love that
unduly proud of "mortgage reinsurance kickbacks,"
good night Austin,TX,
WH23
Elizabeth Warren’s ‘A Fighting Chance’: An exclusive excerpt on the foreclosure crisis
By Senator Elizabeth Warren
BY LATE 2009, the mortgage crisis had prompted plenty of finger-pointing — and a lot of it was directed at the families losing their homes. Earlier in the year, when talk of writing down mortgages surfaced, a televised rant about “losers” went viral and was generally credited with sparking the Tea Party. Now everybody seemed to have a favorite story about a bus driver who bought an $800,000 home or somebody’s brother-in-law who flipped houses, made a fortune, and then lost it all when the music stopped.
It all seemed backward. It was as if people were saying:
“Oh, gosh, we can’t blame poor Mr. CEO Banker. He gets paid millions and millions of dollars because he’s really good at his job, so how was he supposed to know that his bank was about to collapse?”
And then they turned around and said:
“Hey, stupid homeowner! Why did you sign those confusing mortgage papers? Didn’t you know that your balloon payment would come due just the moment your job disappeared?”
The hypocrisy drove me nuts.
In fall 2009, Secretary Timothy Geithner invited people working on TARP oversight to a meeting. It was held in the Treasury Building in an incredibly fancy room that was loaded with historic furniture, rich draperies, and heavily framed paintings. It looked like a room for kings to negotiate over who was going to get what colony. The secretary and his aides sat on one side of a huge table. The rest of us lined up on the other side.
Secretary Geithner spoke quickly, often dropping his voice into a barely audible monotone, rushing ahead so fast that there was no room for interruptions. He was clearly smart and in command of the facts, but he didn’t offer many opportunities for questions. Maybe he was a little anxious. It probably wasn’t much fun to face more than half a dozen people whose job was to look over your shoulder and second-guess your decisions.
I tried not to fidget. But after we had listened to the secretary go on and on about his department’s cheery projections for recovery, I finally interrupted with a question about a new topic. Why, I asked, had Treasury’s response to the flood of foreclosures been so small? The Congressional Oversight Panel had been sharply critical of Treasury’s foreclosure plan. We thought that the program was poorly designed and poorly managed and provided little permanent help, and we worried that it would reach too few people to make any real difference. After the rush-rush-rush to bail out the big banks with giant buckets of money, this plan seemed designed to deliver foreclosure relief with all the urgency of putting out a forest fire with an eyedropper.
The secretary seemed annoyed by the interruption, but he quickly launched into a general discussion of his approach to dealing with foreclosures, rehashing the plan that the Congressional Oversight Panel had already reviewed. Next, he explained why Treasury’s efforts were perfectly adequate — no need to worry. Then he hit his key point: The banks could manage only so many foreclosures at a time, and Treasury wanted to slow down the pace so the banks wouldn’t be overwhelmed. And this was where the new foreclosure program came in: It was just big enough to “foam the runway” for them.
There it was:
The Treasury foreclosure program was intended to foam the runway to protect against a crash landing by the banks. Millions of people were getting tossed out on the street, but the secretary of the Treasury believed the government’s most important job was to provide a soft landing for the tender fannies of the banks.
I’VE NOW BEEN a US senator for a little more than a year. I’ve seen our Congress up close, and parts of it are truly dysfunctional. I’ve already lived through one government shutdown and too many Republican filibusters to count. Every day I wrestle with the same ruthless reality that I’ve known for many years: Change — real change — is hard. Uphill, grind-grind-grind, sweat-it-out hard.
Yes, change is hard, but it is possible — and that’s the part that fires me up.
Every day I think about the people I’ve met who are part of this battle. I remember their faces, their fears, their determination. Every one of them worries about our future. Every one of them has anxious days and sleepless nights. But every one of them is tough and resourceful. And every one of them — every single one of them — has a deep core of optimism that we can do better.
Equality. Opportunity. The pursuit of happiness. An America that builds something better for the next kid and the kid after that and the kid after that.
No one is asking for a handout. All we want is a country where everyone pays a fair share, a country where we build opportunities for all of us, a country where everyone plays by the same rules, and everyone is held accountable. And we have begun to fight for it.
Adapted from A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren,
yep, Fed/Treasury, rapidly, continually revolving door with Wall St, bailed out the US/UK/EU financial sector, not the criminal victim of the US economy of the 99%.
where is Geithner now?
"Warburg Pincus LLC, the private-equity firm managing about $37 billion in assets, is considering investments in Africa and the Middle East as capital starts to flow back into emerging markets.
Warburg Pincus, founded in 1966, owns stakes in more than 120 businesses and last year hired former U.S. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner as its president."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-08/warburg-pincus-to-buy-dubai-company-stake-in-middle-east-foray.html
“Independent” Foreclosure Review Error Rate Vastly Higher Than Previously Admitted
At this point, it seems hard to add insult to injury, given the terrible track record of the OCC Independent Foreclosure Reviews. But it’s nevertheless been done.
By way of background, in April 2010 the Office of the Comptroller and the Fed issued consent orders to 11 servicers (three more were added later). The orders mandated that borrowers who had had foreclosures that were pending or had completed foreclosure sales in 2009 and 2010 could request an investigation by independent reviewers, selected and paid for by the servicers but subject to approval by the OCC. It was clear from the outset, however, that this consent order process was never intended to help homeowners in a serious way, but was intended to give air cover for predatory servicers.
Even so, the foreclosure reviews turned out to be an embarrassing and costly fiasco. The investigation was halted abruptly, as more and more leaks showed that the foreclosure reviews were anything but “independent”. 11 servicers and the regulators hastily negotiated a settlement, with the authorities failing to identify any methodology for how the portion of the settlement allotted to cash awards, $3.3 billion, would be distributed to homeowners. It was predictable that the outcome would be that insultingly small checks would be distributed broadly to bolster claims of how many people has been recompensed, as if checks of a few hundred dollars on average was even remotely adequate res ution for the loss of one’s home.
Nevertheless, there had to be some sort of process put in place to distribute the piddling cash compensation, so the OCC set up a framework with various types of damage leading to stipulated levels of awards, with $125,000 the maximum. But this was all Through the Looking Glass logic. Since the foreclosure reviews had never been completed, how could anyone have the foggiest idea who deserved what? The only exceptions for those who got through the process early and servicemembers, who were treated with kid gloves. The death-of-a-thousand-unkind-cuts treatment continued with the Byzantine process of getting correct addresses to Rust Consulting, the firm in charge of sending the money, bounced checks and late mailings.
The abusive treatment of borrowers contrasted with how well the enablers made out. Across 11 servicers, the failed review-meisters pulled out $2 billion. Promontory, which mismanaged the reviews at Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC pulled out a cool $930 million.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/...+capitalism%29
What Problem Is Privatizing Fannie and Freddie Meant to Solve?
President Obama's chief economist, Jason Furman, weighed in behind efforts to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week. The main plan on the table is a bill put forward by Senators Tim Johnson and Mike Crapo, the chair and ranking member, respectively, on the Senate Finance Committee.
While Furman's column (which was co-authored with James Stock, another member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers) indicated support for the principles behind the Johnson-Crapo bill, it is not clear what problem they are hoping to solve.
At the moment, it seems Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing their job just fine. They are issuing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that include more than 60 percent of new mortgages. Interest rates on mortgages are low and both companies are making substantial profits which are refunded to the government. Why is there any need to overhaul this system?
The financial industry is of course unhappy with this situation. It sees the money being earned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as money that could be going into its pockets. Of course there is nothing that prevents Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the rest from going out and issuing their own MBS right now.
The problem is that they have a really awful track record. Remember the financial crisis? And of course it is especially hard for them to compete with two relatively efficient government-run issuers like Fannie and Freddie.
Johnson-Crapo solves both problems for the industry. First, it shuts down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This means Wall Street no longer has to worry about competing with them. But, Crapo-Johnson does more than just wipe out Wall Street's compe ion; it also allows banks to issue MBS that carry a government guarantee.
Under Johnson-Crapo, investors would have 90 percent of the price of a privately issued MBS guaranteed by the government. This means that no matter how much garbage Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan threw into an MBS, investors wouldn't have to worry about losing more than 10 percent of their investment. After an initial 10 percent loss, the taxpayers would be on the hook for the rest.
Proponents of Johnson-Crapo argue that the risk of losing 10 percent of their investment will ensure the quality of these MBS. Apparently these people are not old enough to remember back to the days of the housing bubble when investors gobbled up MBS issued by the Wall Street banks even though they could in principle lose 100 percent of their investment.
The moral hazard created by Johnson-Crapo, in which private banks get the profit and taxpayers get the risk, virtually guarantees the sort of abuses we saw during the housing bubble years. In fact, if we feel the need to get rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as government-run companies, it would make far more sense to just get the government out of the MBS market altogether.
The Wall Street boys will surely be able to figure out a way to provide credit for mortgages without the government holding their hands. They are able to do it now with the market for jumbo mortgages; if necessary we can send over some high school math majors to teach them to do it with the conventional mortgages handled by Fannie and Freddie.
It is worth challenging the idea that everything needs to be done by the private sector, even in cases where the government can do it more efficiently. This was the situation we faced back when President Bush wanted to privatize Social Security.
The privatizers derided Social Security as an old-fashioned one-size-fits-all model. The description is largely accurate, but that is exactly what we need in a system designed to provide workers with their core retirement income. According to the Bush administration's own estimates, the administrative costs of their privatized system would have been ten times as large as the administrative costs of Social Security.
We can tell the same story with Medicare compared with private issuers. The administrative costs of the Medicare system are 2-3 percent of what it pays out for health care. By contrast, the administrative costs of private insurers are 15-20 percent of annual payouts. In addition, providers face higher costs because of the office staff they need to hire to deal with an array of different insurance forms. Nonetheless, because of the political power of the insurance industry, the only way to extend health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act was to cut them in for a big piece of the action.
In principle, the power of inertia should work in favor of keeping Fannie and Freddie in place. However many of those who were opposed to privatizing Social Security have taken the side of the financial industry in this battle. At the least, it should be possible to block Wall Street's efforts to get a government guarantee for their new foray into the mortgage-backed securities market.
It is ironic that at a time when much of the liberal intelligentsia has become obsessed with Thomas Picketty's new book warning about ever greater concentrations of wealth and income, this huge giveaway to Wall Street could pass largely unnoticed. Of course no one ever expected much by way of serious thought from intellectuals.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/23...meant-to-solve
the official review protected the targets instead of the victims:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5228275.htmlThe foreclosure review was supposed to uncover abuses in how the mortgage industry coped with the epic wave of foreclosures that swept the U.S. in the aftermath of the housing crash. In a deal with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve, more than a dozen companies, including major banks, agreed to hire independent auditors to comb through loan files, identify errors and award just compensation to people who'd been abused in the foreclosure process.
But in January 2013, amid mounting evidence that the entire process was compromised by bank interference and government mismanagement, regulators abruptly shut the program down. They replaced it with a nearly $10 billion legal settlement that satisfied almost no one. Borrowers received paltry payouts, with sums determined by the very banks they accused of making their lives .
Now, new evidence shows that had the reviews continued, they may have uncovered far more mistakes than regulators said were present when they scuttled the deal. If the program hadn't been shut down, aggrieved homeowners could've received another $1.5 billion in cash, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office released Tuesday.
In a letter last week, Rep. Elijah mings (D-Md.) said an inquiry by his office had revealed "widespread and systematic foreclosure abuses" turned up by the auditors conducting the mortgage reviews. The letter was sent to Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
mings specifically cited high error rates described in several reports issued by Promontory Financial, one of the auditing firms. In a May 2013 report, Promontory said that an audit of a small sample of Bank of America files revealed an error rate of 60 percent, mings said. These were mistakes made by the bank in its handling of mortgage modification applications, submitted by people hoping to avert a foreclosure.
In a separate report, Promontory said it found "borrower financial injury" in 21 percent of PNC Bank loans, according to the mings letter.
These numbers are vastly higher than the figure regulators gave when they cancelled the review program. At the time, regulators said they had detected an error rate of just 6.5 percent -- meaning the mortgage industry had made a mistake in handling about 1 in 20 foreclosures. The error rate is critical because it was almost certainly used by regulators when they were determining how much the mortgage companies should pay to settle abuse claims.
The Promontory do ents have not been made publicly available. Officials at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve have declined to comment on the letter.
The mings letter offers the latest evidence that the government badly fumbled its best opportunity to learn the full scope of mortgage abuses that inflicted additional harm on already battered neighborhoods and almost certainly deepened the recession that gripped the U.S. in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008.
Untold thousands of people have complained that their lender fouled up their mortgage -- assessing bogus fees, losing applications for loan modifications and even pushing them into an unnecessary foreclosure. Nearly all the evidence that has come to light indicates that these errors were commonplace, and even intentional.
At Bank of America, employees have testified that they lied to homeowners seeking loan modifications, denied their applications for invented reasons and were rewarded for pushing borrowers into foreclosure.
A 2012 study conducted by academics and regulators at both the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve found that the mortgage industry had screwed up the modifications of more than 800,000 loans.
the government knew Sallie Mae was cheating US service members and breaking the law, but renewed its five year contract anyway:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_5229312.htmlFederal investigators discovered evidence showing Sallie Mae cheated active-duty military service members on their federal student loans at least two months before the Department of Education told the company it planned to renew its lucrative contract to collect loan payments.
The evidence led officials to preliminarily conclude as early as August that Sallie Mae had allegedly violated the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act in servicing some federal student loans, according to people familiar with the probe. The law requires companies to reduce interest rates on student loans to no more than 6 percent upon request by service members called to active duty.
The revelation that some federal officials believed Sallie Mae violated the service members law by failing to allow active-duty soldiers to use critical protections for their federal student loans has prompted outrage among a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers. Student advocates are trying to use the findings to force the department to suspend ties with the company.
The timing of the discovery, not previously reported, raises new questions about the Education Department’s October decision to reward Sallie Mae with a potential five-year extension of its existing contract to collect payments on federal student loans. The company’s contract with the Education Department, which expires in June, requires it to comply at all times with all relevant federal laws in its pursuit of borrowers’ monthly payments on their federal student loans.
ish.... interesting.
Thanks, I will have to devote a lunch hour to it at some point.
Mortgage Companies Break The Law And Their Own Promises To Homeowners
Mortgage companies in California continue to routinely violate foreclosure laws and go back on promises they made in legal settlements, according to housing counselors and advocates, despite new federal rules designed to stamp out lingering problems in the mortgage servicing industry.
Homeowner advocates “continue to report frustration with poor servicer responsiveness” in response to a survey by the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC). Mortgage servicers fail to provide a consistent contact person for caseworkers and homeowners, lose do ents, ignore the timelines they are supposed to follow for responding to inquiries, and fail to process paperwork properly when a homeowner’s loan gets transferred from one company to another.
The survey is meant to capture the impact of new rules for mortgage servicers from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), but most respondents say it’s too soon to tell how the new requirements are working. The CRC report says its respondents have seen a “moderate improvement in servicer practices,” but the counselors quoted in the report emphasize that new rules can only do so much without authorities following through with strict oversight of how the industry is responding. “Servicers have not changed their practices and will not unless there is auditing and enforcement,” one respondent to the CRC survey wrote.
The report also features nearly a dozen separate homeowner horror stories. Gemma and Cornelio Jaochico of Castro Valley followed every instruction they got from Wells Fargo in hopes of winning a loan modification after Gemma lost her job and their mortgage became untenable. The bank told the Jaochicos it would postpone the sale of their home while reviewing the modification request, but then sold the house out from under them and filed an eviction notice. The bank refused to revisit the modification application and even rejected the couple’s attempt to repay the full overdue amount after scraping funds together from family members. The Jaochicos ultimately lost their home in February of this year. Other foreclosure victims like Josefina Duenas held onto their homes, but only after years of stonewalling and paperwork deceptions drew homeowner advocates to file official complaints against the servicers.
The stories and survey findings from the CRC are in line with what other reports have found about the mortgage servicing business model. The official monitor for the National Mortgage Settlement that was supposed to clean up the industry found that banks continue to violate the terms of that 2012 agreement. A CFPB review of industry practices found that servicers frequently seek to intimidate borrowers who need modifications and routinely mishandle payments and paperwork that homeowners have made properly.
Evidence that mortgage servicers continue to flout the law in ways that cost people their homes shouldn’t be all that surprising. The industry’s paperwork problems have been building up for years, with loans frequently changing hands without all the proper do entation. Companies got so accustomed to doctoring the records in order to make deals appear legitimate that the largest mortgage servicer in the country even had a formal instruction manual to teach employees how to gin up the do ent they needed to prove a sale or foreclosure was legal. Trillions of dollars worth of mortgages don’t have any legally valid owner thanks to the industry’s paperwork problems. But ineffectual enforcement efforts from the government have allowed companies to continue violating homeowners’ rights with near impunity.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/05/21/3440289/foreclosure-survey-california/
BofA to settle with DOJ for $12B:
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_e...MDAwNTEwNDUyWjBank of America Corp. BAC +1.13% is in talks to pay at least $12 billion to settle civil probes by the Justice Department and a number of states into the bank's alleged handling of shoddy mortgages, an amount that could raise the government tab for the bank's precrisis conduct to more than $18 billion, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
At least $5 billion of that amount is expected to go toward consumer relief—consisting of help for homeowners in reducing principal amounts, reducing monthly payments and paying for blight removal in struggling neighborhoods, these people said. As the negotiations with the government heat up, the bank is being pressed to pay billions more than the $12 billion it is offering.
I'd make the Fed cram back down the banks' throats all the toxic MBS it bought with QEx.
and in so doing, you'd wreck the US banking system. admittedly, it deserved to fall on its face.
problem there was, the political and social consequences would have been profound. misery, chaos, economic breakdown, probable martial law...a radical change in the status quo no doubt, but would that really have been preferable?
The TBTF banks were bankrupt, should have been nationalized, investors take a haircut, TBTF broken up (esp separate insurance from investment banking from retail banking), the new banks severely regulated as to interest rates and fees. Could it have happened? no. Will the financial sector continue to create financial crises and Human-Americans in every orifice? yes.
Citigroup settles mortgage fraud allegations for $7B:
Citigroup has agreed to pay $7 billion in a deal with the government for misleading investors about the riskiness of mortgage-backed securities sold in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, the Justice Department announced Monday.
The deal marks another notch for a task force formed by President Barack Obama in 2012 to investigate whether major banks knew they were packaging shoddy loans into securities sold to investors, which included pension funds, local governments and other financial ins utions.
The settlement struck with Citi follows several months of talks that at one point broke down over the size of the penalty and federal authorities last month were preparing to sue the bank before the negotiations got back on track.
Citigroup, which received $45 billion in taxpayer bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis, is one of the largest banks yet to be penalized by the task force. The fine includes a $4 billion civil penalty, which Attorney General Eric Holder said is the largest of its kind, and $2.5 billion for programs intended to help struggling borrowers.
“The penalty is appropriate given the strength of the evidence of the wrongdoing committed by Citi,” Holder said at a news conference on Monday. “Despite the fact that Citigroup learned of serious and widespread defects among the increasingly risky loans they were securitizing, the bank and its employees concealed these defects.”
Mirable Dictu! Florida Activists Help Depose Terrible Foreclosure Judge
Mr. Stopa: Judge, you acknowledged yourself, on multiple occasions, on the record, that, you know — Initially, you had multiple times where you said you were ruling for the defendant, and then you said if you didn’t, it would be reversed. I’m not arguing with you, but my point is that I think there are legitimate grounds to go to the Appellate Court, and before my client is divested of the property and a third party purchaser tries to buy it and, potentially, take possession, ultimately to potentially be removed, then a stay should be entered so that we can pursue our right on an appeal…
The Court: You’re welcome to do that.
Mr. Stopa: Can I submit you an Order that grants a stay?
The Court: No. Your stay is denied.
Mr. Stopa: On the issue of stay, can I ask for an explanation, or what have you, because, you know –
The Court: My job is to move cases.
Mr. Stopa: I’m sorry?
The Court: My job is to move cases and that’s what I’m doing.
Lewis basically embodied the concept that homeowners with arrears are automatically deadbeats, and that the actual procedures of law establishing property rights, existing for over 300 years in America, meant absolutely nothing. There’s not even the semblance of impartiality here; foreclosure cases simply move to final judgment by default. Not to mention that she was boorish, rude, and dismissive of people simply trying to have their day in court. Here are a series of testimonials – the words “vile,” “de able” and “disgrace” frequently crop up.
She said she suspects most of the complaints come from lawyers, like many of those in Ticktin’s office, who appear before her on foreclosure cases. Many are ill-trained, never having had the advantage of being mentored by older lawyers, she said.
This is a typical take from Lewis. The lawyers she harassed and demeaned in her courtroom every day simply had to be unqualified. But when so many lawyers have the same complaint, it’s obviously indicative of the problem.
The legal community across the state backed Ticktin, as did several editorial boards. “At some point in her current six-year term, in bent Palm Beach County Circuit Court Judge Diana Lewis’ reputation for rudeness stopped being a forgivable quirk and became an embarrassment for the judiciary,” said the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Activists, lawyers and ordinary Floridians donated money and time to Ticktin’s campaign (here’s an example). I’m told that friends of the blog Lisa Epstein and Michael Redman stayed on their feet in the hot sun on Tuesday for several hours, encouraging voters to choose Ticktin over Lewis.
It paid off. Last Tuesday Ticktin defeated Lewis 54-46. My spies tell me that Judge Lewis was more peevish than usual on the bench the next day.
No matter; she won’t be there much longer.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/...+capitalism%29
we already knew Obama was shielding banks from accountability for one of the biggest ripoffs in history, but yesterday his administration finally admitted it:
http://www.hngn.com/articles/50472/2...d-official.htmA top Federal Reserve official admitted Friday that the U.S. government has worked to protect big banks from criminal prosecution due to the belief that such prosecution could harm the financial system, the Huffington Post reported.
U.S. government protection of big banks is a policy the Obama administration has adamantly denied, but during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Friday, William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, candidly admitted to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, that the policy was indeed a reality.
Under the Obama administration, despite overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, large financial organizations have avoided criminal prosecution for the following: laundering money for suspected terrorists and drug cartels, manipulating interest rate benchmarks, rigging various commodities markets, misleading investors in mortgage-linked securities, tricking homeowners into taking out expensive mortgages, manipulating municipal debt markets, and breaking state and federal rules when seizing homes from borrowers who were behind on their payments, according to the Huffington Post.
and there's no reversing, no stopping the govt collusion with the corrupt-to-core financial sector, always TBTF. TBTJ
governments and great fortunes fail. has happened in the past, will happen again.
nothing lasts forever, boutons. not even oligarchies.
well duh, America can't remember from 20 minute ago, and they probably can't think forward much more than that any. Instant gratification rules. "living one day at a time" is no way to run a civilization
There are no positive signs, so I'd say America is ed and un able, and I'll grant you the qualification "for decades to come", and by then AGW will be wreaking unsurmountable havoc on water, food, coastal flooding all over the planet.
if your crystal ball only detects the near future, I'd say you're pretty much worthless as a fortune teller.There are no positive signs, so I'd say America is ed and un able
the signs aren't globally bad for renewable energy. look at Germany. change may come too late to reverse damage already done, but there is the bare possibility the rate of change can be slowed in the long term.by then AGW will be wreaking unsurmountable havoc on water, food, coastal flooding all over the planet.
we're by no means irrevocably ed. the course we decide on now matters very much for a lot of things. regarding energy consumption, individual choice can be mighty in the aggregate.
I'm talking about lifetimes for current adults, 30 - 40 more years
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