"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
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.)
Back in the 2004
election, Republicans made great hay out of John Kerry's supposed
flip-flopping. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with changing one's mind
when new evidence comes to light.
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.
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.)
"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.
Joe Biden Touts Wall
Street Support for His Plan to Abolish American Suburbs
7,907
2:37
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is touting Wall
Street’s support for his $640 billion housing plan that would force low-income,
multi-family housing developments into America’s suburban communities.
During a visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin — where the Black Lives
Matter organization and members of Antifa have led riots for weeks — Biden told
supporters that Wall Street supports his housing plan because it “will increase
the GDP.”
“And by the way, it’s not a waste of money. Even the folks on
Wall Street point out that will increase the GDP, make it grow,” Biden said of the plan. “People will do
better, people will do better.”
Biden’s housing plan, as Breitbart News has noted, would implement an unprecedented
expansion of Section 8 housing vouchers while requiring that local communities
abolish strict zoning laws in order to become eligible for certain federal
grants.
The plan provides a $300 million investment “to give states and
localities the technical assistance and planning support they need to eliminate
exclusionary zoning policies and other local regulations that contribute to
sprawl.”
Communities unwilling to eliminate their zoning laws to allow
multi-family, mixed-income housing development in their neighborhoods would be
shut out of federal grants under Biden’s plan:
Exclusionary zoning has for decades been strategically used to
keep people of color and low-income families out of certain communities. As
President, Biden will enact legislation requiring any state receiving
federal dollars … to develop a strategy for inclusionary zoning, as
proposed in the HOME Act of 2019 by Majority Whip Clyburn and Senator Cory Booker.
[Emphasis added]
Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey (R), has
called Biden’s housing plan “disastrous” for suburban families who would see
rapid dense-housing developments pop up in their communities.
“Biden’s plan is to force suburban towns with single-family
homes and minimum lot sizes to build high-density affordable housing smack in
the middle of their leafy neighborhoods — local preferences and local control
be damned,” McCaughey wrote in July.
The plan is coupled with Biden’s expansion of illegal and legal
immigration, producing a model for packed suburbs with record population
growth, denser living spaces, and potentially a migration from cities to
smaller, middle-class communities.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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
Joe Biden admits it: Obama stiffed the deplorables
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/joe_biden_admits_it_obama_stiffed_the_deplorables.html
It's getting weird out there in these dog days of the
Democratic presidential nomination race ahead of the Big One in 2020.
Departing from his nonstop praise for President Obama, former
vice president Joe Biden came up with this doozy in
his interview with the New York Times. Here's the money quotes
picked out by Breitbart:
Former
Vice President Joe Biden admitted "a lot of people were left behind"
during his and President Barack Obama's tenure in the White House.
Biden,
who has pitched himself as the only Democrat capable of winning back the white
working class in 2020, made the admission when being interviewed for a profile
in The New York Times that was published on Tuesday.
"A
lot of people were left behind," the frontrunner said when
discussing the Obama administration's efforts to combat the recession.
"In areas where people were hard hit, I don't think we paid enough
attention to their plight."
So some kind of reality has dawned on him. He's
noticed the Obama-era meth addicts and hollowed out cities, made that way by
the Obama "you didn't build that" agenda, but not quite enough
to recognize that a large portion of Trump voters were actually well
educated.
None of this makes Biden look like someone you'd like to
elect president.
Three possibilities are there for what is going on.
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. These Biden remarks suggest that maybe he's
realized this and is distancing himself, even as the Breitbart report noted
that he tried to soften the blame. Nope, blame is blame, even with
sugarcoating.
Two, Biden is trying to draw negative attention
to Obama...to deflect from all the stuff he didn't bother to
do. According to Breitbart:
Despite
the confession, Biden stopped short of laying the culpability on Obama.
Instead, he claimed the president and others were preoccupied by more pressing
issues during their eight years in office.
"Everything
landed on the president's desk but locusts," Biden said in
describing the early days of the administration. He added that Obama was
so busy he "didn't have time to breathe."
The
former vice president attributed the "lack of messaging" and Obama's
reluctance to "promote his successes."
Obama was busy? Where the heck was Joe,
then? Vice presidents are supposed to be there to do all the work
the president can't do, such as go to funerals. Biden declaring
Obama busy only raises the question about what Biden was doing. Was
he doing anything at all — other than meddling in the internal affairs of
Ukraine in the name of business deals? Biden, like Obama, had
his priorities — and helping deplorables wasn't one of them. So now
he's trying to pin the whole thing on Obama.
Third, it may just signal that Biden doesn't have a strategy
at all, just bits and pieces and parts and particles, and he likes the sound of
his voice to interviewers. He's popping off and doing
gaffes. He doesn't recognize that what he's saying is damaging to
him because of what it reveals. What could it reveal? That
he's bitter at Obama, that he was a lazy, shiftless, do-nothing vice president,
that he doesn't know what he's talking about. What a picture of
incompetence.
There aren't any other scenarios. Biden's remarks
on this, after years of effusive praise of the Obama years, is some kind of
truth coming out. Truth is not going to help old Joe.
Image
credit: Obama Library, public domain.
Hat tip:
Roger Luchs.
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.
By David
Dayen
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