Monday, July 24, 2017

Student Loan Debts May Be Wiped Away

As Paperwork Goes Missing, Private Student Loan Debts May Be Wiped Away

By STACY COWLEY and JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERGJULY 17, 2017

Tens of thousands of people who took out private loans to pay for college but have not been able to keep up payments may get their debts wiped away because critical paperwork is missing.

The troubled loans, which total at least $5 billion, are at the center of a protracted legal dispute between the student borrowers and a group of creditors who have aggressively pursued them in court after they fell behind on payments.

Judges have already dismissed dozens of lawsuits against former students, essentially wiping out their debt, because documents proving who owns the loans are missing. A review of court records by The New York Times shows that many other collection cases are deeply flawed, with incomplete ownership records and mass-produced documentation.

Some of the problems playing out now in the $108 billion private student loan market are reminiscent of those that arose from the subprime mortgage crisis a decade ago, when billions of dollars in subprime mortgage loans were ruled uncollectible by courts because of missing or fake documentation. And like those troubled mortgages, private student loans — which come with higher interest rates and fewer consumer protections than federal loans — are often targeted at the most vulnerable borrowers, like those attending for-profit schools.

At the center of the storm is one of the nation’s largest owners of private student loans, the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts. It is struggling to prove in court that it has the legal paperwork showing ownership of its loans, which were originally made by banks and then sold to investors. National Collegiate’s lawyers warned in a recent legal filing, “As news of the servicing issues and the trusts’ inability to produce the documents needed to foreclose on loans spreads, the likelihood of more defaults rises.”

National Collegiate is an umbrella name for 15 trusts that hold 800,000 private student loans, totaling $12 billion. More than $5 billion of that debt is in default, according to court filings. The trusts aggressively pursue borrowers who fall behind on their bills. Across the country, they have brought at least four new collection cases each day, on average — more than 800 so far this year — and tens of thousands of lawsuits in the past five years.

The Path of a Student Loan

When a student takes out a private loan, that is only the first step in a complicated process.

Last year, National Collegiate unleashed a fusillade of litigation against Samantha Watson, a 33-year-old mother of three who graduated from Lehman College in the Bronx in 2013 with a degree in psychology.

Ms. Watson, the first in her family to go to college, took out private loans to finance her studies. But she said she had trouble following the fine print. “I didn’t really understand about things like interest rates,” she said. “Everybody tells you to go to college, get an education, and everything will be O.K. So that’s what I did.”

Ms. Watson made some payments on her loans but fell behind when her daughter got sick and she had to quit her job as an executive assistant. She now works as a nurse’s aide, with more flexible hours but a smaller paycheck that barely covers her family’s expenses.

When National Collegiate sued her, the paperwork it submitted was a mess, according to her lawyer, Kevin Thomas of the New York Lega l Assistance Group. At one point, National Collegiate presented documents saying that Ms. Watson had enrolled at a school she never attended, Mr. Thomas said.

“I tried to be honest,” Ms. Watson said of her court appearance. “I said, ‘Some of these loans I took out, and I’ll be responsible for them, but some I didn’t take.’”

In her defense, Ms. Watson’s lawyer seized upon what he saw as the flaws in National Collegiate’s paperwork. Judge Eddie McShan of New York City’s Civil Court in the Bronx agreed and dismissed four lawsuits against Ms. Watson. The trusts “failed to establish the chain of title” on Ms. Watson’s loans, he wrote in one ruling.

When the judge’s rulings wiped out $31,000 in debt, “it was such a relief,” Ms. Watson said. “You just feel this whole weight lifted. My mom started to cry.

Joel Leiderman, a lawyer at Forster and Garbus, the law firm that represented National Collegiate in its litigation against Ms. Watson, declined to comment on the lawsuits.

Lawsuits Tossed Out

Judges throughout the country, including recently in cases in New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas, have tossed out lawsuits by National Collegiate, ruling that it did not prove it owned the debt on which it was trying to collect.

The trusts win many of the lawsuits they file automatically, because borrowers often do not show up to fight. Those court victories, which can be used to garnish paychecks and take federal benefits like Social Securityfrom bank accounts, can haunt borrowers for decades.

The loans that National Collegiate holds were made to college students more than a decade ago by dozens of different banks, then bundled together by a financing company and sold to investors through a process known as securitization. These private loans were not guaranteed by the federal government, which is the nation’s largest student loan lender.

But as the debt passed through many hands before landing in National Collegiate’s trusts, critical paperwork documenting the loans’ ownership disappeared, according to documents that have surfaced in a little-noticed legal battle involving the trusts in state and federal courts in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

National Collegiate’s legal problems have hinged on its inability to prove it owns the student loans, not on any falsification of documents.

Robyn Smith, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, has seen shoddy and inaccurate paperwork in dozens of cases involving private student loans from a variety of lenders and debt buyers, which she detailed in a 2014 report.

But National Collegiate’s problems are especially acute, she said. Over and over, she said, the company drops lawsuits — often on the eve of a trial or deposition — when borrowers contest them. “I question whether they actually possess the documents necessary to show that they own loans,” Ms. Smith said.

In an unusual situation, one of the financiers behind National Collegiate’s trusts agrees with some of the criticism. He is Donald Uderitz, the founder of Vantage Capital Group, a private equity firm in Delray Beach, Fla., that is the beneficial owner of National Collegiate’s trusts. (Mr. Uderitz’s company keeps whatever money is left after the trusts’ noteholders are paid off.)

He said he was appalled by National Collegiate’s collection lawsuits and wanted them to stop, but an internal struggle between Vantage Capital and others involved in operating the trusts has prevented him from ordering a halt, he said

“We don’t like what’s going on,” Mr. Uderitz said in a recent interview.

“We don’t want National Collegiate to be the poster boy of bad practices in student loan collections, but we have no ability to affect it except through this litigation,” he said, referring to a lawsuit that he initiated last year against the trusts’ loan servicer in Delaware’s Chancery Court, a popular battleground for corporate legal fights.

Ballooning Balances

Like those who took on subprime mortgages, many people with private student loans end up shouldering debt that they never earn enough to repay. Borrowing to finance higher education is an economic decision that often pays off, but federal student loans — a much larger market, totaling $1.3 trillion — are directly funded by the government and come with consumer protections like income-based repayment options.

Private loans lack that flexibility, and they often carry interest rates that can reach double digits. Because of those steep rates, the size of the loans can quickly balloon, leaving borrowers to pay hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of dollars each month.

Others are left with debt for degrees they never completed, because the for-profit colleges they enrolled in closed amid allegations of fraud. Federal student borrowers can apply for a discharge in those circumstances, but private borrowers cannot.

Other large student lenders, like Sallie Mae, also pursue delinquent borrowers in court, but National Collegiate stands apart for its size and aggressiveness, borrowers’ lawyers say.

Lawsuits against borrowers who have fallen behind on their consumer loans are typically filed in state or local courts, where records are often hard to search. This means that there is no national tally of just how often National Collegiate’s trusts have gone to court.

Very few cases ever make it to trial, according to court records and borrowers’ lawyers. Once borrowers are sued, most either choose to settle or ignore the summons, which allows the trusts to obtain a default judgment.

“It’s a numbers game,” said Richard D. Gaudreau, a lawyer in New Hampshire who has defended against several National Collegiate lawsuits. “My experience is they try to bully you at first, and then if you’re not susceptible to that, they back off, because they don’t really want to litigate these cases.”

Transworld Systems, a debt collector, brings most of the lawsuits for National Collegiate against delinquent borrowers. And in legal filings, it is usually a Transworld representative who swears to the accuracy of the records backing up the loan. Transworld did not respond to a request for comment.

Hundreds of cases have been dismissed when borrowers challenge them, according to lawyers, often because the trusts do not produce the paperwork needed to proceed.

‘We Need Answers’

Jason Mason, 35, was sued over $11,243 in student loans he took out to finance his freshman year at California State University, Dominguez Hills. His lawyer, Joe Villaseñor of the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, got the case dismissed in 2013, after the trust’s representative did not show up for a court-ordered deposition. It is unclear if the trusts had the paperwork they would have needed to prove their case, Mr. Villaseñor said.

“It was a scary time,” Mr. Mason said of being taken to court. “I didn’t know how they would come after me, or seize whatever I had, to get the money.”

Nancy Thompson, a lawyer in Des Moines, represented students in at least 30 cases brought by National Collegiate in the past few years. All were dismissed before trial except three. Of those, Ms. Thompson won two and lost one, according to her records. In every case, the paperwork Transworld submitted to the court had critical omissions or flaws, she said.

National Collegiate’s beneficial owner, Mr. Uderitz, hired a contractor in 2015 to audit the servicing company that bills National Collegiate’s borrowers each month and is supposed to maintain custody of many loan documents critical for collection cases.

A random sample of nearly 400 National Collegiate loans found not a single one had assignment paperwork documenting the chain of ownership, according to a report they had prepared.

While Mr. Uderitz wants to collect money from students behind on their bills, he says he wants the lawsuits against borrowers to stop, at least until he can get more information about the documentation that underpins the loans.

“It’s fraud to try to collect on loans that you don’t own,” Mr. Uderitz said. “We want no part of that. If it’s a loan we’re owed fairly, we want to collect. We need answers on this.”

Keith New, a spokesman for the servicer, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (known to borrowers as American Education Services), said, “We believe that the auditors were misinformed about the scope of P.H.E.A.A.’s contractual obligations. We are confident that the litigation will reveal that the agency has acted properly and in accordance with its agreements.”

The legal wrangling — now playing out in three separate court cases in Pennsylvania and Delaware — has dragged on for more than a year, with no imminent resolution in sight. Borrowers are caught in the turmoil. Thousands of them are unable to get answers about critical aspects of their loans because none of the parties involved can agree on who has the authority to make decisions. Some 2,000 borrower requests for forbearance and other help have gone unanswered, according to a court filing late last year.

Correction: July 19, 2017

An article on Tuesday about missing paperwork for private student loans referred imprecisely to how debt collectors may garnish federal benefits like Social Security from borrowers. The collectors can in some circumstances take benefits after they are deposited in a bank account; they cannot garnish the benefits directly.

James Comey Has A Long History Of Questionable Obstruction Cases

By Mollie Hemingway

JUNE 12, 2017

Following countdown clocks on cable outlets and dramatic claims in the media about what devastating testimony to expect, James Comey sat down before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. The hearing ended up being a bit of a let-down for critics of President Trump who hoped to get him impeached (or removed via the 25th amendment!) as soon as possible. Comey admitted that Donald Trump had told the truth when he wrote that the former FBI director had thrice told him he was not under investigation in the Russia meddling probe. Comey admitted that Trump had twice encouraged him to get to the bottom of the Russian meddling issue.

But the media chose to run with a dramatically different narrative. That narrative was if James Comey had not proven obstruction, he came pretty darn close.

“Is Trump Guilty Of Obstruction Of Justice? Comey Laid Out The Case,” was the big takeaway from NPR’s Domenico Montanaro.

“Comey Bluntly Raises Possibility of Trump Obstruction and Condemns His ‘Lies’,” exulted the New York Times, describing his testimony as “a blunt, plain-spoken assessment” by a man who was “humble, folksy and matter-of-fact.”

The New Yorker was even more breathless. “Comey’s Revenge: Measuring Obstruction,” wrote Evan Osnos. “[T]his was not a political partisan tossing off a criticism of a rival; this was a career prosecutor, who served Republican and Democratic Presidents, presenting a time line of specific statements from the President that he described as either untrue or potentially criminal.”

MSNBC agreed. And I watched an hour of CNN the night of the hearing with the sober legal analysis of Jeffrey Toobin, who declared repeatedly that he’d never seen such obstruction of justice in the history of the world. I’m only slightly exaggerating.

Most liberal, mainstream media have flipped and flopped on their view of James Comey, in direct relationship to whether his actions hurt Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. They’re currently huge fans, needless to say.

Comey is a man of rectitude, they’re currently saying. A boy scout who is very honest, and good at laying out obstruction of justice cases.

It’s worth looking at a few of these cases, and whether they say anything about his current judgment.

One of the few media outlets that has consistently expressed skepticism about Comey is the Wall Street Journal. When he was nominated by President Barack Obama to be FBI director in 2013, they presciently wrote a piece headlined, “The Political Mr. Comey: Obama’s FBI nominee has a record of prosecutorial excess and bad judgment.” The article described even then Comey’s “media admirers” and a “media fan base” that refused to ask him tough questions. But the Journal had concerns:

Any potential FBI director deserves scrutiny, since the position has so much power and is susceptible to ruinous misjudgments and abuse. That goes double with Mr. Comey, a nominee who seems to think the job of the federal bureaucracy is to oversee elected officials, not the other way around, and who had his own hand in some of the worst prosecutorial excesses of the last decade.

Frank Quattrone

Let’s begin with the case of one Frank Quattrone, a banker who Comey pursued relentlessly on banking related charges without fruition. But while he couldn’t find any wrong-doing on criminal conduct, he went after him for supposed “obstruction of justice” because of a single ambiguous email. Sound familiar?

Before he was indicted, Comey made false statements about Quattrone and his intent. The first trial ended in a hung jury but the second one got a conviction.

That conviction was overturned in 2006. Quattrone was so scarred by the harassment, he began funding projects designed to help innocent people who are victims of prosecutorial overreach or other problems. He said his motivation for supporting such projects was that at the very moment he was found guilty in the second trial, he realized there must be innocent people in prisons who lacked the financial resources to fight for justice. He also started the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Quattrone has noted with interest the disparities in how he was treated by Comey for a single email compared to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email server scandal.

Martha Stewart

You might remember Martha Stewart being sent to jail. You might not remember that James Comey was the man who put her there, and not because he was able to charge her for anything he began investigating her for. The original investigation was into whether Stewart had engaged in insider trading. They didn’t even try to get her on that charge. Gene Healy wrote about it in 2004, warning about federal prosecutorial overreach:

Comey didn’t charge Stewart with insider trading. Instead, he claimed that Stewart’s public protestations of innocence were designed to prop up the stock price of her own company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and thus constituted securities fraud. Stewart was also charged with making false statements to federal officials investigating the insider trading charge — a charge they never pursued. In essence, Stewart was prosecuted for “having misled people by denying having committed a crime with which she was not charged,” as Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds put it.

The pursuit was described as “vindictive” in the New York Times and “petty and vindictive” in The Daily Beast.

But she still served a five-month prison sentence.

Steven Hatfill

The FBI absolutely bungled its investigation into the Anthrax attacker who struck after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Carl Cannon goes through this story well, and it’s worth reading for how it involves both Comey and his dear “friend” and current special counsel Robert Mueller. The FBI tried — in the media — its case against Hatfill. Their actual case ended up being thrown out by the courts:

Comey and Mueller badly bungled the biggest case they ever handled. They botched the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that took five lives and infected 17 other people, shut down the U.S. Capitol and Washington’s mail system, solidified the Bush administration’s antipathy for Iraq, and eventually, when the facts finally came out, made the FBI look feckless, incompetent, and easily manipulated by outside political pressure.

More from Cannon, recounting how messed up the attempt to convict Steven Hatfill for a crime he didn’t commit was:

In truth, Hatfill was an implausible suspect from the outset. He was a virologist who never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. (Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters – including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI). So what evidence did the FBI have against Hatfill? There was none, so the agency did a Hail Mary, importing two bloodhounds from California whose handlers claimed could sniff the scent of the killer on the anthrax-tainted letters. These dogs were shown to Hatfill, who promptly petted them. When the dogs responded favorably, their handlers told the FBI that they’d “alerted” on Hatfill and that he must be the killer.

When Bush administration officials were worried about the quality of the case Mueller and Comey had, the two men assured them. “Comey was ‘absolutely certain’ that it was Hatfill,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said.

“Such certitude seems to be Comey’s default position in his professional life,” Cannon wrote. He shouldn’t have been certain in this case. After the six years the FBI spent destroying his life, they settled a $4.6 million lawsuit he filed and officially exonerated him.

Scooter Libby, Judith Miller

After pressuring John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the responsibility on the grounds of potential conflicts of interest, Comey gave Patrick Fitzgerald, his close personal friend and godfather to one of his children, the role of special counsel into the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee. Some conflicts of interest are more important to Comey than others, apparently.

Fitzgerald immediately discovered that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the leaker. Of course, the FBI and Department of Justice had known that all along, so Comey’s push for a special counsel is … intriguing.

Not only did they not shut down the investigation that never needed to begin, Comey expanded its mandate within weeks. The three-year investigation was a cloud over the Bush administration and resulted in nothing but the jailing of a journalist for not giving up a source, and a dubious prosecution of Scooter Libby for, wait for it, obstruction of justice. Comey was unconcerned about the jailing of journalists and never threatened to resign over this infringement on First Amendment freedoms.

Hillary Clinton

Comey treated Hillary Clinton poorly by convicting her in the court of public opinion without giving her the chance to defend herself in a free and fair trial. But it’s interesting to note why Comey didn’t pursue charges against Clinton. He claimed — despite this not being a legal standard of relevance, that he didn’t think Clinton had intent. And while Clinton and her team engaged in massive evidence destruction shortly after subpoenas were issued, Comey — who was near-delirious in his pursuit of others on obstruction charges — didn’t seem to think anyone would be interested in prosecuting here.

Clinton had classified info on a private server, was extremely careless in handling that information, and had caused the destruction of evidence. The notion that “no reasonable prosecutor” would even try to charge her with the misdemeanors or felonies in question is beyond belief.

But there’s so much more to that case, such as upon learning that two Clinton staff members had classified information, the FBI didn’t subpoena those computers but gave the employees immunity in return for giving them up. The FBI severely limited their own searches for data on the computers and then destroyed them. A technician who destroyed evidence lied to FBI investigators even after he received immunity, and Comey did nothing. And after the FBI discovered that President Obama had communicated with Clinton on the non-secure server, Obama said he didn’t think Clinton should be charged with a crime because she hadn’t intended to harm national security. As former Attorney General Michael Mukasey noted, “As indefensible as his legal reasoning may have been, his practical reasoning is apparent: If Mrs. Clinton was at criminal risk for communicating on her nonsecure system, so was he.”

Did Comey pursue the case under the relevant laws or follow Obama’s wish that charges not be filed? In this case, he chose the latter. As a Wall Street Journal editorialist wrote last July, “Mr. Comey wasn’t ready to go it alone and impose accountability on Mrs. Clinton. That would have been tough. That would have been brave. He instead listed her transgressions in detail and left it to the public to pass judgment at the ballot box in November. That isn’t how the system is supposed to work. But Mr. Comey is no John Adams.”

Donald Trump

As the Journal noted in 2013, the media are enamored with Comey. Such blinders make it difficult to see problems with his own testimony. He claimed that his motivation to leak was to achieve the appointing of a special prosecutor. His very close friend — and associate in the bungled Hatfill prosecution — Robert Mueller was, in fact, named as a result of his leak. The immediate cause of the leak was, he said, Donald Trump telling him not to leak. Yet the day before that tweet, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “In a private dinner, Trump demanded loyalty. Comey demurred.” The information, as with the story about the memos Comey leaked, was sourced to associates of Comey. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out who was pushing this information.

More bizarre was his claim regarding the notes he kept before leaking. He said, inexplicably, that he never kept notes on his meetings with George Bush (he did) or Barack Obama but kept notes on Trump simply because he believed he was a liar. He said he viewed these notes as personal property, despite the fact that they were government work product, produced on classified computers in a government vehicle following a meeting with the President of the United States. We don’t know why the FBI is unable to deliver these memos to the investigative committees, or whether the FBI even has copies of them. But we do know that his claim to have not kept notes about his meeting with President Bush was false.

As John Hinderaker details, Barton Gellman wrote a book against Dick Cheney that used extensive notes from a meeting between Comey and President Bush. And the information contained therein reads very much similar to the Trump memos, down to the gratuitous grandfather clocks that are mentioned and 15 lines of dialogue in which Comey appears to be, however implausibly, the only virtuous man in Washington.

Comey’s case would require his friend Robert Mueller to agree that the president’s actions weren’t bad enough to make Comey do literally anything other than chat with subordinates about it and save notes in case of vengeance, but then somehow bad enough to be obstruction of justice. Mueller has fans within the D.C. establishment, but I’m not sure that’s a case he’d be willing to take on, no matter how many recipients of Comey leaks cheer him on.

There are many other examples of Comey’s poor judgment when it comes to obstruction of justice cases. But the idea that Comey should be trusted to lay out an impartial case for obstruction is going to be hard to swallow.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at @mzhemingway

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Friday, July 21, 2017

Our Self-Interested Senators

KIMBERLY STRASSEL:

Our Self-Interested Senators.

The House bill isn’t perfect—no bill ever is—but it amounts to the biggest entitlement reform in history. It repeals crushing taxes. It dramatically cuts spending. And it begins the process of stabilizing the individual health-care market and expanding consumer freedom.

None of this is good enough for a handful of senators, so now it’s time to make this exercise all about them. Mr. McConnell should make clear that the overwhelming majority of the Republican Party stands ready to make good on its repeal-and-replace campaign promise—and that it would have done so already were it not for a cynical or egotistic few. It’s time for some very public accountability.

That rests in Mr. McConnell giving his caucus a drop-dead date to broker a compromise, after which he will proceed to bring up the House bill. And any Republican who votes against moving forward, “a motion to proceed,” will forever be known as the Republican who saved ObamaCare. The Republican who voted to throw billions more taxpayer dollars at failing entitlement programs and collapsing insurance markets. The Republican who abandoned struggling American families. The Republican who voted against a tax cut and spending reductions. The Republican who made Chuck Schumer’s year.
And that’s only a short list of the real-world accountability.

The Democrats could agree on almost any “reform” bill, so long as it brought more money and power to Washington — the important thing was to bring more booty to Washington for divvying. What the Republicans have to do is much tougher, as any repeal or genuine replacement means less booty.

60Posted at 10:24 am by Stephen Green

Saturday, July 15, 2017

VDH

California-VDH @IBD

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Two years after the bailout, life in Greece has gotten more miserable.

UNEXPECTEDLY:

Two years after the bailout, life in Greece has gotten more miserable.

The economy is stagnant, unemployment hovers around 25% and is twice as high for young adults, taxes are rising, and wages are falling. Half of Greek homeowners can’t make their mortgage payments and another quarter can’t afford their property taxes, according to the Bank of Greece.
“All these years, I’ve heard dozens of promises from the current and the previous governments on creating new jobs and bettering conditions in the country, but I never believed anything of what I heard,” said Nikos Theodoridis, 57, who became homeless during the economic crisis that began in 2007.
“Homelessness and the crisis are still here, despite all that politicians are saying,” said Theodoridis, who makes a paltry living hawking magazines on the street.
On July 5, 2015, voters soundly rejected the terms of a proposed bailout with international lenders because the plan demanded too much austerity. Yet, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza Party ignored the referendum results and signed a third bailout deal that would provide nearly $100 billion in loans the country desperately needed to avoid collapse.
Tsipras, whose party gained power on a pledge to resist further austerity requirements, reversed itself and adopted more budget and pension cuts. In June, he negotiated the latest payment of $9.7 billion.
Many Greeks now are resigned to living in poverty under the deal. “It’s our fault,” said Vasiliki Gova, 52, a cleaning woman who gained national attention by staging a two-year protest outside the Ministry of Finance where she had been laid off from her job. “People were looking for hope and put all their hopes on politicians. But no messiah will come save us.”

Greeks spent a lot of money they didn’t have, then the bill came due. Greece has been down this road before, but never so far. Belonging to the eurozone allowed them to borrow at the same low rate as thrifty Germans — like giving dad’s Platinum American Express to a reckless teenager. Needless to say, they ran up some big bills. Even worse, their attachment to the euro means that this time they can’t devalue their way out like they have in previous debt crises.
Another case of “bad luck,” I suppose.

75Posted at 8:13 am by Stephen Green

Friday, July 7, 2017

THE ADMINISTRATIVE THREAT REVISITED

At the RealClearPolicy site, editor M. Anthony Mills has posted a good summary of Professor Philip Hamburger’s critique of the administrative state — the regime of administrative law promulgated and administered by administrative agencies — set forth this year in the inspired Encounter Books pamphlet The Administrative Threat.

I recently noted Professor Hamburger’s pamphlet here. I wrote about Professor Hamburger’s great work of scholarship on the subject — Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (2014) — for National Review in “A new old regime.”

Mills interviews Professor Hamburger in the podcast below (34 minutes). If you have any interest in the subject, this is worth your time.

Toward the end of the podcast they take up the anti-democratic impetus of the case for the administrative state. “Some early progressives were quite candid about this,” Professor Hamburger writes in the pamphlet. Wilson complained of the necessity of the old-fashioned need to persuade voters. He was particularly worried by the diversity of the nation, Professor Hamburger notes, which meant that the reformer needed to influence (this is Wilson speaking) “the mind, not of Americans of the older stocks only, but also of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes.”

Professor Hamburger writes: “Rather than try to persuade such persons, Wilson welcomed administrative governance. The people could still have their republic, but much legislative power would be shifted out of an elected body and into the hands of the right sort of people.”

Thursday, July 6, 2017

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY: LOOKS LIKE IT’S STILL COAL

POSTED ON JULY 5, 2017 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ENERGY POLICY

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY: LOOKS LIKE IT’S STILL COAL

One of the refrains of anguish following Trump’s sagacious decision to ditch the Kellogg-Briand Pact Paris Climate Accord was that the United States would be “ceding world leadership” in promoting “clean energy,” along with some fancy-sounding statistics about how renewable energy is soaring in China. Well, about that:

As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants

By Hiroko Tabuchi

When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.

But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.

These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.

Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent. (Emphasis added.)

The climatistas like to say that anyone who dissents from the narrow orthodoxy of Al Gore is a “denier,” yet amidst the Paris Climate Accord’s provision that every nation will soon submit its plan for how to essentially de-carbonize their entire energy infrastructure by the year 2050, I notice that all of the long-range forecasts of our Energy Information Administration, the International Energy Agency in Paris, and just about every private sector forecasting firm, expect that in 2050 three-quarters of the world’s energy will still be provided by traditional hydrocarbons. Just who are the deniers now?

I think we should start calling the climatistas “reality deniers.” Especially when you see stories like these about how the “unstoppable” renewable energy revolution looks to be stopping in lots of places:

New proposals would kill solar and wind in the European Union

In mid-May, European grid regulators spoke out against priority dispatch for renewables. If the proposals are adopted, it will be hard to add more wind or solar capacity.

Have I mentioned lately that Germany’s CO2 emissions are going back up, because they are burning more coal to replace the nuclear power they are shutting down? I guess wind and solar just don’t cut it, despite over $100 billion in subsidies over the last 15 years.

And this:

North Carolina Legislators Pass Two-Year Ban on Wind Turbines

North Carolina state lawmakers passed a two-year-long moratorium on the construction of new wind turbines early Friday morning.

If enacted, the measure will be the longest statewide halt on wind energy development ever passed in any state. Tennessee passed a year-long moratorium on new wind turbines in May.

At least as far as energy goes, the answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind.

Monday, July 24, 2017

The Path of a Student Loan

Lawsuits Tossed Out

Ballooning Balances

‘We Need Answers’

Frank Quattrone

Martha Stewart

Steven Hatfill

Scooter Libby, Judith Miller

Hillary Clinton

Donald Trump

Friday, July 21, 2017

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Friday, July 7, 2017

THE ADMINISTRATIVE THREAT REVISITED

Thursday, July 6, 2017

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY: LOOKS LIKE IT’S STILL COAL