Now these same banks, to speed up the foreclosure process (and to cover up the sloppiness of their record keeping), were caught fudging legal papers. It wasn’t bad enough that lenders recklessly wrote home loans with little regard for a borrower’s ability to pay-or that individual employees, if not sometimes entire offices, routinely forged loan documents and larded deals with hidden fees. (“One of the better AGs we’ve had in a long time,” Rheingold says.) It was Miller who, around this time last year, started calling his fellow attorneys general to see about jointly investigating the “robo-signing” scandal then in the headlines.
The bad guy in Schneiderman’s telling is Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney general, who is no bad guy at all. It’s making sure people who can save their homes have the right to save their homes.” Then, with the sigh of someone who's been engaged in the same fight for a very long time, he adds, “I think sometimes we lose sight of what’s possible to achieve.” “He’s probably right that his approach would get more money, but that’s not the most important thing for people like me,” says Rheingold, who has been battling predatory subprime lenders dating back to his days as a Legal Aid attorney in the 1980s. That’s a plan that old warriors in the fight like Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, wish Schneiderman would get behind. It would mean bringing in new sets of players and, most important, putting on indefinite hold a settlement plan that would both help fix a broken foreclosure system and force lenders to sit with individual homeowners to work out a loan modification. The more cynical think he’s a grandstander: a politician overeager in his pursuit to be seen as Eliot Spitzer without the hookers.Ī case in point is the negotiations between the country’s 50 attorneys general and the Obama administration on one side and the banks (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, etc.) on the other-the very talks that have thrust Schneiderman into the headlines. The more generous among these caped-crusader types view Schneiderman as well-meaning but misguided. But I’m inclined to agree with those who’ve been waging trench warfare against the likes of Countrywide and Ameriquest stretching back a decade or more.
#The us crackdown economic espionage mess trial
Sure, I’m as eager as the next 99-percenter to see Wall Street’s worst offenders pay tens of billions of dollars in fines, if not stand trial for the damage they’ve done to the global economy. Over the past few weeks, he’s been the subject of sweet-smelling profiles in The New York Times and Politico (“America’s Most Powerful Liberal?") Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel are among the high-profile lefties blogging about his heroic powers.Įxcept I’m not ready to declare Schneiderman the next coming of Elizabeth Warren. But there’s Schneiderman, demanding that the banks pay several pounds of flesh for the pain they’ve caused. Everyone from the president (who chose a JPMorgan Chase executive to serve as his chief of staff, for heaven’s sake) on down has seemed willing to give them a pass.
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