You Can't Sell Your Soul If the Devil Ain't Buying

cross-posted at Dagblog

The election is the day after tomorrow, and I'm basically done looking at predictions of the results. Foreknowledge is the beginning of folly, and no matter how the day goes I'm going to do the same thing on Tuesday and after Tuesday. Win or lose, you keep your eyes on the prize.

But there's one thing just about every prognosticator agrees on: Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark) is toast.

Lincoln, of course, is a "moderate" Blue Dog. She has clearly felt that the Obama Administration's agenda would hurt her back home in Arkansas, so she's gone out of her way to water down key bills, especially financial reform, and essentially run against her own party:

She takes strenuous pains to distance herself from the White House, trumpet her centrist credentials and assert her independence from her Democratic colleagues.

Her reward for watering down those votes that she was afraid would cost her re-election? She's an incumbent who can't even get to 40 percent in the most recent polls.

And that brings me to the political lesson of the day, this October 31: You can't sell your soul if the Devil ain't buying. Every voter that Blanche Lincoln was trying to appease is voting against her anyway. Why shouldn't they? She signaled over and over again that their political philosophy was right, and that she herself was uncomfortable with Democatic policies. Maybe the votes that Lincoln would pick up by making a strong case for Democratic principles and the good that Democratic policies did for the average Arkansas voter wouldn't have been enough to re-elect her. But clearly she couldn't win without those votes.

Sometimes the Devil won't pay for your soul. He'll just take it for free. You might as well do the right thing instead.

The post-election pressure to be more compromising and more moderate and more "Clintonian" already started ramping up last week. The next six hundred times you hear that talking point, remember Blanche Lincoln: a classic Clinton Democrat, with Bill Clinton himself stumping for her personally, getting stomped 2-1 in Arkansas. If that's what winning looks like, let's look at some losing strategies, please.

And before you say it's impossible for a Democrat to win in a state like Arkansas, let me point out that Lincoln's seat has been Democratic since Reconstruction and that the state's other Democratic Senator, Mark Pryor, was re-elected two years ago by an 80-20 margin. Lincoln hasn't lost a tough hold. She's given away a stronghold.

Moving to the "middle" by meeting the hardest right-wing candidates in living memory halfway isn't going to help Democrats survive. Conceding the basic principles of the "conservative" argument simply means conceding to them. You can't say, "Big government is a problem, but we need to do some practical things out of necessity," anymore. And you can't make so many concessions to your policies that the policies don't work, because the opposition will just hang the failed policies around your neck. If the Republicans decide next week to oppose all childhood vaccinations and claim that they cause autism, you don't try to appease them by weakening the MMR vaccine until it stops protecting kids against measles, mumps and rubella. Doing that would destroy the case for vaccinating kids in the first place, and look like an admission that the crazy fact-free case against vaccinations was true.

Plenty of Democrats are going to take that "centrist" advice. Lots of them already believe it in their souls. And most of those centrists, frankly, are going to end their own careers. Do you seriously think that Ben Nelson is going to be re-elected in 2012 for being the least Democratic of the Democrats? He's going to be run out of Omaha on a red-state rail, and a real Republican will replace him. If your political purpose is to pull Obama to the right, a Republican is always, always going to do it better. The question is whether more progressive Democrats are going to follow Ben Nelson on the same cliff.

I'm all for pragmatism. But pragmatism isn't pragmatism if it doesn't get results. And I understand why any working politician is going to think about his or her own political safety. That's the nature of the beast. But at a certain point, cowardice won't keep you safe. If you want to survive, you have to push forward and fight for every step. There's no guarantee of winning that way. But you're guaranteed to lose doing anything else.

Harassing the Professor

cross-posted at Dagblog

The University of Venus blog at Inside Higher Ed recently posted a personal reflection by a non-white female professor who has felt sexually harassed by one of her male undergraduates. This is at once shocking and entirely unsurprising. Even a white straight guy like me can't work in higher education and not notice the inappropriate behaviors that many female colleagues have to put up with from male students: students sexually propositioning them, giving them flowers, attempting to contact them off-campus, writing graphic sexual comments in teaching evaluations. It may not have happened to every single woman who professes, but it happens to plenty, and to far, far more than it should. In this case, the student turned a writing assignment into something graphically sexual that had nothing to do with course content. (And yes, of course sex is not off limits for academic discussion. But it has to be academic discussion. "That Georgia O'Keefe painting looks pretty symbolic to me," is a normal part of art history class. "Let me tell you more about my penis," is not.)

The original post had led to a intense online discussions both at the University of Venus and at Historiann. Some insights have been great, and others derailed by the question of parity: does this happen to male faculty too? Shouldn't we treat men and women faculty equally? I find this line of argument unsettling for three reasons: 1) this is very obviously not a case of parity, 2) that the situations are radically unequal does not mean that men are never, ever, ever harassed, or that we need not consider how such a situation should be treated, and 3) the focus on student harassment as an exchange between only two people leaves out all the other people in the classroom, and those people's education is very definitely affected by such misbehavior.

Here's a key quote from the original poster:

Right after my confrontation with this student about his first paper, I shot my usual line to my husband, who is also an academic: “this would never happen to you!” And then I realized there were other things that were happening that I doubt happen to him or other male faculty. Based on the content of the student’s paper, and his behavior towards me, it was very clear that he saw me not as a professor but as a sexualized, “exotic” woman. I became acutely aware of my body language and my clothes. I found myself often quickly checking the buttons on my shirt during class to make sure they were all buttoned. I felt awkward turning around to write something at length on the board. I found myself limiting my physicality in other ways, like not sitting on top of the desk as I often do during discussion sessions. I started scheduling students back to back during office hours, if he wanted to meet with me, just so there would be a crowd of students outside my door when he was inside my office. And I made sure that I wasn’t the last person to leave the classroom. I understand that male professors are sometimes viewed sexually by their students. But I think the consequences of that are very different. I wonder if male professors have to worry about being the last person to leave the classroom, if they wonder what kind of predicament the next bad grade they give out is going to land them in.

The focus, again, has been on "This would never happen to you!" Of course it does happen to men, occasionally. But the real point isn't whether anything like this happens to male teachers or not. The point is that this situation is much easier for men to defend themselves against than it is for women.

If you're a straight male teacher, a straight female student is much less likely to cross the boundaries that you set in your teacher-student interactions, and in the rare cases when one does, a male teacher is going to protect himself, and count on his institution to protect him, pretty easily.

The male teacher's advantage begins with our culture's standard heteronormative scripts for courtship and dating. Should a female student express interest in a male professor, that expression will in almost every case involve the student signaling availability, rather than making any overt gesture. The script is that the woman signals interest and the man pursues. That's by no means a feminist script but face it: a female undergraduate interested in having an actual romantic relationship (as opposed to a crush or occasional daydream) involving a major power differential with an older man is typically also invested in old-fashioned gender roles and in the man as pursuer.

Basically, all a male college professor has to do to repel such invitations is ignore them. A student has a fantasy, no matter how durable or ephemeral, of being pursued by an older man; if the older man doesn't pursue, that's pretty much the ballgame. If a male professor doesn't know how to ignore or deflect comments professionally, he can just fall back on playing dumb. Actually being dumb also works quite nicely. Does the student just have a garden-variety crush, or is she actually hoping to act out her fantasies? Doesn't matter; there's not much she can do without the male faculty member's cooperation. Male privilege is not only powerful, but it's convenient.

A woman professor, unfortunately, doesn't have to distinguish the male students with harmless crushes from the ones who are prone to act out, either, because the young men who want to act out do. If the script is "man pursues," a young man with a sexual interest in his professor is apt to make unequivocal gestures. A dozen roses; an e-mail describing erotic dreams; a surprise phone call at home. Bad times. And then the onus is put on the faculty member to actively refuse the student, and of course to manage his hurt feelings. (She not only gets to be inappropriately sexualized; she gets to be inappropriately sexualized and then become a focus of anger.) And while a female student hitting on a male professor often experiences his authority as "sexy," many male students who proposition female professors experience a woman's authority as an anomaly that needs to be reversed or resolved. There are plenty of horror stories, although none are mine to tell. This situation is much, much harder than it is for the male teacher, right from the start. And when a male student refuses to hear the refusal, and responds with larger and less appropriate gestures in order to make sure that he has communicated his desires to their object, it gets ugly.

Are there occasionally students who refuse to accept that a male professor has refused them? Sure. It's much rarer than it is for female professors, but it happens. Harassers, of whatever gender, can be defined by their inability to hear the word no or to recognize boundaries, and when one inappropriate gesture doesn't get what they want they follow with an even less appropriate one. When inappropriate e-mail doesn't work, make an inappropriate phone call. If that doesn't work, just show up. To take one of the original poster's implicit questions, "I wonder if male professors have to worry about being the last person to leave the classroom," literally, the answer is "Once in a great while, yes." It's happened to me only once in nineteen combined years as a high school teacher, grad school teaching fellow, and professor, and it lasted rather less than a semester, and it was a hell of a lot easier on me than it is on almost any woman in the same position. That experience in no way makes me less privileged, or "equally a victim." In fact, my experience illustrates how much easier men have it.

On semester, I got some alarming e-mail sent to my personal account; it was anonymous, but various details indicated a student in a night course I was teaching. (Even though the student didn't respect my boundaries or my privacy, I was still supposed to come looking for her; she had apparently created an e-mail profile just for the purpose of sending me her amorous spam, and her profile picture was a jpeg of Lady Godiva. Even the unsettling inappropriate behavior was a variant on come-and-get-me.) I reported it to my department chair immediately, gave the students no indication that anything had happened, and spent a few weeks working out which of my students had done it. Did I give thought to how and when I left that classroom at nine PM? You bet. I took great care not to make any move that might encourage the initially-unidentified culprit, who might construe almost anything as encouragement. For several weeks I made sure not to leave the building with any female students.

But was I afraid of physical danger, as the original poster was? Decidedly not; my experience was much, much less alarming than hers. When the (eventually identified) culprit chose to glower at me in the classroom, I felt the opposite of fear. Her displeasure was an admission of her powerlessness, and I was confident that she would not resort to any physical intimidation. Neither did I worry about my appearance, or become uncomfortable about my body; I did not believe that the incident had much to do with my body or my looks. Neither did I worry about my work clothing, since I had already availed myself of perfectly "safe" and "professional" male clothing which could not be second-guessed. It wasn't just that what I was wearing could not be construed as sexy by the student; I was also safe from any charge from administrators that I had "brought it on myself" with what I wore. Professional women, alas, don't get such easy and uncontroversial dress standards.

But the most important difference was that I knew the school authorities would back me. And that would have been true for me virtually anywhere. I trust that my particular chair and my particular dean would do the same for any of my female colleagues in the same situation, but that is not true of every chair or every dean. Again, there are horror stories which aren't mine to tell, but I can think of instances where a male student made wildly inappropriate overtures toward female faculty, where there was no dispute either of the inappropriateness of the student behavior or the identity of the student, and the student was allowed to remain in the professor's classroom. That is the difference between being a man and a woman in this profession. If a man asks to be protected in his workplace, he always gets protected. Some women do, and some women don't. That's an abuse of the faculty member who's forced to be in a classroom where she doesn't feel safe, and it's an abuse of every one of her students, whose education is compromised by keeping the harassing student in the classroom.

A teacher who's having students trespass her (or his) boundaries will almost certainly begin to second-guess those boundaries and feel tempted to make them much more rigid. There's an instinctive response to make oneself as distant and unapproachable as possible. That doesn't help anybody's learning. Nor does feeling wary and defensive help you run a classroom better. A teacher's professionalism may compensate for her or his discomfort in that situation, and the students may never see it overtly expressed, but it will still be a compensation and it will take that teacher's energy and attention away from other things.

Read that original post again. The professor in question was feeling so cautious about her boundaries that she gave up her habit of sitting on the desk. Now, sitting on the desk is not itself the key to teaching effectiveness, but it was clearly something she used to signal a relaxed and open atmosphere for discussion. It seems overwhelmingly likely that discussion in that classroom stopped feeling quite so relaxed and welcoming, because the teacher couldn't afford it to be. That's hard on the teacher and bad for the students. She also writes about scheduling student conferences very tightly in order to avoid being alone with the culprit, which means that everybody's individual conference got kept short and hurried. The faculty member was put in a situation where the goal of her safety and comfort was put in conflict with the goals of effective teaching, all for the dubious benefit of keeping the problem student in the classroom.

And before anyone takes up a Gender Wars 1.0 position, siding with the male student against the prudish female authority figure, remember this: when a professor who's feeling the instinct to pull back from students because she's been (or being) harassed by a male student is going to pull back furthest from other male students. Allowing one boy the inalienable male privilege of handing in porn for course credit has a cost. It gets paid by other male students who get a teacher who is less available, less generous, less likely to become a mentor. How could it not? (It also, of course, exacts a toll on the professor's well-being and her soul.)

When put in a less-intense parallel situation, even knowing that I would be supported by my superiors, I went through a few months when I was instinctively much more distant from female students and had to work, consciously and hard, to remain equally accessible to all my students. During the night course with the problem student, I was very careful to leave the building every night with at least one male student. That felt like a very reasonable step. But it did mean that the male student, often the same one, got an extra five or six minutes of conversation about the writers and books we were studying, a little extra attention from the professor. Is that gender inequality? You bet. And there was an enormous temptation to shut myself off from female students for the next few months, becoming less likely to stop for a brief chat if I passed them on campus, more reluctant to take on independent study projects, quicker to end conversations in my office. That would obviously be unjust, and that is not the teacher I have ever wanted to be. But absolutely no one would have called me on it. I could also have been "fair" by pulling back from all my students, but that is not teaching either. And it took a hard, conscious effort not to become that person. That's doing it the easy way, cushioned by institutional support and male privilege and a sense of physical safety. It's a lot harder for women. That penalizes women and their students as well.

Female faculty need to be allowed to solve classroom problems as they see fit, but they also need to know that they have all the tools that their solutions require, including backing from administrators. A faculty member who's feeling harassed by a student might decide that the student does not need to be removed from her classroom, but she does need the confidence of knowing that she could have the student removed if that were necessary. The real scandal isn't that students treat male and female faculty differently; that is just an ugly reflection of our wider society's values. But when the people overseeing a university and upholding its values allow female faculty to be treated in a way that male faculty would never be asked to tolerate, it's a scandal and a shame.

History Never Repeats Itself

cross-posted at Dagblog

Election day is next Tuesday. Papers like the New York Times and Washington Post began publishing their post-mortem analyses of the election results last week. What should Obama do now that next Tuesday's results are in? Highly paid opinion writers have opinions.

The current conventional wisdom has two basic pillars:

1) It is currently 1994.

2) Since it's 1994, Bill Clinton should be President.

I'm going to leave the actual electoral predictions to my colleague Articleman and to folks like Nate Silver. But even if Tuesday night were to turn into an exact replay of 1994, district by district, the political situation on Wednesday morning would still be something completely new. History echoes itself, but it never repeats exactly. If this really were 1994, of course, being more like Bill Clinton would be a stupid idea, like telling someone fighting Muhammad Ali to be more like Sonny Liston. As Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall both remind us, the Big Dog was soundly beaten in 1994. And his post-1994 playbook, no matter how successful it was fifteen years ago, is just not going to work in 2011. Things have changed.

The point of all the "1994 all over again" spin is that it allows reporters and "expert" sources to come off like experts and make confident pronouncements about how things are going to go. "It's tough to make predictions," as Yogi Berra said, "especially about the future." That's why most pundits and sources try to predict the past instead. The point is not to be useful or even to be right, but to sound knowledgeable, and if pundits just predict a replay of what happened last time they can stick to repeating what they know instead of thinking about the unknowns. And if things play out differently, well, the pundits bet with the smart money and that's what really matters, if you're a pundit.

Planning a strategy on the assumption that things will go exactly the way they went last time is inviting one's own defeat, especially in adversarial contests. If something worked on your adversary last time, and they're coming back, do you really think they're going to make precisely the same mistakes this time? France in 1940 is not France in 1918, and you can't expect the Germans to cooperate by sticking to the strategies that lost them World War I. It's still very important not to repeat major strategic mistakes, like allowing unemployment to hit 10% in an election year, trying to march an army from Western Europe all the way to Moscow, or attempting to reduce the deficit during a massive recession. Those will always lose. But you can't count on winning the way you did last time, because the circumstances change and the opposition adapts. When Very Serious People talk about how Obama can win by using Clinton's playbook, they might as well be talking about defending France with the Maginot Line. Marshal Joffre was a Very Serious Person, too.

There are a bunch of reasons why the political situation in Washington, even if Tuesday night looks like deja vu, will actually be terra incognita, requiring a brand new map.

1) We're in much worse shape. In 1994, we were going through a moderate cyclical recession. We were also at peace, with a secure feeling of military near-omnipotence. We are now mired in a much deeper and longer recession, with troops in two ongoing wars. The economy has been seriously, structurally damaged, and there's the potential for plenty more bad news around the corner. The moderate and centrist small-bore fixes that worked well enough in the 1990s will not fix the problems we have now. Neither will just waiting for things to get better. And inaction, let alone wrong-headed action, could make things even worse.

The Republicans have been campaigning for two solid years on a hot-potato strategy, trying to keep the Democrats from fixing things, on the principle that if things were still a mess in 2010 they would get power back. They have no lucid proposals for fixing the economy; they want a mix of useless but expensive tax breaks for folks who are already hoarding their capital and foolishly pro-cyclical spending cuts that will make the depression even worse. If, as they and the media establishment expect, they get the hot potato back next week, they have to figure out what to do about it. And they have no plans that will work. The only predictable result is a lot of trouble.


2. The Republicans are counting on winning this time. 1994 was a big surprise. People weren't predicting it. The Republicans themselves weren't seriously predicting it. They've been predicting big wins in 2010 for well over a year. They have promised their base a victory, and more to the point they have promised that base the spoils of victory. Anything but a major rightward policy shift is going to disappoint and antagonize that base. Indeed, as Daniel Larison points out, disappointment and anger from the right wing is almost certain. There's going to be rage if (as Larison believes), the GOP comes up a few House seats short of a majority, but there's also going to be rage if the majority is smaller than the months of what Larison calls "overhyping" have led conservatives to expect and, most of all there will be rage when the GOP can't give their base everything their base has been counting on. Any new Republicans elected next week will have been elected to run Obama out of town, not to compromise with him. The voters who will carry any such Republicans to victory are hellbent against compromise.


3. Obama has passed more legislation in his first two years than Clinton did. For all the disappointment and anger among the left-wing base, Obama has gotten more done than Clinton did in the first two years. He didn't pass the health care bill I would have designed, but he passed a health care bill. He didn't make financial reform as strict or thorough as I think we need, but he passed a financial reform bill. And if he blew the size of the stimulus, he passed a much larger stimulus than the other side of the aisle wanted. In the same period, Clinton passed the Family Medical Leave Act and the Brady Bill (which requires background checks for gun purchases except when it doesn't), created Don't Ask Don't Tell (which was treated as progressive at the time), and got stuffed on health care. I don't mean any disrespect to the Big Dog; those are just the facts. And while the Family Medical Leave Act is a great thing, it isn't a thing that the Republicans were hell-bent against or wanted to repeal. Obama, on the other hand, has passed major legislation that the Republicans hate, have campaigned against, and will claim they have a mandate to repeal. Compromising with the other party is much easier when you're talking about what to do next. "Compromising," for Obama, would mean giving some of his major legislative accomplishments back. And that is neither a recipe for success nor compromise.

It isn't so much Barack Obama isn't Bill Clinton as that he can't be Bill Clinton. And he'll pay badly if he tries.

The Mortgage Crisis in the Tranches

cross-posted at Dagblog

I've posted about the housing and mortgage crisis, and the impending dangers, here and here, but there's one additional problem that I hadn't got my head around when I wrote those posts. That's the tranche problem, which is likely to lead to all kinds of perverse incentives and unforeseen difficulties.

Most of the bad mortgages, by which I mean both the loans which should never have been made and the mortgages that have that have become part of the banks' routine fraud, were bundled into so-called pools that supported the infamous mortgage backed securities. Those securities then split up the revenues from each mortgage pool a bunch of different ways. So instead of your mortgage having one owner, it's part of a big lot of mortgages with let's say ten different owners, the holders of the various bonds issued on the pool of mortgages your home loan is in. So far, so good.

Here's where it gets tricky: not all of those owners are equal, even if they own equally large percentages of your house, because the bonds are organized into "senior" and "junior" tranches, which get paid off in order of seniority. So, to oversimplify a little, let's say the pool of mortgages your house is in got securitized and divided up ten ways, with each bondholder getting ten percent. Those ten bondholders get paid off in order: one bought the first and safest ten percent, then another bought the second ten percent, all the way down to bondholder number ten, who gets the last ten percent of the money from you paying your loan (or rather, from all of the loans in your pool). All of this was done, in part, by clever financial engineers who figured that this would remove the risk from financing mortgages. (Cue hollow laughter here.)

In the old days, if you ran into trouble paying your mortgage and had to renegotiate, the mortgage had one owner, the bank holding the note, and if you only ended up paying two-thirds of what you owed, that bank took the whole hit. If the mortgage-backed securities were divided equally and you only paid two-thirds of what you owed, then all then bond-holders would get 66.6% of what they'd planned. But under the current system, if you only pay two-thirds of your mortgage, six of your bondholders get paid in full, one gets a two-thirds return, and three get nothing at all. (It's more complicated, actually, because the bonds are actually tied to all of the mortgages in a pool, but the concept remains: if half of the mortgages pay in full, and the other half get written down either through negotiations or through foreclosure and resale a a lower price, at least half of the bondholders are fine but others lose the whole investment.)

Why does this matter to people who are neither Goldman nor Sachs? Because it changes the incentives for dealing with troubled mortgages. In the old days, if your mortgage went south and the bank holding it was going to take a haircut, you could rely on them, at least, to do the economically rational thing. They had an interest in getting back as much of the loan value as they could. That might lead them to refinance. In a housing market that had collapsed since the original home purchase, it might make the bank less eager to seize and resell the home (at a big loss), when they could potentially work something out. Their interests were clearly aligned to maximizing the value of the home.

Under the mortgage-backed-securities system, the incentives get scrambled. Some of the bondholders are getting paid, no matter how much the mortgage declines in value. As long as 20% or 30% of the expected return comes in, they're sitting pretty. At least one or two of the bondholders are holding worthless paper no matter what, because they were only getting paid if the loans returned the full amount of interest on top of the principal, and they are basically out of the decision making loop. A few in the middle could either gain or lose, depending on how specific mortgages are resolved. But there's not a single party with decision-making power whose profit and loss are tied to maximizing the actual value of the asset. Maybe it makes more sense to keep a homeowner in the house rather than sell the house at a fifty percent markdown, but it makes more short-term sense for the "senior" bondholders to take what they can get up front ... sure, the house lost half its value, but their investment was in the "top" half of its value anyway.

The same thing goes for the problem of mortgage backed securities that turn out to be based on fraudulent paperwork. As I've blogged before, there are legal remedies that allow bond-holders to make the issuing banks eat that bad paper, buying back the bonds at the original price. But here, again, the holders of different tranches have different interests. If you bought tranche #8 of 10 in a mortgage backed by a pool that's cratered in value, you want to stick that bad investment back to the bank who put it together, and if it turns out that they didn't perform due diligence, you'd be negligent not to sue them. However, even the crappiest mortgage pool in the world has at least one or two traches of bondholders who are actually turning a profit, and they clearly don't want the deal undone. Why would they? They get the first ten percent, even if only ten percent of the expected returns come in. So we can expect a litigation bloodbath over this.

I have no idea how all this plays out. But I'm afraid that no one else does, either.

Realism About the Housing Mess

cross-posted at Dagblog

Most public debates over the mortgage and housing mess have been running aground on the false-dilemma problem, framing a problem with several possible solutions as a choice between only two options. At least one of the options in false dilemmas is always completely moonbat crazy, and frequently they both are. The false dilemma I've been hearing these days goes like this:

"We either have to give mortgage lenders a free hand, and forget about the legal details, or just let borrowers keep their houses for free without paying anything!"

Obviously, this is not the actual set of choices. It's the two most extreme choices within that set. The point of this either/or formulation is to make one unreasonable course of action seem sane and necessary by pairing it with an even crazier course of action. Letting banks foreclose on people's homes with forged documents is so clearly insane (and such an attack on basic property rights) that it can only be justified by pretending that there are no other options except giving away six-bedroom homes as gifts to deadbeats.

Of course there are other options. How could there not be?

I tend not to trust people who tell me there are only two ways to, especially when both ways are extreme. The world really is not a set of choices between Galt Gulch and Soviet Communism, between repealing the Fourth Amendment and accepting Sharia law, between life in a religious commune and life in a Vegas brothel. And generally when somebody tells me that I have to make a choice like that, I presume that person is trying to hustle me. The choice between "never foreclose on any home for any reason" and "foreclose on people whether you actually have title to their home or not" is obviously a hustler's presentation of the choice. And of course, you can't take a time out to think, because we have to foreclose now! Right away! There's no time to think over the actual rights and wrongs! (This is why it's called hustling.)

Ezra Klein has a characteristically excellent post running down four practical solutions to help homeowners in realistic ways that help homeowners without simply ripping off the lenders. The whole piece is worth a read, and the options are basically sensible. They include simple things like requiring mediation before a foreclosure and changing HAMP so that banks have to opt out instead of opting in, bigger things like allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the principal on mortgages for primary residences, and practical fixes like the "right to rent," in which borrowers lose the house and their equity but can remain as tenants paying market rents for a set period.

All of those sound reasonable to me. I'm personally a big fan of cramdown, the modification of principal by bankruptcy judges. That could allow banks and borrowers to split the difference between the inflated house prices on which the original loan was based and the current market price, so that both the lender and the borrower take a haircut on their mutual bad investment. That would also help separate the borrowers who can actually pay from the ones who never could, and the borrowers who genuinely bought much more than they could afford from the homebuyers who, because of the bubble, had to spend a million dollars for what would usually be four hundred thousand dollars of house.

In other news, here's Digby recommending serious jail time for the people who actually turned fraud into something routine. I have to admit that sounds pretty reasonable, too.