The New Robber Barons Page 35
A complaint of alleged fraud on the part of Goldman Sachs detailed its close relationships with Countrywide, New Century, and Fremont. The complaint showed Goldman knew of "an accelerating meltdown for subprime lenders such as New Century and Fremont." Despite known serious loan problems, Goldman continued to securitize the loans and sell them in packages of residential mortgage backed securities. Goldman Sachs Alternative Mortgage Products (GSAMP) was "garbage sold at mythical prices."
The complaint alleged that Countrywide employees in a Chicago office inflated incomes on 90 percent of reduced documentation loans, also known as "liars' loans." One of Countrywide's mortgage brokerage arms "routinely doubled the amount of the potential borrower's income ... so that borrowers could qualify for loans they could not afford." The complaint alleged that brokers, not borrowers, engaged in massive fraud to push loans through the system and earn commissions. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told First Business Morning News: "Countrywide broke the law, homeowners did not."
Arianna Huffington explained that our elected officials allowed banks to thwart usury laws:
"Every day, Americans, faced with layoffs and tough economic times, are forced to use their credit cards to pay for essentials such as food, housing, and medical care -- the costs of which continue to escalate. But, as their debt rises, they find it harder to keep up with their payments. When they don't, banks, trying to offset losses in other areas, turn around, hike interest rates, and impose all manner of fees and penalties."Third World America, P. 77.
Even when banks initiated foreclosure fraud, they refuse to bear the costs of delays and bad deals of their own making. After pumping up appraisals and falsifying borrowers' income on applications, banks are walking away from abandoned homes and sticking taxpayers with the bill to clean up the mess they left behind.
Banks claim that it is mortgage lenders or mortgage servicers who are guilty, but these are bank affiliates and business partners funded by the banks.
Banks supplied the money (via private label phony securitizations) that fueled this problem. Banks engaged in widespread massive mortgage securitization fraud. As underwriters, banks were responsible for doing adequate due diligence on the underlying loans. Banks were responsible for making sure the representations about risk in their financial products were accurate. Instead, the representations were materially misleading.
According to a local study by the Woodstock Institute, the mortgage servicers and trustees most often associated with abandoned properties are Bank of America, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase.
We Need the Mother of All Reforms
Doing nothing ensures a relentless downward slide into financial and social chaos for great swaths of the country. Washington's political corruption and mismanagement has the same roots as Chicago's. As Arianna points out, on a national level, we need "the mother of all reforms:
"That is why the first step toward stopping our relentless transformation into Third World America has to be breaking the choke hold that special interest money has on our politicians." (Third World America, 172)
Money isn't the only way to sway politicians. One can take away the power politicians try to buy with that money. Among voters, a show of numbers is as effective as money. The middle class needs to make its voice heard in the media and in direct contact with their local and national elected officials.
On a national level, we need a Constitutional amendment requiring full public financing for political campaigns (for starters). Too many politicians are owned by special interest groups that buy votes, finance campaigns, employ their relatives, or just buy them off. As Arianna explained: "If someone's going to own the politicians, it might as well be the American people."
Endnote in response to comments: I use "wilding," since that is the term used by our local mainstream media news articles, including articles at NBC and the Sun-Times. This is the definition given by the free online dictionary: "Slang: The act or practice of going about in a group threatening, robbing, or attacking others."
*Update June 8: Garry McCarthy was approved by the full City Council and named Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department on Wednesday, June 8, 2011.
Update June 9: Two days after the new Superintendent said his men on trains and platforms would break up mobs before they formed and said several arrests proved there were enough police officers downtown to prevent attacks before they occur, Jesse Andersen, 35, brother of Billy Corgan, lead singer of Smashing Pumpkins, was attacked by a group of young people while riding the train on his way to work. Andersen was not seriously hurt and was interviewed here. Corgan twittered about it and told the SunTimes: "He was just sitting there on the train, listening to his iPod. They obviously set [my brother] up to rob him ." Even the Wall Street Journal reported this story. Mr. Andersen was much luckier than a victim the previous day, who was robbed of cash and an iPhone and sent to Northwestern Hospital in serious condition.
The Middle Class is Drowning in Debt and Choking on Lies
June 24, 2011
If a drunk driver crashed his speeding rental car into your house and killed your spouse, you would be outraged if law enforcers took bribes and refused to give the driver a blood test. If the judge then gave the killer a small fine and ordered you to pay the fine and pay for all the damages, you'd be outraged. If the government then handed the drunk-driver keys to a bigger faster rental car, handed the drunk driver an even bigger bottle of whiskey, and then gave you the rental bill; you'd storm Washington, blizzard elected officials with protests and organize friends and associates to vote these malefactors, the elected officials that betrayed your trust, out of office.
Yet, we've remained largely silent in the face of the same sort of behavior by Wall Street and Washington. Bonus-seeking bankers crashed into Main Street's economy and ran control frauds within banks that would have failed without taxpayer bailouts. Bureaucrats and elected officials bailed them out without demanding consequences. Bankers are revving their engines again in credit derivatives, currency derivatives, and commodities trades. "Financial reform" addresses none of the latter problems.
Arianna Huffington's Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream explains that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the bank bailout package also known as TARP, allotted only $72 billion to infrastructure projects. Another feature of the bill was to have banks agree to lend money to medium and small sized businesses to stimulate the economy. That didn't happen and official unemployment numbers remain above 9%, while unofficial figures for underemployed Americans soar above 20%.
The number one stimulus for any economy is not consumer spending, although that is a powerful secondary effect. The number one stimulus is capital spending, investment in the production of real goods and consumables. As Third World America explains: "There were three flaws with the old economy that has crashed. It favored consumption over production, debt over small savings, and environmental damage over environmental renewal."
Our ongoing bank bailouts included the mispricing of around $4 trillion of toxic assets that the banks cannot afford to honestly price, since bank capital would be wiped out sparking another global financial meltdown. We continue to provide cheap taxpayer funding through the Fed. New accounting rules allow banks to cover-up the low price of impaired assets, and government debt guarantees provide ongoing subsidies to banks that have a value of trillions of dollars.
Ground Zero for America's Debt Crisis
Beyond the banks, we have fiscal mismanagement and corruption that plagues middle class taxpayers. I happen to live in Illinois, the best example of this in the nation. Cook County encompasses Chicago and some of its surrounding suburbs. This week, the Cook County Treasurer discovered "stunning" debt. This debt isn't new, but apparently our officials are now properly terrified. Our total debt for the municipality, education, county, sanitary, park, fire, township, library and special services is
now $108 billion. That means the debt per person in Chicago exceeds $23,700 (corrected assuming 2.67 average per household) or more than $63,500 per household, and that is just local debt.
The other problem is that the Illinois economy isn't growing. Many of those households have no income coming in other than government subsidies, and some have no income at all. Unofficial unemployment numbers top 20%. State of Illinois taxes increased from 3% to 5%, an increase of around 67%. Taxes on real estate, utilities, sales, and more are expected to skyrocket. Businesses like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are being courted by low income tax states (at least the income taxes are currently low) like Florida.
We're not doing better on a national level. Americans owe almost $166,600 (corrected assuming 2.69 average per household) per household or around $45,000 per person (Greek citizens owe $44,000 per person). That's on top of our local debt.
David Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general, says it's even worse than that. When he takes into account future obligations for Medicare, Social Security, Federal debt, Military retirement, Civil servant retirement, and more, we owe $546,663 per household. That doesn't even include your local debt -- it may not be as bad as if you lived in Illinois, but it's substantial nonetheless -- and personal debt including mortgages and consumer debt that average more than $120,000 per household.
We're told we are a great country and we can "grow our way out of it." Exactly how does that occur, when jobs are going overseas, taxes for the wealthiest in our country are uncollectible after exploiting tax breaks, and programs for investment in infrastructure and production are virtually nonexistent?
America's biggest problem by far is that capital spending in new production facilities that create jobs and real products never occurred, not even after trillions of dollars were thrown at banks in the global financial system.
Chicago Police Superintendent McCarthy's Cheap Shot: "Government Sponsored Racism"
One would think that our fiscal problems and corruption by local and national officials would unite citizens in a common cause. I've been very vocal about predatory lending that targeted vulnerable minorities. A practice called "reverse red lining" targeted people of color and those in minority neighborhoods to get them to sign mortgages that had complicated documentation that hid risks. Yes, there was some fraud by borrowers, but the overwhelming problem in the Chicago area, was fraud on borrowers. I've explained this in some detail on The Huffington Post in past years and again recently: "Third World America 2011: Forget 'Fast Tracking to Anarchy.' We've Arrived." (June 8, 2011).
I've also been vocal about shootings, mob wildings, and muggings in Chicago and the fact that our officials are lying to our population about the causes. It's true that most of shootings are black-on-black or brown-on-brown and that violence in our poorer neighborhoods is branching out into middle class neighborhoods. In instances where perpetrators are black or brown and the victims are white, it is tempting to say it is all about race, but as I pointed out, this is much bigger than our racial issue:
It's Not a Race War; It's a Class War
It's much too easy to let politicians divide the nation, make this about race, and ignore the underlying causes. It's true that many of the mobs in downtown Chicago are comprised of African Americans, but Oprah Winfrey isn't into wilding. Mary McCarthy didn't get a close up look at the mob outside her window, but they appeared white -- definitely not African American.
Last year, I never mentioned race in my post about Chicago violence, but a few commenters brought up race and made unwarranted assumptions. Some commenters assumed "wildings" only involve black youths. Chicago is a city with a lot of diversity and gangs of every race. I mentioned a separate incident of an armed intruder being shot and killed by an off duty police officer; the armed intruder was not African American. I also mentioned three police officers were shot and killed within a two month period. Two were African American, one was not.
I pointed out that our officials have been lying to the public about crime. On June 23, NBC televised a segment on how 911 calls on Memorial Day noted gang violence on Chicago's trendy beaches and the lack of adequate police presence for crowd control.
For example, a 911 caller implored for more police protection. He was selling chairs and umbrellas on the beach that day when he was confronted by thugs: "We have a couple of gentlemen, well, actually a few people, threatening to shoot us, threatening to whoop our ass. They're unhooking our equipment." Calls like this belied the story told by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy that the beach was closed due to the heat.
More disturbing, however, were remarks made by Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to Father Pfleger's congregation on Sunday June 5, 2011 at St. Sabina's Catholic Church. I provide the entire transcript along with this video, which has already been pulled from the web once, and was retrieved from the Google cache by a concerned citizen: http://youtu.be/xIX4j2sormY
The last part of the speech is wrong on many levels. I'm happy to speak up about injustices such as predatory lending and how this practice victimized many neighborhoods in Chicago. In fact, I co-authored an Op-ed for the New York Times with the Reverend Jesse Jackson on that topic; it wasn't published, however, but we gave it a shot.
When it comes to the type of violent crime referred to by the Superintendent, he has his cause and effects all wrong, and he made it all about racism. He equated gun laws to "government sponsored racism."
If criminals didn't have guns, they would use knives. The killings in our African American communities have nothing to do with racism. These are black-on-black crimes perpetrated by criminals with no respect for authority and no self-respect. They victimize and terrorize decent members of the black community struggling to survive a devastating economic crisis. The Chicago Police Superintendent's pandering and misinformation doesn't make it easy for anyone to respect authority.
Gun control is "government sponsored racism?" Superintendent McCarthy is wrong on many levels. He mentions segregation, Jim Crow and the Black Code. The latter denied African Americans the right to own guns and that left them open to victimization by armed racists. Now they are victimized by armed criminals in their own communities. Only law-abiding citizens aren't allowed to have guns in Chicago, which seems to be a violation of U.S. citizens' Second Amendment rights. The chief challenger of this prohibition in Illinois is an African American man who wants to own a gun so he can defend himself. Moreover, Superintendent McCarthy didn't mention the understaffed and underequipped police officers, many of whom are men and women of color, who have been shot and killed, wounded, or have had guns pointed at them by criminals. How is any of this racism?
Father Pfleger has something to answer for as well. What happened to separation of Church and State? Why does the Catholic Church deserve tax-exempt status if it allows a priest to use the Church pulpit for political rallies?
Politicians divide the nation and try to make these issues about race, and ignore the underlying causes.
In Third World America, Arianna Huffington notes: "the first step toward stopping our relentless transformation into Third World America has to be breaking the choke hold that special interest money has on our politics." We must also break the choke-hold that politicians in clerical robes and uniforms have on our public discourse.
Endnote: Transcript of Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy addressing the Congregation at St. Sabina's Church in Chicago, Illinois on June 5, 2011 (from above video):
I feel so inadequate after Father Pfleger speaking, but I would never turn down an opportunity to share a couple of words with the community.
Because there's only 24 hours in the day, I'm trying to fit that 25th hour in and get out everywhere and talk to everybody all the time. I've spent an awful lot of time over the last... tomorrow's my three week anniversary. And I'm also up for conformation tomorrow, so speak to your alderman; that would be very helpful.
But I've spent an awful lot of time speaking
to police officers over the last few weeks and I cannot help but be impressed by the sense of pride that they all take in this great agency called the Chicago Police Department. And Father, I've gotta...You know what? I'm there.
I'm going to take one second if you'll forgive me for this. Um, You know I cannot echo or speak as articulate as you did laying out the challenges that we face as a society, but I'm here to tell you one or two quick things. There are no accidents. There are no accidents in this universe and I believe deep down in my soul, I've never made a decision in my police career but God has brought me to this place. I've never made a decision in my police career, and I jokingly tell people that I lead a Forrest Gump type existence, floating along and ending up where I go.
But I did 20 years in the NYPD, and I was there on 911, so I have my own personal opinions about Osama Bin Laden. Please forgive me for that Father. But I was also there to see a change, a big change in the NYPD and the way we do business. And I want to give you a couple of numbers. In 1990 in NYC, there were 2, 245 people murdered. I'm going to say that again. 2,245 people murdered, and the headlines on the daily news were "Do something, Dave," talking to David Dinkins, the Mayor at the time. Well we changed the way we did business, and the NYPD has been very successful to the point where last year they reduced that number to 450.