Politics: Make Up Your Mind

The thing I hate most about politics is that it is largely based on mob mentality. As a member of a group, there is a tacit or direct message that some person running for office is “your guy or gal.” Most people do not realize that their “membership” is conferred in their own minds. Others in your conceived group will undoubtedly take issue with your credentials and will seek to get others to see you as a non-member. You can look to the right or to the left. That is what happens.

All of that is a distraction from the issue of governance.

It is rare that anyone listens to people like me. I am willing to hold my nose and vote for someone I don’t particularly like if I am relatively sure that they will do something positive about the issues that concern me the most.

But the current polarization reveals the ability of political candidates to manipulate their audience such that they might receive a vote simply because the candidate is not “them.” We have had multiple waves of this thinking in American history.

If we want it to change, then we must vote on something other than hate or contrived superiority. Nobody is superior to anyone else, and wishing or thinking or even orating to the contrary will never make it otherwise.

But it gets even more complicated. For example, the race for Senate in California. If I lived in that state, I would cast my vote for Katie Porter simply because of her long and highly polished track record as an advocate for consumer causes in credit, services, and products.

That is my issue, and I would vote accordingly. And to the trained eye of a trial lawyer, she asks relevant piercing questions that nobody else seems willing or able to ask. Note that she was the one who published a powerful study when she was in Iowa that revealed the absence of any original note.

Her opposition is Adam Schiff, who has his own track record on the issue of the rule of law, national security, and preserving democracy. He is also a good candidate if those are your top issues. You can argue with me about my choice of priorities, but you can’t argue with me or bully me into changing them.

Nearly 30 years ago, a scheme was hatched on Wall Street that changed World History. It was called “securitization,” but only Wall Street gave it that name or label, and nobody else who understood investment banking called it securitization of debt because any trained analyst understood that no debt was being securitized. But the marketing puff told the story that this was a risk-free way of entering the lending marketplace.

As for risk, see 2008.

There was no entry into the lending marketplace because there were no creditors, no risk of loss on “non-payment,” nor any unpaid loan account into which payments were credited even in “foreclosure.”

People like Katie Porter attacked the premise and proved that the scheme was empty. But Wall Street was able to bully their way through by changing claimants from the original lender (no longer involved and was a pretender lender) to the company named as servicer (not servicing), to thinly capitalized aggregators of data who never saw one cent of the money trail, to “trusts” that had no assets and trustees who had no duties.

My view and my politics is that I will vote for any candidate who is devoted and committed to taking down this illegal scheme and breaking up the mega banks so that such entities can never achieve the level of political influence they have enjoyed for decades. I will be just as enthusiastic about voting for a Republican as a Democrat.

People like Katie Porter need to be elevated, in my opinion. People who specialize in us/them mentality should be demoted. We are not a mob. We are citizens in the greatest political experiment in the history of humans.

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