“Donald Trump And The Courts”: Represents Everything GOP Claimed To Be Against When It Comes To The Court System
Usually when the judicial branch of government comes up during presidential campaigns, the discussion focuses on what kind of judges the candidate would nominate to the Supreme Court. For Donald Trump – his list of potential nominees is cause for concern. But that doesn’t even begin to capture the problem.
We’re hearing a lot lately about the lawsuit brought against him by former students of Trump University. His response hasn’t just been racist. It is downright disturbing.
“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said at a campaign rally in San Diego, adding that he believed the Indiana-born judge was “Mexican.”
He also suggested taking action against the judge after the election: “They ought to look into Judge Curiel, because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace. Okay? But we will come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case? Where everybody likes it. Okay. This is called life, folks.”
Legal experts are right when they suggest that this kind of personal vendetta undermines our courts.
On the other hand, Trump has “suggested” that he wants to exploit the judiciary in an attempt to bully his critics.
During a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, Trump began his usual tirade against newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, saying they’re “losing money” and are “dishonest.” The Republican presidential candidate then took a different turn, suggesting that when he’s president they’ll “have problems.”
“One of the things I’m going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we’re certainly leading. I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” Trump said.
Out goes the First Amendment and it’s protections of a free press. Think he’s kidding? Nick Penzenstadler and Susan Page provide history and data to demonstrate Trump’s pattern.
An exclusive USA TODAY analysis of legal filings across the United States finds that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits.
OK, so that’s 3,500 cases over 3 decades. How does it look in the present?
Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at least 50 civil lawsuits remain open even as he moves toward claiming the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in seven weeks.
Trump likes to dismiss this kind of thing as simply the cost of doing business. But Penzenstadler and Page compared this record to the legal involvement for five top real-estate business executives and found that “Trump has been involved in more legal skirmishes than all five of the others — combined.”
Trump’s abuse of the court system is simply another example of the way he exposes himself as a narcissistic bully.
He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force. He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners. He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers and other vendors.
In other words, Trump represents everything the Republicans have claimed to be against when it comes to exploiting the court system. As a friend of mine used to say…”Now run and tell that.”
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 2, 2016
“Biggest Banks Are Bigger Than Ever”: Five Years After Lehman Brothers, We’re Still Just One Crisis From The Edge
Five years ago tomorrow, the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, officially kicking off the financial crisis that led to what we now call the Great Recession. Lehman’s bankruptcy was followed by the bailout of insurance giant AIG, the $700 billion bank bailout known as TARP and an alphabet soup of Federal Reserve programs launched in an attempt to stem the damage being done to the economy.
But even with those emergency measures, the final toll of the crisis was staggering: 8.7 million jobs were lost, $16 trillion in household wealth was wiped out and 12 million homeowners were left underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their homes were worth. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the cumulative effects of the crisis – wealth lost during the recession plus the effect that lower earnings and wealth will have on future earnings and output – could add up to more than $28 trillion.
The crisis began with a housing bubble fueled by subprime mortgage lenders, who were encouraged to make loan after loan by Wall Street banks that wanted mortgage securities to slice, dice and sell around the world. But it was exacerbated by the fact that the biggest Wall Street banks were so interconnected that the failure of one meant all the others were brought to the brink of collapse. The banks – engorged on debt and engaging in risky trading for only their own benefit – put the whole economy at risk.
Since then, quite a lot of time, effort and ink have been spent trying to fix what went wrong. So how did that attempt go?
The main legislative response to the crisis – the Dodd-Frank financial reform law – undeniably contains some things that will make the next crisis, whatever its form, easier to manage (or even prevent). There’s now a regulator explicitly tasked with policing consumer financial products, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There’s a new process that, at least in theory, will allow the government to dismantle a failing mega-bank without resorting to ad-hoc bailouts, a legal process that was sorely missing during the 2008 crisis.
There’s a new regulatory regime for derivatives – the risky financial instruments that helped bring down AIG – that should make their market much more transparent. And banks are now required to hold more capital on hand to protect against a sudden downturn.
In other areas, though, not much has changed. For instance, the biggest banks are bigger than ever. In fact, the six largest banks in the U.S. now hold $9.6 trillion in assets, a 37 percent increase from five years ago. That total is equal to 58 percent of the entire economy. As Fortune’s Stephen Gandel noted, “The biggest bank in the nation, JPMorgan, has $2.4 trillion in assets alone — the size of England’s economy.”
And while those banks have gotten bigger, rules meant to rein in their risky trading have gone precisely nowhere. A key part of Dodd-Frank known as the Volcker Rule – which was supposed to prevent banks from making risky trades with taxpayer-backed dollars, such as consumer deposits – was watered down by Congress even before it passed, and is now stuck in a bureaucratic and lobbying morass. (Overall, just 40 percent of the rules in Dodd-Frank are actually finished.) More ambitious reforms, like capping the size of banks, garnered just one unsuccessful vote in the Senate.
Homeowners, meanwhile, continue to struggle. Not only are 7.1 million still underwater, but banks are engaging in shady practices to push homeowners into foreclosure who should have been able to stay in their homes. A much ballyhooed settlement stemming from rampant “foreclosure fraud,” as it’s called, doesn’t seem to have actually stopped these pernicious practices.
So while some things have certainly changed for the better – and having a consumer regulator will hopefully shortcircuit a lot of problems before they start – the biggest banks are still just one catastrophe away from pulling the country back to the edge of a cliff. And if the new process for unwinding a failed mega-bank doesn’t work, there won’t be many options available other than the odious bailouts used in 2008. In the meantime, homeowners who have suffered at the hands of the financial industry still find themselves with few avenues for receiving any justice.
Is there any momentum for new reform? Well, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been beating the drum for breaking up the biggest banks, and introduced a bill – along with Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Angus King, I-Maine – that would bring back a Depression-era regulation keeping investment and commercial banking separate. Former Citigroup CEO John Reed, who presided over the nation’s first true banking behemoth, told the Financial Times recently that breaking up banks can and should be done, making him one of a handful of Wall Street titans to take such a position.
But the financial industry is as strong as ever, so the prospects of real reform happening absent another crisis or a real populist reawakening are still pretty slim. If another crash comes along, we’re going to have to hope that the tinkering and tweaking that’s already occurred is enough to save us.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, September 14, 2013
“Bank Of America’s Foreclosure Frenzy”: Maximizing Fees And Profits For Big Banks
In one corner, we have five former Bank of America Corp. employees who told a federal court they were instructed to mislead customers on the verge of losing their homes and stall their applications for loan modifications.
In another corner, we have Bank of America, which says nothing could be further from the truth.
Who’s right? If anything, the bank’s strident denials make me more inclined to believe the workers’ claims. “These allegations are absurd, patently false and contrary to Bank of America’s long-standing policy only to foreclose as a last resort when other available options to help keep people in their home have been exhausted,” Jumana Bauwens, a Bank of America spokeswoman, told Bloomberg News in an email this week.
Perhaps some of the allegations may be wrong. But to say all of them are obviously false? You have to wonder. A lot of the former employees’ claims make sense.
We have known for years that the U.S. Treasury Department’s Home Affordable Modification Program failed miserably at its stated goal of helping struggling homeowners. In part, that’s because companies and divisions of major banks that service mortgage loans often can make more money from foreclosures than from loan modifications.
It didn’t bother the banking industry’s “robo-signers” that they risked committing perjury when they signed false affidavits filed in courthouses across the country to speed foreclosures along. Now, Bank of America would have us believe that all of these former employees were making things up under penalty of perjury when they came forward and told their stories.
The former employees’ statements were filed with a federal court in Boston as part of a lawsuit against Bank of America by homeowners who say they were improperly denied permanent loan modifications. Bank of America says it will respond to the statements in greater detail in a court filing.
The workers gave horrific accounts about Bank of America’s compliance with the Home Affordable Modification Program. One consistent theme was that they said they were told to deceive borrowers about the status of their applications.
“My colleagues and I were instructed to inform homeowners that modification documents were not received on time, not received at all, or that documents were missing, even when, in fact, all documents were received in full and on time,” said Theresa Terrelonge of Grand Prairie, TX, who worked at Bank of America from 2009 to 2010 as a loan-servicing representative. She said workers “were awarded incentives such as $25 in cash, or as a restaurant gift card” based on “how many applications for loan modifications they could decline.”
Simone Gordon of Orange, NJ, who left Bank of America in 2012, gave a similar account. “Employees were rewarded by meeting a quota of placing a specific number of accounts into foreclosure, including accounts in which the borrower fulfilled a HAMP trial period,” Gordon said. “For example, a collector who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus.” Other rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure included gift cards to Target or Bed, Bath & Beyond.
“We were regularly drilled that it was our job to maximize fees for the bank by fostering and extending delay of the HAMP modification process by any means we could — this included by lying to customers,” Gordon said.
William Wilson, a Bank of America underwriter and manager in Charlotte, NC from 2010 to 2012, described what he said was called a “blitz.” About twice a month, he said, Bank of America would order case managers and underwriters to clean out the backlog of HAMP applications by rejecting any file in which the documents were more than 60 days old. Employees were instructed to “enter a reason that would justify declining the modification to the Treasury Department,” Wilson said.
“Justifications commonly included claiming that the homeowner had failed to return requested documents or had failed to make payments,” he said. “In reality these justifications were untrue. I personally reviewed hundreds of files in which the computer systems showed that the homeowner had fulfilled a trial period plan and was entitled to a permanent loan modification,” but was nevertheless declined during a blitz.
“On many occasions, homeowners who did not receive the permanent modification that they were entitled to ultimately lost their homes to foreclosure,” he said.
After Bloomberg wrote last week about the former employees’ statements, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, Maxine Waters, sent a letter to Christy Romero, the special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, asking that her office investigate. Yet it’s hard to get one’s hopes up about the government’s desire to get at the truth.
There already has been a $25 billion nationwide whitewash of a settlement between regulators and big banks over improper foreclosure practices, along with billion-dollar payments under a different settlement to consultants who were hired to review those practices. Nobody was prosecuted, much less wrist-slapped.
This week, the court-appointed monitor overseeing compliance with the terms of the national mortgage settlement said he found “more work needs to be done” by big mortgage servicers to improve their treatment of customers. But neither he nor the regulators have ever reported anything as dubious as the conduct described in the former Bank of America employees’ court declarations. Perhaps they just missed a bunch of stuff.
If there was a good reason to believe that the government’s priority is to investigate big banks rather than protect them, maybe Bank of America’s blanket denial would seem more credible.
By: Jonathan Weil, Bloomberg View, Published in The National Memo, June 21, 2013
Mitt Romney On Foreclosurers: ‘Any Owners Who Lose Their Homes Are Getting What They Deserve’
Since the housing bubble began to burst six years ago, prices nationwide have fallen by a third. Nearly $7 trillion of home equity has been wiped out. Currently, some 14.7 million homeowners owe $700 billion more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Going forward, prices are likely to fall further as banks put a backlog of foreclosed properties on the market. As home prices fall and more homeowners sink underwater, there will be more foreclosures and more price declines.
So what is Mitt Romney’s response? Bring it on.
In interviews and in the Republican presidential debates, Mr. Romney has said that the cure for foreclosures is for the government to get out of the way and let the process run its course. Once prices hit bottom, investors and want-to-be homeowners would presumably swoop in and prices would stabilize.
The argument might have some red-meat appeal, playing off the notion that any owners who lose their homes are getting what they deserve. It is wrong on several counts:
Efficiency.
Mass foreclosures are a rotten way to stabilize the market. They impose huge costs on neighbors, communities and local governments, and on the broader economy, as falling prices erode equity, depress consumer spending and mire the housing market in a deep hole.
Logic.
Who does Mr. Romney think will buy up millions of foreclosed properties? Borrowers who lose their homes to foreclosure or who sell their homes for less than the balance on their mortgages can be denied credit for years; many will never be homeowners again.
Many college graduates, unable to find jobs, are moving in with their parents, not starting careers, not starting families and not becoming first-time home buyers. High school graduates are despairing of any economic toehold. Investors are inclined to buy distressed properties only if they believe home values will rise, a confidence that is hard to come by in a market that is threatened by more foreclosures and renewed price declines.
Danger.
With the economy still weak and vulnerable to shocks, more foreclosures and the resulting price declines would only weaken the economy further.
Fairness.
The let-it-crash argument conveniently ignores that the housing bubble was the result not only of overborrowing but of reckless lending too. When the bubble burst, the banks were bailed out, while speculators and uncreditworthy borrowers — whom lenders had aggressively pursued during the boom — quickly began to lose their properties. But the economic damage went far beyond the “bad” borrowers, as evidenced by deep recession, ensuing slow growth, high unemployment and crashing home values — all of which has now harmed millions of homeowners who never went near a subprime mortgage. They are the collateral damage of the banks’ binge and bailout. They deserve help, not scorn.
That is not to say that every troubled borrower can be saved. Of the estimated 14.7 million underwater borrowers, 1.6 million are lost causes, according to Moody’s Analytics. Many have already abandoned their homes, leaving them vacant, or are hopelessly behind on their payments, often because of long-term unemployment. This group needs policies to help convert homes to rentals.
Another 1.6 million underwater borrowers have missed payments because of a setback, like job loss, that may prove temporary. They could be helped with forbearance, allowed to make no or reduced payments for a time, and make up the difference later, or with loan modifications that result in meaningfully smaller payments.
The remaining 11.5 million underwater homeowners are current in their payments, but are at high risk of default, since they have no equity to cushion a financial setback and no incentive to keep paying, especially if prices go down again.
Loan modifications that reduce principal balances are the best solution, because they restore equity and reduce monthly payments. The banks would take a hit on principal write-downs. So be it. Refinancings, which the Obama administration is in the process of expanding, also help, because a new loan with a lower rate makes staying in the home more affordable. Mr. Romney has said refinancing is “worth further consideration.” Investors in mortgage-backed securities will take a hit on refinancings. So be it.
At a recent debate, Mr. Romney was asked why he was willing to risk further huge losses in home equity by pushing foreclosures. “What would you do instead?” he replied. “Have the federal government go out and buy all the homes in America?”
No one is suggesting that. What is needed is a set of policies — rentals, forbearance, principal write-downs and refinancings — on a scale that tackles the problem.
By: The New York Times, Editorial, November 26, 2011
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