BushCo’s lust for snooping on Americans gets ever-more addictive

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has circulated a draft bill that would expand the government's powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, liberalizing how that law can be used.

Here’s the details:

According to officials familiar with the draft changes to FISA, McConnell wants to:

• Give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking FISA court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States.

• Clarify the standards the FBI and NSA must use to get court orders for basic information about calls and e-mails - such as the number dialed, e-mail address, or time and date of the communications.

Civil liberties advocates contend the change will make it too easy for the government to access this information.

• Triple the life span of a FISA warrant for a non-U.S. citizen from 120 days to one year, allowing the government to monitor much longer without checking back in with a judge.

• Give telecommunications companies immunity from civil liability for their cooperation with Bush's terrorist surveillance program. Pending lawsuits against companies including Verizon and AT&T allege they violated privacy laws by giving phone records to the NSA for the program.

• Extend from 72 hours to one week the amount of time the government can conduct surveillance without a court order in emergencies.

Remember, this all while the government is facing a lawsuit over past alleged FISA violations related to domestic snooping.

These guys are a piece of work.

Once again, Warren Chisum outdoes himself

The Texas Senate's windbag of the windy Panhandle shows why we should consider other legislative ideas of his, such as the “Bible as literature” book, with much skepticism: his plan for free marriage licenses for couples that do premarital counseling.

We can only guess how Chisum would apply the Bible, the next step past Bible as literature, to this counseling about a legally secular institution.

It's not only intrusion into private lives, as the newspaper story said; knowing Chisum, it's another attempt to tear down the First Amendment wall separating church and state.

Plus, a two-year wait on divorce for non-covenant marrieds might fall under some version of prior restraint, restraint of trade, or similar, on its constitutionality - not that that would stop Chisum, or even cross his mind.

Ban banks: As usual, Ted Rall hits one out of the park

In his latest offing, the usually spot-on, hard-hitting Rall details how corrupt much of the “lending industry” has become over college student loans. Read for why we should, indeed, ban banks, at least from the student loan process.

The current student loan scandal highlights just how corrupt the system has become. It began when Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that New York State is investigating a company called Student Loans Xpress for sweetheart-deal stock transactions designed to enrich the company and corrupt financial aid officers at the expense of clueless college kids and their parents. (Student Loan Express' corporate parent is the CIT Group. CIT is a former subsidiary of Tyco, which itself became embroiled in a corporate scandal a few years back.)

According to Cuomo, financial aid officials at Columbia University, the University of Texas and the University of Southern California were paid kickbacks as compensation for steering students to them. (Disclosure: I'm a Columbia alum.) The three bought stocks and options at insider prices in Education Lending Group, the parent company of Student Loan Xpress until 2005, when it was sold to CIT. They then sold them at a profit that would make Donald Trump drool. David Charlow, executive director of financial aid at Columbia, paid $1 for each of 7,500 shares of ELG and dumped the stock two years later at $10 a share--a 450 percent annual rate of return on his "investment."

Student Loan Xpress, which uses phone-forwarding wizardry to masquerade as some institutions' financial aid offices, is recommended to students as a “preferred lender” at the three universities enmeshed in the scandal. As young, novice borrowers--most kids sign their first loan document at the tender age of 17--they trust their colleges' recommendations. "There's an implicit assumption that the financial aid office is an impartial, informed intermediary," says education expert Michael Dannenberg of the New America Foundation. “What we're finding out now is that some colleges and some financial aid administrators may not be so impartial.”

The mess is spreading. The Johns Hopkins University admits that its director of student financial services collected $65,000 in cash and tuition payments from Student Loan Xpress. The dean of financial aid at Widener University in Pennsylvania took in $80,000. John Ryan, chancellor of the 64-campus State University of New York (SUNY)system, is under scrutiny for his spot on the board of directors of CIT, where he collects $150,000 a year on top of his $340,000 salary from SUNY.

Even the feds couldn't resist dipping their paws into the student loan jar. Matteo Fontana, the federal Education Department official charged with overseeing student lending, made a cool $100,000 from a sale of ELG stock. The Bush Administration shouldn't be too surprised at Fontana's conflict of interest. (No pun intended.) It hired him straight out of Sallie Mae, a student loan mill that rakes in spectacular profits on 10 million student loans worth $126 billion.

I have to say I am so glad I got done with college more than 20 years ago, and grad school for a useless professional degree 15 years ago.

Yet more subprime fallout: Fraud, pressure tactics on appraisers and more

Yes, that's a bit of the laundry list of the subprime loan crisis, and its dirty laundry leading up to this point, with details here.

It includes shady mortgage brokers forcing appraisers, or trying to, to raise home prices; fraud committed on electronic documents; last-minute surprises (which, in my opinion, have been the modus operandi for a certain part of the real estate profession for years but have gotten worse); suspicious activity reports up 9 times since 2001 and doubled in the last year; and more.

Here's the root of the problem:

Unlike banks, many of which are supervised by federal regulators, mortgage brokers are regulated state by state. And state rules and licensing procedures vary widely. In about half the states, a single mortgage broker with a license can open an office staffed by an unlicensed sales staff, according Hagar.

Worse, bad mortgage brokers who are banned in one state can move to another relatively easily - without being detected by regulators in their new home state. Though many lenders maintain their own private databases of bad actors, what's needed is a national database to track the worst offenders, according to Capouano.

It's exacerbated by this:

Federal regulations do apply to so-called “conforming” loans sold to quasi-government agencies like Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. Loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration, the Depression-era agency set up to manage the world's largest mortgage fund, also carry strict guidelines.

But oversight of those loans has been getting looser, according to HUD Inspector General (Kenneth) Donohue. Beginning about a year ago, FHA began allowing approved lenders to keep their mortgage application files on site instead of forwarding them to the FHA, which now spot checks about 6 percent of those applications, he said.

“We live by the review,” said Donohue. “It's at that point - often we get tips and we have a hotline - but it's at that point that the referrals are made to us. So if you find a red flag in that loan file, it might take you back to a bad lender. You track it backwards.

“Do I think that a 6 percent review of the total universe is acceptable? You can only imagine how much you might be missing in the process,” he said.

Donohue himself said this could become like the 1980s S&L crisis. Problem was, other than the taxpayer bailout, it didn't hit middle-class families as much as this likely will.

Yes, it does sound alarmist, and I've been accused of being so, but this thing looks big.

And, what if gas prices do an inflation-adjusted 6 percent climb each of the next three summers? By 2010, real gas prices are up 20 percent in the middle of this mess. A 7 percent per year climb, compounded, puts us at a 25 percent overall hike.

Sad to see a woman still living her husband’s identity

Got an obit at the paper today. The deceased woman was in her 70s, and identified ONLY as “Mrs. William …” as if she never had a first name of her own to leave for posterity at her own death.

Have I mentioned that this place is probably too conservative for me socially, or sociologically, as well as politically?

More worries on the subprime crunch: property taxes

Now Texas does not have a state property tax, unlike some states, but local cities and school districts do. So, the fact that Florida will have state tax revenuesdrop for the first time since the 1970s energy crises should get government officials everywhere to pay attention.

Plus, sales taxes get affected:

New home sales nationally fell in February to the lowest rate in seven years, and homeowners who tapped into plentiful home equity and spent extravagantly during the real estate boom have started to cut back.

Those events not only threaten revenue streams for things like building materials and labor, but also affect spending on big-ticket items like cars and furniture, which many homeowners financed with home equity lines of credit. …

In one hint of how much Floridians were relying on property wealth during the real estate boom, 16 percent of new car purchases here were being made with home equity loans in 2006, compared with 7 percent nationally, according to CNW Marketing Research, an automotive research firm in Bandon, Ore. In California, the percentage was even higher — about 30 percent, said Art Spinella, the firm’s president.

During the last few years, families in much of the country have relied on the cash from mortgage refinancing, made possible by rising house values, low interest rates and a bevy of creative new loans, to make up for stagnant wages. From 2001 to 2005, even as the economy was growing at a healthy clip over all, the pay of most workers failed to keep pace with inflation. Now the housing slowdown is making it more difficult to take equity out of a house, and an improved job market is finally causing wages to rise.

I’ve heard educated people say they’re not worried about this issue. I keep telling them: start worrying.