Two New Fraud Deals Show Wall Street’s Washington Insiders at Work
It must’ve been like old home week when the old gang of Wall Street and Washington insiders finalized a couple more cushy settlements last week.
Everybody knew the drill: Ignore the potential criminal charges and agree on settlement figures they think the public will swallow — figures that are big enough to sound impressive but far smaller than the banks’ ill-gotten gains. They’ve done this dozens of times before.
But there was an empty chair at the negotiating table.
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So whose chair is it? You already know. That chair belongs to the borrower whose home value was artificially inflated by a bank-hired appraiser. It belongs to the homeowner who paid her mortgage on time every month, but was still hit with unjustified ‘servicing charges’ that caused her to fall behind … and lose her home.
That empty chair belongs to the minority communities targeted for predatory lending, then left to wither and die. It belongs to the bedroom communities whose residents invested their life’s savings in real estate whose value had been artificially pumped up by by bank speculation. It belongs to millions of families — in Hendersonville, in West Garfield Park, in Baltimore and Jacksonville and Bakersfield and thousands of other communities across the country.
That chair belongs to the family who lost $50,000 or $75,000 or $100,000 when they lost their homes, and then got $1,200 back in that “big” $25 billion deal — and only then if they were “lucky.” It belongs to all the Americans who lost trillions of dollars in housing value when the bank-created bubble finally burst, and who were then left holding the debt.
That chair belongs to all the people who can’t find work because nobody’s hiring. Nobody’s hiring because nobody’s buying. And nobody’s buying because so many people are struggling to pay their overpriced loans.
That chair belongs to you, and it belongs to me. And as long as it’s empty these deals will all turn out the same. A small circle of friends will keep cutting the same cushy deals over and over again until we go to Washington and demand a change…
Full article here…
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@RJ – I find it interesting that Obama’s campaign couldn’t wait to ‘sit in the chairs’ amongst us in dingy restaurants etc. but we weren’t privileged to sit in a chair at the negotiations . . . that involved us no less . . . it should be mandatory that a ‘constituent’ attend each and every meeting that directly involves him/her.