By John Ballard
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones...
Thus spoke Mark Anthony in the famous encomium to the lateJulius Caesar. It applies to women as well as men, I suppose.
This delightful story is part of how the Wall Street Journal chronicles the last day of 2010, a fitting note to some of this year's developments.
Martha Kunkle has come back to life.She died in 1995. Yet her signature later appeared on thousands of affidavits submitted by one of the nation's largest debt collectors, Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc., in lawsuits filed against borrowers.
Some regulators complain that the use of Ms. Kunkle's name reflects an epidemic of mass-produced, sloppy and inaccurate documentation in the debt-collection industry. Lawsuits have surged as more borrowers fall behind on payments and collection firms turn to courts to get what they are owed.
After being sued for fraud, Portfolio Recovery Associates decided in early 2008 that any documents bearing Ms. Kunkle's name had "defects" and shouldn't be used when trying to collect debts, a company spokeswoman said.
Last July, though, lawyers for Portfolio Recovery Associates sought a court judgment in a lawsuit against a Seattle woman for $2,892.10 in credit-card debt and interest that she allegedly owed. It was a cookie-cutter case, except for one thing: To vouch for the debt's validity, the Norfolk, Va., company included an affidavit signed by Martha Kunkle.
The spokeswoman said the document was "inadvertently used by our outside counsel" because of "human error," adding that the suit was dropped later "upon review of the case."
The company said Ms. Kunkle's name isn't on any other affidavits submitted to judges since early 2008 by Portfolio Recovery Associates or outside lawyers who handle most of its debt-collection cases.
[...]Questions about Martha Kunkle first popped up in 2008 after her name appeared in thousands of affidavits generated by a unit of Providian National Corp. The credit-card issuer sold an undisclosed number of delinquent account balances to Portfolio Recovery Associates and other debt collectors, which then sued the borrowers to collect the debt.
Most of the debt was racked up before 2004. Providian was acquired in 2005 by Washington Mutual Inc. The Seattle company's banking operations failed in 2008 and were sold to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., which declined to comment.
H/T Naked Capitalism
Either no one actually believes in the principles of free-market capitalism, or free-market capitalism is actually intended to operate principle-free.
ReplyDeleteIt's ever more increasingly apparent that, in the US, laws only apply to the little people -- defined as all those who can't afford a competent (preferably 'connected') attorney.
Yep. I started listening to Washington Journal a little while ago and when they started talking about the "weakness" and "irresponsibility" of countries like Greece and Ireland I had to turn it off. (The topic of the moment was the importance of the Euro.)The transnational global banking meltdown of 2008 was the result of corrupt banking on a historic scale but the perpetrators, blackmailing whole national economies by their criminal behavior, successfully socialized the debts while privatizing their dirty "profits." Meantime, during the intervening two years the blame has been successfully redirected at "sovereign" national economies (PIIGs, remember) when the underlying problems were overwhelmingly the manipulative games played (and lost) by global banking.
ReplyDeleteI know there was and is national corruption as well as individual "investors" with little to no understanding of what they were/are getting into... all that plays a part. But the underlying scheme -- Ponzi in nature -- was conceived and executed by the very people who knew better and instead conducted their affairs counting on the "greater fool" theory.
It makes me angry every time I think about it. Too many criminal bastards running around rich and free. What passed as regulatory reform is no more challenging for them than clearing a snowfall in Minneapolis.