On evil

Yesterday, I had planned to write about Sergey Aleynikov, Goldman Sachs and the amazing market manipulation software program which has spawned so many juicy conspiracy theories. Frankly, I'm afraid that many of you are well ahead of me on this one, since I spent much of July media-free. So my thoughts on that tale will wait until later. In the meantime, feel free to send in your own thoughts.

Right now, I'd like to draw your attention to the most evil -- downright chilling -- story to come out of the current economic mess. A couple of days ago, the NYT published an expose of those fly-by-night firms which promise to renegotiate mortgages for people who have fallen behind in their payments.

Bottom line: As often as not, these shady firms do nothing. Not a thing.

Many of these companies are owned and staffed by the same scoundrels who arranged all of those subprime loans in the first place. Now they use high-pressure sales techniques, deceptive ads, and a battery of outrageous lies to convince cash-strapped people to hand over what little money they have. The people who work for these firms tell the victims that they can convince lenders to renegotiate terms. They will say they have achieved a success rate of 60 percent, 70 percent or better.

It's all a lie. The figures are imaginary. After taking the money, these con artists often do nothing to change the terms of the loan.

Here's the passage that freezes the soul:

By March, sales agents were inundated by calls from furious clients who had paid long ago, but not heard from anyone. Some called from motels, their belongings piled in boxes, weeping as they recounted losing their homes.

The agents let most calls go to voicemail, playing the most dramatic messages over speakerphones for communal amusement, Mr. Pejman said.

“Guys would sit there and laugh,” he said. “ ‘This lady’s going crazy,’ that sort of thing.”

I'm reminded of the Enron consters who were caught on tape snickering at the people they had defrauded. But this situation strikes me as being even worse.

Sometimes I wonder if humanity is salvageable.

I also wonder if capitalism is salvageable.

More than that: Can any economic or political system be made to work when its human agents have an illimitable ability to rationalize perfidy?

In Victorian England, it used to be said that civilization depends on the majority of humankind agreeing to observe rules of behavior which can never be codified -- rules which can be neither legislated nor enforced by the police. No such rules now apply.

I can -- in a sense, and to a degree -- understand theft. I can understand how an embittered person might rationalize robbery in order to keep himself fed in a barbaric world. Every great fortune was founded on a crime, as the French say. If the Rockefeller fortune began with the selling of snake oil, why shouldn't you or I follow a similar course?

But to laugh at those who have lost everything? That's not cold; that's sub-zero. Even Jack the Ripper would have been frightened by that level of callousness.