If nothing else, it is becoming painfully obvious that the major players responsible for the economic debacle, the health insurance scam, the looming environmental disaster, and all the rest of the corporate agenda of the last 8 years have no intention of doing a damn thing different than they have been, and no apparent belief that anyone can make them.

The Mortgage Players

After years of successfully gaming the system to make themselves rich and impoverish the planet to do it if necessary, the corporations holding the paper on millions of failed mortgages are deliberately making it as hard as they can for those mortgages to be recast in a sensible, payable way.

Somewhere on earth, there must be a more difficult task than this: persuading American mortgage companies to lower payments for homeowners who can no longer afford their loans. But as Karina Montenegro struggles to accomplish this feat for a troubled borrower, she strains to imagine a more futile pursuit.

Ms. Montenegro, an intern at a local company that seeks loan modifications, dials Washington Mutual to check on the status of an application for a homeowner whose income has plummeted. She endures a Muzak-scored purgatory while on hold. Syrupy-voiced customer service representatives chide her for landing in the wrong department. She learns that the documents her company sent in have simply vanished — for the third time since November.

“I don’t know what happened,” says a customer service officer who identifies himself as Chris. “I don’t know if there was a glitch in the system, whether it was transferred from one call center to the other.”

(emphasis added)

Of course he doesn't. He doesn't know a damn thing, He just works there.

The reasons are simple. Obama's plan "offers mortgage companies $1,000 for each loan they agree to modify, then another $1,000 a year for up to three years." It's chickenfeed to what they think they can get if they hold out. And if the mortgages nevertheless go sour, they've got control of all that property for when the market recovers and prices again go up.

Wall Street's confidence has been immeasurably enhanced by Obama's bail-outs. They no longer believe there's anything to worry about. They have chosen to believe that despite nearly 10% unemployment and a cadre of Damoclean swords hanging over every industry from the auto makers to the banksters themselves, everything's going to be just fine and the party will be on again any day now. Besides, they're getting paid from both ends just for running the process. Viz:

Two days in Los Angeles — where a loan modification company allowed a reporter to listen as its agents contacted mortgage servicers provided the firm not be named — starkly illustrated the problems.

The company charges homeowners $3,000, typically upfront, as it seeks to persuade lenders to rewrite loan documents so as to lower monthly payments.

So they charge a broke homeowner trying to keep their house $3 grand upfront and collect another grand a year from the govt and they still don't have to moderate their terms. It is, iow, business as usual: take everybody for a ride for as long as you can and rake as much as you can off the top while you're doing it.

They ain't going to change until we make them change.

The Health Insurance Corpo Fraud

The NYT ed board is on the Congress' back today to put some teeth into the regulations governing insurance companies since they are patently not going to do it themselves.

A House oversight subcommittee took a close look at a particularly shameful practice known as “rescission,” in which insurance companies cancel coverage for some sick policyholders rather than pay an expensive claim. The companies contend that rescissions are rare. But Congressional investigators found that three big insurers canceled about 20,000 individual policies over a five-year period — allowing them to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims.

The companies typically argue that the policyholders withheld information about pre-existing conditions that would have disqualified them from coverage. But the subcommittee unearthed cases where the pre-existing conditions were trivial, or unrelated to the claim, or not known to the patient. When executives for the three companies were asked if they would be willing to limit rescissions to cases where the policyholder deliberately lied on an application form, all said they would not. This tactic will not be ended voluntarily.

No and neither will any of the other frauds they practice regularly. They sat in front of Ciongress, got grilled by the House and toasted to a golden brown by the press and still had the balls to insist they were going to go right on perpetrating fraud, practically daring the Congress to do anything about it but sputter and shake.

Now that's an industry that is confident it owns the playing field. And the players. They're so sure we can't stop them breaking any fucking law they want that they're telling us to our faces to get bent.

They ain't going to change until we make them change.

Environmental Disaster Deniers

Paul Krugman writes a sizzling column today, pulling very few punches about the holocaust global-warming deniers who got up in Congress last week and told everyone that science is shit because they don't like what it's telling them.

[A]s I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

***

[I]f you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists.

The corporate apologists, puppets, tail-waggers and ass-kissers in Congress are prepared to risk the life of the planet if it means more $$$ in the pockets of the Masters of the Universe. The combination of unchecked greed bolstered by a denial of uncomfortable realities so complete that they can ignore the fact that half the polar ice cap is gone is so dangerous to our welfare as a species that it is almost incomprehensible. 

Yet there they stood, arrogant, blind, and stoopid, loudly decrying the evidence of their lying eyes.

They ain't going to change until we make them change.

Will we?