the right wing can't really mention right now. See, much as they want to sling "angry left" around and hope it sticks, there's simply no getting over the fact that, despite how it will take the Obama administration many years to repair the incredible damage Hurricane Bush hath wrought, most of us on the left are actually feeling pretty damn good these days. Happy, even.

See, we know the tide has turned. The Bush Dark Days are nearly over. The Obama groundswell is historic, extraordinary, unstoppable. The GOP had its turn, was handed six years of unprecedented, unchecked power, and very nearly destroyed the country. Even Republican leaders now openly admit their party is a mess, shattered and gutted by Bush, will take years and decades to restore to something resembling dignity. And McCain/Palin? An aberration, one of the most disquieting quasi-conservative tickets to ever give a nation the creeps.

So then, trust me when I say, try as they might, "the angry left" won't stick. As anyone with the slightest sense of history and poetic justice knows, such a jab is merely the final, desperate wailings of the bankrupt, the shameful, and the doomed.

Thoughts about this column? E-mail Mark.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate.com. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal (i.e.; non-Chronicle) mailing list (appearances, books, readings, blogs, yoga and more), please click here and remove two more.

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• Emine Saner
• The Guardian,
• Monday March 26 2007

Tom Hurndall just after he was shot by an Israeli sniper in the Gaza strip. Photo: PA/Tom Hurndall Foundation

All that is clear from the book his mother, Jocelyn, has written about Tom's life, and about his family's battle to bring the Israeli army to account for killing him. It's not a political book, she stresses, though the anger, frustration and disappointment she feels towards the army, and the Israeli and British governments, is obvious.

Tom was in Rafah, in the Israeli-occupied Gaza strip, on April 11, at an ISM demonstration. Suddenly low shots were fired from an Israeli army watchtower in the direction of children playing on a mound of rubble. Most of them ran - but three froze. Tom, wearing a bright orange ISM jacket, ran to help them. He scooped up a boy and carried him to safety. He ran back for the two girls, bent down to put his arm round one of them and was shot in the head.

Jocelyn was at work, at a school in London where she was head of learning support, when she got a call from her daughter Sophie saying that Tom had been shot. It was the last day of the spring term. She calmly finished photocopying a report she had been working on and distributed it into pigeonholes, before setting off for home. It was as if she was trying to put off discovering the full horror of the story. "I think you do anything to delay the moment of impact," she says in the bright sitting room of her north London home.

After nearly two months by his hospital bedside in Israel, the family - Hurndall, her former husband, Anthony, and their children Sophie, Billy and Fred - were allowed to bring Tom back to the UK. The brain injury had left him in a coma; his main organs working, but nothing else. Did she accept that Tom would die from the start? "I think I knew," she says. "The pressure in Tom's head had damaged other parts of his brain. I knew he would never recover."

Tom eventually died nine months later on January 13 2004 - Jocelyn's birthday - in hospital in London. Was it a relief, in a way? "It was, because he wasn't in pain any more," says Hurndall. "But it was also impossible when he died." She is silent for a long time. "I still haven't accepted it."

Hurndall is softly spoken with gentle, pale blue eyes. She seems fragile but with an intense strength. She's a battler but seems surprised by it. She tells of the time she met Tony Blair at a dinner. "I remember saying to him, 'You've hurt me'. I couldn't imagine saying that to anybody five years ago." She laughs at this. "This middle-class mother coming out with these strident things." Tom's death has changed her. "You develop this language when there's this anger. I'm not usually a strident person, I've never needed to be."

Her book is called Defy the Stars, words Tom had tattooed on his wrist. They come from Romeo's cry "Then I defy you, stars!" in Romeo and Juliet, and seemed to say a lot about his attitude to life. Hurndall says she finds herself carrying her book around the house, "because it's what's left of Tom. It's my gift to Tom, it's my gift from Tom."

Apart from the anger and the love and the pain, one of the strongest senses in the book is that of discovering Tom, as his mother has since his death. She read his journals and pored over his photographs. Tom was young and idealistic, but he also knew how dangerous it would be to go to Iraq and Gaza. "He was very mature in many senses," says Hurndall. "He was aware of the risks, but his desire to see and question and be curious was greater. People are surprised to read that Tom considered the possibility of being shot. I gulp when I read it, but I understand that of course he would consider it. If you're there, it's on your mind all the time."

She didn't want him to go to Baghdad but she knew she couldn't stop him. "I couldn't condone it. I felt angry with Tom and a terrible worry that weighed me down and affected me every minute he was away. I was numb, anaesthetised, blank. I kept expecting him to come home. I think he would have left Rafah within 48 hours of his final entry in his journal." His final entry was on the morning of the day he was shot.

From the beginning, the Hurndalls worried that there could be a cover-up. The first news reports, heard by an Israeli friend on the radio station Kol-Israel, said a man wearing military fatigues had been shooting at a watchtower. "Even days later no one from the Israeli army or Israeli government had been in touch with us," says Hurndall. "So that in itself spoke volumes. We really felt this draught of silence." At the hospital, one doctor suggested that Tom's head injury "was commensurate with a blow from a baseball bat", even though on his notes it clearly said "gunshot wound", with an entry point and exit point - as though someone was suggesting that the injury had been caused at close range and so not from the watchtower.

The Palestinians, meanwhile, held Tom up as a hero. Hurndall received a letter from Yasser Arafat praising her son. "I do understand something of the mentality of the need to make Tom an icon, a martyr," she says. "Having seen the level of Palestinian desperation myself, you would grasp at people who seemingly have taken up your cause and suffered because of it, and you idolise them because they represent hope."

It was shortly after seeing Tom in hospital for the first time that she took her first trip into Rafah. "I remember the faces of the women and the men and the grandfathers, which spoke of such a worn kind of loss. Life was very, very hard. I definitely had a feeling that they were thinking, 'Here's this shocked western family. Do they know that this happens to us every day and we live under the threat of it happening every minute?' I remember really wanting to find a way of saying 'I understand'."

Tom's father, Anthony, a lawyer, set about collecting witness statements and writing his own report into his son's death, an attempt to get the Israeli army to accept accountability. It was intensely frustrating. The report the Israeli army produced was amateurish, the incident itself reduced to simplistic scenarios including the idea that Tom was hit by a Palestinian gunman, or that he was even the gunman himself. Little of what they said tallied with the many witness statements that Anthony had collected. The map they produced to show where it had happened was out of date, and they had got the location of where Tom had been shot wrong. The Israeli army said they had fired a single shot; witnesses stated there had been at least five shots, maybe as many as eight.

The Hurndalls' requests for a meeting with Israeli officials went unanswered until, on the day they were due to fly Tom home, they were granted a meeting at the ministry of foreign affairs. Major Biton, the Israeli soldier in charge of the inquiry, insisted that the army couldn't have seen Tom from the watchtower, saying buildings were in the way of the window where the soldier was standing. Anthony calmly pointed out that there was a surveillance platform on the top of the tower, and that visibility would have been perfect. When he asked for CCTV footage to prove it, he was told there was no footage, although a camera could clearly be seen on the photographs of the tower Tom had taken. Anthony raised the shootings of two young Palestinian men who had been shot within 48 hours of Tom's shooting, in the same area. "It was clear that Anthony had mentioned the unmentionable," writes Hurndall. "The shooting of a young Englishman was one thing, but to mention the shooting of young Palestinians was quite another."

The Israeli government eventually sent a cheque to pay for the repatriation (though it covered only a fraction of the cost), but they did not admit liability. The cheque, for £8,370, bounced. Compensation and damages are still an issue.

When the Hurndalls met Rachel Corrie's parents, their experience was painfully familiar. The Corries said the doctor who did the autopsy had claimed that her death had been caused by tripping over, though as her father pointed out, "I would like to ask the doctor how many times he's seen somebody with broken ribs, breaks in her spinal column, crushed shoulder blades and cut lungs just from tripping."

The British government wasn't much help. Despite assertions that it had "repeatedly pressed the Israeli government for a full and transparent inquiry", the Hurndalls felt this was hollow. When the Hurndalls met Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, they found him remote and cold. Blair never publicly condemned the shooting. On top of all this, she received anonymous phone calls and letters calling her a "Nazi-lover" for questioning the Israeli authorities.

With a son in hospital wasting away, and three grieving children at home, how did she cope? "I don't think I did. I made sure there was food in the fridge and I didn't crack up. As a mother, you're used to getting in there if there's a problem and suddenly I couldn't get in there. Suddenly motherhood seemed distanced and that is terrible. Grief is such that you do have to do it on your own. The only way that I could grieve for Tom was to uncover who he was and to think about my relationship with him. And to untangle this complex bundle of tragedy."

The fight still isn't over. Taysir Walid Heib, a soldier in the Israeli army, was put on trial for shooting Tom, and it was unbearable. A medical witness called by the Israeli army suggested that Tom's death had nothing to do with the shooting and had been a result of negligence by the British hospital. He even implied that the family had been complicit in Tom's death. Another medical witness agreed - he claimed Tom's death had not been caused by pneumonia, but by an overdose of morphine and that this was the fault of British doctors. It was so ludicrous that it strengthened the prosecution.

In June 2005, Taysir, a Bedouin sergeant, was convicted of manslaughter and, in August, was sentenced to eight years, the longest sentence an Israeli soldier has been given for killing a civilian since the start of the second intifada. "It was limited justice," says Hurndall. "He did break the so-called rules of engagement. On the other hand, he was in a culture where there are very loose rules of engagement and their senior commanders turn a blind eye." An Arab, Taysir could neither read nor write Hebrew, and had a learning disability. Although the Bedouins are marginalised in Israel, some do volunteer for the army, although they tend to be sent to the most dangerous zones and career progression is rare. "I was convinced that Tom was the victim of a victim," Hurndall writes. "That it was the policy-makers who had put Taysir in this position, who should be on trial." The family are hoping there will be further arrests up the chain of command and they have yet to receive a public apology.

But is it getting easier? "It is less mad, less chaotic, less muddled. There are fewer distractions. It feels like coming to the edge of a cliff. I went to Fred's school to watch him playing football and I was in heaven. I don't mean because Tom had been at the same school and also played football in the same way, had the same long legs. I mean that I've come to value those moments so much more. What happened really put a focus on every minute of life, so in some ways it has made our lives more vibrant. It seems terrible that it has taken that. But life matters even more than it did".

Source

Ernestine L. Rose

Jan 1810 – August 1892

Atheist & America's first woman's rights canvasser. She adopted the word without apology or embarrassment, well before Robert Green Ingersoll discovered freethought. She was born in  the Jewish ghetto in Poland, the daughter of an orthodox rabbi. Having read the Torah in Hebrew she had rejected the bible and Judaism by the age of 14. after an eventful journey thought Europe she met and married William Ella Rose and together they left for America in 1836.

She was a committed and energetic activist. Soon after arriving in America she drafted the 'Married Woman's Property Act" that was proposed by freethinker Judge Thomas Hertell. Canvassing door to door to get support she had to battle not only men, religionists and clerics, but also women who told her "We don't want any more rights – we have rights enough"

Ernestine was one of several women freethinkers who went on lecture tours addressing state legislators and conventions in support of atheism, freethought, women's rights and abolition of slavery. She was called "the female devil, so bold as to contest the right of the South to hold their own slaves"

At one of her gatherings she told the audience:-

"Agitation is the opposite of stagnation – the one is life, the other death" and

"Ignorance is the evil – knowledge will be the remedy"

One national newspaper called the first women's rights convention "An Awful Combination of Socialism, Abolitionism and Infidelity"

At another convention she opposed attempts to reconcile womens's rights with Christianity saying:- "For my part, I see no need to appeal to any written authority, particularly when it is so obscure and indefinite as to admit of different interpretations. When the inhabitants of Boston converted their harbour into a teapot rather than submit to unjust taxes, they did not go to the Bible for their authority; for if they had, they would have been told from the same authority to ..give unto Caesar what belonged to Caesar.' Had the people, when they rose in the might of their right to throw off the British yoke, appealed to the bible for authority, it would have answered them, ..Submit to the powers that be, for they are from God.' No! on Human Rights and Freedom, on a subject that is as self-evident as that two and two make four, there is no need of any written authority."

The harassment of woman's rights advocates by ministers and mobs continued, most notably at a four-day bible convention called by William Lloyd Garrison

In 1854 The Albany Register editorialised a convention meeting at which she spoke thus:-

"People are beginning to inquire how far public sentiment should sanction or tolerate these unsexed women, who make a scoff of religion, who repudiate the Bible and blaspheme God; who would step out from the true sphere of the mother, the wife, and the daughter, and taking upon themselves the duties and the business of men, stalk into the public gaze, and by engaging in the politics, the rough controversies. And trafficking of the world, upheave existing institutions, and overturn all the social relations of life.

It is a melancholy reflection, that among our American women who have been educated to better things, there should be found any who are willing to follow the lead of such foreign propagandists as the ringleted, glove-handed exotic, Ernestine L. Rose. We can understand how such men as the Rev, Mr May, or the sleek-headed Dr. Channing may be deluded by her to becoming her disciples………"

Women Without Superstition – "No Gods No Masters"

Edited by Annie Laurie Gaylor

A Defence of Atheism

By Ernestine L. Rose

This lecture was delivered in Mercantile Hall, Boston, on April l0, 1861, and was later published in pamphlet form by the F P Mendip, (Boston) Investigator office. This is its first appearance in book form.

MY FRIENDS: -IN UNDERTAKING THE INQUIRY of the existence of a God, I am fully conscious of the difficulties I have to encounter. I am well aware that the very question produces in most minds a feeling of awe, as if stepping on forbidden ground, too holy and sacred for mortals to approach. The very question strikes them with horror, and it is owing to this prejudice so deeply implanted by education, and also strengthened by public sentiment, that so few are willing to give it a fair and impartial investigation,-knowing but too well that it casts a stigma and reproach upon any person bold enough to undertake the task, unless his previously known opinions are a guarantee that his conclusions would be in accordance and harmony with the popular demand. But believing as I do, that Truth only is beneficial, and Error, from whatever source, and under whatever name, is pernicious to man, I consider no place too holy, no subject too sacred, for man's earnest investigation; for by so doing only can we arrive at Truth, learn to discriminate it from Error, and be able to accept the one and reject the other.

Nor is this the only impediment in the way of this inquiry. The question arises, Where shall we begin? We have been told, that "by searching none can find out God," which has so far proved true; for, as yet, no one has ever been able to find him. The most strenuous believer has to acknowledge that it is only a belief, but he knows nothing on the subject. Where, then, shall we search for his existence? Enter the material world; ask the Sciences whether they can disclose the mystery? Geology speaks of the structure of the Earth, the formation of the different strata, of coal, of granite, of the whole mineral kingdom.-It reveals the remains and traces of animals long extinct, but gives us no clue whereby we may prove the existence of a God.

Natural history gives us a knowledge of the animal kingdom in general; the different organisms, structures, and powers of the various species. Physiology teaches the nature of man, the laws that govern his being, the functions of the vital organs, and the conditions upon which alone 73 health and life depend. ... But in the whole animal economy-though the brain is considered to be a "microcosm," in which may be traced a resemblance or relationship with everything in Nature-not a spot can be found to indicate the existence of a God.

Mathematics lays the foundation of all the exact sciences. It teaches the art of combining numbers, of calculating and measuring distances, how to solve problems, to weigh mountains, to fathom the depths of the ocean; but gives no directions how to ascertain the existence of a God.

Enter Nature's great laboratory-Chemistry.-She will speak to you of the various elements, their combinations and uses, of the gases constantly evolving and combining in different proportions, producing all the varied objects, the interesting and important phenomena we behold. She proves the indestructibility of matter, and its inherent property-motion; but in all her operations, no demonstrable fact can be obtained to indicate the existence of a God.

Astronomy tells us of the wonders of the Solar System-the eternally revolving planets, the rapidity and certainty of their motions, the distance from planet to planet, from star to star. It predicts with astonishing and marvellous precision the phenomena of eclipses, the visibility upon our Earth of comets, and proves the immutable law of gravitation, but is entirely silent on the existence of a God.

In fine, descend into the bowels of the Earth, and you will learn what it contains; into the depths of the ocean, and you will find the inhabitants of the great deep; but neither in the Earth above, nor the waters below, can you obtain any knowledge of his existence. Ascend into the heavens, and enter the "milky way," go from planet to planet to the remotest star, and ask the eternally revolving systems, Where is God? and Echo answers, Where?

The Universe of Matter gives us no record of his existence. Where next shall we search? Enter the Universe of Mind, read the millions of volumes written on the subject, and in all the speculations, the assertions, the assumptions, the theories, and the creeds, you can only find Man stamped in an indelible impress his own mind on every page. In describing his God, he delineated his own character: the picture he drew represents in living and ineffaceable colours the epoch of his existence-the period he lived in. 74- It was a great mistake to say that God made man in his image. Man, in all ages, made his God in his own image; and we find that just in accordance with his civilization, his knowledge, his experience, his taste, his refinement, his sense of right, of justice, of freedom, and humanity, so has he made his God. But whether coarse or refined; cruel and vindictive, or kind and generous; an implacable tyrant, or a gentle and loving father; it still was the emanation of his own mind-the picture of himself.

But, you ask, how came it that man thought or wrote about God at all? The answer is very simple. Ignorance is the mother of Superstition. In proportion to man's ignorance is he superstitious-does he believe in the mysterious. The very name has a charm for him. Being unacquainted with the nature and laws of things around him, with the true causes of the effects he witnessed, he ascribed them to false ones-to supernatural agencies. The savage, ignorant of the mechanism of a watch, attributes the ticking to a spirit. The so-called civilized man, equally ignorant of the mechanism of the Universe, and the laws which govern it, ascribes it to the same erroneous cause. Before electricity was discovered, a thunderstorm was said to come from the wrath of an offended Deity. To this fiction of man's uncultivated mind, has been attributed all of good and of evil, of wisdom and of folly. Man has talked about him, written about him, disputed about him, fought about him,-sacrificed himself, and extirpated his fellow man. Rivers of blood and oceans of tears have been shed to please him, yet no one has ever been able to demonstrate his existence.

But the Bible, we are told, reveals this great mystery. Where Nature is dumb, and Man ignorant, Revelation speaks in the authoritative voice of prophecy. Then let us see whether that Revelation can stand the test of reason and of truth.-God, we are told, is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent,-all wise, all just, and all good; that he is perfect. So far, so well; for less than perfection were unworthy of a God. The first act recorded of him is, that he created the world out of nothing; but unfortunately the revelation of Science-Chemistry-which is based not on written words, but demonstrable facts, says that Nothing has no existence, and therefore out of Nothing, Nothing could be made. Revelation tells us that the world was created in six days. Here Geology steps in and says, that it requires thousands of ages to form the various strata of the earth. The Bible tells us that the earth was flat and stationary, and the sun moves around the earth. Copernicus and Galileo flatly deny this flat assertion, and demonstrate by Astronomy that the earth is spherical, and revolves around the sun. 75 Revelation tells us that on the fourth day God created the sun, moon, and stars. This, Astronomy calls a moon story, and says that the first three days, before the great torchlight was manufactured and suspended in the great lantern above, must have been rather dark.

The division of the waters above from the waters below, and the creation of the minor objects, I pass by, and come at once to the sixth day.

Having finished, in five days, this stupendous production, with its mighty mountains, its vast seas, its fields and woods; supplied the waters with fishes-from the whale that Jonah swallowed to the little Dutch herring; peopled the woods with inhabitants-from the tiger, the lion, the bear, the elephant with his trunk, the dromedary with his hump, the deer with his antlers, the nightingale with her melodies, down to the serpent which tempted mother Eve; covered the fields with vegetation, decorated the gardens with flowers, hung the trees with fruits; and surveying this glorious world as it lay spread out like a map before him, the question naturally suggested itself. What is it all for, unless there were beings capable of admiring, of appreciating, and of enjoying the delights this beautiful world could afford? And suiting the action to the impulse, he said, "Let us make man." "So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them."

I presume by the term "image" we are not to understand a near resemblance of face or form, but in the image or likeness of his knowledge, his power, his wisdom, and perfection. Having thus made man, he placed him (them) in the garden of Eden-the loveliest and most enchanting spot at the very head of creation, and bade them (with the single restriction not to eat of the tree of knowledge), to live, to love, and to be happy.

What a delightful picture, could we only rest here! But did these beings, fresh from the hand of omnipotent wisdom, in whose image they were made, answer the great object of their creation? Alas! no. No sooner were they installed in their Paradises home, than they violated the first, the only injunction given them, and fell from their high estate; and not only they, but by a singular justice of that very merciful Creator, their innocent posterity to all coming generations, fell with them! Does that bespeak wisdom and perfection in the Creator, or in the creature? But what was the cause of this tremendous fall, which frustrated the whole design of the creation? The Serpent tempted mother Eve, and she, like a good wife, tempted her husband. But did God not know when he created 76 the Serpent, that it would tempt the woman, and that she was made out of such frail materials, (the rib of Adam,) as not to be able to resist the temptation? If he did not know, then his knowledge was at fault; if he did, but could not prevent that calamity, then his power was at fault; if he knew and could, but would not, then his goodness was at fault. Choose which you please, and it remains alike fatal to the rest.

Revelation tells us that God made man perfect, and found him imperfect; then he pronounced all things good, and found them most desperately bad. "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thought of his heart was evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." "And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created, from the face of the earth; both man and beasts, and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me that I have made them." So he destroyed everything, except Noah with his family, and a few household pets. Why he saved them is hard to say, unless it was to reserve materials as stock in hand to commence a new world with; but really, judging of the character of those he saved, by their descendants, it strikes me it would have been much better, and given him far less trouble, to have let them slip also, and with his improved experience made a new world out of fresh and superior materials.

As it was, this wholesale destruction even, was a failure. The world was not one jot better after the flood than before. His chosen children were just as bad as ever, and he had to send his prophets, again and again, to threaten, to frighten, to coax, to cajole, and to flatter them into good behaviour. But all to no effect. They grew worse and worse; and having made a covenant with Noah after he had sacrificed of "every clean beast and of every clean fowl,"-"The Lord smelt the sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done." And so he was forced to resort to the last sad alternative of sending "his only begotten son," his second self, to save them. But alas! "his own received him not," and so he was obliged to adopt the Gentiles, and die to save the world. Did he succeed, even then? Is the world saved? Saved! From what? From ignorance? It is all around us. From poverty, vice, crime, sin, misery, and shame? It abounds everywhere. 77 Look into your poor-houses, your prisons, your lunatic asylums; contemplate the whip, the instruments of torture, and of death; ask the murderer, or his victim; listen to the ravings of the maniac, the shrieks of distress, the groans of despair; mark the cruel deeds of the tyrant, the crimes of slavery, and the suffering of the oppressed; count the millions of lives lost by fire, by water, and by the sword; measure the blood spilled, the tears shed, the sighs of agony drawn from the expiring victims on the altar of fanaticism;-and tell me from what the world was saved? And why was it not saved? Why does God still permit these horrors to afflict the race? Does omniscience not know it? Could omnipotence not do it? Would infinite wisdom, power, and goodness allow his children thus to live, to suffer, and to die? No! Humanity revolts against such a supposition.

Ah! not now, not here, says the believer. Hereafter will he save them. Save them hereafter! From what? From the apple eaten by our mother Eve? What a mockery! If a rich parent were to let his children live in ignorance, poverty, and wretchedness, all their lives, and hold out to them the promise of a fortune at some time hereafter, he would justly be considered a criminal, or a madman. The parent is responsible to his offspring the Creator to the creature.

The testimony of Revelation has failed. Its account of the creation of the material world is disproved by science. Its account of the creation of man in the image of perfection, is disproved by its own internal evidence. To test the Bible God by justice and benevolence, he could not be good; to test him by reason and knowledge, he could not be wise; to test him by the light of the truth, the rule of consistency, we must come to the inevitable conclusion that, like the Universe of matter and of mind, this pretended Revelation has also failed to demonstrate the existence of a God.

Methinks I hear the believer say, you are unreasonable; you demand an impossibility; we are finite, and therefore cannot understand, much less define and demonstrate the infinite. Just so! But if I am unreasonable in asking you to demonstrate the existence of the being you wish me to believe in, are you not infinitely more unreasonable to expect me to believe-blame, persecute, and punish me for not believing-in what you have to acknowledge you cannot understand?

But, says the Christian, the world exists, and therefore there must have been a God to create it. That does not follow. The mere fact of its existence does not prove a Creator.

78 Then how came the Universe into existence? We do not know but the ignorance of man is certainly no proof of the existence of a God. Yet upon that very ignorance has it been predicated, and is maintained. From the little knowledge we have, we are justified in the assertion that the Universe never was created, from the simple fact that not one atom of it can ever be annihilated. To suppose a Universe created, is to suppose a time when it did not exist, and that is a self-evident absurdity. Besides, where was the Creator before it was created? Nay, where is he now? Outside of that Universe, which means the all in all, above, below, and around? That is another absurdity. Is he contained within? Then he can be only a part, for the whole includes all the parts. If only a part, then he could not be its Creator, for a part cannot create the whole. But the world could not have made itself. True; nor could God have made himself; and if you must have a God to make the world, you will be under the same necessity to have another to make him, and others still to make them, and so on until reason and common sense are at a stand-still.

The same argument applies to a First Cause. We can no more admit of a first than a last cause. What is a first cause? The one immediately preceding the last effect, which was an effect to a cause in its turn-an effect to causes, themselves effects. All we know is an eternal chain of cause and effect, without beginning as without end.

But is there no evidence of intelligence, of design, and consequently of a designer? I see no evidence of either. What is intelligence? It is not a thing, a substance, an existence in itself, but simply a property of matter, manifesting itself through organizations. We have no knowledge of, nor can we conceive of, intelligence apart from organized matter; and we find that from the smallest and simplest insect, through all the links and gradations in Nature's great chain, up to Man-just in accordance with the organism, the amount, and quality of brain, so are the capacities to receive impressions, the power to retain them, and the abilities to manifest and impart them to others; namely, to have its peculiar nature cultivated and developed, so as to bear mental fruits, just as the cultivated earth bears vegetation-physical fruits. Not being able to recognize an independent intelligence, I can perceive no design or designer except in the works of man.

But, says Paley, does the watch not prove a watchmaker-a design, and therefore a designer? How much more then does the Universe? Yes; the watch shows design, and the watchmaker did not leave us in the dark on the subject, but clearly and distinctly stamped his design on the face of the match. 79 Is it as clearly stamped on the Universe? Where is the design, in the oak to ..;-row to its majestic height= or in the thunderbolt that rcpt it asunder? In the formation of the wing of the bird, to enable it to fly, in accordance with the prompting of its nature: or in the sportsman to shoot it down while long? In the butterfly to dance in the sunshine: or its be-ing crushed in the tiny fingers of a child? Design in men's capacity for the aquisition of knowledge, or in his groping in ignorance= In the necessity to obey the laws of health, or in the violation of them, which produces diseases In the desire to he happy, or in the causes that prevent it, and make him live in toil, misery, and suffering

"the watchmaker not only stamped his design on the the of the watch, but he teaches how to wind it up when run dogs n; hogs to repair the machinery -hen out of order; and how to put a new spring in m -hen the old one is broken, and leave the match as good as ever. Does the great Watch-maker, as he is called, show the same intelligence and power in keeping, or teaching others to keep, this contemplated mechanism-... -1 an  always in good orders and when the life-spring is broken replace it with another, and leave him just the same If an Infinite Intelligence deigned man to possess knowledge, he could not be ignorant; to be healthy, he could not he diseased; to he virtuous, he could not be vicious; to be wise, he could not act so foolish as to trouble himself about the Gods, and neglect his own best interests.

But, says the believer, here is a wonderful adaptation of means to ends; the eve to sec, the car to hear, &c. As, this is very wonderful; but not one jot more so, than if the eve were made to hear, and the car to see. The Supporters of Design use sometimes .. erg- strange arguments. A friend of mine, a very intelligent man, with quite a scientific taste, endeavoured once to convince me of a Providential design, from the fact that a fish, which had always lived in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, was entirely blind. t-fete, said he, is strong evidence; in that dark rive, where nothing was to he seen, the fish needed no eyes, and therefore it has none. He forgot the demonstrable fact that the element of light is indispensable in the formation of the organ of sight, "About which it could not be formed, and no Providence, or Gods, could enable the fish to see. That fish story reminds me of the Methodist preacher who proved the wisdom and benevolence of Providence in always placing the rivers near large cities, and death at 80 the end of life; for Oh! my dear hearers, said he, what would have become of us had he placed it at the beginning?

Everything is wonderful, and wonderful just in proportion as we are ignorant; but that proves no "design" or "designer." But did things come by chance? It exists only in the perverted mind of the believer, who, while insisting that God was the cause of everything, leaves Him without any cause. The Atheist believes as little in the one as in the other. He knows that no effect could exist without an adequate cause; that everything in the Universe is governed by laws.

The Universe is one vast chemical laboratory, in constant operation, by her internal forces. The laws or principles of attraction, cohesion, and repulsion, produce in never-ending succession the phenomena of composition, decomposition, and recomposition. The how, we are too ignorant to understand, too modest to presume, and too honest to profess. Had man been a patient and impartial inquirer, and not with childish presumption attributed everything he could not understand, to supernatural causes, given names to hide his ignorance, but observed the operations of Nature, he would undoubtedly have known more, been wiser, and happier.

As it is, Superstition has ever been the great impediment to the acquisition of knowledge. Every progressive step of man clashed against the two-edged sword of Religion, to whose narrow restrictions he had but too often to succumb, or march onward at the expense of interest, reputation, and even life itself.

But, we are told, that Religion is natural; the belief in a God universal. Were it natural, then it would indeed be universal; but it is not. We have ample evidence to the contrary. According to Dr. Livingstone, there are whole tribes or nations, civilized, moral, and virtuous; yes, so honest that they expose their goods for sale without guard or value set upon them, trusting to the honour of the purchaser to pay its proper price.

Yet these people have not the remotest idea of a God, and he found it impossible to impart it to them. And in all ages of the world, some of the most civilized, the wisest, and the best, were entire unbelievers; only they dared not openly avow it, except at the risk of their lives. Proscription, the torture and the stake, were found most efficient means to seal the lips of heretics; and though the march of progress has broken the infernal machines, and extinguished the fires of the Inquisition, the proscription, and more refined but not less cruel and bitter persecutions of an intolerant 81 and bigoted public opinion, in Protestant countries, as well as in Catholic, on account of belief, are quite enough to prevent men from honestly avowing their true sentiments upon the subject. Hence there are few possessed of the moral courage of a Humboldt.

If the belief in a god were natural, there would be no need to teach it. Children would possess it as well as adults, the layman as the priest, the heathen as much as the missionary. We don't have to teach the general elements of human nature;-the five senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. They are universal; so would religion be were it natural, but it is not. On the contrary, it is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so. Even as it is, they are great sceptics, until made sensible of the potent weapon by which religion has ever been propagated, namely, fear-fear of the lash of public opinion here, and of jealous, vindictive God hereafter. No; there is no religion in human nature, nor human nature in religion. It is purely artificial, the result of education, while Atheism is natural, and, were the human mind not perverted and bewildered by the mysteries and follies of superstition, would be universal.

But the people have been made to believe that were it not for religion, the world would be destroyed:-man would become a monster, chaos and confusion would reign supreme. These erroneous notions conceived in ignorance, propagated by superstition, and kept alive by an interested and corrupt priesthood who fatten the credulity of the public, are very difficult to be eradicated.

But sweep all the belief in the supernatural from the face of the earth, and the world would remain just the same. The seasons would follow each other in their regular succession; the stars would shine in the firmament; the sun would shed his benign and vivifying influence of light and heat upon us; the clouds would discharge their burden in gentle and refreshing showers; and cultivated fields would bring forth vegetation; summer would ripen the golden grain, ready for harvest; the trees would bear fruits; the birds would sing in accordance with their happy instinct, and all Nature would smile as joyously around us as ever. Nor would man degenerate, Oh! no. His nature, too would remain the same. He would have to be obedient to the physical, mental, and moral laws of his being, or to suffer the natural penalty for their violation; observe the mandates of society, or 82 receive the punishment. His affections would be just as warm, the love of self-preservation as strong, the desire for happiness and the fear of pain as great. He would love freedom, justice, and truth, and hate oppression, fraud, and falsehood, as much as ever.

Sweep all belief in the supernatural from the globe, and you would chase away the whole fraternity of spectres, ghosts, and hobgoblins, which have so befogged and bewildered the human mind, that hardly a clear ray of the light of Reason can penetrate it. You would cleanse and purify the heart of the noxious, poisonous weeds of superstition, with its bitter, deadly fruits-hypocrisy, bigotry, and intolerance, and fill it with charity and forbearance towards erring humanity. You would give man courage to sustain him in trials and misfortune, sweeten his temper, give him a new zest for the duties, the virtues, and the pleasures of life.

Morality does not depend on the belief in any religion. History gives ample evidence that the more belief the less virtue and goodness. Nor need we go back to ancient times to see the crimes and atrocities perpetrated under its sanction. We have enough in our own times. Look at the present crisis-at the South with 4,000,000 of human beings in slavery, bought and sold like brute chattels under the sanction of religion and of God, which the Reverends Van Dykes and the Raphalls of the North fully endorse, and the South complains that the reforms in the North are owing to Infidelity. Morality depends on an accurate knowledge of the nature of man, of the laws that govern his being, the principles of right, of justice, and humanity, and the conditions requisite to make him healthy, rational, virtuous, and happy.

The belief in a God has failed to produce this desirable end. On the contrary, while it could not make man better, it has made him worse; for in preferring blind faith in things unseen and unknown to virtue and morality, in directing his attention from the known to the unknown, from the real to the imaginary, from the certain here to a fancied hereafter, from the fear of himself, of the natural result of vice and crime, to some whimsical despot, it perverted his judgment, degraded him in his own estimation, corrupted his feelings, destroyed his sense of right, of justice, and of truth, and made him a moral coward and a hypocrite. The lash of a hereafter is no guide for us here. Distant fear cannot control present passion. It is much easier to confess your sins in the dark, than to acknowledge them in the light; to make it up with a God you don't see, than with a man 83 whom you do. Besides, religion has always left a back door open for sinners to creep out of at the eleventh hour. But teach man to do right, to love justice, to revere truth, to be virtuous, not because a God would reward or punish him hereafter, but because it is right; and as every act brings its own reward or its own punishment, it would best promote his interest by promoting the welfare of society. Let him feel the great truth that our highest happiness consists in making all around us happy; and it would be an infinitely truer and safer guide for man to a life of usefulness, virtue, and morality, than all the beliefs in all the Gods ever imagined.

The more refined and transcendental religionists have often said to me, if you do away with religion, you would destroy the most beautiful element of human nature-the feeling of devotion and reverence, ideality, and sublimity. This, too, is an error. These sentiments would be cultivated just the same, only we would transfer the devotion from the unknown to the known; from the Gods, who, if they existed, could not need it, to man who does. Instead of reverencing an imaginary existence, man would learn to revere justice and truth. Ideality and sublimity would refine his feelings, and enable him to admire and enjoy the ever-changing beauties of Nature; the various and almost unlimited powers and capacities of the human mind; the exquisite and indescribable charms of a well cultivated, highly refined, virtuous, noble man.

But not only have the priests tried to make the very term Atheism odious, as if it would destroy all of good and beautiful in Nature, but some of the reformers, not having the moral courage to avow their own sentiments, wishing to be popular, fearing least their reforms would be considered Infidel, (as all reforms assuredly are,) shield themselves from the stigma, by joining in the tirade against Atheism, and associate it with everything that is vile, with the crime of slavery, the corruptions of the Church, and all the vices imaginable. This is false, and they know it. Atheism protests against this injustice. No one has a right to give the term a false, a forced interpretation, to suit his own purposes, (this applies also to some of the Infidels who stretch and force the term Atheist out of its legitimate significance). As well might we use the terms Episcopalian, Unitarian, Universalist, to signify vice and corruption, as the term Atheist, which means simply a disbelief in a God, because finding no demonstration of his existence, man's reason will not allow him to believe, nor his conviction to play the hypocrite, and profess what he does not believe. 84 Give it its true significance, and he will abide the consequence; but don't fasten upon it the vices belonging to yourselves. Hypocrisy is the prolific mother of a large family!

1:17 AM 

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Secure the Evidence
NOW !

• - schedules,
• - meetings and meeting notes.
• - official memos,
• - official files,
• - official emails sent and/or received from any domain.
• - logs, including but not limited to, phone logs, visitor logs, Secret Service logs and official aircraft logs.
• - employment records, including interview notes and internal memos on would-be hires.
• - contracts, no bid and otherwise, including, but not limited to, all related notes, memos and emails

By Juan Cole, JuanCole.com. Posted July 29, 2008.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin (1802)

Jefferson had it right.  More than 1.5 million homeowners are expected to enter foreclosure this year, and about half of them are expected to have their homes repossessed.  If the dire consequences Jefferson warned of 200 years ago have been slow in coming, it is because they have been concealed by what Jerome a Paris calls the Anglo Disease – "the highly unequal economy whereby the rich and the financial sector . . . capture most of the income but hide it by providing cheap debt to the middle classes so that they can continue to spend."  He calls "finance" the "cannibalistic" sector in today's economy.  Writing in The European Tribune this month, he states:

"[O]ne of the more attractive features of the financial world, for its promoters, is its ability to concentrate huge fortunes in a small number of hands, and promote this as a good thing (these people are said to be creating wealth, rather than capturing it). . . . [O]f course, the reality is that such wealth concentration is created by squeezing the rest, as is obvious in the stagnation of incomes for most in the middle and lower rungs of society.  This is not so much wealth creation as wealth redistribution, from the many to the few.  But what has made this unequality . . . tolerable is that the financial world itself was able to provide a convenient smokescreen, in the form of cheap debt, provided in abundance to all.  The wealthy used it to grab real assets in funny money, and the rest were kindly allowed to keep on spending by tapping their future income rather than their insufficient current one; in a nutshell, the debt bubble hid the class warfare waged by the rich against everybody else."¹

Now the debt bubble is bursting, with the anticipated real estate crash, banking crisis, foreclosures, and inevitable recession.  "The income capture mechanisms set up during the bubble have not been reversed, so the pain is falling disproportionately on the poorest," writes Jerome a Paris.  Meanwhile, finance is being bailed out.  What's to be done?  "[T]he financiers . . . will say that more 'reform' and 'deregulation' and tax cuts are needed," he says, but "maybe it's time to stop listening to what is highly self-interested drivel, and take back what they grabbed: it's not theirs."

Good idea, but how?  The financiers own the media, and their massively funded lobbies control Congress.  How can we the people get enough clout to take on the giant financial and corporate giants?  What can we do that will make politicians sit up and take notice?

How about swarming the courts?  New case law indicates that a majority of the 750,000 homeowners expected to lose their homes this year could have a valid defense to foreclosure.  As much as $2 trillion in real estate may be vulnerable to this defense, providing a very big stick for a lobby of motivated debtors.  Mobilizing that group, in turn, could light a fire under the investors in mortgage-backed securities -- the pension funds, money market funds and insurance companies holding these "orphan" mortgages.  These investors also wield a very big stick, in the form of major law firms on retainer.  When the embattled banks demand a bailout because they are "too big to fail," the taxpayers can respond, "You have already failed.  It is time to try something new."

The Legal Trump Card: Make Them Produce the Note

A basic principle of contract law is that a plaintiff suing on a written contract must produce the signed contract proving he is entitled to relief.  If there is no signed mortgage note or recorded assignment, foreclosure is barred.  The defendant must normally raise this defense, and most defaulting homeowners, unaware of legal procedure and concerned about the expense of hiring an attorney, just let their homes go uncontested.  But when the plaintiffs bringing subprime foreclosure actions have been challenged, in most cases they haven't been able to produce the notes.

Why not?  It appears to be more than just sloppy paperwork.  The banks that originally entered into these risky subprime arrangements generally did so because they had no intention of holding the loans on their books.  The mortgages were immediately sliced and diced, bundled up as mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and sold off to investors.  Loan originators sold the mortgages to financial institutions or other banks,  which then sold the rights to the monthly mortgage payment income to investors, while transferring the responsibility to collect these payments to specialized mortgage servicing companies.  The result has been to slice up the mortgage contract, with no party really having ownership of the original paperwork. When foreclosure has been initiated, the servicer or trustee acting as plaintiff now has trouble proving that it originated the mortgage or owned the loan.  In order for a second bank or financial institution to have standing to bring a foreclosure lawsuit in court, it must have been assigned the mortgage; and with the collapse of the housing market, many of the subprime lenders have gone out of business, making it impossible to contact the originating mortgage company.  Other paperwork has just been lost in the shuffle.²

Why weren't the mortgage notes assigned to the MBS holders when they were first sold? Apparently because the investors aren't even matched up with specific properties until after default. Here is how the MBS scheme works: when the mortgages are first bundled by the banks, all of the subprime mortgages go into the same pool. The bundled mortgages are chopped into "securities" that are sold to many investors -- banks, hedge funds, money market funds, pension funds -- with different "tranches" or levels of risk. The first mortgages to default are then assigned to the high-risk "BBB-" tranche of investors. As defaults increase, later defaulting mortgages are assigned down the chain of risk to the supposedly more secure tranches.³ That means the investors get the mortgages only after the defendants breached the agreement to pay. It also means the investors weren't a party to the agreement when it was breached, making it hard to prove they were injured by the breach.

The investors have another problem: the delay in assigning particular mortgages to particular investors means there was no "true sale" of the security (the home) at the time of securitization.  A true sale of the collateral is a legal requirement for forming a valid security (a secured interest in the property as opposed to simply a debt obligation backed by collateral).  As a result, the investors may have trouble proving they have any interest in the property, secured or unsecured.⁴

The Dog-Ate-My-Note Defense

When the securitizing banks acting as trustees for the investors are unable to present written proof of ownership at a time that would entitle them to foreclose, they typically file what's called a lost-note affidavit.  April Charney is a Florida legal aid attorney well versed in these issues, having gotten foreclosure proceedings dismissed or postponed for 300 clients in the past year.  In a February 2008 Bloomberg article, she was quoted as saying that about 80 percent of these cases involved lost-note affidavits.  "Lost-note affidavits are pattern and practice in the industry," she said. "They are not exceptions. They are the rule."⁵

In the past, judges have let these foreclosures proceed; but in October 2007, an intrepid federal judge in Cleveland put a halt to the practice.  U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Boyko ruled that Deutsche Bank had not filed the proper paperwork to establish its right to foreclose on fourteen homes it was suing to repossess.⁶ That started the ball rolling, and by February 2008, judges in at least five states had followed suit.  In Los Angeles in January, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Samuel L. Bufford issued a notice warning plaintiffs in foreclosure cases to bring the mortgage notes to court and not submit copies.  In Ohio, where foreclosures were up by a reported 88 percent in 2007, Attorney General Marc Dann was reported to be challenging ownership of mortgage notes in forty foreclosure cases.⁷

Few defendants, however, are lucky enough to have advocates like Charney and Dann in their corner, and most defaulting debtors just let their homes go.  A simple challenge can be filed to the complaint even without an attorney, and some subprime borrowers have successfully defended their own foreclosure actions; but retaining an attorney is strongly recommended.  People representing themselves are often not taken seriously, and they are likely to miss local rule requirements.  With that warning, here is some general information on challenging standing to foreclose:

Some states are judicial foreclosure states and some are non-judicial foreclosure states.  In a judicial foreclosure state (meaning the matter is heard before a judge), if a promissory note or recorded assignment naming the plaintiff is not attached to the complaint, the defendant can file a response stating the plaintiff has failed to state a claim.  This can be followed with a motion called a demurrer to the complaint.  Different forms of demurrers can be found in legal form books in most law libraries.  In essence the demurrer states that even if everything in the complaint were true, the complaint would lack substance because it fails to set out a copy of the note, and it should therefore be dismissed.  Ordinarily there is no need to cite much in the way of statutes or case law other than the authority reciting the necessity of showing the note proving the plaintiff is entitled to relief.

In a non-judicial foreclosure state such as California, foreclosure is done by a trustee without a court hearing, so the procedure is a bit trickier; but standing to foreclose can still be challenged.  If the homeowner has filed for bankruptcy, the proceedings are automatically stayed, requiring the lender to bring a motion for relief from stay before going forward.  The debtor can then challenge the lender's right to the security (the house) by demanding proof of a legal or equitable interest in it.⁸ A homeowner facing foreclosure can also get the matter before a court without filing for bankruptcy by filing a complaint and preliminary injunction staying the proceedings pending proof of standing to foreclose.  A judge would then have to rule on the merits.  A complaint for declaratory relief might also be brought against the trustee, seeking to have its rights declared invalid.⁹

An Equitable Settlement for Everyone

These defenses can help people who are about to lose their homes, but there is another class of victims in the sub-prime mortgage crisis: investors in MBS, including the pension funds and 401Ks on which many people depend for their retirement.  If the trustees representing the investors cannot foreclose, the lucky debtors may be able to stay in their homes without paying.  However, the hapless investors will be left holding the bag.  If the investors manage to shift liability back to the banks, on the other hand, the banks could go down and take the economy with them.  How can these tricky issues be resolved in a way that is equitable for all?  That question will be addressed in a followup article.  Stay tuned.

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___________________

Ellen Brown, J.D., developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles.  In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust."  She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves and how we the people can get it back.  Her websites are webofdebt.com and ellenbrown.com.

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