Thomas Dart, sheriff of Cook County, has banned evictions, saying he was outraged at banks evicting renters because the owner was in foreclosure.

“These mortgage companies … don’t care who’s in the building,” Dart said Wednesday. “They simply want their money and don’t care who gets hurt along the way.

“On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We’re not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We’re just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.”

Predictably a bankers association was horrified by this scurrilous and unwarranted intrusion of ethics into their sick practice of tossing the blameless into the streets. The sheriff responded, bring me the proper and legal paperwork for evictions, and I’ll do it. Otherwise, no.

“When you’re blindly sending me out to houses where I’m coming across innocent tenant after innocent tenant, I can’t keep doing this and have a good conscience about it.”

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Especially when their banks were crazy over-extended in other countries? The government of Iceland has now nationalized all their major banks, their currency is dropping off a cliff, and their stock market has been closed until Monday.

Apparently their banks took a cue from US banks, and went insane on leveraged greed too - but even more excessively. Not a good idea for a tiny country.

How insane did it get there?

In the past five years, people’s average wealth has grown by 45 per cent - and the money has gone into houses and cars, financed by 100 per cent loans based on a spread of foreign currencies. Now the krona is plummeting, loans are ballooning and thousands are defaulting.

Basing the interest rates of car loans on a spread of foreign currencies is howling at the moon madness. Good for coyotes maybe, but not for financial institutions.

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“The Bush administration, which took office as social conservatives, is now leaving as conservative socialists.”

– Allan Mendelowitz

(And I don’t want any squawking in the comments from Marxists about how this isn’t real, actual, 100% Lenin-would-approve socialism. The US is going to nationalize banks. That is socialism, deal with it. Seems to me Marxists should be rejoicing about this unexpected turn of events rather than engaging in the usual theological hair-splitting and being lefter-than-thou.

This is the biggest, juciest organizing opportunity for the left in decades. That a tiny elite have been pillaging the country making billions while everyone else gets screwed is now quite obvious to everyone. Come out from the bunkers, lefties, the mainstream of America is now receptive to your message. )

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NYT: Tens of thousands of voters have been purged illegally from voter rolls, but it doesn’t seem to be coming from just one party, and could be a result of states trying to comply with 2002 election laws.

VotersUnite tells you how to confirm your voter registration

Voter supression wiki tracks the not-so-innocent attempts at supression.

Colin McEnroe, liberal columnist for the Hartford Courant, says a pox both on ACORN’s sleazy vote-gathering methods and the even worse excesses by Justice.

ACORN is like a basketball player who commits a lot of dirty fouls.  The Justice Department scandal was a wholesale attempt to buy off the refs.  Which do you consider a greater threat to the integrity of the game?

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Finally

We continue to see the wreckage caused by Greenspan’s no-regulations, cheap money, extreme right-wing Ayn Rand philosophy. I remember being at a client, a precious metals dealer, during the peak of his regime, and being baffled at why the traders treated his deliberately indecipherable pronouncements with such awe. He was then, and remains, an extremist charlatan who believes greed is good and the common good should be ignored, if not spat upon. (He was an early disciple of Rand, part of her inner circle, and that was her philosophy.)

The credit markets are still dangerously frozen. One reason: Credit default swaps from Lehman and WaMu settle this month. Institutions who sold these financial instruments of mass destruction, which pretended to be insurance on what is now toxic waste, may face losses of 80-85 cents on the dollar. $400 bn of Lehman swaps unwind on Friday, so losses for some could be catastrophic (assuming they even have the money to pay, if not, then the other side on the transaction gets hurt.)

Banks are believed to be hanging on to cash both to pay for their own settlement and out of fear that their counterparties may take irreparable damage in the Lehman settlement process. There may be some relief if the financial community passes this test, but with another big settlement, WaMu, later this month, banks are still likely to remain on high alert.

TED Spread at record. Translation: The big banks don’t even trust each other for short-term loans.

Take a bow, Mr. Greenspan. Your policies led inexorably to this day.

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NY Times. December 4, 1914

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Bruce Schneier summarizes a paper by Max Abrahms in International Security.

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don’t compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

Such ineffective, self-defeating methods are because, he theorizes, terrorists turn to terrorism for social solidarity, with politics and winning seemingly relatively unimportant.

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