Will the state Attorneys General stand up to Wall St. and the White House?
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
I know the financial industry runs the country top to bottom, but even this is hard to believe:
Eric T. Schneiderman, the top prosecutor in New York, was removed on Tuesday from a committee of state attorneys general investigating mortgage abuses.
In recent months, Mr. Schneiderman has voiced concerns over a proposed settlement between major banks and a coalition of federal and state officials over claims of foreclosure abuses. He has come under increasing pressure to approve the deal.
The Iowa attorney general’s office is leading the investigation and on Tuesday sent an e-mail to other lawyers involved in the investigation to announce the decision. “Effective immediately, the New York attorney general’s office has been removed from the executive committee of the robosigning multistate,” a lawyer from the Iowa office wrote, using the shorthand for the investigation, which is looking into so-called robo-signing of mortgage documents and other abuses.
Word on the ground is that Scheiderman won’t exactly be taking this slight lying down, and fully intends to fight for accountability for the mortgage lending racket. Good for him.
You have to feel for the Administration. They’re faced with a dual revolt on their hands: on the one hand, they have angry progressives and liberals who expect something remotely approaching governance on behalf of the people instead of Wall Street. And on the other, they have banksters threatening to give all hard stolen earned money over to Mitt Romney.
Faced with that hard choice, the Obama Administration has chosen to protect the banksters. Not surprising: they expect irrelevant liberals to fall in line, and they know Wall St. cash is a more fickle mistress.
The only question now is what state Attorneys General are going to do about it. They’re accountable to their people, too, and more importantly they aren’t usually beholden to financial sector cash.
David Dayen has a good rundown of the status of the rest of the relevant attorneys general as well:
Democrats Madigan, Schneiderman, Delaware’s Beau Biden (the VP’s son, who has joined Schneiderman on his intervention into the Bank of America settlement with investors over mortgage backed securities), Massachusetts’ Martha Coakley and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto are on the record against a broad liability release in one way or another, and others like Washington’s Rob McKenna (R), Colorado’s John Suthers (R), California’s Kamala Harris, and even Utah’s Mark Shurtleff (R) and Michigan’s Bill Schuette (R) have active investigations or lawsuits on this issue.
Of particular interest is what newly elected California Attorney General Kamala Harris will do. California is an extremely powerful player nationally, and many of the greatest excesses of the mortgage fraud business took place here. Ms. Harris won election to Attorney General in a surprise over a formidable Republican candidate, in spite of being an anti-death-penalty female African-American. Quite an extraordinary feat, but one that was accomplished with much blood, sweat and tears from the California Democratic Party’s liberal base. So far she has done good work on mortgage fraud, but her efforts have mostly centered on small-to-medium sized mortgage scammers rather than on the big boys.
Ms. Harris and the other Democratic Attorneys General across America would do well to join with Mr. Schneiderman in refusing to bow to the Obama Administration’s pressure. The needs of the people and the demand for accountability are more pressing concerns to New Yorkers and Californians than President Obama’s need to win a few more bankster millions away from the Mitt Romney campaign.