One of my walking routes to work takes me through a few alleyways, including one behind a low-rent apartment building. Yesterday morning, the entryway to that particular alley was clogged with what looked like the detritus of a bad breakup or an eviction: a mattress, a boxspring, lamps, clothes, chairs, boxes of household crap, all soggy and soiled.

I walked by again in the afternoon and there were half a dozen salvagers sorting through the crap and making little piles for themselves. (Including one guy who seemed particularly into collecting shards of broken mirror.) I walked by again last night and saw the same thing: the salvagers, the little piles, the big pile diminishing. This morning, more of the same. It was as if they'd worked through the night.

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  • bk

I don't really have anything to add except I've never seen anything like that in Seattle before—and that you should read Matt Taibbi's new article about Alayne Fleischmann, the JP Morgan whistleblower who is finally breaking her silence about "massive criminal securities fraud" in the banking world's mortgage dealings that resulted in millions of foreclosures and evictions:

This past year she watched as Holder's Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called "statements of facts," which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.

And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. "I could be sued into bankruptcy," she says. "I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don't start speaking up, then this really is all we're going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history."

... the government decided to help Chase bury the evidence. It began when Holder's office scheduled a press conference for the morning of September 24th, 2013, to announce sweeping civil-fraud charges against the bank, all laid out in a detailed complaint drafted by the U.S. attorney's Sacramento office. But that morning the presser was suddenly canceled, and no complaint was filed. According to later news reports, Dimon had personally called Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, and asked to reopen negotiations to settle the case out of court.

It goes without saying that the ordinary citizen who is the target of a government investigation cannot simply pick up the phone, call up the prosecutor in charge of his case and have a legal proceeding canceled. But Dimon did just that. "And he didn't just call the prosecutor, he called the prosecutor's boss," Fleischmann says.

Which brings to mind the old Dorothy Parker quote: "If you want to know what god thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."