OneWest Bank, which Donald Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, ran from 2009 to 2015, repeatedly broke California’s foreclosure laws during that period, according to a previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office.
The memo obtained by The Intercept alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.
In the memo, the leaders of the state attorney general’s Consumer Law Section said they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” in a yearlong investigation. In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties.
But Harris’s office, without any explanation, declined to prosecute the case.
Mnuchin, the former CEO of OneWest, was already facing challenges in his upcoming Senate confirmation hearings on account of his bank’s ruthless foreclosure practices, ranging from locking out one homeowner during a Minneapolis blizzard to foreclosing on another over a 27-cent payment shortfall.
“After years peddling the kind of dangerous mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the economy, Mnuchin swooped in after the crash to take a second bite out of families by aggressively — and sometimes illegally — foreclosing on their homes,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in a statement last month. Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, warned: “Given Mr. Mnuchin’s history of profiting off the victims of predatory lending, I look forward to asking him how his Treasury Department would work for Americans who are still waiting for the economic recovery to show up in their communities.”
The consistent violations of California foreclosure processes outlined in the memo would indicate that Mnuchin’s bank didn’t merely act callously, but did so with blatant disregard for the law.
According to the memo, OneWest also obstructed the investigation by ordering third parties to refuse to comply with state subpoenas.
Whether Mnuchin directed efforts to prevent scrutiny of his bank’s practices could be a focus of the confirmation hearings.
The memo also raises questions about then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was sworn in as a U.S. senator on Tuesday, and who will soon have to vote on Mnuchin’s appointment.
Why did her office close the case, deciding not to “conduct a full investigation of a national bank’s misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened,” as her own investigators had urged?
State and federal law enforcement have been severely criticized for failing to hold accountable those responsible for the financial crisis and its aftermath. The OneWest case provides another example, and this time, the failure to prosecute could help the nation’s next treasury secretary get confirmed.
To understand the importance of these revelations, one needs to know a bit about California’s nonjudicial foreclosure process. If a homeowner misses mortgage payments and no resolution can be worked out, the lender files a notice of default, starting a 90-day clock where the homeowner can either repay the debt or face a sale of their property.
In the original deed of trust that establishes the mortgage, the lender designates a third-party trustee to handle the sale process in case of foreclosure. Lenders can change trustees at any time, memorializing this with a “substitution of trustee” document (SOT).
After the 90 days expire, if the homeowner is still in default, the trustee can record a notice of sale, setting a date for the auction at least 21 days thereafter. The winner of the auction gets the home, and can proceed to evict the homeowner.
Because no judge oversees this process, adherence to the rules is paramount.
“Compliance with the law gives us confidence in the outcome,” said Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and an expert on foreclosures. “The whole scheme is a gift from the legislature to the mortgage industry. If the state is giving the industry benefits to take shortcuts, it’s reasonable to expect the industry to comply strictly with that process.”
And according to the state investigation, OneWest wasn’t following the rules.
OneWest already had a history of using false documents in foreclosures. A July 2009 deposition of Vice President Erica Johnson-Seck revealed that she “robo-signed” 6,000 foreclosure-related papers per week, spending just 30 seconds on each sworn affidavit that attested to the veracity of all relevant information in the case. Johnson-Seck even admitted to not reading the documents before signing them. OneWest entered into a consent order in April 2011 with the now-defunct federal Office of Thrift Supervision over related failures in the foreclosure process.
Knowing that OneWest foreclosed on thousands of California homeowners, the Consumer Law Section decided to investigate in 2012.
Because of federal pre-emption rules, state prosecutors cannot subpoena national banks for information about their core functions prior to filing a lawsuit. But the California attorney general’s office was nevertheless able to review over 204,000 publicly available foreclosure documents filed with county recording offices throughout the state, along with other documents purchased from a website called ForeclosureRadar (now called PropertyRadar) that tracks foreclosure activity.
Working through the county records, the attorneys immediately uncovered a startling finding: 86 OneWest documents changing the designation of third-party trustees (SOTs) bore a date prior to March 19, 2009, the date OneWest opened for business. Some dated back to 2008.
“Because it would have been impossible for OneWest to sign the instruments before it became an operational bank,” four deputy attorneys general from the Consumer Law Section wrote in the memo, “we deduced that the instruments were backdated.”
Prosecutors also issued subpoenas to third parties with access to OneWest documents.
According to their memo, one subpoena went to Lender Processing Services, a company that assisted with foreclosure operations. LPS produced a random sample of 300 OneWest loan files and agreed to send more, but on February 13, 2012, Jennifer Gray, OneWest’s head of litigation, told the attorney general’s office that “the loan files belonged to OneWest and that LPS could not produce them.”
The Consumer Law Section feared OneWest would sue them to stop the investigation, as they did in January 2010, when a lawsuit shut down an inquiry into OneWest’s reverse mortgage subsidiary Financial Freedom. So prosecutors only got the 300 LPS files.
Mnuchin spokesperson Tara Bradshaw said that “state attorneys general have no jurisdiction to investigate federally chartered banks like OneWest. When OneWest pointed that out to the California attorney general’s office, they withdrew their subpoena.”
(Brian Brooks, the lead lawyer on that 2010 OneWest lawsuit, eventually became OneWest’s Vice Chairman.)
The relatively few additional files prosecutors were able to obtain revealed more evidence of backdating. The Consumer Law Section reviewed 913 documents from Quality Loan Service Corp., a trustee that worked with OneWest; 909 of them were backdated. The LPS files included backdated documents as well. Investigators determined this because the document metadata showing the dates of execution showed later dates than the ones stamped on the documents themselves.
Investigators surmised that OneWest listed trustees on notices of default before formally executing the SOTs, then backdated the SOTs to make it look like those trustees were already in place at the time the notice of default was issued.
Had OneWest put the correct date on the SOTs, they would have had to file new notices of default, restarting the 90-day clock and delaying the foreclosure.
“That’s consistent with a pattern of creating whatever documents that appear necessary at the time that they’re created to grease the wheels of the foreclosure machine,” said Mark Zanides, a former federal prosecutor who has represented homeowners in California.
The memo also alleges that OneWest occasionally acted as the loan owner on these SOTs when it was merely the servicer — and therefore did not have the authority to execute the documents. Other SOTs were recorded in county offices without being signed or without being dated. Trustees acting on OneWest’s behalf also did not honor the 90-day waiting period in dozens of instances, issuing the notice of sale prior to the deadline. In other cases, SOTs were never mailed to homeowners notifying them of the identity of the new trustees with the power to sell their homes.
Finally, investigators found irregularities with foreclosure sales. At auction, bidders must typically pay the full amount by cash or cashier’s check. But the “present beneficiary” — the current owner of the mortgage — can make a “credit bid” at the beginning of the auction if they want to keep the property themselves.
These credit bids, usually for the amount due on the loan, typically stop other bidders, who would never be able to profit from a re-sale if they paid full price for a foreclosed home. “Credit bids generally have the effect of deterring or entirely chilling a competitive bidding process,” said Katherine Porter.
The Consumer Law Section found that, as with the SOTs, the key documents assigning beneficial interest in the loan sometimes were created after the auctions. In other words, OneWest made or directed others to make credit bids despite not being the present beneficiary.
Not only did this mean the winner of the auction may have made an unlawful bid, but credit bidders were exempt from significant documentary transfer taxes imposed by cities and counties. Those taxes range from $1.10 to $16.10 for every $1,000 of purchase price. Submitting credit bids saved OneWest and its partners from paying the taxes.
In 2015, CIT Bank bought OneWest. In a statement, CIT spokesperson Matthew Klein said that “CIT complies with all applicable laws and regulations, including California’s foreclosure process and all applicable servicing guidelines, and has implemented enhancements that strengthen the overall operations and controls at OneWest Bank.”
The January 18, 2013, document obtained by The Intercept, known as a “package memo,” was a pitch from the deputy attorneys general in the Consumer Law Section to their superiors. It laid out the evidence obtained, ran through the resources required for the case and the likelihood of success, and gave pros and cons for filing. In conjunction with the package memo, investigators directly made their case to supervisors and members of Attorney General Harris’s executive committee.
Though the state investigators could not subpoena OneWest and were obstructed from obtaining more documents, they extrapolated that a full and unencumbered inquiry would yield at least 5,600 violations of foreclosure sale auctions, and turn up instances of backdating in nearly all of the 35,000 foreclosures OneWest had completed in California from 2009 to 2012. They wrote that there would be “substantial public justice value” in such an investigation, which could only proceed through the discovery process of a civil lawsuit. That discovery could have turned up other examples of noncompliance which may have been even more harmful to homeowners.
The attorneys wrote that scrutinizing the scope of OneWest’s misconduct would provide public accountability, and enhance the deterrent to violating state foreclosure laws. They hoped to get injunctive relief, forcing OneWest to verify the accuracy of every foreclosure document they issued.
That’s on top of civil penalties, which could be up to $2,500 for each violation, and double for “protected classes” like senior citizens or the disabled. Additional restitution could proceed from any premature foreclosures executed as a result of the misconduct.
The case did not contemplate criminal indictments, even though many of the violations described were felonies; Consumer Law is a civil enforcement section.
The prosecutors made clear to their superiors that the case would be a tough one, with no guarantee of success. They said they expected litigation to chew up substantial resources and last three to five years (which would have been about now).
“We face a higher than average risk that the court may choose to award minimal amounts of restitution and/or penalties,” they wrote, explaining that they expected OneWest to argue that homeowners defaulted on their mortgages and were therefore not harmed by process violations.
Indeed, California courts have been known to accept such arguments. In a recent case against OneWest, a trial court agreed that a homeowner alleging improper documents in his mortgage case “never claimed he was not in default or that the ‘true lender’ would have refrained from foreclosing under the circumstances.” Similarly, in a 2015 case against OneWest for failing to execute an SOT before issuing the notice of default — precisely the violation at issue in the Consumer Law Section investigation — the First District Court of Appeal allowed the foreclosure to go forward.
But those were cases brought by individual homeowners, rather than by a state law enforcement apparatus charged with policing noncompliance with statutory laws.
Consumer Law planned to argue that “while it may be true that the homeowners were delinquent on their mortgage obligations, that did not change the fact that they were denied the procedural protections required by law.”
Legal experts agree that ignoring clear violations would make a joke of California’s foreclosure law. “The foreclosure statutes establish a proper way to do things that will ensure that all parties are treated fairly,” said former federal prosecutor Mark Zanides. “If you ignore that, you’ve reduced yourself to a banana republic, where courts sworn to uphold the law are precluded from doing so by being given documents that are false.”
Mnuchin spokesperson Tara Bradshaw, without commenting on the violations themselves, would only say by way of justification, “the attorney general’s office made no finding of any violation and took no action against OneWest.”
Consumer Law Section attorneys recommended “that the attorney general authorize us to file a civil enforcement action against OneWest.” Two months later, they were told that the office would not move forward with the complaint. OneWest representatives were not even brought in for a meeting to discuss the matter.
So why didn’t Kamala Harris leap at the chance to take on a bank that her staff said was illegally rushing Californians out of their homes? Why did she reject a case that her office had already spent significant resources on during a year of line-level investigation?
Kristin Ford, communications director at the attorney general’s office, did not respond to a detailed request for comment. Without an official explanation, we can only speculate why Harris passed up the opportunity. Perhaps she judged the case too difficult, or not a high enough priority, or not having enough of a human interest. Or maybe it was something else.
Harris has been criticized for a lack of vigor in prosecuting foreclosure fraud before. She set up a Mortgage Fraud Strike Force in 2011, dedicated to “protect innocent homeowners and bring justice to those who defraud them.” But despite hundreds of complaints of loan modification fraud — a primary target identified by the office — it only prosecuted 10 cases in the first three years.
County district attorneys and even attorneys general in other states filed many more California-based cases, despite more limited resources. And some of the cases Harris did file began under her predecessor Jerry Brown or were organized by other local and federal law enforcement teams; Harris just gave her strike-force credit for them.
In fact, many of the cases Harris’s office is known for were part of multistate or prior investigations. The 2012 $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement with five large mortgage servicers (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally Bank) over allegations of illegal foreclosure practices, which Harris touted in campaign ads, was a 49-state and federal matter, where she was not deeply involved with negotiations and was criticized as a grandstander.
The Intercept asked Harris’s office for a breakdown of cases initiated and prosecuted by the Consumer Law Section during her tenure. They have not yet provided them.
Rigid hierarchies within Harris’s office were known to have made it difficult to get cases moving. Sign-offs to open investigations, issue subpoenas, and proceed with enforcement all traveled through a chain of command from senior assistant attorneys general running the various divisions, to a small inner circle of special assistants known as the executive committee, to Harris. And this created a bottleneck, especially if Harris was tending to other matters. She has been criticized for luxury travel spending and a relentless nationwide campaign schedule throughout her attorney general tenure.
Many special assistants came from Harris’s district attorney staff in San Francisco, and several are joining her in Washington as she enters the U.S. Senate.
The investigators who actually did the ground work in the OneWest case were not present for executive committee decision-making.
One of the supervisors involved in the OneWest case, Supervising Deputy Attorney General Benjamin Diehl, left the office in November 2013 to join Stroock Stroock & Lavan, a corporate law firm that represents Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup in cases against consumers, regulatory agencies and state attorneys general. Emails indicate that Diehl arranged private meetings with Stroock partners six months before his hiring, while he still worked for the attorney general. Stroock would not make Diehl available for comment.
Harris’s prodigious fundraising also raises questions about how attentive she is to the needs of campaign contributors. Prior to signing on with Trump, Mnuchin donated to members of both parties. He gave $2,000 to Harris’ Senate campaign in February 2016. Among the investors in OneWest Bank was major Democratic donor George Soros, who maxed out to Harris’ campaign in 2015.
“I don’t know why they didn’t move forward,” said Paulina Gonzalez of the California Reinvestment Coalition, a state housing advocacy group. “There’s some really concerning information in this document that would say to us there needs to be further investigation. … This is damning evidence of clear violations.”
Gonzalez, whose organization has been tracking OneWest for several years, also received a copy of the package memo and sample complaint in the mail. Her copy came “with Wonder Woman stamps and the return address of Planned Parenthood,” Gonzalez said. The copy sent to us had no return address.
With Mnuchin set to take over the Treasury Department, Gonzalez said the memo raises “real concerns about his ethics and potential for illegal behavior.” She said her organization would take up the matter with OneWest’s federal regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), along with Harris’ replacement as California attorney general, Xavier Becerra.
Bradshaw, the Mnuchin spokesperson, provided a report from the OCC showing relatively fewer error rates in OneWest foreclosures than other national banks. But those were reviewed under the context of harm to borrowers, not statutory noncompliance.
OneWest may also have violated a loss share agreement signed with the FDIC upon purchasing assets from the failed lender IndyMac. That agreement, which backstopped OneWest losses on foreclosures, committed OneWest to make good faith options to try to avoid them. Violations that sped up foreclosures could indicate that the bank didn’t make such an effort.
Senate Democrats have already attacked Mnuchin over OneWest’s foreclosure practices, even setting up a website inviting foreclosure victims to tell their stories. One of those victims, Teena Colebrook, voted for Donald Trump but lost her faith in that decision after the Mnuchin pick. In an interview, Colebrook alleged discrepancies on her substitution of trustee, similar to what was described in the package memo.
“It has to get out why this man should not be put in charge of Treasury,” said Colebrook. “Nobody minds a billionaire, but not one feeding off people’s misery.”
Colebrook says she sent materials to Kamala Harris years earlier, asking her to help her save her home. Harris’s response?
“She said ‘We can’t get involved in an individual case.’”
Top photo: Steven Mnuchin at Trump Tower in November.
As a CA resident, this report sickens me. I hope all of you in CA and elsewhere will fight like hell against politicians who refuse to stand up for “We, the People” as I plan to do. I always wonder how much difference it makes, but I’ve written to Sen. Harris to let her know how disappointed I am that she didn’t and referencing this article. I’ll be watching to see if she takes a stand against Mnuchin’s confirmation. It’s time for an uprising against politicians who refuse to stand up for the people they represent. I haven’t faced foreclosure, but I lost a $200,000 inheritance over the Washington Mutual fiasco and it infuriates me that virtually no high-level banker has gone to jail (unlike those involved with the S&L scandal in the 80’s & 90’s). It makes me lose total faith in government, but not ready to give up the fight just yet.
great pick!!
The current military budget is to be about $773 billion.
1) there are about 330,000,000,000 people in the US
2) say 2 children 2 parents leaves 165,000,000,000 employable persons – factoring in under 18 & over 65 being equal
3) 5% unemployment and 47% dont make enough to pay taxes, leaves about 80,000,000 employed.
4) coupling everyone to family or near family units will be 40,000,000 employed families, if you are single you wont be for long.
5) now, 40m families have to pay that horrendous bill. This maths out to about $19,000 per family.
$19,000 per family
HERE IS THE SCAM. T-BILLS nobody cashes in but trades them in for new ones and only collects the interest forever without a run on the bank.
HERE IS THE FIX. Sell them T-bills any way you can.
ALL HAIL THE NEW JUNK BOND KING!
Congratulations everyone who whined that Hillary was not pure enough; you got the cabinet members (and the rest of government) that you deserve.
I guess this hypocrisy will finally end when the “silent majority” realizes that the ones who lost their homes aren’t the only victims. the scumbags in the financial industry have stolen the life savings of an entire nation.
jobs, savings, pension funds all savaged so walking excrement like weill, blankfein and diamond can live the lifestyle they “deserve”.
given the role this a$$ played on both sides of the mortgage meltdown and subsequent massive transfer of the nations wealth to scum like him. this lizard should be in jail!!! when are the people who have suffered at his greedy hand going to see justice. if I walked into his bank and stole any amount I would go up the river. the ag who gave this lowlife a pass s/b prosecuted too (must have graduated with eric holder). so now trump thinks he s/b sec treas. along with the other “job creators” trump has chosen for his inner circle and the military/intelligence guys to run the control arm of his government my guess is that after 4 years there won’t be much left of the American experiment with liberty for a few and justice for none.
I agree it appears that Kamala Harris was as guilty as this dirtbag and just another corporate Dem! What we need is people who will prosecute all the dirtbags.
A sign of a contagion is when you begin to dig up other behaviours and people when you look into it (or in this case him, the him being Mnunchin). So here I am reading up on this Harris character. Something really stinks in Denmark. If you don’t think there is a mandarin class screwing over everyone, warping politics, destroying discourse and pursuing nothing but their own shoddy oily self interest you’ve got your head stuck in the sand. The symbolic bird of the U.S. doesn’t deserve to be a bald eagle, it should be an ostrich.
The only question is, will he be prosecuted or not? If yes, good; hit him hard and mean. If not, then the accusations mean nothing. Instead, protest him. Throw rotten eggs and tomatoes at him. Make his life hell; his and his family’s. He did it often enough to others to deserve centuries of it back.
Teena, Hon’…there are NO Billionaires who DON’T feed off of other people’s misery. And plenty that profit from creating it. The French figured this out about two hundred years ago. Rinse, History, Repeat…
Some of us have been less than hopeful about Kamala Harris – and wonder how easily she’s swayed by monied interests. Now we have something concrete to support our concerns, in the attached pdf
“The memo also raises questions about then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was sworn in as a U.S. senator on Tuesday, and who will soon have to vote on Mnuchin’s appointment…
Why did her office close the case, deciding not to “conduct a full investigation of a national bank’s misconduct and provide a public accounting of what happened,” as her own investigators had urged?”
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3250383/OneWest-Package-Memo.pdf
thanks!
Tens of thousands of people should have gone to jail over the Wall Street super scam that continues to this day. I just checked the Wikipedia article on Kamala Harris; it had little to say on her not prosecuting the banksters but neither did AG Holter, another scumbag. Only in America would she not be white, not even an Oreo like obomber. Kleptocratic courtier s for the ruling class!
“Senate Democrats have already attacked Mnuchin over OneWest’s foreclosure practices.”
What feigned outrage, why didn’t the Democrats make any noise when their Senator, billionaire John Corzine, transferred hundreds of millions out of his own bank when his ponze scheme was collapsing.
Why didn’t they cause this uproar when Obama let off the entire banking industry for fraudulent robo-signing?
Good questions. I’m going with a corrupt self-interested hypocrisy, causing me to laugh at them same as I always have Republicans.
Thank you and I will be asking these same questions for the next eight years.
I never understood the whole home ownership meme in the US. A mortgage doesn’t mean you own the house. It means you’re paying a bank a lot more money for the illusion of ownership. I’ve had grown adults tell me they are “investing” when buying a house. They say they’re buying a house valued at $500,000 at the time of purchase, but after 30 years of payments they’re paying more like $1,000,000 and the value of the house could be no where near the purchase value. This is of course using a new job’s income which jobs now rarely last you 30 years.
I always encourage people to rent. You can get out of leases a lot easier. Your land lord is liable to get stuff done, and if they’re crap you can move. And if the values of the house tanks or you lose your job, at least you aren’t drowning in debt. Stop perpetuating the delusion that individual ownership of houses is possible with our meager incomes as workers. It isn’t.
The banks are predatory, sure, but they prey on ignorant and gullible people. Wise up to their game. It’s rigged aginst the customer.
The ONLY way owning a house makes sense is it you could buy it outright. No mortgage.
It’s all about taxes!
You get to write off the depreciation over the course of that 30 year mortgage. Then you can pump up your home renovations and write that off too. In the end, your tax benefit is the value of the house, so the $1M you’ve spent winds up being less than $500K because ostensibly you’ve reinvested those funds over the years, rather than succumbing to affluenza.
However, removing taxes from the equation, you are spot on…terrible investment.
Since the most recent crisis by the banks ~ many “predatory” vulture capitalists have bought properties and when you sign a lease now – you agree to repair everything – heating, roof, etc – all the things the “landlord” used to pay for. If we take away the mortgage deduction – you will see the prices of homes plummet ~ and this is a deduction that primarily benefits the richest among us. We need new ways of lending that don’t involve the big banks ~ and new ways of being in community. Thank you for this article –
Look at you gettin’ all CNBC interviewed after Democracy Now, you news-scooper you!
I remember rumors of Jamie Dimon before Mnuchin, so it’ll be birds of a particular feather regardless.
Great work! Fabulous! I was in the building industry (new homes) in So Cal during this period. I hope to see more work like this. IndyMac/One West was just a fraction of the devastation. How can we NOT charge for the entire derivative/CDW scheme is unimaginable. And for Mnuchin to be Treasury. -just sickening . So, a question. What may have happened if AIG was allowed to fail? (post Lehman) I read somewhere transportation would have been stressed. Would commerce be threatened? As in, planes, trucks, freight shipping etc. Are we talking groceries and gasoline not being resupplied? How close did we come to a global meltdown? Looks to me like we were at a cliffs edge.
“Looks to me like we were at a cliffs edge.”
Certainly what the PTB would prefer you think.
This whole consumer law prosecution is a fiasco. Why not just bring criminal prosecutions? Forgery and perjury are pretty easy to prove. When attorney generals start sending these banker crooks to jail then I will believe they really care about protecting the consumer.
Forgery and perjury are pretty easy to prove?
Do you recall the statement about a prosecutor being able to obtain a grand jury idictment against a ham sandwich? If that is true the inverse is also true.
Reviewing statutes related to forgery, and perjury, I note they include the phrases “with intent to defraud,” and “makes a material false statement, which he does not believe,” respectively. Both of those are so fluid, and include so much wiggle room, that a prosecutor can do whatever he, or she, wants to do with them.
I am certainly not a fan of Islam, but it does seem like there are some traits in their culture potentially useful in such situations. To begin with, their antipathy to borrowing and paying interest would lead them to pay the pure interest outright as rent, save their money, and avoid buying into the illusion that they own a home when they do not. I understand that there are major tax incentives in the U.S. to make people not do it this way but go through the banks again, but surely the Republicans can be induced to repeal them if it means the middle class takes some more of the vestigial tax burden off the rich.
The other thing, of course, is terrorism; terror is the new democracy, and I have to ask, where are our Voters? If someone is truly screwed out of a house over 27 cents, why isn’t he waiting for the company board meeting to let out with a sawed off shotgun and no duck plugs? Where is the person you can name your child after, whose face is painted on half the trucks on the road, whose birthday means nobody works and nothing moves and people firing guns in the air, whose prison cell is surrounded by square miles of permanent security lockdown because the powers that be know the people await any chance to liberate him? If a farmer hacks a limb off something and it doesn’t respond, it’s a plant; if it tries to kick him with a remaining leg, it’s an animal; and if it gets a posse and comes after him, it’s a neighbor. So far, the Vote seems to be that banks are vegetarians.
Agreed .
Voting is political masturbation !
I never said that. Voting at a ballot box is a weak, but nonetheless a very real and tangible articulation of a terrorist intent, the intent to elect people of your stripe to hire men with guns to go out and enforce your position. At times, when people unite in a cause, it can be extremely powerful. When they are disenfranchised and the would-be leaders are all crooks with their own agenda, less so. One thing to understand about terrorism is that in execution it is not necessarily violent or even illegal at all! The question is, when do people think it is justified, and what kind of just war theory do they use in evaluating it, and do they do it in an efficient and effective way?
Maybe what American voting needs is a bit of “canned laughter” playing in the booth while you participate in the group jerk .
Just a marketing idea .
The analogy ” Voting is political masturbation ! ” is mine Wnt .
I do not ,,, repeat DO NOT ,,, resort to , he says , she says, crap .
American voting ,, in my opinion ,, is a joke ,, a very sick joke !!
We now have a government which runs on a perpetual-war-economy !!!
You are not going to vote that bastard government out .
You can take that to THE BANK ( sick joke ) !
“One thing to understand about terrorism is that in execution it is not necessarily violent “————————Wnt
————————————————————————————
Look pal ,, you terrify people by scaring the living-shit out of them . And the tried and proven procedure is to show people what pain may come to them if they don’t comply . The CIA in most cases does not torture to extract information . It tortures to show what non-compliance can bring .
The people of CA deserve better than Kamala Harris.
It’s a shame they are stuck with her for six years at least.
She was rewarded for inaction… maintaining the corrupt status quo.
At least there is still justice to look forward to… the leaker of this memo (who mailed it with Wonder Woman stamps) will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if Harris and her bipartisan cadre of the corrupt get their way.
Oh, but look… gay marriage and legalized marijuana and dangling shiny objects… so the Democrats involved must be good progressive people… don’t follow the money.
And on the flip side… oh, they’re too rich to be corrupted… don’t follow the money there either though.
The suckers have us outnumbered.
Mr. Mnuchin’s bank may have committed fraud on a sufficiently large scale to render it immune from prosecution. But was the fraud sufficiently large to qualify him to be in charge of the Treasury? This article didn’t make that case, and ultimately it will be for the confirmation committee to decide.
I am happy to report that I saw two great movies this year. As I do not go to theaters, some of you might laugh at my delays.
I saw Sicko a couple of months ago. I knew I would love it – I laughed and I cried.
I just watched Capitalism: A love story. Ditto.
So Capitalism opened with and dealt very starkly with foreclosures. In 2009 CA, when I moved 2.5 west from Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills (the homes on stilts overlooking great vistas) were littered with foreclosure signs. There were streets all over the area that had more signs than no signs. It was easy to find a new home. Since the economy has bounced back so “spectacularly,” they are finally raising rents under Rent Control. They haven’t yet restored our interest payments. This is equivalent to no COLA raises for Social Security – it doesn’t reflect the fact that it costs more to buy food every year.
If Michael Moore is not the conscience of America and one of our greatest treasures (a la Ralph Nader), then I don’t know who is.
BTW – the last time I was in a theater was to see Fahrenheit 911. Do you detect a pattern?
pattern? 1. You won’t be seeing any movies in a theatre until MM makes another. 2. Since F911 there haven’t been any films worthy of seeing given the exhorbitant expense of ticket prices. 3. With the traffic, road rage, and theatre shoortings, staying at home is safer and since you are still alive, proof. 4. You have a penchant for documentaries and dont have a good explanation for not seeing An Inconvenient Truth – at a theatre.
But hey, things are about to get real exciting what with the repubes by attempting to fire the sheriff of ethics. Lots of docu material. Save up!
When I got an email from Harris’ campaign, I wrote back and asked her where she stood on a number of issues. Knowing that people in law enforcement tend to be more conservative, I had many questions.
She also listed the environment on the bottom of her platform. The response that I got was to the effect of thank you for your support.
Why am I not in the least surprised?
Great story, David Dayen. I knew there were reasons that I did not like her much, but I wasn’t sure what they were. My rep, Adam Schiff hasn’t stopped railing about the Russians, so I’ve ignored him.
Most of the FB responses at his page were similar to mine – per the information I got here, at TI.
The neolibs are struggling to move to Dems to the center, while others of us are trying to move them to the left.
This is shaping up to be a doozy of a cabinet. I had tweets ready to go for the House Ethics Committee members this morning. I fired one off for them to share with Rules, but I was preempted.
Move the Dems to the center?!
They have been center/right since Obama took office in 2009!
From Obama’s cozy relationship with the banksters to the Romneycare fiasco otherwise known as Obamacare.
Suggest you go to Truthdig and read Paul Street’s analysis of Obama and the Democrats! It is SPOT ON.
Kamala was spending all her time targeting medical marijuana growers. Low hanging fruit. Easy work. She didn’t protect the people because it required work. It’s a disgrace.
Well shit, here we go with the first of what I’m sure will be many fantastic scandals. My real concern is that the Wimpycrats won’t do much with all this muck.
Thanks TI for another great story. It looks like people know who to leak to, the standard lamestrem media wouldn’t do much with something like this because it’s too complicated.
“Legal experts agree that ignoring clear violations would make a joke of California’s foreclosure law.”
That should be edited to read “Legal experts agree that ignoring clear violations has made a joke of California’s foreclosure law.”
How did the legal experts, and the author, miss the fact that it has already occurred?
open season on homeowners –
1. falsify the valuations of homes on te upside
2. raise prices of retail products
3. up credit card limits and raise cc rates
4. trip up homeowners by adding an item to te bill that results in the homeowner not including that amount
5. foreclose on them to steal the home
JUST LIKE NAKBA 1948 BUT WITH A TWIST
I laughed when I saw your declaration at the end. The banksters are just like the Ziothugs, implacable super predators.
So, Munchkin apparently has just the right credentials for his new job. No surprise there
There is a superb movie that came out last year or so titled 99 Homes. It stars Michael Shannon as a mortgage-busting hardass out to flip as many people out of their homes as he can for the least inadherence to the mortgage contract. He’s the money nearest the homeowner, but he has the big boys behind him, players like OneWest, which bankroll slimeball operations in real life like Shannon’s in the movie.
This is a great little movie that illustrates exactly the type of consumer fraud being perpetrated on the public by companys like OneWest.
Sickening news. Great reporting. Thank you, TI.
I think Mnuchin bought One West after it collapsed from the loses it suffered due to foreclosures. The hanky-panky with the documents has nothing to do with the fact that the owners couldn’t make their payments and were foreclosed due to nonpayment. They lost their homes and there were so many of them that it clogged the system and a little creative streamlining was employed in the process. It happened throughout the country and may have been irregular but no one will recover the home they couldn’t afford that caused the foreclosure.
I doubt that Mnuchin made much if any profit while clearing out all the bad loans/foreclosures from One West many of these properties lost much of their value and sold cheap. He did save the bank and made it profitable enough to later sell. The two foreclosure horror stories may be true but there were millions of foreclosures and there were mistakes.
What is called a credit bid here is the owner/lender of the property legally recovering his own property at the required public foreclosure auction and taxing someone for claiming their own property is nonsense. I had to do this once and fees were paid but no tax.
Mr Propandist:
here is what you missed, or avoided
His national finance chairman (and rumored choice for Treasury Secretary), Steve Mnuchin, ran OneWest Bank, one of the more egregious practitioners of robo-signing and improper foreclosures, disproportionately in minority communities.
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/07/foreclosure-victims-say-donald-trumps-economic-advisor-drove-them-out-of-their-homes/
i dont know if who pays you but you sure would be taking them for a ride, eh?
You are confused. The reason why Mnuchin bought indyMac in the first place was because he saw the economic benefit of clearing the non performing assets off the balance sheet. Once done, the revenue from performing loans would drive revenue and bonusses. This was done with the reset of valuations. Bankers/appraisers were mandated by the government to be much more conservative. There were still many loans that were on the brink ( no equity, barely enough income) which were packaged with the new mortgages swooped up and securitized. Watch The Big Short. The foreclosure process detailed by Dave in Chain of Title is the mechanism to get non performing loans ( often sold to those who couldn’t afford them in first place. But generated securitization revenue) off their balance sheet.
@ wayoutwest
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Or the systemic failures in documenting both the negotiable paper (i.e. the notes) and all the other documents that must be recorded. That’s independent of the systemic bad faith in treating homeowner’s inquiries about their past due amounts, crediting past due payments so as to take their loans out of foreclosure, of being denied trial mods under various federal programs, of lenders systemically “losing” modification paperwork, or using any of a number of subterfuges to enable not timely processing said paperwork . . . all to keep homeowners in the foreclosure process while servicer’s gouged them for fees while stripping the equity from their homes, at least of those who had equity.
It was ugly and nasty and evil, and I saw it all as over the course of 5 years I sued almost every single major financial institution, servicer and loan document processor or custodian.
And the first paragraph is just touching the tip of the iceberg as far as the scams they were running–which doesn’t include outright fraud on the courts of America, knowingly passing fabricated documents, knowingly falsifying affidavits, knowingly recording documents which affiants had no first hand knowledge of, “credit bidders” not being the actual mortgage beneficiary (which was usually a trust assuming the required mortgage docs actually timely made it to the custodian so as to be a lawful asset of the corpus of the trust) as required by law (but rather usually the servicer), gaming the public auctions by postponing them without notice . . . .
I could go on, but it would take me an hour to list all the scams the mortgage industry, bankers, their lawyers, loan documentation producers and servicers ran, and it wasn’t just in one state–it was literally in millions of instances in every single state in the nation without exception–that’s systemic industry wide fraud, whether you want to recognize it as such or not.
It wasn’t just some isolated instances reported on by David Dayen. I handled hundreds of these cases, and know lots of lawyers in my state who handled just as many which amounted to thousands and thousands.
Most people just gave up, but the systemic frauds would have been in their foreclosures as well, but nobody challenged those.
And it is clear you know nothing about it. None of it. Not the breadth, depth or nature of the myriad scams they ran/are running to this day.
Let me make that statement clear, they weren’t “failures” in the sense of good faith mistakes in documentation, they were systemic frauds using the vehicle of MERS and loan originators who shielded the true “funder” of the loan and was thus the true “beneficiary” of the loan. And it all started right there and continued downstream in every conceivable way imaginable.
This was industrial strength systemic hovering up of American homeowner’s equity for anybody that fell behind in a payment. There was nothing good faith about any of it on the part of bankers, the mortgage lending industry, loan servicers or any of the various agents.
RR:
Good for you for suing; how were the suits adjudicated?
The report above doesn’t mention any criminal charges for these process manipulations but there must have been some prosecutions. The paperwork was a mess on many of these properties but they were already lost to the inhabitants who couldn’t make their payments in most cases. Some of these people stayed in these homes for years after they stopped making payments but before an actual foreclosure eviction.
I won’t argue with you about the sleazy people involved in this collapse but once it began there was no stopping it and as we learned Obama and Geithner were just foaming the runway for the banks while mostly lying about relief tor the rubes.
I haven’t seen any numbers showing how much actual equity was lost or how many of the foreclosed people had already extracted any equity they may have had. I didn’t suffer foreclosure but I was underwater on my last home so I know that feeling.
One thing is certain and that is the fee takers profited from this collapse including lawyers on both sides along with document mills, advisors, scam sellers and others.
I basically did all my foreclosure defense work for nothing, so I didn’t “profit on one-side as a lawyer”.
As far as teasing out the rest of your assertions I’m not going to bother because you really need to do your own work on this topic, other than “understanding the feeling” because you were “underwater’ at one point in time.
And human beings aren’t “inhabitants” they are “homeowners” until such time as the “true beneficiary” (or their lawfully appointed and documented agent) of the debt obligation lawfully meets their multiple legal burdens of proof that demonstrates they are entitled to foreclose on a homeowner as the rightful beneficiary.
There’s your problem, and everybody else’s as well. Not that a bunch of homeowners were freeloading or took out loans they couldn’t afford, or had anything to do with millions of otherwise capable working class homeowners doing something that caused nearly the entire world economy too implode and them losing their capacity to make their mortgage payments when they lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
If anyone should have been punished it was speculators who bought and sold homes, flipping them, and taking out mortgages they couldn’t pay hyper-inflating an already “foamy runway”, not those who took out mortgages under less than lawful terms and lived in the home as their primary residence. They should have been protected and the rest wiped out.
You must be a very successful lawyer to have been able to defend these people for free to the tune of about $400,000, 400 clients @ $1000 each. Either way I hope you were able to help some of them such as those who were actually making their payments but were caught up in the snow blower machinery needed to clear this blizzard of foreclosure.
There were two phases to this crisis that started with the subprime borrowers who bought into that scheme, no one forced them to sign liar loans or to cash-in their equity and spend it. The second phase is still with us and includes prime mortgages and normally dependable homeowners. Foreclosures were happening in this group before the crisis but it was at a manageable rate but the steep decline in property value in many areas has complicated even selling a home not in foreclosure. We’ll have to depend on Trump to fix the jobs problems and keeping unemployed or underemployed people in homes they can’t afford fixes nothing.
I doubt that there is a problem today with keeping track of the records that caused so much trouble after the crash. Mortgages will continue to be sliced and dices into investment securities as they were long before the crisis because the system can’t work without them.
I was talking with a new homeowner down my street who purchased a nice small house at a real bargain price. He explained that the previous owners, who were still making payments, were required to go into foreclosure before the short-sale could proceed. My feelings about being underwater were sympathetic with others who may make payments for decades and never build any equity or lose what little they may have in a sale.
The Flippers are still with us but their ranks were thinned and their loses huge during the crisis. I watched the Canadians get carved up like bacon because they moved into Phoenix too early and rode their investments down to the real bottom.
In short, SECURITIZATION was the driving factor of the housing crash. Wall Street. They needed loans to be securitized. It didn’t matter how bad the credit was. A loans packaged with bbb and b-. Securitized, traded. That’s the issue in a nutshell. Goldman (Mnuchins firm) created a security from loans that was destined to fail. ABACUS. they knew the credits were destined to fail. They sold them to pension funds, municipalities. Securitization totally disconnects mortgage lenders from the credit. Wall Street didn’t give a shit about predatory lending practices. Just give us mortgages to package. We don’t care about the credit. We’ll just hide bad 1’s with good 1’s. Not complicated at all.
i heard a loud smack. was that the WEATERN door hitting you on the WAYOUT?
Did that same door hit you in the face when you tried to and failed to become a homeowner?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Obama’s first Treasury Secretary was s known tax cheat at the time of his appointment. Ladies & Gentlemen, your two-party system at work.
This proves he is smart.
If “That makes me smart” justifies a president who doesn’t pay taxes, then certainly it must be good enough for anyone he hires.
Thanks Republicans.
Once again you’ve outdone yourselves.
I thought Reagan was a joke and Bush (the befuddled) a disaster.
Trump is a whole different class of WTF imbeciles that American voters find acceptable.
Actually, I think they know exactly what they’re doing. Ripping off the public.
Hmm, no mention in your comment about the bank loving Obama Administration that enabled the banks to cash in on everything for the last 8 years. The two party political system is killing the US.
if he runs the same repo threat game on the US as he did in his privateer operation, would he repo like, whole states?
But when is The Intercept going to start publishing leaked documents about Trump?
“Big Sister” will not be replacing “Little Brother” in 2017 Jose. PropOrNot?
Make an effort to accept this with quiet dignity and grace and resist confusing the Intercepts 2016 coverage of the election cycle with the internal DNC NSA leak of unredacted internal campaign correspondence to Journalists.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-03/wikileaks-hints-huge-upcoming-revelations-2017-will-blow-you-away
Thanks in advance
Well, I of course don’t speak for the Intercept, but I imagine when they get some “leaked documents” on Trump, they’ll report on them. That make sense to ya? You do know that Trump picked Munchkin for Treasury, right? And, if Trump’s man turns out to be a crook (absolutely the case), it reflects very badly on Trump, right?
Sahil Kapur Verified account ?@sahilkapur
OVERHEARD in the Speaker’s lobby: “The guy puts out a tweet and half our conference goes nuts. What are we going to do?”
Considering how liberal/progressive California is, why do they continue to elect such conservative Senators?
Why have these revelations become ordinary and routine, just like the drone wars, just like the police shootings, just like the incarceration of innocent people? Just like the fact that we are subjected to the most massive spying that has ever been undertaken, and we not only tolerate it but contribute to it, routinely and casually.
Do you notice how nothing changes?
I don’t think the reason for this is evident. We need to know why.
Excellent article, David. Hopefully this will take down both Mnuchin and Harris with expediency.
Roger that!
Wilbur Ross is another Russian Shill. Took over corrupt Bank of Cyprus with a Russian oligarch. Then put former Deutsche Bank ceo who oversaw a Russian $10 billion money laundering scam as Chairman of Bank of Cyprus. Deutsche is Trumps largest lender. Paul Atkins/Dan Gallagher firm Potomak is a Deutsche Bank monitor. Nothing to see here.
Trump’s proposed cabinet has a net worth of over $14 billion.
I can personally attest that everything in this article by Mr. Dayen is accurate with regard to the entities referenced. Together with every other major bank in this country, and Europe, and almost every single loan “servicer” which were really straw man entities for the big banks primarily, much less the scummy regional banks that were big players in the national mortgage market.
I had many cases against these very same entities, their practices (of deceit and document fabrication and backdating) were well established in Oregon.
Ms. Harris is just another in a long line of purported public officials who helped bury these misdeeds by the mortgage financing and banking industries (together with far too many courts and judges), for what can be one of only two reasons–they didn’t want to jeopardize their own personal ambitions, or two if they had actually used the resources of their “public offices” to expose the nationwide (if not global) scam that were REITS and various other mortgage backed “securities” it would have brought down the entire real property economy, and the global economy.
That’s how widespread and fucked up the American real property market is, and still is, and will continue to be until both REITS and mortgage backed securities are properly regulated (including the “grading” of them as investments), and until all paperwork (from affidavits to all the other non-judicial foreclosure notices and documents that must be recorded) have been properly scrutinized. But that’s never going to happen because those in power in the regulatory sphere, courts, and state’s AGs got their share of a pittance of a settlement, and the statute of limitations has lapsed on most of the possible claims you could bring under contract or in tort or by statute (even “fraud” with an extension due to “time of discovery”) except for new foreclosures.
And one of the most ironic things, particularly in the federal court system, is that banks used Depression era laws specifically designed to prevent foreclosure, make direct payments to homeowners, and create a favorable environment for banks to re-structure the loans, for the exact opposite purpose–to remove cases from state courts to federal court, and then use a strained reading of those same laws to fuck-over homeowners royally.
That reality is why, and even though I had good success against the banks on balance, I’m just about to leave the practice of law. There is very little “justice” in America’s system of justice. It is about money, and often very little more, and even then only in very isolated instances.
Used to work in mortgage servicing industry (A Lehman Brothers Company) and all of Dave Dayen’s reporting is correct. These abuses were commonplace, especially keeping homeowners on track to foreclosure though that was supposed to be suspended for potential modification, like HAMP.
Mr. Heard, the law will miss you if and when you go, though I certainly cannot fault you for deciding to leave. Heavy burden to bear.
The banking business is based on theft pretty much. Basically, rich people at some point figured out a way to use their money to transfer wealth from the middle class into their pockets. There are many ways in which banks do that, but the most obvious is the credit card. It’s a no-guarantee loan, so the interest rates and fees are ridiculous. They even tell you what you should pay every month, and if you follow their advise, the bank will end up keeping a lot of your money by the time you pay off your entire debt, assuming you do.
From time to time, people are unable to pay their debts. It happens. But when no one is able to pay their debts all of the sudden, like in 2008, that’s obviously a systemic problem caused by overlending. The responsibility for that should fall on the banks, not the borrowers.
I bank at a credit union and I don’t have a single credit card. I don’t like banks, and I understand about 99% of their scams quite intuitively together with extensive study of their practices as a lawyer.
They should be busted up by resurrecting anti-trust laws, usury should be legally capped except in the commercial lending arena, and all BODs and executives of banks should have their salaries limited by law. It isn’t the “banks money” and never was. It is either created by government or is a function of depositors deposits, I don’t care what little gimmicks and scams they use to claim it isn’t. And they should act accordingly and not have any shield of personal liability when the fuck it all up and disappear everyone’s money above and beyond what FDIC insures (and they even like to stiff their FDIC required payments when they can).
Almost the entirety of the banking industry is a very evil racket that makes lawyers look like pikers.
Thank you for your posts.
Feel free to link to some seminal cases, if you like. Glenn Greenwald-style. :)
You should write, publish, and continue to explain the ‘unexplainable’ to the thousands of us who can’t even comprehend what is going on. More than half the time I get more out of the ‘comments’ to these articles than I do from the articles themselves. Trolls aside, most often someone rises above it all, you are one of those ‘someone’s’………..thanks
I echo the others in thanking you for your comments. You lay things out in a way that is very enlightening and no-nonsense.
I find comment sections fascinating — an interesting mix of opinion, ulterior-motive types, truth-seekers, and deceivers.
A truth-teller stands out like a beacon.
RR:
“That reality is why, and even though I had good success against the banks on balance, I’m just about to leave the practice of law. There is very little “justice” in America’s system of justice. It is about money, and often very little more, and even then only in very isolated instances.”
So right in your assessment; now go back and read the Cato Analysis I led you to and try to recognize that there was “very little ” justice'” in that sordid matter.
ah, dont leave it yet, could get real innerstin’.
Re: “And one of the most ironic things, particularly in the federal court system, is that banks used Depression era laws specifically designed to prevent foreclosure, make direct payments to homeowners, and create a favorable environment for banks to re-structure the loans, for the exact opposite purpose–to remove cases from state courts to federal court, and then use a strained reading of those same laws to fuck-over homeowners royally.”
Correct me if I’m wrong or suffering from a bout of bad recollection,but wasn’t it the policy of the first G.W. bush administration and it’s direction
of the DOJ to use federal law to stymie states attorneys generals from attempting to prosecute financial malfeasance of the big banks.
The citing of this Supreme court decision in the OneWest memo piqued
this interest ( Cuomo vs. Clearing House Assn. )
“Nobody minds a billionaire, but not one feeding off people’s misery.”
Excuse me, Ms. Colebrook: that’s how they become billionaires. By feeding off people’s misery. If you don’t do that, you’re just a plain vanilla millionaire.
You are correct. ALL of this illegal activity so the lender can get the “bad loan” off its books. A non performing loan does not drive revenue and bonusses. I read where Mnuchins dead mother was an investor in Madoff. One of the few in fact who somehow booked a profit . It helps when Mnuchin lives in same building as Ezra Merkin. So what did Mnuchin and his brother do with their dead mothers Madoff profits while other people lost their life savings? The man is scum.
All bankers are crooks.
Hasn’t anyone else figured this out, yet? (Maybe you’d prefer David Rockefeller in the Treasury Department? DRAIN THE SWAMP is a big job… and Trump has to pick one who is a penitant banker? Beware of the money changers. Who said that?)
Of course. They are granted the means to counterfeit with complete impunity. There are just a few paper requirements they have to meet and few tracks they have to formally cover.
Y’know, a few utterly bltant things they cannot do that distinguishes their flurry of documentation (and their inducement — and coercion — of others to participate in it with them) from simple printing in someone’s basement.
What do people expect to happen? They will counterfeit for a little bit, then pause and wait. And then not pause for very long, and then not at all.
Seems as if I voted for the wrong Senate Candidate in November. Not sure yet but from what this story tells me Senator Kamala was up to no good by ignoring the charges against Mnuchin. What I constantly ask myself is- how do these low lives rise to near the top with no morals, sense of propriety and it seems small brains? Has the U.S. become so corrupt that these people just pass inspections with so much wrong with them?
Don’t know if the brains are small, but they are reptilian.
The Dem Establishment came out early and often in support. As you know, her competition was practically non-existent.
If you saw the news yesterday about the Republican Congress’s internal and secret vote to abolish the (OCE) Ethics Office, then you wouldn’t ask about corruption. Of course it is – especially after something as blatant as that (remember, there are Dems who don’t like independent investigations either – Charlie Rangel/Maxine Waters – CREW called her one of the most corrupt members of Congress).
It SUCKS, doesn’t it?
Good article. Mnuchin learned well from Goldman Sachs, and Harris learned well from Hillary, Obama, and the DNC.
For me, the big question is why nobody throws RICO at these forgers. Do the banks control the system that much?
Yes. Yes they do control the “system” exactly that much.
yep. i recall when g-dub appointed some guy from long beach ca to head the sec – and by some co-incidence i had been introduced to the culture of the business network there. BS by the truckload.
great work by Dayen. to think Mnuchin could have gotten away with this in the most progressive State in the country shows 1 thing: money transcends politics. neithe political party has the ethics market cornered. A telling quote from his spokeswoman: ” OneWest is/was a federally regulated bank”. look for a Mnuchin Treasury to do everything they can to strip States anti fraud statutes. the Globalist. former SEC commish, Schwarzman/Dimon hand picked Trump Adviser Paul Atkins wants to go after NY Martin Act. he also loathes whistleblowers like myself. A disaster waiting to happen. this is not what Trump voters voted for.
This is exactly what Trump voters voted for.
Character matters, except to a Trump voter.
Are you saying HRC voters voted for her based on her character? Lets not be hypocritical. Ideologues got us into this mess.