Mostly I’m linking this New Yorker article: The Caging of America so I don’t forget to go back and read it. I’ve read the first few paragraphs, and it seems worth going back to. (h/t Roger).

Catching my eye right at the front “In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.” The former is the Northern impulse whereas the latter is the Southern.

The Evansville Courier Press has a column entitled EDITORIAL: Still more planets are found. The column notes that there seem to be about 1.6 planets per star and about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The universe is lousy with planets, and we’re huddled up on one of them. And a stray meteor could trash the joint at any given moment.

Of course, as Bill Bryson pointed out in his book, a Short History of Nearly Everything, space is extremely aptly named. Despite all the stuff, space is still so large as to separate the stuff with vast, vast emptiness. As yet, we don’t have the technology to get from place to place in anything like human lifetimes.

When I think of the immensity of the universe, it always brings to mind The Total Perspective Vortex from Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide” series; described as the most horrible torture to which a sentient being can be subjected:

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

No real point to this post; I’m just kind of rambling since last night’s storms made the night less than restful.

Just got an e-mail from The Indiana Lawyer with an article entitled Indiana Legislature proceedings from 19th century now available online

A joint project between the Indiana University Maurer School of Law Library and the IU Digital Library Program has digitized nearly 8,000 pages of General Assembly proceedings from the 1800s, creating an online repository that is accessible free of charge.

The Brevier Legislative Reports, published biennially from 1858 to 1887, offer a verbatim accounting of day-to-day activities in the Indiana Legislature. All sessions are covered, with the exception of the latter part of the 1875 Regular Session, the 1875 Special Session, and the 1877 Regular and Special Sessions.

The archives are available here. I probably won’t geek out over this too much.

I don’t have a lot to add to what others are saying and have already said about the man and what he stood for. Anecdotally, I can report that my son seems to lack a context in which he is able to grasp why folks would have taken issue with Dr. King’s principles or would have wanted to treat people differently based on their race; any more than he can grasp why people would want to discriminate based on hair color. I think that’s a good thing. In his school, primarily because of the proximity of Purdue, there are kids from a wide array of cultures. From what I can tell, they all seem able to play together without thinking a thing of it.

But, I probably want to make sure that I don’t oversimplify things by allowing Dr. King’s opponents and detractors to become caricatures of what they really were. As a kid, I remember digging in a little against the folks who said that the only difference between blacks and whites was the color of their skin. I knew there was more to it than that. There was a cultural and economic component — there still is, but I think it is diminishing. The differences between black and white, whether caused by nature or nurture, went beyond pigmentation alone; and, so, when someone would tell me that skin color was the only distinction, my reaction was to be distrustful of the rest of what the person had to say.

Race relations have come a long way since Dr. King died even if they they still have a good ways to go. He was instrumental in a lot of the progress that was made. I think we can all be thankful for that.

As Mitt Romney’s primary challengers make last ditch efforts to stop him by looking at his record at the helm of Bain Capital, he has fought back, trying to characterize this as “an attack on capitalism.” The problem is that not all “capitalism” is created equally. If Bain was just making money by taking risk and adding value to the companies they dealt with, that’s one thing. But we all know that’s not the only way to make money in the finance business. And the looters shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind the growers.

Matt Taibbi brings us a finance story entitled Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale. A guy who worked for Bear Stearns personally enriched himself, in part, by doing the following:

1) Bundle a bunch of crap mortgages that you know to be crap.
2) Have them insured.
3) Sell them to investors.
4) Don’t tell the investors about a deal whereby the original mortgage lender would pay you back if a mortgage goes into default.
5) Pocket the default payback money when it comes.
6) Bet against the insurers.
7) When the insurers crash under the weight of your crappy mortgages, cash in on your short bet.

Then, apparently, you’ll have enough money to rent out 94 Aspen hotel rooms for three days to throw a party for your daughter.

Gretchen Morgenson, writing for the New York Times, has a story entitled Mortgage Servicing Horror Stories. (h/t St. John & Associates). The story details some of the allegations of fraud in the mortgage servicing industry; and points out the feeling of some that it’s probably a good thing that the federal government has not made more progress on a deal to settle complaints with the industry.

That’s probably not a terrible thing. After all, no deal is better than a bad deal. State and federal authorities jumped into these talks without conducting serious investigations into foreclosure shenanigans. Why strike a deal — one that would, say, shield banks from new litigation over toxic loans, flawed securitizations and the mess at MERS, the registry that has made such a jumble of land records — without knowing what happened?

The article goes on to talk about allegations by former employees in some loan servicing companies that they were forging signatures on legal documents, falsely notarizing signatures (sometimes the ones they had previously forged), and being asked to manage attorney inquiries on files at the rate of 30 per hour.

This kind of abuse, in my mind, arises from divorcing the profit on the loan from its performance; primarily through bundling loans into securities. In the old fashioned sort of mortgage business, as a lender, you’d make your money through the interest paid by the borrower over time – this interest was your profit and your hedge against default by other borrowers. It prompts you to be more conservative with your loans. The incentives are not the same when you have a loan originator who takes its cut at closing, then walks away, a lender who bundles a bunch of loans and sells it to another buyer who, in turn, sells it to a bunch of investors who don’t look too closely at it because AIG has sprinkled fairy dust on it and turned a bunch of crap mortgages into AAA rated investment vehicles.

With the machine more complex and the money at risk so far removed from the initial mortgage, to grease the machine, you get abuses like the ones described in this New York Times article. I’m certainly no fan of letting debtors walk away from their obligations — particularly one where they have (or should have) fair knowledge of what deal they signed up for — but, if you have to commit fraud to “prove” that the person owes you money, you’re doing it wrong.

Interesting post by Karl Kurtz at the Thicket entitled Federal Court Rejects Texas Legislature’s Claim of Legislative Privilege. A federal court hearing a challenge to a Texas redistricting plan rejected the legislature’s claims of privilege with respect to internal documents.

The Justice Department and plaintiffs sought access to the documents prepared by legislators and legislative staff. The Legislature claimed that the documents were protected by legislative privilege and an attorney-client relationship between the staff of the Texas Legislative Council and the members of the Legislature.

Legislative privilege is the doctrine found in the federal Constitution and 43 state constitutions that provides legal protection to legislators in the conduct of legislative business. The intent is to shield them from threats of judicial or executive intervention in their work.

The Texas redistricting blog has more. Kurtz suggests that the case has more to do with Texas law than some kind of generally applicable trend. Additionally, the attorney-client argument apparently failed because the the staff in question weren’t lawyers. A key part of the discussion:

While Texas argues that the ‘statute provides strong evidence that the legislators believed their communications with [the Texas Legislative Council] to be protected by the attorney-client and legislative privileges,’ the statute says no such thing and the habits of the years do not transform ‘confidentiality’ to avoid public inquiry into ‘attorney- client privilege’ when demanded as part of litigation.

Just an item of which the Indiana General Assembly might want to be aware.

Interesting article by Jason DeParle in the New York Times entitled, Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs.

On average, the U.S. is still doing o.k. in terms of absolute wealth when compared to other countries because, as a country, we are wealthier. In terms of social mobility, our poor stay poor and our rich stay rich. The middle class is fairly fluid. The stability of who is rich might have something to do with the magnitude of the wealth — it’s harder to fall from such heights and harder to climb them as well. Whereas in a country where the gap between rich and poor is more compressed, it might take less money to cross into or out of the top percentiles. The stability of the poor is more troublesome and might have something to do with how thin the safety net is. Our poor kids tend to start lower and further behind than those in Western Europe and Canada.

HB 1091 would allow the owner of land used for agricultural operations used for maintaining a nuisance to recover attorney’s fees and punitive damages if the court determines that the action was “frivolous, initiated maliciously, or groundless.”

There is also a provision in the legislation that would allow the owner of property on which agricultural operations are conducted to detain a person on the person’s property who the owner has probable cause to believe is manufacturing meth.

I guess my main issue with this legislation is that I don’t see any strong reason to make it specific to people with agricultural land. If it’s good policy for them, it’s probably good policy for anyone.

Dorothy Schneider, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier has an article entitled New mayors expect to face steadier conditions which features Everybody’s Favorite Economist, Larry DeBoer.

New mayors won’t, apparently, have rosy financial circumstances under which to begin their terms, but conditions seem to have plateaued. He makes an important point about local finances:

“In this day and age, you’ve got to watch everyone else’s budget as well as your own. Where tax caps are in effect, your city could be being frugal and keeping its tax rate down, but then if the schools or the county go above (the limit), you lose money.”

And then there is this:

Given that tax caps now are in the state constitution, DeBoer said local leaders shouldn’t expect any relief on property tax revenues coming down the line. The only hope for mayors is to add to the property tax base through new developments in the community.

DeBoer expects more municipalities and counties will have to adopt Local Option Income Taxes in the next decade to help offset revenue losses.

“They’ll probably also be looking at user fees,” DeBoer said. “I expect once the economy gets going again … we’ll see more of that.”

I think what we’ll find is not so much a reduction in the tax burden from property tax caps but a shift in the burden from property owners to income earners. (Obviously, there is a lot of overlap in those categories.)