I found it absolutely stunning to hear President Obama defend the Treasury's laughable and miserable failure of the HAMP program, and actually lay 'his cards out on the table' as to who the President continues to defend: Wall Street and the Banks.
Well, at least it's all out there now in the open, isn't it?
The President's remarks on finding what he called, 'that sweet spot,' reeked of hypocrisy and a complete disconnect with the American people, and the price that they have had to pay in terms of their lost jobs, their lost homes, their dignity, their lives, as a result of the Great Heist of 2008. How much is enough, how much do we as Americans, have to pay for those that ruined our entire economy, and then were rewarded will billions for doing so? Apparently, it's never enough, and it never will be.
So, according to President Obama:
(He) argued that the "biggest challenge" was to make sure speculators and deadbeats didn't take advantage of the government's help.
Wait a minute...ok, so his 'biggest challenge' is to make sure speculators and deadbeats don't take advantage of the government's help?
Wow.....what about you turn that around President Obama, because I think you got it ass backwards:
You're biggest challenge should be in restoring the Public Trust and confidence in our 'rigged and manipulated' key financial markets, who did indeed get paid off trillions (still being held inside of the 'grave yard of toxic debt of Freddie and Fannie Mae, and of course the hidden Maiden Lane Accounts that Ben Bernanke is still refusing to release).
"The biggest challenge is how do you make sure that you are helping those who really deserve help and if they get some temporary help can get back on their feet, make their payments and move forward and stay in their home versus either people who are speculators, own second homes that they really couldn't afford because they'd gotten a subprime loan, and people who through no fault of their own just can't afford their house anymore because of the change in housing values or their incomes don't support it," Obama said during a roundtable discussion with a handful of progressive bloggers at the White House.
"And we're always trying to find that sweet spot to use as much of the money that we have available to us to help those who can be helped, without wasting that money on folks who don't deserve help," he continued. "And that's a tough balance to strike."
Obama pointed out that what's driving foreclosures nowadays is the jobs crisis, rather than predatory lending and exploding mortgages. "And so the single most important thing I can do for the housing market is actually improve economic growth as a whole," he said. "If we can get the economy moving stronger, if we can drive the unemployment rate down, that will have probably the biggest impact on foreclosures, as well as housing prices, as just about anything. "
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
So, say again Mr. President? 'It is the jobs crisis, rather than the predatory lending,' that is the what you believe the real problem here?
And how again, Mr. President did that job crisis come about? Here's a clue: When Wall St./the Banks and our complicit Congress all signed on to above all to 'Cover up the Fraud to Cover up the Fraud,' no matter what it costs the American people, and decided to allow the greatest transfer of wealth in our history to bail out those same crooks and liars and thieves who began an economic Pearl Harbor, that has acted like a chain of dominoes, that keep falling faster and faster everyday in our nation, that was the first lighting of a fuse, that began to unravel our entire economy.
Kicking the can down the road, and adding insult to injury does the President, and our nation a great disservice to the tenuous string that is barely holding our Democracy together.
It is the FRAUD TO COVER UP THE FRAUD, Mr. President, and it is not going to go away, until we face what has happened in our country.
Why Covering up Fraud Losses Impairs Economic Recovery
by: William K. Black
Bad bankers, bad regulators, and bad politicians love to cover up losses, fraud, and bank failures. The snake oil peddlers pushing for a cover up scream that if losses are recognized capitalism will collapse. Recognizing losses "causes" bank failures (ponder that "logic"). Bank failures cause other banks to fail. Selling bad assets of failed banks is invariably described as a "fire sale" that causes further falls in asset values, which causes more banks to fail, which causes more assets to be sold, which causes – the end of life as we know it. If the snake oil guys are correct then financial markets aren’t fragile, they’re friable – a few bank failures away from crumbling. The solution under this logic is to lie about asset values and pretend that insolvent banks are healthy.
For a banker, what’s not to love about the right not to recognize even massive losses on assets? He gets to keep his job, reputation, and obtain bonuses for blowing up the bank. For a senior regulator whose failures allowed the bankers to cause the "epidemic" of mortgage fraud (FBI 2004), the mother of all bubbles, and the Great Recession a cover up is ideal. Bank failures are supposed to lead to investigations by the Inspector General and can lead to embarrassing congressional oversight hearings. Bankers and bad regulators sell the cover up to legislators as the miraculous "silver bullet" solution that can solve a crisis at no cost. Legislators wish everything they do could be that easy. Among my most painful memories are being in their offices to listen to their explanation of how simple, cheap, and pleasant the cover up will be. Everyone wins, no one loses. It’s just like the financial bubble that inflated the fictional asset values. Remember how wonderful the bubble was? The cover up pretends that the bubble prices were real. The cover up strategy says that the answer to a bubble is a bigger, longer bubble. Fiction can be so much more pleasant than reality.
Fraudulent bankers’ are the biggest winners from the cover up. In addition to maintaining their jobs, reputation, and bonuses they dramatically reduce the risks of being prosecuted and sued. Bank failures are supposed to prompt investigations and severe sanctions against fraudulent and abusive managers. In the (vastly smaller) S&L debacle we obtained over 1000 felony convictions of senior insiders, over 1000 enforcement sanctions, and hundreds of successful civil suits. The S&L CEOs with the greatest political influence were frauds. They led the push to cover up S&L losses.
http://dailybail.com/...
For President Obama to blame those who have lost their jobs, what he calls the: 'job crisis' because of the Foreclosure scandal and the FRAUD, that is now become the ultimate train wreck in our nation, sending homes values into the fucking toilet, is beyond the pale, it really is.
This is not going to go away Mr. President, even if you have the temerity to blame those who paid the greatest price, by bailing out those same crooks, liars and thieves, who have now paid with their jobs and their homes.
This isn't just about the FRAUD, what this really goes to is the most basic precepts of contractual law, what is known as good faith, home ownership, the 5th Amendment, and Federal Vs. States Rights.
The Attorney General's of all 50 States will not stand by and let their own citizens be 'had' by these bunch of thugs, who think they can get away with locking people out of their own homes illegally.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Will State AGs in Shining Armor Slay the Bank Dragons?
Joe Nocera has a very hopeful piece at the New York Times on the potential scope and impact of the investigation by all 50 state attorneys general into the robo signing scandal. Nocera stresses that the leader of this effort, Tom Miller of Iowa, and a core group of assistant AGs with long standing working relationships, are using the probe into what banks would have you believe are mere paperwork problems to delve into more serious abuses, with an eye to forcing the servicers to make serious loan modifications:
And best of all, they have a very clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish. They don’t want to merely reform the foreclosure system (though that would be nice, wouldn’t it?). Nor do they particularly want a big financial settlement, which would be meaningless for a giant like Bank of America.
Rather, they hope to use their investigation as a cudgel to force the big banks and servicers to do something they’ve long resisted: institute widespread, systematic loan modifications. "Instead of paying a huge fine," Mr. Miller posited to me the other day, on his way to an election rally, "maybe have the servicers adequately fund a serious modification process." Getting the banks and servicers to take loan modification seriously is another in a series of areas where the Obama Treasury Department has failed miserably.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...
As Mr. Nocera states in his excellent article:
The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have made it clear that they are more concerned about keeping the foreclosure mill going full speed than they are about determining whether the banks broke the law. Somehow throwing people out of their homes quickly is supposed to help the economy. Or so they keep telling us.
snip..
Unlike the feds’ tepid efforts, this will be a serious investigation, led by a handful of assistant attorneys general who’ve worked together for years, and who see this as their chance to finally do something for beleaguered homeowners. They’ve got resources, subpoena power and a justifiable suspicion that the robo-signing shenanigans are just the tip of a very ugly iceberg.
snip..
There’s one more reason to cheer the involvement of the states. During the bubble, it was the state attorneys general who first saw the problems in subprime lending. But whenever they tried to do something to halt the predatory lending and outright fraud, they were stopped cold by the federal bank regulators, who consistently sided with the banks in court. It is not too much to say that if the states had succeeded, the subprime crisis might never have occurred. "The federal regulators should have been listening to us instead of trying to shut us down," said Mr. Cox, who at the time was an assistant attorney general in Minnesota in charge of consumer enforcement. "They weren’t interested in our perspective. They viewed our concerns as trivial." Now, with the mortgage foreclosure mess, they’re back — and the feds can’t stop them. It’s about time.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
No, Mr. President, this is not going to just 'go away.' You cannot kick the can down the road, and blame the American people who've already paid, and will continue to pay the greatest price, for our nation, ignore the real reasons we are experiencing a job crisis, and look the other way, as the FRAUD continues.
Here it is all coming down, to this because enough Americans are sick to death of being pushed around by a bunch of out of control greed monsters on the 'crack pipe,' who should be thrown in jail and prosecuted (not fined).
Attorney General of Ohio, Richard Cordray, call this entire illicit Foreclosure scheme exactly what it is: Unappetizing, contempt for the law, and of course FRAUD.
More than $535 billion in taxpayer money went to firms and toxic assets as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to the latest quarterly figures from two federal auditors. About $992 million has gone to homeowners, the same data show. President Barack Obama's promise to "enable as many as three to four million homeowners to modify the terms of their mortgages to avoid foreclosure," which he detailed in a February 2009 speech, was "always modest compared to the incredible scale of the problem," Senator Ted Kaufman, a Delaware Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, a bailout watchdog, said Wednesday during the hearing with Caldwell. "Certainly, it was modest compared to the boldness shown in rescuing AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, Citigroup and the auto companies."
Caldwell's revelation about the possible wrongful disbursement of taxpayer money comes on the heels of multiple nationwide criminal and civil investigations emanating from mortgage companies' use of fraudulent paperwork to foreclose on homeowners. "Evidence has mounted that there are substantive problems with the liens that support significant numbers of securitized mortgages," Damon Silvers, a member of the panel created to keep tabs on the bailout, who also works as director of policy and special counsel at the AFL-CIO, said Wednesday. The paperwork determines true ownership. If those documents weren't properly passed along, then an investor who bought a piece of the mortgage or the company collecting those payments from homeowners, known as servicers, may not have the right to either the home or the mortgage.
The administration's Home Affordable Modification Program, known as HAMP, doles out taxpayer funds to servicers, investors, lenders and homeowners for successfully restructuring a struggling homeowner's mortgage and lowering their monthly payment so they can afford to stay in their home. So taxpayer funds may be going to companies that have no right to it, admitted Caldwell, Treasury's chief homeownership preservation officer.
"How do we know that people who don't have good liens aren't getting public money essentially under the false pretense that they have a good lien?" Silvers asked Caldwell. "Again, we don't," was her reply. "Our focus at this point has been on..." Silvers quickly stopped her. "Hold it," he said. "That's the issue." He added that he hoped Treasury "would be diligent" in trying to answer "what's potentially at play -- are servicers and banks getting public money under false pretenses? We ought to try to figure out whether that's true or not," Silvers added. Caldwell agreed. Those companies continue to get the money, though. Meanwhile, borrowers are tossed from the program for the same reason -- faulty paperwork. "I am concerned by what appears to be a discrepancy between the treatment of paperwork defects on the part of homeowners seeking help from HAMP, and the treatment of servicers who are obtaining HAMP funds on the basis that they have a valid lien on the homeowner's property," Silvers said in an interview. "However, I think that our hearing may have focused the HAMP team on what the issues are here, and I hope they do as they said they were going to do in terms of looking into the status of these liens," Silvers said. Three megabanks -- Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo -- service $5.4 trillion in home loans, or 50 percent of all outstanding residential mortgages, according to the latest quarterly data from MortgageStats.com and the Federal Reserve. BofA and JPMorgan, the nation's two largest banks, have halted foreclosure sales. On Wednesday Wells Fargo acknowledged errors in its paperwork, and said it's filing supplemental documents in 55,000 foreclosure proceedings During a separate exchange, Kaufman and Caldwell discussed the second lien issue. Kaufman noted the "reluctance of some financial institutions to extinguish second liens because they're carrying them on the books at 90 percent of value." "It seems to me the only reason that they're carrying the second liens is because they don't want to write them down because they're carrying them at 90 percent of value, and they're worth nowhere near 90 percent of value," he added.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
This will eventually come down to exactly where it must, to the State Attorney General's standing up against our own Federal Government in support of it's own citizens.
President Obama laid his cards on the table for everyone in our nation to see, and he made it very clear exactly who he is protecting, and unfortunately, it is not the American people.
It's too damn bad, because it didn't have to be this way. He could have chosen another path. He did not. More's the pity. He had the potential to be own of our greatest President's at a time in our nation, when we desperately needed a bold and courageous leader. One who truly understood the 'urgency' that was required at this time in our country. One who truly should have trusted the very people who sent him to the White House, to among other things: restore the public trust.
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.
Inaugural Address
By President Barack Obama
There have been many outstanding Democrats like Senator Kaufman, who have stood up for the truth, and for restoring the public trust in our nation. They understand what is at stake here, they understand, that as Mr. Nocera said, that what is now unfolding before out eyes is indeed, 'the tip of the ugly iceberg.' Indeed, the longer this Fraud to cover up Fraud is allowed to continue, the more painful it will become for our nation, the more misery and despair with continued job losses and home foreclosures will occur.
It's too damn bad, it didn't have to be like this. A fair and equitable arrangement could have been worked out, but instead our so called 'fearless leaders,' have just gone along for the ride, as pretended that it would just somehow all go away.
It's only just beginning, and again, we as a party, will pay the greatest price of all, and so will all our fellow Americans as the Tea Bagger crazies, end up making it all a million times worse than we can ever imagine.
There is always a price for corruption, and we've paid enough.
Thanks as always.
Ms. B.