Treasury Secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin kicked off his confirmation hearing Thursday with a defiant opening statement, mostly defending his record as CEO of OneWest Bank. He cast himself as a tireless savior for homeowners after scooping up failed lender IndyMac. “It has been said that I ran a ‘foreclosure machine,’” he said. “I ran a loan modification machine.”
But in stark contrast to his fuzzy statistics about attempted loan modifications, the victims of OneWest’s foreclosure practices have been real and ubiquitous.
A TV advertising campaign that’s been running in Nevada, Arizona, and Iowa features Lisa Fraser, a widow who says OneWest “lied to us and took our home” of 25 years, right after her husband’s funeral.
And on Wednesday, four women appeared at a congressional forum organized by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, relaying their stories of abuse at the hands of OneWest. Democrats had hoped to present the homeowners as witnesses at Mnuchin’s confirmation hearing, but were denied by Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch.
The women’s stories share a remarkable symmetry to those of nearly a dozen OneWest homeowners reviewed by The Intercept over the past several days. They paint a picture of a bank that did more to trap customers than to help them through their mortgage troubles.
Mnuchin complained to senators that he has “been maligned as taking advantage of others’ hardships in order to earn a buck. Nothing could be further than the truth.”
Treasury Secretary-designate Stephen Mnuchin arrives on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2017, to testify at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee.
Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
But the evidence to support that conclusion is considerable.
Heather McCreary of Sparks, Nevada, one of the four individuals in Washington to testify on Wednesday, was laid off from her job as a home health care provider in 2009. She and her family sought a modification from OneWest as they recovered from the lost wages. OneWest did modify the loan, one of the “over 100,000” such modifications Mnuchin touted in his hearing. But after six months of making modified payments, the bank denied McCreary’s personal check, claiming that the payment had to be made by cashier’s check. “I looked at the paperwork, and couldn’t find that on there,” McCreary said. “The Legal Aid person working with us couldn’t find it.”
OneWest told McCreary to re-apply for the modification twice, then cut off all communications and refused to accept payments. “A few months later we had a foreclosure notice taped to the window, with two weeks to get out,” she said. The bank was pursuing foreclosure while negotiating a modification — a practice known as dual tracking that is now illegal.
Tara Inden, an actress from Hollywood, California, couldn’t get a loan modification from OneWest after multiple attempts. Even after finding a co-tenant willing to pay off her amount due, OneWest refused the money and pursued foreclosure. Inden has fended off four different foreclosure attempts, including one instance when she returned home to find a locksmith breaking in to change the locks. “I took a picture of the work order, it said OneWest Bank on it,” Inden said. “I called the police, they said what do you want us to do, that’s the bank.”
Inden remains in the home today. OneWest gave her $13,000 as part of the Independent Foreclosure Review, a process initiated by federal regulators forcing OneWest and other banks to double-check their foreclosure cases for errors. Inden received no explanation for why she received the money, but sees it as a tacit admission that OneWest violated the law in her case.
Tim Davis of Northern Virginia had a mysterious $14,479 charge added to his loan’s escrow balance on multiple occasions, even after a U.S. Bankruptcy Court ordered it removed. “I don’t think that Mr. Mnuchin should be put in a position of government power without further scrutiny,” Davis said in an email.
Donald Hackett of Las Vegas claimed in legal filings that OneWest illegally foreclosed on them without being the true owner of his loan. He ended up losing the case, and the home. “They had to cheat to beat me,” Hackett alleged. “They came in like union busters to try to bust everybody up and scare you, make you afraid.”
While Hackett was unsuccessful, Mnuchin’s bank has been accused by investigators at the California attorney general’s office of “widespread misconduct” in foreclosure operations, with over a thousand violations of state statutes. The state attorney general, now-Sen. Kamala Harris, decided not to prosecute OneWest for the violations.
Teena Colebrook, an office manager from Hawthorne, California, came to prominence as a Trump supporter disgusted by the Mnuchin selection. She lost her home to OneWest in April 2015, after a yearslong battle that began with the loss of renters who shared the property. Colebrook was informed that the only way she could receive help from OneWest was if she fell 90 days behind on her mortgage payments. This was not true: qualifying for the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, did not require delinquency, only a risk of default.
“They won’t tell you in writing and they’ll claim they never said that,” Colebrook said. She found robo-signed documents in her file, had insurance policies force-placed onto her loan unnecessarily, and kept getting conflicting statements about how much she actually owed. Late fees piled up, like outsized certified mailing costs of $2,000, all appended to her loan. She eventually ran out of appeals. “They wanted my property, wouldn’t accept any tender offers,” Colebrook said. “They stole my equity. That’s why I’m so angry. If [Mnuchin] can’t get one person’s figures right, how can he be in charge of the Treasury?”
Colebrook put together a complaint group on the Internet to share stories with other sufferers of OneWest. She found multiple people who said they were told to miss payments and then shoved into foreclosure. Others said they were put through year-long trial modifications (under HAMP they were only supposed to be three months long) and then denied a permanent modification, with an immediate demand for the difference between the trial payment and original payment, which could stretch into thousands of dollars. Others lost homes held by their families for decades.
These stories are familiar to those who experienced the aftermath of the financial crisis. OneWest was neither special nor unique in its urgency to foreclose and unwillingness to extend help to the broad mass of struggling borrowers. But Mnuchin’s nomination has put the spotlight back on a forgotten scandal of deception.
Wednesday’s unofficial hearing was the first in Congress in several years featuring homeowners. In the hearing room, Heather McCreary sat next to Colleen Ison-Hodroff, an 84-year-old widow from Minneapolis asked by OneWest to pay off the full balance due on her residence a few days after her husband’s funeral. Ison-Hodroff said OneWest could kick her out of her home of 54 years at any time. “Allowing an 84 year-old woman to be foreclosed on is not the American way,” McCreary said.
When OneWest foreclosure victims heard that Mnuchin was chosen to lead the Treasury Department, they were shocked. “When he was nominated, it was like the floor crashed underneath me,” said McCreary. “It brought back everything. His name was on my paperwork.”
Other victims offered similar remarks. “For someone who will be tasked with making sure that the economy is doing all it can for people like me, even when it seems the system is rigged against them, Steve Mnuchin is not that person,” said forum participant Cristina Clifford, who lost her condo in Whittier, California, after also being told by OneWest to fall behind on payments.
“I think the first thing is he belongs in a prison,” said Tara Inden.
The Mnuchin nomination can only be derailed through Republican opposition, which is relatively unlikely. But it has set off a new wave of activism nationwide.
Activists have been camped out at Goldman Sachs’s New York City headquarters since Tuesday, targeting Mnuchin’s former employer of 17 years. In an echo of a protest to save her home in 2011, OneWest customer Rose Mary Gudiel of La Puente, California, led a march in the rain to Mnuchin’s Bel-Air mansion on Wednesday night, placing furniture on his driveway before police dispersed roughly 60 activists. (Mnuchin famously scrubbed his address off the internet after the 2011 protest, saying his family was subjected to “public ire at the banking industry.” But the same organizers found his house again.)
“I put it in the middle of a resurgence of housing justice activism,” said Amy Schur of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. “Hard-hit communities are organizing across the country like they haven’t in years. Sometimes we might have kept eyes on the powers that be locally, but with the likes of Trump and this cabinet, we have to take this fight nationally as well.”
[David Dayen is live-tweeting the hearing here.]
Top photo: Protesters hold a sign during a demonstration outside of a Goldman Sachs office on Jan. 18, 2017, in Los Angeles. More than two dozen activists and foreclosure victims staged a demonstration outside of a Goldman Sachs office to denounce Steve Mnuchin, President-elect Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary nominee.
On the one hand, I stand to enjoy investment gains if Mnuchin is approved and *IF* he privatizes Fannie/Freddie (and on what terms).
On the other hand, based on these stories about OneWest, this guy is just FILTHY.
I’m not feeling cognitive dissonance so much as moral nausea, and a desire to move to New Zealand if this is what the US has to look forward to for the next 4 years.
I do loan modifications for people who can’t afford their mortgage payments. During the recession, OneWest was the one lender that refused to modify loans. I had to tell people with a OneWest mortgage that I couldn’t help them because of that.
OneWest told my partner that it couldn’t modify mortgage loans because it was a Chinese bank and therefore didn’t get financial help from the U.S. government like U.S. banks do. That was obviously a complete lie. What scum!
Among other things, The Intercepts’ desire for a “robust” comment section is severely hampered by it’s ongoing insistence that more than one hyper-link in a comment (many times even just one) will place that comment into moderation purgatory for who knows how long.
If The Intercept is truly interested in being a part of the discussion that leads to a more informed populace and perhaps even a change to the status quo, they might want to consider using technology that is at least a step-up from the telegraph.
An overly broad statement in another article that I’ll not address specifically, because I think there’s another issue that has arisen since the housing/bank crisis that is affecting the ability to live in almost any kind of a home in America: the fact that in many places, discounting tax breaks (which most low income folks cannot take advantage of) it costs as much or more to rent a home per month than it does to buy it.
Combine this with the fact that, since the last mortgage debacle, banks and other big-money interests have been buying up existing homes (and ranches and farms in my area) and turning them into rental properties, resulting in higher rental prices than local owners would normally charge for monthly rent as well as a higher threshold for loan qualification, and you get a market where the big banks now control both the inventory of homes for sale and for rent, as well as the means to procure a loan or otherwise qualify for occupying the property.
With earning power essentially stagnant or declining, many folks simply cannot gather together enough cash for the down payment to purchase a home, or what’s needed for the first month, last month, and security deposit required to get into a rental.
This concerns me greatly. Just before the housing bubble burst, my home appraised for twice its initial appraisal, which was only a few years after purchase, and even a schmo like me knew that wasn’t right. Banks were allowing the overvaluing of homes simply to create more credit. We know how well that turned out.
By bogarting the market using access limitations like those described above, ones that essentially create a larger credit market for them to take advantage of and therefore control, Wall Street et al. are likely manipulating themselves (and taxpayers, because we bailed them out last time) into another untenable position that once again ignores the market realities on the ground in favor of the controlling the narrative from their balance sheets.
Add all that to what they (and our government) have allowed with the one trillion plus dollar student loan debt bubble just siting there waiting to explode, and the shit gets even deeper for us all.
Is this the making America great again we’ve been looking for?
The root of this problem is the concept of landlords. Indigenous societies, including that of the Americas, didn’t not have this concept; you used the land you were on, not owned it. (As a Native American once told me, if anything the land owns you.) At least for residential land, people should own their homes by virtue of living there. Fuck landlords.
That may be. It seems also further related to communities once actually being much more ‘communal’ in the sense that folks living together recognized the benefit of using that day-in-day-out “we’re all in this together” lifestyle and organized their world around that concept.
Communities today have been broken down and compartmentalized into subgroups (those that have) that have ignored the shared interests that make societies strong and successful (primarily the physical and emotional wellbeing of everyone).
Trumps election and Brexit are really just exemplars of this deficit. What societies do about it will ultimately show us how healthy they are…or at least how healthy they want to become.
Makes you wonder why Former Cal AG and now Darling Sen K. Harris Dropped the case against the little S*** when she had him by the Balls. She still doesn’t have an answer. But when you have Gold Sacks does it matter who is squeezing?
There is a double standard in this country where the little guy pays for his crimes while the hardened gold collared. suit wearing criminals are allowed to steal and pilfer without any consequences. The courts across the country are allowing forged and fabricated evidence to be used to steal homes in fraudulent foreclosures. Legal instruments authenticate ownership , but when banks resort to fabrication and forgery to create the illusion of ownership the entire system breaks down.
CORRUPT bank of america (or as they prefer in their falsified assignments: fka Countrywide), KNOWINGLY LIED to the District Attorneys about modifications in regards to their ponzi scheme loans , and instead underhandedly, bundled up the loans AGAIN, but not before forging owner’s signatures and adding falsified stamped “ta-da” endorsements, fabricated assignments and then handed them over to others, such as Ditech (FKA GreenTree), Everbank, etc, who then handed the fabricated documents over to their substitute trustee attorneys…. who have been and continue to submit the fabricated documents to the courthouses across the country to foreclose on countless more homeowners, who were NOTHING , but bamboozled from the start. But it’s ok because evil bank of america dished out anywhere from $300-$2000 per homeowner a few years ago as their hush hush punishment. Then the games began…lies about modifications, lies about trial payments, lies about lost modification applications….all to stall and then bundle them up again with the newfound forgeries and falsifications. But it’s ok because after Fannie Mae(hiding behind their substitute trustees) kicks the defrauded homeowners to the curb, they’ll make up for it by selling the home to minorities or small time investors. Sorta like if a child molester rapes a child and then on the way home stops by the candy store to buy a gumball for a kid on the street. How pathetically evil! Anyone who believes the wall street bailout ended in 2008 is sadly and sorely mistaken.
People better WAKE UP and see that these demon puppets are laughing at every single one of the idiots who fund their charades. How TRULY TRULY PATHETIC
The Indymac Video http://thenationalrealestatepost.com/our-history/
Yeah sure, the FDIC claims this is false. I’d like some proof that more of this type of thing is not going on.
Seterus whistleblower claims $13M bilked out of Fannie Mae. You know those packages for assistance ? $500 per.
Plenty of incentives to refinance in HAMP, nothing for mortgage write downs.
Of course the bailouts wouldn’t stop with Tarp, AIG.
It’s ongoing and indefinite. The perfect trap.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2014/07/22/john-paulson-and-george-soros-score-big-selling-onewest-bank-for-3-4-billion/#169063d5ab00
Sure Mnuchin is horrible news for honest people but let’s not forget how Soros fit into the One West deal and how he profited. People shouldn’t be accepting his money. It’s filthy, like all billionaire money.
Q. Are you a crook?
A. I am not a crook.
The USA is still on the brink of a financial collapse as the banks keep pocketing ill gotten gains from all the fraud that went on with the credit bubble. Foreclosure is the big stick to refinance and collect fees. HAMP is simply a program to make fraud affordable. Fannie Mae is meeting with “investors” in an unprecedented move to unload REO properties. The players change, but the fraudulent programs are all the same. What a country ! Socialism for the lenders and a polluted market for the people. Gotta love that freedom.
The U.S. is BANKRUPT but due to the dumb&dumbers not having realised that yet, they have not filed the petition for bankruptcy. Expect the dumb&dumbers to continue printing funny-money (ALT-DOLLARS, FAKE-DOLLARS) until they default or, pay bonds in funny-money.
Like Greenspan said, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6vi528gseA
We should all default if we have mortgages. Only solution.
that would work
bankrupting wallstreet like they bankrupted mainstreet, gotta love it
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OK, I’ll try again. Yes, Democrats have been trounced, almost a coup, so destroyed is our nation. But I continue to believe there was an approach that would have succeeded, that simply enough would have been to highlight the destructive nature of the off-shored trillions resulting in hundreds of billions of stolen taxes from our economy and We the People. The actual trillions are of no consequence, but the stolen taxes helped create the environment along with fux and limbaugh lies and hatred that elected trump, denying our economy and helping create the vast unsatisfied demand that the rich (and republicans) have no desire to dissipate. Hillary and the Democrats might have unleashed the unjust nature of those stolen hundreds of millions, but couldn’t do so because they of course are beneficiaries of those stolen hundreds of billions. But the truth still exists, trump will do exactly as Hillary suggested, that the taxes be repatriated pennies on the dollar, so that the ‘unfair’ taxes imposed won’t have to be paid.
If we had Democrats beside Bernie who would expose to all the hundreds of billions in stolen taxes, and the negative impact they have had on our economy, and the opportunity costs being paid by all those who are poor and disadvantaged (food, lodging, medical care, education) , maybe, just maybe a revolution could be kick started, so the disasters of trump and his idiots could be dissipated. It won’t happen of course, not because Democrats are gutless, but that they refuse to forego the benefits of doing the wrong thing. In my opinion, of course.
I say the sequestered trillions are of no consequence because they are the ill gotten results of trickle down, the accumulation of huge sums that can’t be productively invested because of lack of return , at least in this country, by the very act of trickle down, which destroyed the capability to reduce the unsatisfied demand. The benefits of a feudal society are much greater to those who have stolen these funds than their desire to tolerate a society that benefits from what is rightfully theirs, and so maintain the growing feudal outcomes of their coup, and of course their power.
absolutely
People lose homes because they default on payments – it is the responsibility of the homeowner to pay according to the rules set out in their contract.
Intercept, I notice when I submit a comment it upticks the counter, but my comments aren’t included with the others. I’m used to being censored, the censors hate my truths, but I would think an organization linked to Glenn Greenwald would perhaps be a little more, well, liberal. Of course I understand those who censor and manipulate are afraid of truth, they infect our discourse, and in a time of national can act to bring down all liberal discourse.
recently Rachel described groups that have distinctive names, such as a ‘murder’ of crows, or a ‘pod’ of dolphins. She then asked for a collective name to describe wall street. I wrote her suggestion the correct term would be a ‘thief’ of Wall Streeters.
I believe Mr. Mnuchin must have intended to say, “Nothing could be farther from the truth.” But maybe he was just being honest.
yes you can blame Democrats, but make no mistake this is the republican heartbeat, that anyone is screwable, and if they are poor and defenseless the better it is. This is what republicans stand for, a pos with a huge mansion is by nature a success and therefore above reproach, the ultimate description of trump, foisted on us by fux and all the other right wing liars and haters. The best outcome of all this is that the oppo is brought together, to remove this garbage from our nation, all except the history of course, that we never forget what ignoring the fools brings us. Please note, I’m being warned about my comment, as I am when I comment elsewhere, facebook and disqus have a long reach. They also infect our media, please be aware.
I’m honestly shocked more forclosures like this don’t end in violence. That this man still has a pulse is a testament to the average home owner’s self control
Of much the same mindset, but this time, when there’s a meltdown, and there will be one since nothing has been learned. there is very little oversight and predatory lending is on the upswing, if the DoJ does not at least try to convict some of these bankers criminally I think there will be riots at the very least.
@ wayoutwest
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Or you are running a purposeful disinformation campaign on behalf of the mortgage and banking industry with your support for Mnuchin, and trying to foist the blame for the foreclosure crisis on homeowners.
His argument — that the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party is only targeting a man of Munchkin’s “character” due to loss of power — is accurate. His assertion about “many” foreclosed homeowners cashing out in advance of letting real estate go back to the bank — is unsubstantiated. At best.
I only have anecdotes myself, but I lived in the heart of the housing bubble in 2008-2012. I only knew one couple who effectively gamed the system. The man was very well connected to power brokers in this small sunbelt city, and his assets were largely protected behind a trust (Yes, inherited. Why do you ask?) Everyone else I knew who was foreclosed on lost equity, liquid assets and years of their lives….. over properties that had been inflated far beyond their native value during the run up (2000 – 2007).
The average guy was thoroughly screwed by the FIRE sector mortgage bubble. All of us in that general socioeconomic bracket are still negatively impacted by it. Even those of us who fancy ourselves too clever to get in over our heads.
Of course all these foreclosures were permitted to occur under the Obama regime’s ersatz “relief” programs for homeowners under attack from these monsters, programs which offered false hope and wasted extraordinary amounts of home owner time , money, and energy while the inexorable machinery of government -protected, government-sanctioned extortion kept grinding away.
And with no obstruction, of course.
It was a gift from your government to the shadow government. Do you think the Trump regime is going to change anything with this guy ?
That’s not what happened. The root cause of the recession was a massive number of foreclosures on people with subprime mortgages. Some of these people were Black and were given subprime mortgages due to racism (i.e., banks illegitimately targeting them for extra profits because they’re Black instead of giving them standard mortgages), but most were given loans they should never have gotten because they couldn’t afford them. What this latter group was told was that 1) real estate always increases in value; 2) we will give you a loan with a large balloon payment; and 3) because the value of your house will increase, you can refinance it to pay the balloon payment when the time comes. When these people started defaulting on their mortgage payments and getting foreclosed on, housing prices started decreasing instead of increasing, and none of them could refinance in order to make the balloon payments, so they all got foreclosed on, crashing the housing market and, as a result, the entire economy. See the movie “The Big Short” for an excellent description of this.
Home ownership is not for everyone, despite the American Dream BS. Owning a home is expensive. For example, you need to replace your roof every 15-25 years, and that’s going to cost $10-25,000. You also need to be able to afford other repairs and maintenance as those are required. Poorer people are much better off renting from a good landlord than trying to own a house they can’t afford. But the banks saw an opportunity here and they took it, eventually causing a major recession. If we had an honest and uncorrupted government, none of this would have been allowed to occur.
The national Democratic party infrastructure isn’t going to do anything but play tepid rhetorical defense, because they aren’t capable of going on offense or fighting the long game.
But that should be seen as an opportunity for progressives and what passes for the left in this country to truly drive a stake through the centrist neoliberal heart of the current Democratic party. It will be painful but it is necessary.
There’s an easy model to follow if progressives would get it together, not be afraid of losing in the short, and start setting their sights on running primary challenges (funded like Bernie Sanders campaign) against any of the centrists that don’t show a spine or don’t get on board with a simple message. And that message is a slightly updated version of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights
Michael Moore actually uncovered what was thought to be lost footage of Pres. Roosevelt giving this speech and is included in the documentary Capitalism: A Love Story
If the Democratic party wants to rise from the ashes of its decades long project in neoliberal self-immolation like a progressive phoenix (and I doubt that it does unless progressives/left are willing to engage in Tea Party tactics to purge it of “centrists”) it is going to have to convince a majority of the American people that they aren’t trying to have it both ways–sucking up campaign funds from corporations and business and hyper-rich individuals, and internalizing those funders agendas, and instead take money only from the vast majority of the American people as small donations, and rebuild the trust that the Democratic party is actually the party of the “working class” in this country.
That does not mean giving up on any of the “issues” of their coalition of “identity” groups, or throwing any of their individual issues under the bus, because FDRs and those groups “equality” agendas are/should be/can be complimentary if done right–by purging the Democratic party’s neoliberal economic worldview and fighting for a populist democratic-socialist one that Bernie Sanders attempted and did advance, but for the Clinton primary dead-enders who were wedded to the Clinton worldview.
If they can’t or won’t do that, they are as dead as dog shit, for decades in the future. Maybe forever. You can’t abandon your human constituents and hope to squeak out electoral victories on bare majorities and/or appeals to voters that your party isn’t as horrifically indifferent to the plight of the majority of Americans as the GOP.
Trust once squandered takes time to rebuild. And it isn’t rebuilt with empty rhetoric. It is built upon demonstrating that win or lose, you will stand and fight for ideals and policies consistently over time. I hate what the GOP stands for, but they at least fight the long game consistently.
The Dems have a template that works, FDR’s, they just have to modernize it a bit, and stick to it consistently.
They should spend less time on micro-targeted GOTV, and more time figuring out how to register and GOTV of the millions of Americans who don’t even bother to vote, but who are natural parts of what should be an overwhelming constituency of voters (based on issue polling–which naturally mirrors much of FDRs Second Bill of Rights).
But that also means the Dems are going to have to take on the sacred cow of the MICC and a total rethink of America’s foreign policy, and “free trade” as opposed to “fair trade” that creates a virtuous race to the top (instead of to the bottom) for the world’s working class. And that’s done via new laws that put obligations on American corporations with regard to the entirety of the “supply chains”, and refusals to do business with any entities or nations that don’t respect the rights of their working class, and environment. America has leverage as a consumer nation, if it wanted to exercise it, instead of only giving a fuck about the bottom line for its transnational entities and their executives.
What you say is true and correct as far as it goes, but the problem is that your analysis is limited to a world view where only two parties exist. With over 300 million people in the U.S. (actually the root of just about all problems, but another issue I won’t discuss here), we need many political parties in office, not merely two gangs masquerading as political parties. The absolute power of the Democratic and Republican parties has corrupted absolutely, and they act far more like gangs than political parties.
The solution to this problem is to implement a proportional representation electoral system, as EVERY OTHER DEMOCRACY except England has. Of course we also need to get private money out of political campaigns and fund them solely with tax money in order to remove the corrupting influence of what is nothing but legalized bribery (aka private campaign contributions). But trying to fix a totally corrupt center/right Democratic Party is a fool’s errand and has no chance of succeeding.
As to being willing to lose battles in order to win the war so to speak (I’m totally anti-war and hate that analogy, but it works perfectly here), that’s where almost all progressives fail completely. When Clinton defeated Sanders in the primary and Sanders announced his support of Clinton in the general election, progressives should have thrown their support behind Jill Stein of the Green Party. Instead, they played the losing game of supporting a war-mongering neoliberal with no progressive values and lost anyway. Where I live in Berkeley, California, Clinton got over 88% of the vote (though Stein got more votes than Trump). What these people don’t get is that by voting for Clinton, they empowered the Democratic Party, which is NOT PROGRESSIVE in any way and is in fact opposed to most progressive values. (Unfortunately, most progressives seem to wrongly think that because about 5% of the party is progressive, they have a chance of their values prevailing.)
Fear causes people to do evil things, and this is a perfect example. Progressives were so scared of a Trump presidency that they supported and voted for a different evil in Clinton instead of supporting and voting an actual progressive. There is no realistic chance that Stein would have won this election, but if you don’t start building toward something like that it will never happen. Even if it were to take 10 or 20 years, we need to forget the goal of winning every election and build toward getting actual progressives a chance of winning at some point in the future.
So again, I agree with you to a point, but I suggest that you expand your horizons to consider other parties beside the Democrats and Republicans.
If the “progressives” and “left” that read The Intercept want to read exactly how bad and disorganized the Democratic party is nationally, this will wet your whistle:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/democrats-trump-administration-wilderness-comeback-revival-214650
It really is a cake-and-eat-it-too scenario, something many now-former Democrats have been warning them about for some time. Talk about tin-ears.
It’s an addiction that staunch Democrats are still unwilling to address, as too many don’t see pandering to the well-to-do as being the problem, not the solution; which still blows me away, because Bernie proved that there was a base large enough and with enough money to counter that corrupting influence, yet they still ignore the facts – running repeatedly back to the pushers that promise results (remain in office) in exchange for actually representing the interests of a majority of Americans across all party lines.
I’ve yet to finish the article, so I don’t know if the author offers viable solutions, but creeping around in the back of my head for awhile is the constant refrain that no matter what Democrats (and that damn pseudo-Democrat, Bernie) attempt within the framework that exists it won’t be enough, leaving the only solution (over a longer term than anyone would like) is the abandonment of the Democratic party restructuring efforts en-mass, and letting the chips fall where they may.
Sure. Painful as hell. But incrementalism was rejected because it hasn’t worked to provide long term solutions, and I don’t think it will work this time, either.
From the Graun (looks like it was posted a few minutes ago):
I listened to that this morning. Senator Hatch called hypocrisy on the Dems when Sec’y-nominee Lew had his money parked in the Cayman Islands.
He is absolutely correct. The Dems defended Penny Pritzker and Lew, (except Sen Sanders, I recall clearly).
Jacob Lew had $56,000 in a Citigroup Hedge Fund, but Mr Mnuchin opened his biz there to facilitate investments for “Pension Funds.” He sure stressed his bona fides for working people this morning.
It is good to see HAMP mentioned here and we have been shown how it was planned by Obama and Geithner to ‘foam the runway’ and clear out these foreclosures so the bankers were just doing what they were assigned to do. I’m not defending anything the bankers, mortgage lenders or their minions did but this attack on Mnuchin is political bottom feeding by the loser Clintonites.
Of this pitiful handful of supposed victims displayed by the same politicos that brought them HAMP I wonder how many had already pocketed their equity from their home in cash, about $5 trillion was cashed in before the crash. Many people pulled tens of thousands of dollars in equity from their homes with new or second mortgages and if they lost the home to foreclosure they didn’t have to pay it back to the lender.
Except in the rare case such as the woman who had owned her home for decades and possibly had sizeable equity a foreclosure is a huge loss for the lender especially with crashing home prices. The lender can never recover these losses only clear them from the books and move on.
“Many people pulled tens of thousands of dollars in equity from their homes with new or second mortgages…”
Yes. Homeowners gaming the system is the real problem, as is the inability for these poor bankers to make a buck.
The idea that you find that “this attack on Mnuchin is political bottom feeding” is as wrong as your unsupported supposition that it’s the homeowners to blame.
Homeowners Against Marijuana Planting?
Studies in Colorado, Washington and Oregon show INCREASES in property value where recreational marijuana has been approved.
California will no doubt follow this trend helped along as it will be by ever increasing Post Fukushima use of medicinal forms of the drug as radiation accumulates in ourselves, our water and our food supplies.
Good thing they raised the safe exposure level hundreds of times two years after Fukushima blew and two years after it began pumping billions of gallons of…
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/03/radioactive-waste-still-leaking-five-years-after-fukushima-nuclear-disaster.html
“Sep 11, 2013 – White House draft report calls for steep rollback of standards for radioactive waste clean-up to levels expected to cause cancer in 1 in 23 people, while EPA spokesmodel Jonathan Edwards, Director of the EPA Radiation Office tells “folks” to “put on their big boy pant on and suck it up”
http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/epa-documents-raise-doubts-over-intent-new-nuclear-response-guide/
As the US economy collapses, it’s going to be critically important to have someone who can squeeze money from the poor. Mr. Mnuchin appears to be incredibly well qualified to be treasury secretary.
Rita DiDonna is a 72-year-old widow from Woburn, Massachusetts. When her husband died, Mrs DiDonna was left with enough money she would never have to worry about finances. Her house was paid for and she had a half million dollars in assets. She only needed a safe place to invest the assets that would provide a reasonable return and she would be able to live out her days in security and comfort. Her husband had always handled the family’s finances while he was alive, but a lawyer in Massachusetts put Mrs. DiDonna in touch with David Bralove and Rick Brown of B&B Realty in Bethesda, Maryland. Bralove and Brown were successful in selling her a stake, a “tenancy in common” (TIC), in a commercial property in Alexandria, Virginia.
Bralove and Brown got Mrs. DiDonna’s half million dollars, the elderly widow got a TIC.
At first, there was money coming in from the Virginia investment, but then the amounts began getting smaller and it wasn’t long before the payments stopped altogether. In their place, Mrs. DiDonna began receiving notices of money due for this expense and money due for that expense, and there was something about a hold up on a lease being renewed, and then notices of default, and more money was needed, and then the bank sold the mortgage to somebody in California, and there were more default notices and more demands for more money to cover repairs and fees and who knows what-all, and then there were ominous notices about a foreclosure and the need for even more legal fees and fees to pay all these companies Mrs DiDonna had never heard of to find capital to forestall the foreclosure. But the capital never came, just notices for more money to pay more fees, and then money for lawyers to negotiate with California, and then more money to pay the California company for extensions so that they wouldn’t foreclose, but by that time she was tapped out.
When the old woman had nothing left to give, she received a glimmer of hope from Bralove and Brown of Maryland. There was a chance she could save her investment, they told her, if she would declare bankruptcy. A bankruptcy would force a delay on the foreclosure and give XYZ Capital a chance to secure the refinancing that, they had been assured, was Just Around the Corner.
Bankruptcy!
Yes, bankruptcy is unpleasant. But Bralove and Brown were sympathetic to Mrs. DiDonna’s plight and understood she was desperate and needed money to buy basic necessities. If she would declare bankruptcy, Bralove and Brown would send her a cash payment of $20,000 to help her out.
Frightened, confused, and broke, Mrs. DiDonna accepted the offer of twenty grand and declared bankruptcy.
The next thing she knew, she received a letter—a demand letter—from someone named Arent Fox telling her the people in California took her house away. They owned it now and she had to leave!
It turned out Arent Fox is a business just up the street from the White House that extracts private profit from public law—lobbyists. They have four hundred lawyers working there who are so good at the law that some of them can extract profit at rates of up to one thousand dollars per hour. They even have some people working there who made the laws in the first place—from lawmaker to lawmilker.
The only thing the elderly widow had left was her house.
The TIC that Bralove and Brown drafted and sold to Rita DiDonna contained a “springing guaranty”, [1][2] a complex mechanism that removes a borrower’s legal right to bankruptcy protection in the event a borrower files for bankruptcy protection. While Mrs DiDonna’s bankruptcy benefited Bralove and Brown by delaying the foreclosure, it was catastrophic for Mrs DiDonna.
With the bankruptcy protections removed, G8 Capital of Ladera Ranch, California was able to take her house away from her, and Rita DiDonna had to move in with her daughter and her family.
She still lives there with her daughter, but rarely leaves her room. She suffers from depression and doesn’t understand how all this happened. She feels too foolish and too defeated to come to the phone. Her half million dollars is gone. Her house is gone. And David Bralove and Rick Brown of Bethesda, Maryland didn’t even send her the $20,000 they’d promised.
https://ffinalysis.com
Dems will be overjoyed to settle for having skinned this sacrificial lamb. :)
Banks acting like the disgusting mongrels they are. No big surprise there.
People should just keep camping out at his house and on his properties. What do people have to lose? You have no where to stay so if the cops come you get a free night of room and board courtesy of the government. When they release you the next day just go right back to camping at his houses. When the cops come again, you thank them and ask them what’s for dinner. When you get released again go right back to the house. You may even make friends with some of those cops after a while, so you can call it community out reach. You get free room and board, the cops get to waste their time cleaning up after banks, and the banks sit on empty houses nobody can afford.
Seriously, what do these bankers expect? Kicking people out of their homes doesn’t make them magically go away. They get angry and desperate, and that rarely leafs to positive outcomes for anyone involved.
*rarely LEADS to positive outcomes for anyone involved.
Pardon my typos.