RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 10 to March 16
Featured Investigation
Call it robo-signing, the sequel: As John F. Wasik reports for RealClearInvestigations, abuses of the mortgage foreclosure crisis of 2007-2010 have spread to the wider realm of consumer debt collection. The common denominator both then and now: borrowers who fall into trouble mismatched against aggressive collection. And blameless consumers are collateral damage.
Wasik reports:
- To keep up with defaults, third-party debt collectors increasingly turn to technology, cutting corners along the way: They buy unpaid debts and, often without direct knowledge of the cases and with erroneous information, force debtors into court via signed automated affidavits.
- Debt collectors purchase debts for pennies on the dollar from credit card companies and other sources of credit, then seek to recover the full balance through a series of letters, auto-filed affidavits and phone calls.
- Although there are no reliable national statistics, this type of robo-signing is pervasive. Midland Credit Management, along with its parent company Encore Capital Group, has been sued by 41 attorneys general over robo-signing. According to three class-action suits, Midland was issuing between 200 and 400 computer-generated affidavits a day. The lawsuits involved some 1.4 million plaintiffs.
- Debt collection and buying is a highly profitable business, especially when automated. Few debtors dispute their bills. And letters and calls harangue debtors, in some cases, for debts that they may not even owe.
The Federal Trade Commission says that largely as a result of new technological advances in speed and efficiency, debt collectors have an overwhelming advantage over consumers, who dispute only 3 percent of debts. “If applied to the entire debt buying industry,” an FTC report estimated, “each year [debt] buyers sought to collect about one million debts that consumers asserted they did not owe."
The Trump Investigations: Top Articles
McCain Aide Spread Steele Dossier Around Amid Transition, Washington Times
Strzok: Hillary Got Deal Hiding Foundation Emails From FBI, Examiner
Simpson Planted Idea of NRA Collusion With Ohr of FBI, Federalist
Lisa Page Transcripts: Details of Anti-Trump 'Insurance Policy', Fox News
Read Records on Ohr and Dossier Spy, Justice Department, House Oversight
11 Takeaways From House Panel's Interview of FBI's Ohr, Federalist
1MDB, Clinton-China Ties to Trump Donor Probe, Wall Street Journal
Manafort Sentenced as NY Charges Could Foil Any Pardon, New York Times
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
The College Bribery Scandal
Schadenfreude news of the week: the arrests of Hollywood stars and other very wealthy people on charges they allegedly bribed college coaches, SAT test proctors and other insiders to get their children into some of the nation’s most selective schools. In addition to cheating on tests, applicants allegedly falsely claimed that they starred in non-revenue sports as a way of gaining colleges' favor – sports such as sailing, tennis, water polo and pole-vaulting. The scandal appears to have been uncovered when a person hoping for leniency in a securities-fraud case led authorities to the women’s soccer coach at Yale University, who had allegedly accepted a $400,000 bribe to get a student with false credentials admitted. Of course, some of the reporting reflected ideology: Right-leaning outlets noted that many of the parents involved were liberal Democrats, while left-leaning publications suggested the scandal proves the system is rigged against black and brown people.
Obama Administration Ignored Experts' Warnings on Fentanyl
Washington Post
In May 2016, a group of national health experts issued an urgent plea in a private letter to high-level officials in the Obama administration. Thousands of people were dying from overdoses of fentanyl — the deadliest drug to ever hit U.S. streets — and the administration needed to take immediate action. The epidemic had been escalating for three years. The administration considered the request but did not act on it. The decision was one in a series of missed opportunities, oversights and half-measures by federal officials who failed to grasp how quickly fentanyl – a synthetic painkiller 50 times more powerful than heroin – became the drug scourge of our time. Fentanyl has played a key role in reducing the overall life expectancy for Americans. If current trends continue, the annual death toll from fentanyl will soon approach those from guns or traffic accidents.
Public Routinely Denied Access to Police Officer Video Footage
Associated Press
During the last five years, taxpayers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to outfit officers’ uniforms and vehicles with cameras and to store the footage they record as evidence. Body cameras, in particular, have been touted as a way to increase police transparency by allowing for a neutral view of whether an officer’s actions were justified. An investigation by The Associated Press has found that police departments routinely withhold video taken by body-worn and dashboard-mounted cameras that show officer-involved shootings and other uses of force. They often do so by citing a broad exemption to state open records laws — claiming that releasing the video would undermine an ongoing investigation.
Southern Poverty Ousts Co-Founder, Suggesting Misconduct
New York Times
The Southern Poverty Law Center has fired its 82-year-old co-founder and chief trial lawyer, Morris Dees, for what appears to be unspecified workplace conduct. Asked whether he had engaged in any behavior that could have been perceived as improper, Dees replied, “I have no idea how people take things.” The SPLC, which Dees helped found nearly a half century ago, made its name – and developed an endowment now worth about $471 million – by going after unadulterated hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Nowadays, it designates a wide range of organizations – including ones opposed to same-sex marriage or transgender rights – as hate groups. These designations are routinely repeated by leading liberal news outlets, even though critics, including Cornell law professor William A. Jacobsen, contend the SPLC is, as he puts it, “demonizing political opponents through the use of hate and extremist lists to stifle speech by people who presented no risk of violence.”
Trump Can End 'Press 2 for Spanish' y Save Mucho Dinero
Washington Times
In 2000 President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring the U.S. to make its documents and services available to people who do not speak English. The ubiquitous recording “press 2 for Spanish” is only the most common response; the Justice Department’s immigration court system, for example, now has translation capability for 350 languages. The last time federal officials took a look at the cost, during the first term of President George W. Bush, the Office of Management and Budget fixed it at $2 billion annually. If that price has held steady, then it would mean taxpayers have shelled out more than $30 billion on mandated translations of the government’s business.
Gillibrand's Office Rocked by #MeToo Scandal
Politico
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is a leader of the #MeToo movement everywhere – except in her office. That’s the claim of a female staffer who says she resigned last summer after her complaints about the persistent, unwelcome advances from a one of Gillibrand’s closest aids was ignored. “I have offered my resignation because of how poorly the investigation and post-investigation was handled,” the woman wrote to Gillibrand in a letter sent on her final day to the senator's personal email account. “I trusted and leaned on this statement that you made: ‘You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is O.K. None of it is acceptable.’ Your office chose to go against your public belief that women shouldn’t accept sexual harassment in any form and portrayed my experience as a misinterpretation instead of what it actually was: harassment and ultimately, intimidation,” the woman wrote. The story reports that Gillibrand dismissed the allegedly offending aide, Abbas Malik, after Politico asked about this case and other complaints against him.
U.S. to Scan Faces Soon at 20 Top Airports, Documents Show
BuzzFeed
Customs and Border Protection is implementing a “biometric entry-exit system” at the nation’s 20 largest airports with the goal of using facial recognition technology on travelers aboard 16,300 flights per week — or more than 100 million passengers traveling on international flights out of the United States — in as little as two years. According to 346 pages of documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center there are no limits on how partnering airlines can use this facial recognition data. It is also not clear whether there are any guidelines for how other technology companies involved in processing the data can potentially also use it.
Showing Up Wasted: Indictments Spotlight Prison Rehab Scams
Associated Press
Psst! Going to federal prison soon? Here’s a tip: Tell ‘em ya got a problem with drugs or booze. If you qualify for treatment, you can knock up to a year off your time. Federal prosecutors have long suspected abuses in the program, which is receiving scrutiny after a grand jury in Connecticut indicted three people accused of coaching ineligible convicts on how to get into the Residential Drug Abuse Program, or RDAP, by telling them to show up to prison intoxicated and fake withdrawal symptoms. About 15,600 inmates – nearly 10 percent of the current federal prison population – participated in the nine-month, 500-hour treatment program last year, and thousands more are on waiting lists.
The Last Days of Taliban Head Mullah Omar
Wall Street Journal
Foreign intelligence work is undoubtedly challenging. Still, the CIA sure gets a lot of stuff wrong. This story reports that the agency, along with most other experts, believed Taliban leader Mullah Omar fled to Pakistan after the U.S. ousted his government in Afghanistan following the September 11 terrorist attacks orchestrated by al Qaeda, which operated in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s protection. A new report says he was living in hiding near a U.S. base in southern Afghanistan until his death in 2013. “The report shows that the U.S. got one of the biggest claims about the war wrong, and it also shows how little we understand the Taliban movement,” the report’s author, Bette Dam, said in an interview.
