THE LOOTING OF AMERICA - KAMALA HARRIS AND HER GOLDMAN SACHS BANKSTER STEVEN MNUCHIN - A tidy corrupt partnership
KAMALA HARRIS’ ENTIRE POLITICAL
LIFE HAS BEEN ONE OF NO ACHIEVEMENT AND BRAZEN CORRUPTION THAT HAS PUT PILES OF
MONEY IN HER POCKETS.
SHE WAS TAUGHT BY THE BEST!
HER CALIFORNIA COLLEAGUE, WAR
PROFITEER AND AGENT FOR RED CHINA, SENATOR FEINSTEIN MADE PILES OF MONEY
PROTECTING AND ENABLING CRIMINAL BANKSTERS WELLS FARGO AND BANK OF AMERICA.
WELLS FARGO LONG AGO HAD THEIR
CALIFORNIA MORTGAGE LICENSE REVOKED FOR CORRUPTION AND CORPORATE MALFEASANCE.
THAT DIDN’T STOP THE BANKSTERS OR FEINSTEIN. WELLS FARGO SIMPLY DECLARED ITSELF
ABOVE STATE LAW AND WENT ON TO LOOT TRILLIONS BY MARKETING TOXIC FRAUDULENT MORTGAGE
RELATED INVESTMENT PRODUCTS
FEINSTEIN AND KAMALA HARRIS STATE
WAS GROUND ZERO FOR THE BANKSTER-DRIVEN MORTGAGE MELTDOWN.
WE ALL KNOW THAT BANKSTERS WELLS
FARGO HAVE CONTINUED THEIR TIDAL WAVE CORPORATE CRIME AND CRIMINAL GLOBAL MONEY
LAUNDERING.
WELLS FARGO IS A MAJOR DONOR TO KAMALA
HARRIS. AS CORRUPT LAWYER ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CA SHE MADE SURE WELLS EXECS
NEVER WENT TO PRIONS. OBAMA, THROUGH BANKSTER-LAWYER ERIC HOLDER DID THE SAME.
OBAMA AND HILLARY & BILLARY
HAVE MADE VAST FORTUNES SUCKING OFF BANKSTERS THEY ENABLED AND ABETTED. THESE
ARE BRIBES PAID AS ‘SPEECH FEES’ TO THE TUNE OF $500k EACH.
KAMALA HARRIS LOVES THE SMELL OF THAT!
REPUBLICAN ‘KING OF FORECLOSURES’
STEVEN MNUCHIN IS A MAJOR DONOR TO KAMALA HARRIS. AS ATTORNEY GEN OF CA SHE
KEPT HIM OUT OF PRISON!
THIS POST PERTAINS TO LAWYER KAMALA
HARRIS SWERVING FROM LAWS TO PROTECT DONOR, CRIMINAL GOLDMAN SACHS BANKSTER ‘KING
OF FORECLOSURE’ STEVEN MNUCHIN WHO WAS SO CORRUPT DONALD TRUMP MADE HIM SEC. OF
TREASURY.
WITH SOCIOPATH LAWYER KAMALA
HARRIS DON’T FOLLOW THE LAW, IT DOESN’T APPLY TO HER OR HER BRIBSTERS. JUST
FOLLOW THE MONEY!
ACCE plans to ask incoming California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to take up the prosecution of OneWest based on the newly released evidence. And the group vowed to fight the Mnuchin nomination. “No one who oversaw the defrauding of thousands of homeowners should be allowed to serve watch over our country’s money,” Mears said.
"So in my background as attorney general
of California, I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of
whom lost their homes and will never be able to buy another," Harris said
in late July during the second round of Democratic debates in Detroit.
Here's what really happened:
In fact, she and several other state attorneys
general were instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with
five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other
financial services to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after
Harris secured those funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov.
Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from California's portion of the settlement
to pay off state budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.
Although Harris initially spoke out against
Brown's diversion of the funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court
battle that began in 2014 — even after she left the attorney general's office
and for the last year and a half while serving as senator and during her
presidential bid this year.
She
shook down some banks in the name of 'the people' and then went and used the
money for something else. No wonder she's always been popular with the
Democratic one-party blue-state establishment. I have a full blog on that here.
Fact Check: Big Banks that Kamala
Harris ‘Took on’ Now Support Her
2020
Democratic National Convention / YouTube
Volume 90%
19 Aug 202017
2:53
CLAIM: Former Labor
Secretary Hilda Solis suggested that because Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “took
on” the big banks as attorney general of California, she will stand up to them
as vice president.
VERDICT: While Harris was among 49 state attorney generals
who secured a $25 billion
settlement from big banks, many executives from those banks now support her as
Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s vice presidential choice.
“When millions of
families lost their homes, my friend in California, Sen. Kamala Harris, took on
the big banks and won,” Solis said in reference to the case which
involved Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally
Bank.
BLOG EDITOR: AS
ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA, KAMALA HARRIS REFUSED TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTE ANY
OF HER GENEROUS BANKSTERS DESPITE THAT FACT THAT CA WAS GROUND ZERO FOR
BANKSTER-CAUSED MORTGAGE MELTDOWN AND FORECLOSURE!
A number of executives
on Wall Street with links to Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America
now support Harris in her
effort with Biden to defeat Trump.
As Breitbart News
reported recently, Wells Fargo Vice Chairman for Public Affairs Bill
Daley, who served as Obama’s chief of staff from 2011 to 2012, called a Harris
a “reasonable, rational person who has worked in the system.”
Citigroup
executive Ray McGuire called Harris a “great
choice” for vice president. During the Democrat presidential primary, Harris
raked in campaign donations from executives and employees with Bank of America.
In These Times reported the donations at
the time:
Then there’s California Sen.
Kamala Harris, who received a total of $44,947 from these 12 firms. Harris,
who was once branded a “bankster’s worst nightmare,” and has touted her
prosecutorial record against banks as evidence of her progressive credibility,
received donations from five executives of these firms. They include Blackstone
managing director Tia Breakley, Morgan Stanley’s new head of
international wealth management Colbert Narcisse, Bank of America
senior vice president for diversity and inclusion Alex Rhodes, and Goldman
Sachs vice president of financial crime compliance Margaret
Cullum. [Emphasis added]
Harris’s most enthusiastic
source of support among these firms, however, is Wells Fargo, from whose
employees she received a total of $16,713 — the most funding
from the bank out of any other candidate examined. The donors span multiple
tiers of the bank’s hierarchy, from bankers and consultants, to a regional
director and a manager, to executives like National Head of Cards and
Retail Services Beverly Anderson, both of whom gave the maximum individual
donation of $2,800 to Harris. [Emphasis added]
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Goldman Sachs Bankster “King
of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman
Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand no-strings massive socialist bailouts to
Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat
Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in
2008
Fact Check:
Big Banks that Kamala Harris ‘Took on’ Now Support Her
2020 Democratic
National Convention / YouTube
Volume
90%
19 Aug 202017
2:53
CLAIM: Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis suggested that
because Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) “took on” the big banks as attorney general
of California, she will stand up to them as vice president.
VERDICT: While Harris
was among 49 state attorney generals who secured a $25 billion settlement from big banks, many
executives from those banks now support her as Democrat nominee Joe Biden’s
vice presidential choice.
“When millions of families lost their homes, my friend in
California, Sen. Kamala Harris, took on the big banks and won,” Solis said in
reference to the case which involved Bank of America, Wells Fargo,
JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Ally Bank.
BLOG EDITOR: AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF CALIFORNIA,
KAMALA HARRIS REFUSED TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTE ANY OF HER GENEROUS BANKSTERS
DESPITE THAT FACT THAT CA WAS GROUND ZERO FOR BANKSTER-CAUSED MORTGAGE MELTDOWN
AND FORECLOSURE!
A number of executives on Wall Street with links to Wells
Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America now support Harris in her
effort with Biden to defeat Trump.
As Breitbart News reported recently, Wells Fargo Vice
Chairman for Public Affairs Bill Daley, who served as Obama’s chief of staff
from 2011 to 2012, called a Harris a “reasonable, rational person who has
worked in the system.”
Citigroup executive Ray McGuire called Harris a “great
choice” for vice president. During the Democrat presidential primary, Harris
raked in campaign donations from executives and employees with Bank of America.
In These Times reported the donations at the time:
Then there’s California Sen. Kamala Harris,
who received a total of $44,947 from these 12 firms. Harris, who
was once branded a “bankster’s worst nightmare,” and has touted her prosecutorial
record against banks as evidence of her progressive credibility,
received donations from five executives of these firms. They include Blackstone
managing director Tia Breakley, Morgan Stanley’s new head of
international wealth management Colbert Narcisse, Bank of America
senior vice president for diversity and inclusion Alex Rhodes, and Goldman
Sachs vice president of financial crime compliance Margaret
Cullum. [Emphasis added]
Harris’s most enthusiastic source of support
among these firms, however, is Wells Fargo, from whose employees she
received a total of $16,713 — the
most funding from the bank out of any other candidate examined. The donors
span multiple tiers of the bank’s hierarchy, from bankers and consultants,
to a regional director and a manager, to executives like National Head
of Cards and Retail Services Beverly Anderson, both of whom gave the maximum
individual donation of $2,800 to Harris. [Emphasis added]
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News.
Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Goldman Sachs Bankster “King of the Foreclosures” Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin vows that the Goldman Sachs infested Trump Admin will hand
no-strings massive socialist bailouts to Trump Hotels. Mnuchin says the welfare
will exceed the Bankster-owned Democrat Party’s massive bailout of Obama crony
Jamie Dimon of J P Morgan’s bailout in 2008
OBAMA CRONY DONORS Goldman
Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and every other major US bank have been
implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage
securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and
global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money,
accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes
of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices,
rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
More stiffing the little guy from haughty Kamala Harris
As we've said more than once, Kamala Harris has an authenticity problem.
This
characterization, from Thomas Lifson last month, pretty well sums her
up every time a Kamala Harris story comes to light:
Kamala Harris is scary in her pathological
ambition, moral flexibility, comfort with deception, and sheer ruthlessness.
So
here's a new one, from California watcher Susan Crabtree atRealClearPolitics, reporting Harris's soapboxing at the
second presidential debate:
“So in my background as attorney general of
California, I took on the big banks who preyed on the homeowners, many of whom
lost their homes and will never be able to buy another,” Harris said in late
July during the second round of Democratic debates in Detroit.
Here's
what really
happened:
In fact, she and several other state attorneys
general were instrumental in negotiating a $25 billion national settlement with
five of the top U.S. mortgage lenders to provide debt relief and other
financial services to struggling homeowners. But in 2012, just months after
Harris secured those funds along with the other state AGs, then-California Gov.
Jerry Brown diverted $331 million from California’s portion of the settlement
to pay off state budget shortfalls incurred before the housing crisis.
Although Harris initially spoke out against
Brown’s diversion of the funds, she remained silent on a subsequent court
battle that began in 2014 – even after she left the attorney general’s office
and for the last year and a half while serving as senator and during her
presidential bid this year.
Which
is pretty outrageous. Harris shook down some banks in the name of "the
people" and then like a crooked lawyer, didn't give the
"winnings" to the clients. Whoever got wronged in this
mortgage-lending mess didn't see a penny of the won cash. It all just went
to other Democrat priorities within the one-party state.
Sound
like the kind of lawyer you'd want to have if you got stiffed in some bank
deal? Whatever this is, it's not the doing of the consumer advocate she's
now painting herself to be.
Any
more than she's the prison-rights advocate she claims to be - she threw
thousands of them in jail for petty offenses during her time as State Attorney
General, kept people in jail beyond their sentences in order to retain them to
fight fires, and refused to disavow false testimony from prosecutorial
misconduct that would have freed prisoners. She's never been about the little
guy.
The
mortgage-payout story shows two distasteful things about Harris.
One,
she plays the old California political machine game (it probably happens in
other crooked one-party states, too) of amassing a vast pot of money for one
purpose, a virtue-signaling purpose, a purpose that press releases can be
released on, and political campaign speeches can be made ... and then spending
the same pile of cash on something thing else, something far less
salable to the voters, something that will cover up spending mismanagement or
fatten pensions. In California, this game is gotten away with all the time. Gas
tax is approved by voters to improve roads ... and ends up bankrolling
bureaucrat and administrative hiring sprees. Federal stimulus money is shoveled
into the state for shovel-ready bridges and road improvements --- and goes
to cover municipal budget holes brought on by mismanagement. Voters approve
bond measures in the name of hiring teachers and getting more school
supplies for kids in education -- and it goes to educrat pensions and union
siphon-offs. Harris is comfortable operating that way in taking on the big
banks, shaking them down -- and just letting the money head elsewhere.
Two,
she's still the teacher's pet of Democrats, the sidling, sucking-up,
get-along-to-go-along, slept-her-way-to-the-top errand girl the more powerful
Democrats like. Crabtree reports that Harris first protested the diversion of
the funds, and then went silent. Why would she do that? Obviouly, she heard
from more powerful Democrats, the kind who could make or break her career.
An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-style boat-rocker she was not. The money was won,
the cash was collected, the whole thing went to the government instead of
the little guys, and she went along.
Which
pretty well tells us what kind of leader she would be if heaven forbid she
should win the presidency. In winning the money and then allowing it to
be diverted, she failed the little guys she now says she was serving. And
with that, she shows she's never been about serving the
people, she's about obeying the greater interests of the Democratic
political machine. No wonder she's so popular in those circles - she's been kowtowing to these rich and powerful since the dawn of
her career. For voters, the real message, as she vows to take over their health
care, hand out reparations to black people, and offer free stuff for votes is
clear: That the cash she promises isn't going to get anywhere near
the little guys. Not even the illegal immigrants she's promising free health
care for can believe her.
“One, Biden has cut ties with President Obama and no longer
expects to get that prized, coveted endorsement from him. He's been sucking up for months for it, and all signs
point instead to Obama tilting toward Kamala Harris. The
fact that Obama failed to endorse Biden at this point, after all those
years of faithful service, was quite a slap in the face for loyal old Joe,
who stood at Obama's side no matter what he did.”
In reality,
as David
Dayen detailed at The Intercept, the settlement was at bottom yet another bank giveaway — on
top of the TARP bailout and Tim Geithner's backdoor subsidy of banks through a
fake homeowner assistance program. As Dayen writes, "more families lost
their homes as a result of transactions facilitated by the national mortgage
settlement than those who got a sustainable loan modification to save
them." Nearly half of the dollar value of Harris' settlement was for debt
that could not be legally recovered in the first place. She also declined to prosecute
OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered
over a thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank.
(OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general campaign in 2011, and
Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in 2016.)
The problem with
Harris instead is her tendency to say what is popular in front of progressive
audiences while defaulting to the political status quo when it comes time to
make tough decisions. It would have taken real courage to stand up to the Obama
administration in 2012 when it was pushing states hard to sweep the robosigning
scandal — which involved flagrant document fraud on an industrial scale — under
the rug. But Harris was the top law enforcement official in the largest state
in the country. She certainly could have gotten far better terms than she
did. RYAN COOPER
Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She
Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank
FORMER CALIFORNIA ATTORNEY General Kamala Harris on Wednesday
vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute
Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered
no explanation.
“It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to
questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest
U.S. senator.
“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a
decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case.
We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”
Mnuchin is Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury
Department, and served as CEO of OneWest from 2009 to 2015. In an internal memo
published on Tuesday by The Intercept, prosecutors at the California attorney
general’s office said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure
laws by his bank during that time, and predicted that further investigation
would uncover many thousands more.
But the investigation into what the memo called “widespread
misconduct” was closed after Harris’s office declined to file a civil
enforcement action against the bank.
Harris’s statement on Tuesday doesn’t explain how involved she
was with the decision to not prosecute, or why the decision was made. She also
would not say whether the revelations would disqualify Mnuchin for the position
of treasury secretary. “The hearings will reveal if it’s disqualifying or not,
but certainly he has a history that should be critically examined, as do all of
the nominees,” Harris told The Hill. She added that she would review the
background and history of all Trump cabinet nominees.
Senate Democrats have vowed to put up a fight over Mnuchin —
even creating a website inviting homeowners to list their complaints against
OneWest. And yet not one senator has commented publicly on the leaked memo,
which received media coverage in Politico, Bloomberg, the New York Post, CBS
News, Vanity Fair, CNN, CNBC, and other outlets.
The Intercept has reached out to half a dozen Senate Democratic
offices, including those of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and leading Mnuchin
critics Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, receiving no response.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., retweeted the story, as did the
Twitter account of the Democratic National Committee. But another DNC tweet
just hours later hinted at the bind Democrats are in when it comes to using the
information against Mnuchin. That tweet praised Harris’s swearing-in. Her
decision not to prosecute may make her new colleagues wary of pursuing it.
Progressive groups have not been so reluctant. Three groups —
the Rootstrikers project at Demand Progress, the Center for Popular Democracy’s
Fed Up Campaign, and the California Reinvestment Coalition – have called for a
delay of Mnuchin’s confirmation hearing until he publicly discloses all
settlements and lawsuits OneWest has faced from its foreclosure-related
activities, responds fully to all questions submitted by members of the Senate
Finance Committee, and publicly discloses his role in obstructing the
California attorney general investigation, or any others.
The California Reinvestment Coalition followed that up on
Thursday by asking OneWest to release the obstructed evidence, which involved
loan files held by a third party then known as Lender Processing Services (it’s
now called Black Knight Financial Services). “That’s something the Senate
Finance Committee should ask him for, prior to scheduling their hearing with
him,” said Paulina Gonzalez, executive director of the California Reinvestment
Coalition.
Mnuchin has already declined to answer a detailed list of
questions from Finance Committee member Sherrod Brown, which Brown sent before
the release of the leaked memo.
After The Intercept story was published, Mnuchin spokesperson
Barney Keller called it “meritless,” and highlighted OneWest’s completion of a
foreclosure review with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (which
involved completely separate issues from the California inquiry) and what he
claimed was OneWest’s issuance of over 100,000 loan modifications to borrowers.
“Memos like this belong in the garbage, not the news,” Keller
said.
Meanwhile, the Alliance of Californians for Community
Empowerment, an organizing group that made headlines in
2010 by protesting on Mnuchin’s front lawn over
OneWest’s foreclosure practices, expressed disbelief that
he
could now become treasury secretary.
“My family lived first hand the fraud and unethical
behavior under his leadership when I was told to default before they could
help me, and (was) instead pushed into foreclosure,” said Peggy Mears, a
OneWest victim.
ACCE plans to ask incoming California Attorney General Xavier
Becerra to take up the prosecution of OneWest based on the newly released
evidence. And the group vowed to fight the Mnuchin nomination. “No one
who oversaw the defrauding of thousands of homeowners should be allowed to
serve watch over our country’s money,” Mears said.
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Product details
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Item Weight : 6.1 ounces
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THE LOOTING OF
AMERICA:
BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set
themselves on America’s pensions next!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html
The new aristocrats, like the lords of
old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the lower orders. Voluminous
reports have been issued by Congress and government panels documenting
systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest banks both before
and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank
of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of
scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses,
the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange
markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to
bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers,
credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy
markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
Goldman
Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden
Campaign
The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest
banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of
thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen.
Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.
Former Goldman Sachs
Chief Pours $100K into Joe Biden’s Campaign
26 Oct 2020374
1:41
A former Goldman Sachs president made a huge, last-minute
donation to Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign against
President Trump.
Harvey Schwartz, former president of Goldman Sachs, donated
about $100,000 to the Biden Action Fund in October, according to Federal
Election Commission data.
CNBC reports:
The filing lists Schwartz and a New York address and describes
his work profession as “self employed.” The contribution was processed on Oct.
5, records show.
Schwartz retired from the bank in 2018 after being its president
for just over a year. Prior to that role he was Goldman’s chief financial
officer.
Wall Street executives and employees has been a major donor to
the Biden campaign. One of the donors is a former Goldman Sachs
executive who profited from the housing crisis.
While Biden has taken about 184 separate contributions from
Goldman Sachs executives and employees, President Donald Trump has taken
just 41 contributions
from the big bank. Trump’s contributions from Goldman Sachs total less than
$7,500.
As Breitbart News has noted, recent CNBC
analysis revealed that Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s
campaign this election cycle. CNN analysis found that
“all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Joe Biden-Donor-Rich
Goldman Sachs Admits to Record $1.6B Bribery Scheme
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
25 Oct 2020711
2:30
Goldman
Sachs, home to many big donors to Democrat presidential candidate Joe
Biden’s campaign, has admitted to a record-setting $1.6 billion foreign bribery
scheme this week.
The Justice Department announced charges against Goldman Sachs for their executives’
involvement in a foreign bribery scheme, the largest in United States history.
As a result, Goldman Sachs will pay more than $2.9 billion as part of a
settlement.
“Goldman Sachs today accepted responsibility for its role in a
conspiracy to bribe high-ranking foreign officials to obtain lucrative
underwriting and other business relating to [1Malaysia Development Bhd.],” said
acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Rabbitt of the Justice Department’s
Criminal Division said in a statement.
“Today’s resolution, which requires Goldman Sachs to admit
wrongdoing and pay nearly three billion dollars in penalties, fines, and
disgorgement, holds the bank accountable for this criminal scheme and
demonstrates the department’s continuing commitment to combatting corruption
and protecting the U.S. financial system,” Rabbitt said.
The revelations of Goldman Sachs’ involvement in the foreign
bribery scheme comes as Biden has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars
in campaign contributions from executives and employees at the big bank.
Kathy Matsui and Richard Friedman, in executive and banker roles
at Goldman Sachs, have donated nearly $105,000 to the Biden Victory Fund and
the Biden Action Fund in June. Just this week, news broke that the former
Goldman Sachs executive who profited off the U.S.
housing crash has donated $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund.
While Biden has taken about 184 separate contributions from
Goldman Sachs executives and employees, President Donald Trump has taken
just 41 contributions
from the big bank. Trump’s contributions from Goldman Sachs total less than
$7,500.
As Breitbart News has noted, recent CNBC
analysis revealed that Wall Street has donated more than $50 million to Biden’s
campaign this election cycle. CNN analysis found that
“all the big banks” are backing Biden against Trump.
John Binder is a
reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Wall Street Praises
Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s VP: ‘What’s Not to Like?’
AP Photo/Richard Drew
13 Aug 2020996
4:20
Wall Street executives are praising Democrat presidential
nominee Joe Biden’s choosing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate
against President Trump, feeling they dodged a bullet from a progressive
insurgency.
In interviews with the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Bloomberg, executives on Wall Street expressed relief that Biden picked
Harris for vice president on the Democrat ticket, calling her a “normal Democrat”
who is a “safe” choice for the financial industry.
Morgan Stanley Vice Chairman Tom Nides told Bloomberg that
across Wall Street, Harris joining Biden “was exceptionally well-received.”
“How damn cool is it that a Black woman is considered the safe
and conventional candidate,” Nides said.
Peter Soloman, the founder of a multinational investment banking
firm, told Bloomberg he believes Harris is “a great pick” because she is “safe,
balanced, a woman, diverse, what’s not to like?”
As the Journal notes,
many on Wall Street see Harris is another conscious decision by the Democrat
establishment to stave off populist priorities to reform Wall Street:
To some Wall Street executives, Ms. Harris’s
selection signals a more moderate shift for
the Democratic Party, which its progressive flank has pushed to the left in
recent years. [Emphasis added]
“While Kamala is a forceful, passionate and eloquent
standard-bearer for the aspirations of all Americans, regardless of their race,
gender or age, she is not doctrinaire or rigid,” said Brad Karp, chairman
of law firm Paul Weiss, who co-led a committee of lawyers
across the country who supported Ms. Harris during the primary. [Emphasis
added]
Marc Lasry, CEO of Avenue Capital Group, called Harris a “great”
pick for Biden. “She’s going to help Joe immensely. He picked the perfect
partner,” Lasry told CNBC.
Executives at Citigroup and Centerview Partners made similar
comments about Harris to CNBC and the Journal,
calling her a “great choice” and “direct but constructive.”
Founder of financial consulting firm Kynikos Associates Jim
Chanos was elated in an interview with Bloomberg over Harris joining Biden on
the Democrat ticket:
“She’s terrific,” said Chanos, founder of Kynikos Associates. “She’s got force of personality
in a good way. She takes over a room. She certainly has a charisma and a presence
which will be an asset on the campaign.” [Emphasis added]
Harris is no stranger to praise from Wall Street executives. In
the 2019 Democrat presidential primary, Harris won over a number of financial
industry donors, even holding a fundraiser in Iowa that was backed by Goldman
Sachs Group, Inc.
While criticizing “the people
who have the most” in Democrat primary debates, Harris raked in thousands in campaign cash from financial executives
from firms such as the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America,
Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo.
This month, the New
York Times admitted the “wallets
of Wall Street are with Joe Biden” in a gushing headline about the financial
industry’s opposition to Trump:
Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups
supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44
million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
Harris’s views on trade and immigration, two of the most
consequential issues to Wall Street, are in lockstep with financial executives’
objective to grow profit margins and add consumers to the market.
On trade, Harris has balked at Trump’s imposition of tariffs on
foreign imports from China, Mexico, Canada, and Europe — using the neoliberal argument that tariffs should not be used to pressure foreign
countries to buy more American-made goods and serve as only a tax on taxpayers.
Likewise, the Biden-Harris plan for national immigration policy
— which seeks to drive up legal and illegal immigration levels to their highest
levels in decades — offers a flooded labor market with low wages for U.S.
workers and increased bargaining power for big business that has long been
supported by Wall Street.
John Binder is a reporter for
Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Goldman Sachs fined $2.9 billion over
role in 1MDB corruption case
Goldman
Sachs has been fined $2.9 billion by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in a
deal announced yesterday that closes one of the biggest corruption cases in the
history of Wall Street.
Together
with a settlement reached with Malaysian authorities in July, Goldman Sachs
will pay more than $5 billion for its involvement in the 1MDB scandal.
While
the amounts are large, the settlement follows the pattern of earlier deals on
corruption. In return for an agreement to pay fines out of corporate revenue,
the company and its executives escape prosecution for criminal activity. The
financial penalties are simply written off as a cost of making profit.
Besides
avoiding prosecution, Goldman will also escape the appointment of a government
monitor to oversee its compliance department which had earlier been put forward
by officials involved in pursuing the case.
While
the financial penalties amount to around two-thirds of its annual profits,
Goldman had already taken them into account, as they had been mooted for some
time. Company shares actually rose by more than 1 percent after a report
earlier this week by Wall Street Journal about the expected
action by the DoJ.
Following
the DoJ announcement, the bank’s share price barely moved. “This is already
priced in. The stock price is already reflecting this kind of action,” Sumit
Agarwal, finance professor at Singapore’s National University told the Financial
Times.
Goldman’s
involvement with 1MDB was in response to the situation it confronted in the
wake of the financial crisis in 2008, as its earnings prospects in the US
declined and it went in search of profitable opportunities. The Malaysian
government had launched the 1MDB fund, supposedly to finance infrastructure
development. Goldman stepped forward to organise the sale of $6.5 billion in
bonds, with the aim of collecting large fees, in 2012 and 2013.
The
whole operation saw the development of a vast corruption ring. According to the
prosecution, around $2.7 billion was stolen from 1MDB and more than $1.6
billion was paid out in bribes.
Much
of the money was stolen by an adviser to the fund, businessman Jho Low, who was
aided by two Goldman bankers working for its Malaysian subsidiary as well as
associates in the Malaysian government. It is claimed that the former Malaysian
Prime Minister Najib Razak, now serving a 12-year jail term, received $700
million.
The
DoJ said Goldman had played a “central role” in the looting of 1MDB and should
have detected warning signs. The acting head of the DoJ’s criminal division,
Brian Rabbitt, said: “Personnel at the bank allowed this scheme to proceed by
overlooking or ignoring a number of clear red flags.”
The
attempts to claim that one of the largest corruption operations in history was
a matter of oversight simply does not pass muster. In court yesterday, Karen
Seymour, Goldman’s senior counsel, admitted its Malaysian subsidiary had paid
bribes “in order to obtain and retain business for Goldman Sachs.”
According
to court papers, when an employee told an unnamed senior executive he was
concerned that a 1MDB deal was being delayed because one of the participants
was seeking a bribe, he was told: “What’s disturbing about that? It’s nothing
new, is it?”
The
deals were organised by two Goldman bankers, Timothy Leissner and Roger Ng.
Leissner, the former head of Goldman’s Southeast Asian business, pleaded guilty
to his role in the 1MDB case in 2018. He received more than $200 million from
1MDB and paid bribes to government officials.
Goldman
chief executive David Solomon, who took over from Lloyd Blankfein—author of the
infamous comment in 2009 that big profits for banks meant they were doing
“God’s work”—said: “We recognise that we did not adequately address red flags
and scrutinise the representations of certain members of the deal team.”
As
details of the corruption began to emerge, Goldman sought to blame its
involvement on “rogue operators.” In fact, their activities were encouraged.
According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the 1MDB bond deals
organised in 2012, “won one of Goldman’s most prestigious internal awards,
praised for its ‘spirit of creativity and entrepreneurial thinking’.”
In
an effort to clean up its image, Goldman announced that four senior executives,
including CEO Solomon, would forfeit $31 million in pay this year, and that it
would attempt to claw back bonuses paid to Blankfein in the past. But the
penalty imposed on current executives amounts only to about one-third of what
they were paid in 2019.
The
notion that Goldman was somehow the victim of “rogue” activity and that its
involvement in massive corruption is simply the result of oversight is belied
by its history, in particular, the role it played in the lead-up to the
financial crisis of 2008.
The
Senate investigation into the crisis, which found that the financial system was
a “snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing,” singled
out Goldman for special mention.
In
2006, Goldman determined that subprime mortgage assets it was selling to
clients were destined to flounder. Goldman went short in the market in the
expectation that it would crash and it would make a profit on the other side of
the very trades it had been promoting. The sums were not small. At one point
the firm held short positions amounting to $13 billion.
In
an email, referring to an unsuspecting investor, a Goldman executive wrote: “I
think I found a white elephant, flying pig and unicorn all at once.”
But
the exposure of criminal activity did not bring any prosecutions, let alone
jail terms, merely fines, which Goldman and others simply wrote off. In 2013,
President Obama’s attorney-general, Eric Holder, clearly recognising the extent
of the malfeasance, said that prosecutions would impact on the stability of the
US and global banking system.
Since
2008, notwithstanding claims by authorities that there would be a clamp down,
the corrupt practices have extended, of which Goldman’s involvement in 1MDB is
only one expression.
Last month, documents published by BuzzFeed News from
the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, showed
that between 1999 and 2017, major banks has been involved in financial
transactions of $2 trillion flagged as potentially involving money laundering.
The banks involved were some of the biggest in the world including JP Morgan,
HSBC and Standard Charter Bank.
Earlier
this month, JPMorgan Chase was fined $920 million over “spoofing” activity
involving the quick placing and withdrawal of buy and sell orders to create the
impression there was a surge of activity around a particular financial asset in
order to create a profitable opportunity.
According
to one of the lead investigators in the case, “a significant number of JP
Morgan traders and sales personnel openly disregarded US laws that serve to
prevent illegal activity in the marketplace.”
But
despite the fact that the practice was not only well known but was actively
promoted, no one in the upper echelons was prosecuted, and the fine has been
written off as an operating expense.
The
issue which clearly arises is: what is the underlying cause of this system of
corruption and illegality?
Commenting
on the latest Goldman case, Seth DuCharme, the acting US attorney in Brooklyn,
might have gone further than he intended when he remarked: “This case is …
about the way our American financial institutions conduct business.”
It
certainly is. However, it would be wrong to simply ascribe it to the greed of
the financial executives and others, and thereby able to be countered through
tighter regulations.
Of
course the greed of executives and others exists in abundance. But their
activities are, in the final analysis, the expression of processes rooted at
the very heart of the profit system—they are the personification of objective
tendencies.
While
the aim and driving force of the capitalist system is the accumulation of
profit the mode of accumulation has undergone profound changes, above all in
the US. No longer is the chief source of profit investment and production in
the real economy.
It
occurs through operations in the financial system based on speculation, clever
trades, the securing of fees for the passage of money (without questioning its
source) and where the “value” of assets is determined by arcane algorithms and
other forms of “financial engineering.”
Consequently,
in conditions where profits are increasingly divorced from the underlying real
economy, lies, deception, misinformation, corruption and criminality come to
dominate the entire financial system.
Goldman
Sachs Executive Who Profited Off Housing Collapse Pours $200K into Joe Biden
Campaign
The former Goldman Sachs executive who helped one of the biggest
banks profit off the nation’s housing collapse in 2008 is pouring hundreds of
thousands of dollars into Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and Sen.
Kamala Harris’s (D-CA) campaign.
Donald Mullen Jr., as first noted by the Washington Free
Beacon, gave $200,000 to the Biden
Victory Fund in August. Mullen was a key architect of the “Big Short” scheme
that allowed Goldman Sachs to profit from the housing collapse.
New York Magazine detailed the scheme:
In the years leading up to the financial crisis, a team of
mortgage executives and traders at Goldman Sachs predicted that the housing
market was in trouble. So they designed a massive bet against it, using
a bunch of esoteric financial instruments known as collateralized debt
obligations that would pay off in the event that housing prices fell and
homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. [Emphasis added]
That bet, now known colloquially as “the big short,” allowed
Goldman and its clients (including hedge-fund
managers like John Paulson) to avoid losses and make billions of
dollars when the housing market collapsed, at the same time that people
around the country lost their homes to foreclosure. [Emphasis added]
Meanwhile, millions of America’s working and middle class lost
their homes, as Business Insider reported in 2018:
After the real estate bubble burst in 2008, many
families living in the US found that the cost of running their homes was no
longer affordable, resulting in many of those people losing their homes.
[Emphasis added]
The widespread consequences were that, between 2006 and
2014, nearly 10 million homeowners in America saw the foreclosure sale of their
own homes, which entailed having to give up their property to lenders or
selling it as quickly as possible via an emergency sale, according to the
Süddeutsche Zeitung. [Emphasis added]
Livelihoods were threatened and the financial damage was
colossal — not to mention the emotional damage suffered by victims of the
crisis — a 2014 study shows a correlation between
the crisis and an increased suicide rate. But where are the victims of the real
estate and financial crisis now? [Emphasis added]
It’s not just Mullen Jr. who is showering Biden with campaign
cash to defeat President Trump on November 3. Biden has taken nearly 200 contributions
from employees at Goldman Sachs — including contributions of nearly $50,000 to
$55,000 from the bank’s top executives.
Altogether, a recent CNBC analysis revealed, Wall Street has
donated more than $50 million to Biden’s
campaign this election cycle and CNN has noted that “all the
big banks” are backing Biden and Harris against Trump.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and
their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
by Ryan Cooper
America has long had a
suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over
the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had
only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But
in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during
the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations.
Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp.
Berle
was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it
generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of
economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken
up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on
behalf of the citizenry.
Berle
exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get
his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial
Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production,
which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix
Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis
Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into
New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a
somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand,
antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to
play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and
pensions.
Lemann
then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The
New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative
businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided
major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like
Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social
Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a
lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the
Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social
order.”
Jensen
and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that
only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis
of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly
destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal regulations
that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the greatest
economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They were
outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they supposedly
owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this “principal-agent
problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on irrelevant luxuries
like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and share buybacks. When
that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To Jensen the answer was
clear: make the market for corporate control even more active, powerful, and
all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The
best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington
policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much
to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative
blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a
tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical
mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving
close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture
“was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he
writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations
that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning
democratic political economy.
Then
came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street
level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and
proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged
population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole
businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile
takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And
it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as
Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as
Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant
ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned
under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives
imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella
for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents
desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they
were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway
government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the
book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible
rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have largely
maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of
esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street
maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered
and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have
grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad
market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly
employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the
car industry once did.
In
his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy,
contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common
good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather
than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This
is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which
is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women
who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own
private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people
who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere
appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also
declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous
as government by organized mob.”
If
concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a
poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the
social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill
and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace
on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the
entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And
even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out,
especially African Americans.
Lemann
writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress
welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation
among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went
much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do
considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political
polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely,
for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of
vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently
calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,”
which is how far families are below the poverty line before government
transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.) Imagine
how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though it
proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist
social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are
typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still,
Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive
history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written
illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives
of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a
national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington
Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington
Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin embodies the plutocratic principle that a crisis is a
terrible thing to waste.
Steve Mnuchin knows his way around
a crisis. Twelve years ago, the Treasury secretary was still a middling
multi-millionaire of little renown or historical import. But whenever God
closes a door on an underwater home-owner, he opens a window to an unscrupulous
speculator, and in 2008, the Big Man began closing a lot of doors. Mnuchin
didn’t miss his opening. He may have been just a humble
Goldman Sachs nepotism hire turned Hollywood financier back then, but he had a
few million dollars to play with and a few friends with many millions more. Together, they bought up a failing
mortgage lender, rapidly foreclosed on thousands of borrowers, and resold the
homes at a nifty profit. By the end of his tenure as a bank CEO, Mnuchin had
earned himself the title “Foreclosure King” — and a return of $200 million.
That’s the kind of money that can buy you entrance into the good graces of a
Republican nominee, especially if he’s already alienating a lot of the party’s
biggest donors. And from there, it’s walking distance to the White House.
Thus far, the
COVID-19 crash has been as kind to Mnuchin as the Great Recession once was. If
the last global economic crisis made him rich enough to purchase a lofty perch
in our government, this one is making the Treasury secretary powerful enough to
claim a prominent place in U.S. history. Before the novel coronavirus made its
presence felt, Mnuchin’s most memorable achievement as a public servant may
have been commandeering a government plane for a solar-eclipse-themed day trip.
Since the pandemic sickened global markets, he has brokered the largest
stimulus legislation ever passed and won control of a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund.
Which is to say:
We’ve put one of the primary beneficiaries of America’s inequitable response to
the last economic crisis in charge of crafting our nation’s response to this
one.
Of course, it wasn’t really
God who opened the window to Mnuchin’s foreclosure profiteering or the
profiteering of all the well-heeled investors who bought low during the
financial crisis, then sold high amid the bailout-buoyed recovery (the Almighty
contracts out those jobs to protect his brand integrity). Rather, it was an
economic system that keeps a wide swath of Americans one bad break from
financial ruin — and another tiny class draped in gold-plated armor.
From the first
capital-gains-tax cut of the modern era in Jimmy Carter’s day to the
supply-side bonanza of Donald Trump’s, this system’s essential rationale has
remained the same: If capitalists cannot reap big rewards from their winning
bets, they will have no incentive to take the great personal risks that fuel
collective prosperity.
Mnuchin’s career and
the pandemic response he has overseen belie most of that sentence’s premises.
In truth, the Treasury secretary owes his success to a series of low-risk,
high-reward bets of little-to-negative social value. Which makes sense. After
all, if America’s brand of capitalism actually required the superrich to assume
great personal risk in order to reap outsize returns, they wouldn’t be so
invested in it.
Steve Mnuchin wasn’t born on third
base so much as a few inches to the left of home plate. His grandfather co-founded
a yacht club in the Hamptons. His father was a Yale-educated partner at Goldman
Sachs. If his family’s name didn’t secure Steve’s own Yale admission, its
wealth certainly covered his tuition, books, personal Porsche, and “dorm” at
New Haven’s Taft Hotel. From this perch, it would have been harder for Mnuchin
to tumble down America’s class ladder than to climb higher still. The former
would have required prodigious acts of self-destruction; the latter mere
fluency in ruling-class social mores and the art of strategic sycophancy — and
the wallflower cipher Steve Mnuchin is a master of both.
At Goldman, Mnuchin’s
colleagues did not consider him “especially book smart.” And some have
suggested that his steady ascent at the firm was fueled less by merit than
pedigree (Mnuchin’s elevation to partner in 1996 came at the expense of Kevin
Ingram, an African-American trader who’d risen from a working-class childhood
up through MIT’s engineering school, then Goldman’s ranks, where he struck one
colleague as both “much smarter than Steven” and more “accomplished”).
After Mnuchin paid
his dues at Goldman, he founded a hedge fund called Dune Capital and a
motion-picture-financing company called Dune Entertainment (both named after a
stretch of beach near his house in the Hamptons). He helped bankroll Avatar and the X-Men
franchise, hobnobbed in Beverly Hills, and hoarded his investment profits in a
tax haven. He had everything America’s “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
imagine a person could want. But Mnuchin longed for higher things. And when the
housing market collapsed, he knew he was in luck.
Early in his career,
Mnuchin had watched his superiors turn America’s savings-and-loan crisis into
their own buying-and-selling bonanza. In the summer of 2008, Mnuchin was
watching television in his New York office when an invitation to emulate his
old mentors flashed across the screen: Out in California, frightened depositors
were lined up outside IndyMac, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders,
waiting to withdraw their cash. “This bank is going to end up failing, and we
need to figure out how to buy it,” Mnuchin told a colleague. “I’ve seen this
game before.”
He played it like a
natural. Mnuchin reached out to George Soros, John Paulson, and other
billionaires whose trust he’d cultivated. They marshaled a $1.6 billion bid.
Eager to unload the bank — whose balance sheet was chock-full of toxic assets —
the FDIC agreed to cover any losses that might accrue to the investors above a
certain threshold. Which is to say, the government agreed to partially
socialize Mnuchin & Co.’s downside risk. This public aid came with one
major condition: The new bank, which Mnuchin dubbed OneWest, would need to make
a good-faith effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. The FDIC would
ultimately pay OneWest more than $1.2 billion.
This was not enough
to buy Steve Mnuchin’s good faith.
Purchasing IndyMac secured
OneWest a claim on a lot of undervalued housing. The catch, of course, was that
much of it was full of broke people. And California’s foreclosure laws make the
process of separating low-net-worth humans from high-value housing stock long
and arduous. But this was nothing a little entrepreneurship couldn’t solve:
Mnuchin’s bank (ostensibly) bet it could get away with “robo signing” and
backdating documents to expedite foreclosures. One-West got caught red-handed
on the first count but emerged with a slap on the wrist. Investigators at the
California attorney general’s office concluded the bank was guilty on the
second and requested authorization to pursue an enforcement action. It’s
unclear exactly why then–Attorney General Kamala Harris denied this request.
But as the investigators themselves noted, to pursue legal action against an
entity with OneWest’s resources would mean investing years of time — and large
sums of the public’s money — in a deeply uncertain enterprise. The government
could afford to take only so many risks, which meant the idea that the state
could hold all its superrich residents accountable to its laws was a bluff.
Mnuchin called it.
In the spring of 2016, another promising investment opportunity caught the eye of the
now-former One-West CEO. Mnuchin had crossed paths with Trump several times
over the years; his hedge fund had invested in (at least) two of the mogul’s
projects. So when Donald invited Steve to swing by his tower on the night he
won the New York primary, Mnuchin obliged. A dozenish hours (and a glass or two
of Trump-branded wine) later, Mnuchin agreed to become the finance chairman of
the future GOP nominee’s campaign.
This decision baffled
some of Mnuchin’s Hollywood pals. The bankroller of The LEGO Batman Movie didn’t strike them as a political animal, let alone a
Trumpist. But his motives weren’t mysterious. For someone in Mnuchin’s
socioeconomic position, Trump’s presidential campaign was just another
low-risk, high-reward bet. Or, as Mnuchin himself put it in an interview in August
2016, “Nobody’s going to be like, ‘Well, why did he do this?,’ if I end up in
the administration.”
Mnuchin is the last of the “adults
in the room” — that cabal of semi-credentialed advisers whose presence in the
West Wing eased the troubled minds of Never Trump pundits circa 2017. None of
the others — not Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, or John Kelly — could marshal the requisite
combination of unscrupulous sycophancy and patient politicking to weather each
turn in Trump’s tempestuous moods. Only the former Foreclosure King has what it
takes to unequivocally defend the president’s kind words for alt-right marchers
in Charlottesville or echo his attacks on NFL players who dared to protest
police abuse. So when the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression
hit, Mnuchin became — in The Wall Street Journal’s appellation — “Washington’s indispensable crisis manager.”
Unburdened by ideological conviction or economic literacy, Mnuchin has proved
to be the GOP’s most able dealmaker. Working out of a temporary office in the
Capitol’s Lyndon Baines Johnson Room, Mnuchin spent the closing weeks of March
running (and massaging) messages between the Senate’s Democratic and Republican
camps as they sought consensus on a gargantuan coronavirus relief bill.
“Mnuchin played the middleman, and he must have been in my office 20 times in
three days,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told the Journal, going on to
praise the reliability of the Treasury secretary’s word. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi has said that she and Mnuchin can communicate through a “shorthand”
devoid of time-wasting “niceties or anything like that.”
The soft skills
Mnuchin had once deployed to ink billion-dollar investment deals now eased the
passage of a $2.2 trillion economic-relief package. And there was much to
admire in the legislation’s headline provisions: an unprecedented expansion in
federal unemployment benefits that would leave many laid-off workers with as
much — if not more — income than they’d earned at their old jobs, forgivable
loans for small businesses that agreed to forgo layoffs during the crisis, and
onetime cash payments to all nonaffluent Americans.
But this is still a
Republican stimulus, however much schmoozing Steve has done with Chuck and
Nancy this spring. Congress’s persistent underfunding of the small-business aid
has kept America’s most vulnerable mom-and-pops out in the cold. And our
nation’s decrepit unemployment-insurance offices have struggled to administer
benefits as the ranks of the jobless grow millions stronger every week. The
Treasury Department has allowed debt collectors to garnish the relief checks of
cash-strapped Americans, and Congress has essentially refused to bail out
hospitals whose budgets have suddenly been destroyed by COVID-driven
shortfalls, meaning that over the next few years, whole essential health
systems and services could abruptly be suspended.
Most of all, the
legislation’s largest appropriation — $454 billion to backstop a $4 trillion
Federal Reserve lending program to large corporations — gives Mnuchin
significant personal discretion over which firms will have access to low-cost
credit and on what terms, thereby leaving a connoisseur in the art of
subverting federal crisis management for personal profit in charge of
preventing America’s corporate titans from subverting federal crisis management
for personal profit.
The White House’s
next big idea for promoting economic recovery is, reportedly, to formally
suspend the enforcement of labor and environmental regulations on small
businesses, a measure that would enable petit bourgeois tyrants to suspend all
pretense of concern for their workers’ health and well-being in the midst of a
pandemic.
Nevertheless, could
we have reasonably expected anything better, all things considered? A GOP
president and Senate majority were always going to comfort the comfortable and
toss crumbs to the afflicted. And when Congress approved $2.2 trillion in
coronavirus relief funds last month, nurses were intubating patients without
proper PPE, grocery-store clerks were jeopardizing their health to keep others
fed, and delivery drivers were forfeiting the security of social distancing so
others could more comfortably enjoy it. The legislation included zero dollars
in hazard-pay benefits for those workers. It did, however, provide $90
billion in tax cuts to the owners of pass-through businesses, such as, for
instance, the Trump Organization. Such “relief” was necessary, the American
Enterprise Institute later explained, to mitigate the “penalty” on economic
risk-takers.
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