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The cats are confused by the weather. No, not tornadoes. California tornadoes are really glorified funnel clouds. We've had a few of them this year and, from the reaction of local television weather reporters, you'd think they were right up there with the tornado in Joplin. One of our bigger ones tore the roof off a chicken coop. No chickens were harmed.
But for the second year in a row, we've had spring for four months. Yes, cooler temperatures, a goodly amount of rain. Instead of silently enjoying our good fortune, our local weather reporters have spent inordinate amounts of time on the subject. Pictures of people in raincoats, person-on-the-street interviews, minute-by-minute doppler updates, the works. The first year we lived in Sacramento it was 102 in May. We had no air conditioning in our car. I cried.
We did have one 91 degree day. All the azaleas, which had been blooming for a month, lost their flowers. But it has been cool enough that the basil is failing. Basil is a tropical, and doesn't like temperatures below 50 degrees, and we've had quite a lot of nights in the 40s this spring.
Unfortunately though, the most important fact about the weather is that we may have hit the "point of no return" in carbon emissions, and have permanently trashed our little planet Earth. Emissions in 2010 exceeded those of 2008 and, no matter what we do now, it may be too late to limit the worldwide rise in temperatures to a level that won't bring about a runaway greenhouse effect. We're stuck with those who don't believe that climate change is a problem and those who want to use market mechanisms to deal with it. So it's likely that nothing will happen, and certainly nothing that will actually limit the damage. We're toast, so to speak.
This is the case that stunned California. It allows the federal court to require that the state reduce prison overcrowding by, obviously, reducing the prison population. I suspect that everyone (Republicans, Democrats, me) expected that the Supremes would overturn the lower court decision. After all, prisoners aren't a favored population group and given the willingness of the Court to run roughshod over the rest of us, no one expected that decision. California's prison overcrowding (and the consequent denial of medical treatment) was so egregious that even a very moderate court wasn't willing to countenance it.
A bit of background. California's prisons have been overcrowded for a long time. Democrats would argue that it's because Republicans gained a great deal of political favor with the electorate by being "tough on crime." And that's true. But it's also true that the Democrats didn't fight very hard. In fact, they didn't fight at all. So our state's political leadership reformed prison sentencing by lengthening them to Jim Crow state standards, changed the law to make it difficult for the mentally ill to avoid said long prison sentences, and generally insured that lots more people who were a lot sicker would go to prison for long periods of time. The voters joined in, most notably with the "three strikes" ballot initiative, which has on occasion, sent people to prison for 25 years to life for stealing a pizza.
By 1990 the prison situation was becoming intolerable. Prisons were seriously overcrowded, prisoners with physical health problems weren't getting needed treatment, and the increasing number of prisoners who had serious mental health problems was stretching the system beyond breaking. The federal court spent a long time trying to deal with the issues, but finally concluded that the prisons were too crowded to afford adequate medical care to inmates and that the solution was to reduce the number of prisoners. Other options were, of course, to build more prisons and hire more medical staff, but the prison system already consumes a disproportionate share of California's budget, and there are relatively few medical professionals who want to practice in prisons at all, particularly in prisons in remote areas.
It's unlikely that simply reducing the prison population will solve the problem, of course. If the lowest-level offenders are released (which I think is the idea), the remaining prisoners, particularly those with mental health problems, may still not get the help they need. Caring for people who are psychotic in a prison setting isn't likely to improve their condition. And as the number of older prisoners grows, the prison geriatric wards will become progressively more crowded. Just as medical care will cost more as the population ages, medical care in prison will cost more as prisoners age.
What happens to the prisoners who are released? Some of them will be sent off to county jails to finish up their sentences. This means that some county prisoners will have to be released to make room for them, leaving aside the whole issue of how the state will pay for this. And the counties do expect to get paid. Until 2014, when medically-indigent adults go back on Medi-Cal, county hospitals will become responsible for the care of the released prisoners. County hospitals, which have been on the edge of bankruptcy since the Clinton-Gingrich budget agreement in the '90s, will bear the brunt of this, as the emergency room will become the treatment center of choice.
And it would have been more sensible to do this when the state economy was booming. At least then, ex-prisoners had a chance at a job. Today California's unemployment rate is 12% and people with long, stable employment histories (and no felony convictions) can't get jobs. So many of the former prisoners can't help but end up back in prison--they have no jobs, no stable housing...We're just setting ourselves up for the next installment.
Once again, Peon is proved right. Christmas sales did not indicate that the economy was going to pick up, but that people had decided, by whatever mean necessary, that their kids were going to have Christmas. Even if it meant they didn't spend a sou on things that weren't absolutely necessary for the next six months. If you follow the link and scroll down to my comment, you'll find that I noted that people had blown their budgets for the next six months.
What irritates Peon is that the practitioners of the Ruling Conventional Wisdom didn't see this. It wasn't that hard. Did we suddenly get a bunch of good-paying jobs? Did employers start passing out bonuses to everyone? Well, not unless you're one of the big boys at the banks. And while I wish I could say that it is clear that those paid large sums of money to add and subtract with competence had blown it, I'm not sure it's true. It's that they live in a world populated by their own kind, and don't see the condition of the vast majority. I see it only because I live it, and I'm not afraid to say so. In fact, I relish saying so, and do so as often as possible.
Peon doesn't generally comment on the practical issues for homeowners facing foreclosure. There are lots of public resources for homeowners, and very few for tenants, which is why I concentrate my energy there. (That's not to say that the resources provide the best information or advice, as many homeowners are better off defaulting than emptying their savings accounts for a loan "modification" that's doomed to failure. But I digress.)
The issue in question came up when a tenant suffered the following: in renting an apartment, the tenant-screening service found that he had been evicted from a previous home. As he'd never been evicted, he investigated further and found that his father (who shares the same name) had suffered eviction after the father's home had been foreclosed. Well and good, except that the father had abandoned the house before the foreclosure sale. There was no reason to evict the owners, as they were no longer living there.
After a Trustee Sale, the lender can, if the former owner has not already moved, serve a three-days notice to quit. Only after the three days has expired can the lender file an unlawful detainer (a court eviction). So if the former owner had already moved, how did the lender do this?
Well, it's likely that this is what happened: the lender's representative, finding no one at home, left a three-days notice at the house. Then after the three days had elapsed, the lender hot-footed it to the local courthouse and filed an unlawful detainer. When the former owner didn't file an answer, the lender obtained a default judgment against the former owner. The case then appeared in the court records and the tenant screening service picked it up.
But, you say, how could the former owner suffer this if he had never received any notice, not the three-days notice, not the lawsuit? Well, both the notice and the lawsuit are supposed to be served in accordance with the rules laid out in the Code of Civil Procedure. The lender can serve the notice to vacate and the unlawful detainer in one of three ways:
1. Handing the papers to you.
2. Handing the papers to a "person of suitable age and discretion" at the property and then mailing a copy of the papers to you.
3. Posting a copy at the property and mailing a copy to you. (Serving the unlawful detainer this way requires the permission of the court.)
As you can see with this, "nail and mail" (number 3) is ineffective notice if the tenant no longer lives at the property. Mail forwarding is remarkably iffy (I've personally received forwarded mail weeks after it was sent), so it would be very possible for an evictee to receive no notice of the court action, or no notice before the court had entered a default judgment for the lender.
Welcome to the second-class citizenship of tenancy in California. What should happen is that, before the lender can get permission for "nail and mail" service, the lender should have to show that it's reasonable to assume that the tenant still lives at the property. But judges are, shall we say, much disposed to sympathy for those who crashed our economy and very likely to treat it as a routine matter. And here we get beyond my skill level. It's possible that the lender's representative lied and said that personal service (#1) or substitute service (#2) was effected. A lawyer might be able to help you vacate the default, but the only guarantee in landlord-tenant law is that the landlord has both the law and the sentiment of the court on his side.
You might ask: why would the lender do that when the property is clearly unoccupied? The answer is simple--and not so simple. First the lender may be concerned that you haven't vacated the property, and doesn't want to be sued for a lockout (changing the locks on an occupied property). Second, some servicer contracts provide extra payment if the lender has to file a court eviction and what better way for the servicer to make some easy income than to evict a tenant who isn't there?
The best course of action is prevention. If you are a homeowner and your home is being foreclosed, notify the lender IN WRITING when you move. If possible, deliver the keys to the lender's representative. Keep copies of any missives you send or receive and get the card of the person who receives the keys. Then make sure that the lender knows your post-foreclosure address. Protect yourself, because you can't expect either the Legislature or the court to take the action to prevent these lender abuses.
Now that we know we're not entering the post-Rapture period--no crashed vehicles at the side of the road, for instance--I suppose I should get back to work. Today's work will largely involve the yard, as we will receive our first visit from The Claw since February, and the last one until September. I'll post a picture of the pile when we've finished.
But a couple of notes on my way out. First Dan Walters has this for our edification and delight. The problem is that his proposal takes any downturn in California's fortunes and makes it a lot worse. If it's true that "[w]ith a high tax burden, a dense regulatory structure, a decaying transportation system, still-high housing costs, an uncertain water supply, a failing education system, a chronically imbalanced state budget, and a growing underclass, California is not attractive to the massive investment it needs to employ 2 million jobless workers."
This pessimistic view assumes that California will have at least a decade or two of stagnation. I'm inclined to agree with that, but not because it's the view of William Watkins, an economic forecaster at California Lutheran University. It's because Immanuel Wallerstein noted, on the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, that we would have to suffer 50 years of neoliberal economics. My optimistic will hated the very idea, but my pessimistic intellect, said, "Yeah, probably." And we're only in year 31. We can expect that the financial powers what be will spend the next 19 years desperately trying to make neoliberalism work, perhaps with a couple more bubbles, if they can find anything to exploit. It's possible that they'll glom onto Social Security, the only resource most Americans have left. The problem with that, of course, is that the boomers are many, and we still do have elections in the US. And of course, because it's the only resource most Americans have left.
So what course of action does Walters propose? Well, let's take a bad situation and make it very much worse. We'll cut government! "Reducing safety net services to the poor, slashing pensions for public employees and prison spending, and increasing college fees and other non-tax revenue would become a stark necessity, not merely a topic for detached political debate." Huh? Have the problems noted above? Then do a bunch of stuff that will make them all a great deal worse. Really trash the place! J noted that it was kind of like the "heightening the contradictions" of some left groups in the 1970s. Make things worse and bring on the Revolution. Uh huh.
Getting down off the soapbox, I'll note a good paper by CEPR's John Schmitt on the respective unemployment policies of Denmark and Germany, and their usefulness in theUnited States. The basic argument is that in a demand crash, Germany's work sharing policies are far more effective than worker training for jobs that don't exist. I skimmed the paper which has formulas (a big no-no if you want me to read it), but you can get the main points here.
Should you wish to follow the Rapture from New York, you can do so here. As a nonbeliever, I expect that I will still be here tomorrow. What I am curious about, though, is the believers who paid to have their pets cared for after the rapture. They do realize that those left are the sinners and nonbelievers--those who are unworthy of heaven. What makes them think that those who've agreed to care for the pets left behind won't just pocket the money and leave the pets to fend for themselves?
Update at 6:08 PM: No Rapture after all. It appears that everyone is still here.
The cats are confused by the weather. No, not tornadoes. California tornadoes are really glorified funnel clouds. We've had a few of them this year and, from the reaction of local television weather reporters, you'd think they were right up there with the tornado in Joplin. One of our bigger ones tore the roof off a chicken coop. No chickens were harmed.
We did have one 91 degree day. All the azaleas, which had been blooming for a month, lost their flowers. But it has been cool enough that the basil is failing. Basil is a tropical, and doesn't like temperatures below 50 degrees, and we've had quite a lot of nights in the 40s this spring.
