Neil Barofsky, Shella Blair,are key former regulators (TARP, FDIC), who were conspicuously silent when in office, and therefore colluded in the historically unprecedented robbery of the people of the US. Now, they are joining the chorus, trying the clear their names...
My memory may fail me, but in the case of Shella Blair, there was also the issue of one or more whistleblowers against corruption of banking regulation there, with typical retaliation...
I believe that in 2007 the primary of authority over Countrywide was Federal Trade Commission (Countrywide's Samuels - see below - in a brilliant legal maneuver switched regulators that year). The web site of FTC amazed me, since it was the first time I saw a website of a US government office, where there were prominent notices, advising consumers to contact the FTC Inspector General in case they suspected corruption. Apparently Congress passed a specific law appointing an Inspector General for FTC a decade or two earlier... Needless to say, the Inspector General there did nothing as well,
Neither did Mary Schapiro at SEC.
Neither did the Inspector General of the US Department of Justice Neil Fine.
I am talking a year before Countrywide collapsed, and my complaints to all these agencies documented reckless practices and unprecedented fraud in sub-prime mortgage lending (which already then I estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars of high risk to the tax payer) and widespread corruption of the Los Angeles Superior Court. I also documented physical intimidation and harassment of a former Senior Underwriter, who refused to cooperate in extreme cases of mortgage fraud. She had been fired two years earlier, stayed home, and was constantly monitored and prohibited from talking about anything related to Countrywide. All these racketeering activities were coordinated by the Legal Department under Chief Legal Officer Sandor Samuels. Simultaneously, Samuels served (and serves) the President of Bet Tzedek (the Los Angeles "House of Justice"). At the time, early 2007, he was also running in synagogues and churches in Southern California a campaign against real estate fraud... And through Bet Tzedek he got exclusive contract with the County of Los Angeles to handle Consumers Bureau complaints about real estate and mortgage fraud...
These are all top legal professional, who betrayed their people.
jz
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Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company
Culture change in the financial world may be coming, but not fast enough says banking expert Shelia Blair. READ MORE»
