The Nation -- This story originally appeared at Truthdig
The Obama administration is rushing to the aid of the Wall Street banks again, and is pressuring state attorneys general to negotiate a sweet amnesty deal.
It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt.
In return for a pittance of compensation by banks to ripped-off mortgage holders, it would grant the banks blanket immunity from any prosecution. It is intended to short-circuit investigations by a score of aggressive state officials, inquiries that offer the public a last best hope to get to the bottom of the housing scandal that has cost U.S. homeowners $6.6 trillion in home equity in the past five years and left 14.6 million Americans owing more than their homes are worth.
Eric T. Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York, has come under increasing pressure from the Obama administration to drop his opposition to a wide-ranging state settlement with banks over dubious foreclosure practices. …
In recent weeks, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and high-level Justice Department officials have been waging an intensifying campaign to try to persuade the attorney general to support the settlement.
Donovan has good reason not to want an exploration of the origins of the housing meltdown: He has been a big-time player in the housing racket for decades. Back in the Clinton administration, when government-supported housing became a fig leaf for bundling suspect mortgages into what turned out to be toxic securities, Donovan was a deputy assistant secretary at HUD and acting Federal Housing Administration commissioner. He was up to his eyeballs in this business when the Clinton administration pushed through legislation banning any regulation of the market in derivatives based on home mortgages.
Armed with his insider connections, Donovan then went to work for the Prudential conglomerate (no surprise there), working deals with the same government housing agencies that he had helped run. As The New York Times reported in 2008 after President Barack Obama picked him to be secretary of HUD, “Mr. Donovan was a managing director at Prudential Mortgage Capital Co., in charge of its portfolio of investments in affordable housing loans, including Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Administration debt.”
Shifting the blame from the swindlers to the victims is at the core of the response of both the Bush and Obama administrations to the housing collapse. It is a shameless effort to forgive and forget the crimes of Wall Street and their political allies while allowing ordinary Americans to sink deeper into the pit of debt and despair.
Obama -- who kicked off his campaign vowing to begin a new era of transparency and change -- will stand before the electorate in 2012 having done everything in his power to shield top Wall Street Banks and their political collaborators from all accountability for their crimes.
What about the budget, the economy, the jobs ? he's going to get to that after his vacation at Martha's Vineyard...maybe ?
Meanwhile we should all just sit down, shut up, and stop all the noise, his gangster government wears the crown, they call the shots and continue to shake the people down.
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