STOCK MARKET WATCH - Friday, 27 January 2012

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27. obama's late payment to mortgage fraud victims

http://www.nationofchange.org/obama-s-late-payment-mortgage-fraud-victims-1327587974

n his State of the Union ad­dress, many heard echoes of the Barack Obama of old, the pres­i­den­tial as­pi­rant of 2007 and 2008. Among the pop­ulist pledges rolled out in the speech was tough talk against the too-big-to-fail banks that have funded his cam­paigns and for whom many of his key ad­vis­ers have worked: “The rest of us are not bail­ing you out ever again,” he promised.

Pres­i­dent Obama also made a strik­ing an­nounce­ment, one that could have been writ­ten by the Oc­cupy Wall Street Gen­eral As­sem­bly: “I’m ask­ing my at­tor­ney gen­eral to cre­ate a spe­cial unit of fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors and lead­ing state at­tor­neys gen­eral to ex­pand our in­ves­ti­ga­tions into the abu­sive lend­ing and pack­ag­ing of risky mort­gages that led to the hous­ing cri­sis. This new unit will hold ac­count­able those who broke the law, speed as­sis­tance to home­own­ers and help turn the page on an era of reck­less­ness that hurt so many Amer­i­cans.”

Re­mark­ably, Pres­i­dent Obama named New York At­tor­ney Gen­eral Eric Schnei­der­man as co-chair­per­son of the Unit on Mort­gage Orig­i­na­tion and Se­cu­ri­ti­za­tion Abuses. Schnei­der­man was on a team of state at­tor­neys gen­eral ne­go­ti­at­ing a set­tle­ment with the na­tion’s five largest banks. He op­posed the set­tle­ment as being too lim­ited and of­fer­ing overly gen­er­ous im­mu­nity from fu­ture pros­e­cu­tion for fi­nan­cial fraud. For his out­spo­ken con­sumer ad­vo­cacy, he was kicked off the ne­go­ti­at­ing team. He with­drew his sup­port of the set­tle­ment talks, along with sev­eral other key at­tor­neys gen­eral, in­clud­ing Cal­i­for­nia’s Ka­mala Har­ris, an Obama sup­porter, and Delaware’s Beau Biden, the vice pres­i­dent’s son.

In an op-ed penned last No­vem­ber, Schnei­der­man and Biden wrote, “We rec­og­nized early this year that, though many pub­lic of­fi­cials—in­clud­ing state at­tor­neys gen­eral, mem­bers of Con­gress and the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion—have delved into as­pects of the bub­ble and crash, we needed a more com­pre­hen­sive in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­fore the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions at the heart of the cri­sis are granted broad re­leases from li­a­bil­ity.”