Inspiration for experimentation. Literary. Liberators of techonllo9gy. Prosperitypublishing. Prosperitization. Democracy in design. Feeding demoracy. Research. California pulls out of 50-state foreclosure talks. By DON THOMPSON SACRAMENTO, Calif. California Attorney General Kamala Harris says she will not agree to a settlement over foreclosure abuses that other state attorneys general are negotiating with major U.S. banks. Harris' announcement Friday is the latest to undermine a settlement that had been in the works between the banks and attorneys general in all 50 states.
Other states including New York also have expressed reservations. The agreement was supposed to settle claims of poor mortgage and foreclosure practices, including document fraud known as "robo-signing. " Harris says in a letter to state and federal negotiators that the pending settlement is "inadequate" and gives bank officials too much immunity. She says California will go it alone in negotiating a settlement. Iowa Assistant Attorney General Patrick Madigan says the multistate effort will continue.
The Next Big Bank Bailout | Matt Taibbi. California AG Kamala Harris Rejects Foreclosure Fraud Settlement. In a major development, California’s Attorney General, Kamala Harris, has broken off from the proposed 50-state settlement over foreclosure fraud. If the talks weren’t dead already, and if you’ve read this space you’d know that I think they were, this surely puts them to bed. California Atty. Gen. Harris spent the entire day last Friday in a room with representatives of the big banks, giving them every opportunity to come up with a solution that presented California homeowners with relief commensurate to the liability release they wanted. I think that Harris would have signed on to a deal if she got what she needed out of it. But the banks clearly would not deliver that level of relief, and they still wanted a sweeping liability release, which Harris was unwilling to provide.
Harris’ full letter to Thomas Perrelli of the Justice Department and Iowa AG Tom Miller is here. Fat chance of that. The investigations have to be followed through. Lab.pdf (application/pdf Object) State Legislatures as "Laboratories Of Democracy" Listening to what passes these days for debates in the U. S House of Representatives and the U. S. Senate, it is easy to get the impression there are no new ideas left-certainly no new progressive ideas or suggestions that there might be solutions to the nation's multitude of social and economic problems. At best, what little energy progressive members can muster is exhausted on efforts to halt the rollback of existing programs. The dimming of the vigor and effectiveness of the national legislature is placing a new focus on state legislators, who for so long were regarded as poor cousins to their national counterparts in Washington.
For years, most state legislatures were in session for only a short few months each year or, in some cases, met only every other year. While there remain legislatures not far removed from those practices, a growing number of states have adopted longer annual sessions. For more information about a progressive agenda: www.stateaction.org. Laboratories of Democracy? Brandeis, Federalism, and Scientific Management. Louis Brandeis. Louis Dembitz Brandeis (/ˈbrændaɪs/; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an American lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bohemia, who raised him in a secular home. He attended Harvard Law School, graduating at the age of twenty with the highest grade average in the law school's history. When his family’s finances became secure, he began devoting most of his time to public causes and was later dubbed the “People’s Lawyer.”
He insisted on serving on cases without pay so that he would be free to address the wider issues involved. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Brandeis to become a member of the Supreme Court. Early life[edit] Family roots[edit] Louis Dembitz Brandeis was born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky, the youngest of four children. The Brandeis family chose to settle in Louisville partly because it was a prosperous river port. Race to the bottom. The race to the bottom is a socio-economic phenomenon in which governments deregulate the business environment or taxes in order to attract or retain economic activity in their jurisdictions, resulting in lower wages, worse working conditions and fewer environmental protections. An outcome of globalization and free trade, the phenomenon may occur when competition increases between geographic areas over a particular sector of trade and production.
History and usage[edit] The concept of a regulatory "race to the bottom" emerged in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th century, when there was charter competition among states to attract corporations to domicile in their jurisdiction. Some described the concept as the "race to efficiency", and others, such as Justice Louis Brandeis, as the "race to the bottom".[1] In academic literature, the phenomenon of regulatory competition reducing standards overall was argued for by A.A.
Berle and G.C. Sanford F. See also[edit] Notes[edit] Laboratories of Democracy. Justice Louis D. Brandeis’s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments is perhaps the most familiar and clichéd image of federalism. Contrary to common belief, however, Brandeis’s famous dictum had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. That substantive view proved even more influential, in political thought and constitutional jurisprudence, than the metaphor that flowed from it. To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics.
Click here to view this Outlook as an Adobe Acrobat PDF. "It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system," Justice Louis D. Popular appeal aside, one can make a powerful theoretical case for the experimental, decentralized politics that the laboratory metaphor suggests. Political experimentation, however, does not operate with the efficiency of a disinterested, scientific process of trial and error. Louis D. New State Ice and Interests Freeze!