Busting Wall Street, by the numbers

How many FBI agents does it take to bust one Wall Street crook?

This isn’t the beginning of a joke. It’s one way to measure how serious the Obama’s administration latest highly touted financial fraud task force is about tackling its beat.

The task force is staffed with 10 FBI agents, according to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

You can get some idea of whether that’s an adequate number by comparing it to the law enforcement effort in the wake of the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s, a major but vastly smaller financial collapse.

It only cost the taxpayers a mere $150 billion in bailout money, compared to the 2008 banking collapse, which cost us trillions.

Bill Black, a former S&L regulator turned white-collar criminal law expert and law professor at University of Missouri at Kansas City, has been one of the sharpest critics of the administration’s sharpest critics.

Black makes the point that regulators investigating S&L fraud two decades ago made thousands of criminal referrals, and the FBI assigned 1,000 agents to follow up on those referrals. Black says the referrals led to more than 1,000 felony convictions, including the executives of the S&Ls.

Black is just one of many who have noticed that President Obama’s heart has not really been into the task of putting top bank executives in jail.

As recently as December 11, the president told 60 Minutes in an interview: “I can tell you, just from 40,000 feet, that some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases, some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn't illegal.”

Black points out that this at best a non-answer; at worst it’s double-talk. The president says that “some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street, in some cases some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street, wasn’t illegal.”

So the reasonable follow-up question would be: where are the prosecutions, over the past 3 years, of the rest of the behavior, the part that was illegal?

The other aspect of Obama’s answer that I find worrisome is the president’s perspective – he acknowledges that he’s making a judgment based on a view from 40,000 feet.

That’s a distance of 7.5 miles. The president isn’t predicting the weather here; he’s talking about whether crimes were committed in the process of the worst financial disaster in almost a century.

Good prosecutors and FBI agents don’t investigate from 7.5 miles away. They get in a suspect’s face, and into their history, find out who their friends and associates are. They dig into their family lives if they need to.

That’s how they operate when their hearts are in it if they want to make the case.

But even when their hearts are in it, good law enforcement people can’t do their jobs without resources.

And that’s a decision the president can make. He doesn’t have to ask Congress.

Call the president today and let him know that we won’t be fooled by faux enforcement efforts, and the we know the difference between what 10 FBI agents can do and what 1,000 can do – even from seven miles away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Financial Crisis / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 01/29/2012

Task Force Deja Vu

MoveOn.org and other groups are declaring President Obama’s announcement of a new task force to investigate foreclosure fraud a significant victory.

These groups deserve credit and thanks for mobilizing people to call the White House and state attorneys general and organizing protests to push back against a weak proposed settlement of foreclosure fraud charges against big banks, without having first fully investigated the allegations.

But before we get too carried away with the celebrations, I think it’s worth examining the president’s announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Because we’ve heard it all before.

In 2009, the Obama administration convened, with great fanfare, the “”Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force,” which included officials from the Justice Department, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Announcing the task force, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder said it mission was to the mission was to prosecute the financial fraud that led to the 2008 economic collapse.

“Mortgages, securities and corporate fraud schemes have eroded the public's confidence in the nation's financial markets and have led to a growing sentiment that Wall Street does not play by the same rules as Main Street,” Holder said.

State attorneys general then formed their own mortgage fraud working group to work with federal authorities.

These previous efforts haven’t produced noteworthy results – no criminal charges have been brought against major bank executives, and no major policy changes have been put in place to force banks to help homeowners.

The 2009 task force was not exactly targeting the titans of Wall Street. As these high-profile task forces like to do, this one gave its “operations” hokey names like Operation Stolen Dreams and Operation Broken Trust that make everybody but the prosecutors cringe.

Touting Operation Broken Dreams in 2010, prosecutors bragged that it had netted 330 convictions related to mortgage fraud  – but it focused on borrower, not bank fraud. While Operation Broken Trust focused on investment fraud, among its 343 criminal cases, it focused on lower-level fraudsters.

There was not a single case against a Wall Street banker.

While prosecutors often build cases against higher-ups using those lower in the food chain, that doesn’t seem to be the case with the 2009 task force.

In other words, the 2009 task force hasn’t done anything that would interfere with the flow of political contributions from Wall Street.

Evaluating the task force’s work, the Columbia Journalism Review found it more publicity stunt that real prosecution effort.

Meanwhile, the state AG’s efforts stirred MoveOn.org and other organizations to action. A handful of state AGs are balking at the inadequate proposed settlement, and California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris has joined with Nevada’s attorney general in walking away from the proposed settlement and pledging a real investigation into the foreclosure mess.

There are plenty of other reasons to be skeptical of the President’s newly- anointed task force, rounded up here by Dave Dayen on Firedoglake. While one of its co-chairs, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, appears to be the genuine deal in his intention to crack down on financial crime, he’s being babysat (co-chaired) by two administration lawyers with dubious backgrounds when it comes to getting tough on bankers.

Robert Khuzami, head of enforcement at the SEC, used to be general counsel at Deutsche Bank, overseeing its huge risky investments in mortgages. Shouldn’t Deutsch Bank be a prime target of the task force?

At the SEC, he’s presided over several settlements that appeared to be overly generous to banks. Another other co-chair is the head of Justice’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, who has been apologist in chief for the agency’s lack of aggressiveness in going after too big to fail bankers.

As a private lawyer, Breuer worked at the Washington D.C. law firm Covington & Burling, which represented too big to fail banks Bank of America, Well Fargo, Citgroup and JPMorgan Chase as well as MERS, the Mortgage Electronic Registration Service, a concoction of the real estate finance industry that runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages that has been at the center of complaints about false and fraudulent documents in the foreclosure process.

Breuer and Khuzami both played prominent roles in the president’s previous financial fraud task force, as members of its securities and commodities fraud working group.

The bottom line is that the new task force is only needed because of the abject failure of the administration’s previous efforts to prosecute the fraud at the heart of the financial meltdown.

According to statistics gathered by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, despite all the prosecutors’ puffery about their inanely named operations, financial fraud prosecutions fell to a 20-year low in 2011, continuing a decade-long downward trend.

If this new task force is not going to be a fraud itself, Khuzami and Breuer have to go. They should be replaced by real prosecutors without close ties to the big bankers.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the Obama administration, people like that do exist.

Blogger Abigail Field nominates two crackerjacks – Neil Barofsky, the tough former inspector general of the bailout, and Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois, who has successfully pursued several high-profile cases, including the perjury conviction of Scooter Libby, former VP Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

So after you finish that glass of champagne celebrating the new task force, it’s time to get back on the phone. Here’s the president’s number.

Tell the president we don’t need another task force. We need prosecutors who aren’t compromised and who aren’t afraid to do their jobs.

 

 

California Attorney General Kamala Harris / Foreclosures / Martin Column / President Barack Obama / Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - 01/27/2012

Stop Forecclosuregate Bailout

Is President Obama going to try to sell us another bank bailout in his State of the Union address tonight?

Of course, he won't call it a bailout. He'll tout it as “the largest multi-state settlement of charges of wrongdoing against corporate malefactors in history;” something that sounds important and unprecedented.

But don’t be fooled, a bailout is exactly what Obama administration officials are scheming, under the guise of settling foreclosure fraud charges against the big banks.

The fraud stems from widespread robo-signing in which banks used forged documents or had employees sign off on documents they hadn’t read.

The Obama administration has been pressuring state attorneys general to end a joint federal-state investigation with a sweetheart deal that would amount to another bailout for the banks – rewarding them again for their bad behavior, this time with a light slap on the wrist.

Unlike in 2008, we know a lot more about how government officials under the influence of Wall Street misbehave. When administration officials met privately with state AGs Monday in Chicago, they were met with protestors, and a number of groups have been mobilizing phone calls to the White House and state AGs.

Let me give you some perspective: Banks have made hundreds of billions off the adjustable, high-interest loans they pawned off on borrowers, then sliced and diced and resold to investors until the bankers’ shenanigans sank our economy. Now the Obama administration wants to settle with them for between $19 and $25 billion in fines. Some of that money could be sent directly to 750,000 borrowers who were found to be victims of robo-signing. But there haven’t any thorough investigations to determine the full scope of that scandal or how many people were actually effected.  Part of the money could be used to reduce principal (by a piddling $20,000) for a small number of homeowners, and some could be used to pay housing counselors, who provide advice for people facing foreclosure.

But as in previous foreclosure reduction efforts and previous settlements with the banks, enforcement and accountability are completely lacking.

And while $19 to $25 billion may sound like a lot of money to us, to the bankers, it’s pocket change: It’s neither punitive nor a deterrent.

This foreclosure deal is so bad that Kamala Harris, the California AG who is a close ally of the president’s, walked away from it, promising instead to join with Nevada’s AG to scrutinize the bankers’ foreclosure practices more closely.

In doing so, Harris is behaving like real law enforcement official, not a bank apologist. Like any prosecutor, she knows she has to have solid evidence in hand before she talks about a plea bargain.

A  handful of other state AGs are expressing skepticism about the proposed settlement, but the Obama administration continues to pressure the AGs to settle before the banks’ behavior is fully investigated and understood.

As MIT economist and Baseline Scenario blogger Simon Johnson told Dave Dayen at Firedoglake, “Why go small when you have a strong case for fraud?”

Harris isn’t the only one who walked away from what she saw as a shabby deal for her constituents. The New York AG, Eric Schneiderman also balked, and when he started to question the deal, he was booted off the negotiating committee.  What particularly disturbed Schneiderman was the notion that as part of a proposed settlement, banks would get immunity from lawsuits, not only relating to robo-signing, but for other mortgage-related fraud as well.

“I wasn't willing to provide a release that ... released conduct that hadn't been investigated, essentially,” Schneiderman told National Public Radio. Schneiderman has started his own investigation.

Initially the joint state-federal investigation looked like it had teeth. Back in 2010 when the process began, Tom Miller, the Iowa AG who headed the multi-state task force, stated bluntly: “We will put people in jail.”

What happened?

Remember what Deep Throat told investigative reporters Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate: Follow the money.

After Miller launched that initial investigation of the banks’ foreclosure practices, he raised $261,445 from finance, insurance and real estate interests – more than 88 times as much as he’d raised before the investigation. Not all that much money in the scheme of things, but apparently enough to inspire him to back off. Now Miller is leading the settlement juggernaut.

Where we see fraud, our leaders see financial opportunity.

We can’t let Miller and the Obama administration let the banks off the hook again at our expense. We want thorough, transparent investigations and indictments where appropriate.

Please call the White House today and tell them that if it walks like a bailout and quacks like a bailout, we’ll know it’s a bailout, no matter how administration officials try to dress it up.

 

And we don't want any more bailouts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreclosure / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 01/24/2012

Occupy the New Year

Watch live streaming video from califather at livestream.com

Where’s Our Money greeted the New Year in church – All Saints Church in Pasadena.I moderated a panel on the foreclosure crisis, with three people who have been on the front line of trying to find solutions, help people save their homes and hold bankers for their continuing fraud.

I met Walter Hackett when I first began writing about foreclosures in early 2009. He’s a former banker who became a homeowner’s advocate, as well as a leader in training other lawyers in one of the most complex areas of law. Jono Shaffer and Carlos Marroquin were two of the great people I met through Occupy. Jono, a veteran labor organizer who spearheaded the Justice for Janitors campaign, now works with ReFund California, a coalition that is fighting the austerity agenda across a range of issues, including education, housing and making Wall Street and the 1 percent pay its fair share, rather than making the middle-class bear all the costs of the economic collapse.

Carlos is one of the great spirits of Occupy LA, who through his advocacy and blog, No2HousingCrime.com has helped individual homeowners and put the spotlight on the foreclosure crisis.

The panel was part of stellar afternoon teach-in sponsored by Occupy’s Interfaith Sanctuary as part of the run-up to the Occupy the Rose Bowl Parade the following day.

I thought Walter, Jono and Carlos each made strong presentations and I recommend that you catch up with them in the video shot by my friend Vincent Precht, a stalwart Occupier, special education teacher who also has a terrific blog, California Father, where he writes about education issues, among other things.

It was a great way to start the new year, joining with people who have been doing good strong work for a long time, realizing how much resources we have, along with all the people who are finding their own way into the Occupy movement.

 

 

Foreclosures / Occupy - 01/08/2012

An Enforcer For the 99 Percent?

 California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, has staked out the high ground in promising to hold bankers accountable and protect borrowers in the continuing foreclosure crisis.

So far she’s formed a mortgage fraud task force and walked away from the weak settlement with the banks over mortgage servicing fraud that the Obama administration and the majority of state attorney generals have been trying to foist on the public.

Then earlier this week she told the executive who oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally bailed out quasi-public agencies, he should quit if he won’t consider principal reduction as a tool to help underwater homeowners.

Here’s hoping that Harris can build on the foundation she’s laid.

She has a real opportunity to set herself apart from other Democratic Party politicians, from the president to the congressional leadership and others who have opted for strong PR rather than real enforcement.

But she has her challenges ahead of her.

An ambitious politician who chaired the president’s campaign in California in 2008, Harris will have to go against the political grain if she really wants to hold bankers accountable and fight for homeowners.

Prosecuting bankers is never easy. Her agency, the state attorney general’s office, has had a woeful record on consumer protection. It’s been a long time since John Van de Kamp, when he was attorney general, launched his aggressive antitrust campaign.

As we know, bankers have been lubricating the political system to protect themselves against the consequences of the excesses. They spare no expense in hiring legal talent and defend themselves with a self-righteous fury. The legal system has had an unfortunate tendency to show great deference when the lords of the universe show up.

But as William Black, the former bank regulator turned law professor, has pointed out, it can be done. Bankers can be held accountable. It was done after the savings and loan debacle in the 1980s.

If prosecutors have the tenacity, the resources and the chops, they can go after bankers like they do gang members. First you go after the less powerful, more vulnerable players, squeezing them to gain information, and find documents to gradually build cases against the higher-ups.

Harris will be at a disadvantage without federal help – when prosecutors decide to take out a gang, they form a multiagency task forces, using all the agencies of federal, state and local officials.

We’ve seen just how disinterested the feds are in going after bankers. Local prosecutors around the country haven’t shown much stomach for the job either.

But if she is pursues her task in a determined and savvy way she will find wide and enthusiastic support among a crucial group that have become disenchanted with other politicians – the 99 percent.

If you’re in the Los Angeles and you want to hear more about this from William Black himself, he’s scheduled to participate in a stellar panel at Occupy LA at City Hall moderated by Truthdig’s Robert Scheer. Black, a law professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, will be joined by Michael Hudson, Joel Rogers, a professor of law, political science and economics at the University of Wisconsin, and via live stream, Michael Hudson, a financial analyst who also teaches economics at UM-KC.

 

California Attorney General Kamala Harris / Martin Column / Occupy - 11/05/2011

Mortgage Frauds, Official Shenanigans

Just how did the biggest bank fraud in the nation’s history go on with the full knowledge of authorities for 7 years?

Apparently, without much trouble.

Earlier this week, a judge sentenced Brian Farkas to 30 years in prison. He was the head of one of the country’s largest non-depository mortgage companies, convicted of a multibillion-dollar fraud that has been labeled the largest in the country’s history. The case was brought to prosecutors by the bailout’s former special inspector general – after a bank associated with the mortgage company tried to rip off the Troubled Asset Relief Program for $550 million.

Prosecutors said they sought the tough sentence as a deterrent, though bankers might not get the message.

Writing in the New York Times, white-collar criminal law expert Peter Henning said more respectable executives at bigger companies “perceive themselves as different from – and often better than – those who have been caught and punished, even if they are not.”

But one of the most outrageous aspects of the case has nothing to do with Farkas’ behavior: It has to do with how a government-sponsored  agency, Fannie Mae, found evidence of his wrongdoing  in 2000 and didn’t report it. According to court testimony as reported by Bloomberg News and the New York Times, when Fannie Mae found out that the bank was selling loans that had no value, the agency merely cut its ties with the bank.

Another government-sponsored agency picked up the business a week later, Bloomberg reported.

William Black, a former bank regulator who has been a sharp critic of the current administration’s lack of aggressiveness in investigating fraud in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, told Bloomberg: “If there had been a criminal referral, Farkas would have gone to jail in 2002.”

Farkas’ firm, Taylor Bean remained in business for another 7 years before it collapsed in August 2009.

The confidential agreement to disentangle Freddie Mac from Taylor Bean was overseen by Freddie Mac’s general counsel, Thomas Donilon, who now serves as national security adviser to President Obama.

It’s not the first time Donilon’s actions have been called into question: while he was a lawyer in private practice, he led lobbying efforts to undermine the credibility of an investigation into Fannie Mae’s shaky finances in 2004.

It’s worth cheering that prosecutors finally successfully prosecuted a major case stemming from mortgage crowd. But it’s also worth noting that the perp does not come from the ranks of the nation’s too big to fail banks.

It’s also worth noting that Donilon’s conduct in the financial collapse didn’t get him cast out as a pariah, it won him one of the most important jobs in this administration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Around the Web / Financial Crisis / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 07/01/2011

The Scandal That Won't Go Away

Despite the efforts of our public officials and bankers to ignore it, downplay it, paper it over or make it disappear, the fraud surrounding the mortgages at the heart of the financial collapse is the scandal that won’t go away.

Two big stories breaking over the past week showed what strong legs the scandal has. First, Huffington Post reported on a series of confidential audits that showed five of the country’s largest mortgage companies defrauded taxpayers in their handling of foreclosures on homes purchased with government-backed loans.

Then the New York Times and others trumpeted an investigation of the mortgage securitization process by New York’s new state attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. This investigation won strong praise from two of the toughest watchdogs on the financial beat, Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone and Robert Scheer at Truthdig, who portrayed Schneiderman as a hared-charging prosecutor who unlike the feds and other state attorney generals, is not intimidated by Wall Street.

But Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon argued that confidential audits, which were turned over to the Justice Department were a much bigger story than Schneiderman’s investigation.

Until Schneiderman’s investigation bear some fruit, I think history suggests we should be skeptical of officials who claim they are going to get tough on the banks and protect consumers.

Salmon pinpoints the real significance of the Schneiderman investigation – the continuing cracks in the state attorney general’s 50-state coalition that was negotiating with the banks to settle claims of mortgage fraud. Some Republicans had already criticized the state attorney generals for being too tough on the banks, referring to a proposed settlement as a shakedown. Other critics have raised questions about whether the attorney generals are being too soft, having sat down to negotiate without having done robust investigations first to gather ammunition.

Whatever the outcome of these on-going investigations’s, the week’s news guarantees one thing – the mortgage fraud scandal, and its offspring the foreclosure scandal, are not going away any time soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Around the Web / Foreclosures / Martin Column - 05/19/2011

What About The Rest of Us?

In one of the most appalling aspects of our current politics, our elites – elected officials, media lords and corporate chieftains, have swept the opinions and concerns of most Americans off the table to pursue their own agenda.

So we’re stuck with sterile political games focused on the national debt, even while a majority of Americans favor higher taxes on the rich and more aggressive action to reduce unemployment.

We get the highly touted insider trading conviction of a hedge fund billionaire while the Justice Department doesn’t pursue its own FBI’s massive evidence of the too big to fail bank’s fraud at the heart of the financial collapse.

It’s clear that whoever is setting priorities is not us. Take for example President Obama’s deficit commission, which has worked hard to legitimize the austerity agenda embraced by most of both parties. Not only was it stacked with well-known deficit hawks, It was made up of a collection of lifetime politicians, bureaucrats, with a CEO thrown in – because we wouldn’t want the CEOs to feel left out of any big idea brainstorming.

But what about the rest of us? Over at Campaign For America’s Future, Dave Johnson has been asking some intriguing, relevant questions.

For one, what would the deficit commission have looked like if it truly reflected the population of the country, rather than the backroom.

If a 100-person deficit panel truly reflected the country, it would present a stark contrast to the gang the president relied on:

•                19 people on the commission would receive some form of Social Security benefits, 12 of those as retirees. And on this deficit commission they get to talk when the ones making over $250K propose cutting Social Security.

•                43 of the commission members would have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement. 27 of those less than $1,000.

•                98 of the 100 members would make less than $250,000 a year.

•                50 of the members would come from households in which the total income of all wage-earners is less than $52,029.

•                13 would have income below the poverty level.

•                14 members would be receiving food stamps.

•                16.6% of the commission members would be un- or underemployed, and would be wondering why they are on a deficit commission at all instead of a jobs commission.

•                The commission would include the right proportion of factory and construction workers, and people who work in a kitchen, and work waiting tables, and teaching, and nursing, and installing tires, and all the other things that people do except, apparently, those on DC elite commissions. (People who do hard, manual labor get an extra vote each on what the retirement age should be.)

•                74 members would not have college degrees.

•                20 would not have graduated high school.

•                18 would speak a language other than English at home.

Under present circumstances it’s highly unlikely that the president would appoint a commission to consider the deficit or anything else for that matter that wasn’t stacked with wealthy insiders intent on slashing government services for anybody who is not like them. But highlighting the disconnect does point out in a particularly graphic way why those at the top have managed to get left out when its time to divide up the sacrifices.

 

 

 

 

 

Financial Crisis / Martin Column - 05/17/2011

P.R. Won't Fix Foreclosure Mess

Will one of the nation’s too big to fail banks succeed in buying its way out of a shameful scandal stemming from dozens of improper foreclosures of military families and overcharging thousands more?

J.P. Morgan Chase, which hauled in $25 billion in the bailout, is in full damage control mode, paying out $56 million to settle a class action brought by military families – about $4,500 per family – and temporarily lowering mortgage interest to 4 percent for other military families.

But the bank is still facing a federal investigation stemming from the allegations. Whether the Justice Department finds the nerve to hold accountable one of the big banks remains an open question.

It hasn’t so far, despite evidence of widespread fraud in the bank’s use of robo-signers who verified the accuracy of thousands of foreclosure documents without ever reading them.

But our political leaders haven’t worked up the courage to call it what it is.

The bank had no choice but to acknowledge it had screwed up. To show just how serious it was about doing right by the nation’s fighting men and women, J.P. Morgan Chase appointed an actual commission with some real-life celebrities on it, including retired general William McChrystal and former football legend Roger Staubach.

The Justice Department has no excuse not to go after J.P. Morgan and other banks that have been violating the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which is supposed to keep military families safe from foreclosure while they’re on active duty. Military families have been particularly hard hit by the foreclosure crisis, with 20,000 facing foreclosure last year, a 32 percent increase since 2008.

Federal investigators just made the Justice Department’s job easier – in a recent study GAO found more than a couple of dozen improper foreclosures of military families. You might not think that sounds too bad, until you realize they found those bad foreclosures in an examination of just 2,800 foreclosure files.

Instead of pretending that the foreclosure mess is just going to sort itself out on its own, our political leaders need to acknowledge how deep a hole the big banks have dug for the rest of us to figure a way out of.

We don’t need more hapless PR. A realistic first step would be a foreclosure moratorium. If anybody else but the big banks were engaged in these kind of shenanigans, it would just be labeled what it is: fraud, plain and simple.

 

Around the Web / Foreclosure / Martin Column - 05/09/2011

Remind AGs Who They Work For

The big banks are headed to Washington D.C. in an effort to weaken any potential settlement stemming from complaints about the banks’ misbehavior in the foreclosure crisis.

Those of us who favor holding the banks accountable are taking a different route Tuesday – through the country’s 50 state capitals.

A coalition of homeowner and consumer advocates are encouraging people to contact their state attorney generals today in an effort to encourage them to conduct real robust investigations into the big banks’ foreclosure fraud, not just go through the motions.

The official response to disclosures of the big banks’ sloppiness and downright fraud in the foreclosure process has been a mishmosh. President Obama refused to declare a moratorium while the mess was sorted out; the state attorney generals promised a tough investigation but don’t appear to have followed through, and then the various federal bank regulators got involved in an effort to negotiate a settlement.

One strategy for the big banks and their Republican allies has been to demonize Elizabeth Warren, a strong homeowners’ advocate who has been working to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created as part of the financial reform package passed last year. While the CFPB doesn’t exist yet, Warren has apparently been involved in the settlement process because that agency will have a hand in enforcing a settlement.

At the national level, it’s not just the Republicans that are covering for the bankers. The Obama administration in its present mood of bank coziness hasn’t been inclined to either prosecute bankers for violating the law or drive a hard bargain with them.

So that leaves it up to the attorneys general, several of whom, including Illinois’ Lisa Madigan, Iowa’s Tom Miller and California’s new attorney general have promised tough stances in protecting homeowners and holding banks accountable. Which means it’s up to us to call them – today – and remind them to hang tough.

 

 

Consumer Financial Protection Agency / Foreclosure / Martin Column - 03/28/2011