Eideard

I’m sorry, Congressman, you’re small-minded, too!
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Elizabeth Warren, it’s not you they hate. It’s what you represent. You want to be an honest cop when so many before you in Washington have looked the other way and pretended that the banking industry could police itself.

I can’t think of a better reason why this presidential adviser shouldn’t be the new chief of an unfettered Consumer Financial Protection Bureau…

As the debate about Warren — and what she stands for — rages on, here’s a look at why the banks despise the idea of her as a strong regulator:

Weak consumer regulation was the norm, but banks love the status quo – Prior to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which established the consumer bureau, there simply was no real consumer watchdog over banks…

Mortgage abuses were rampant – More than three years after the biggest financial meltdown since 1929, we’re still trying to unravel what the banks did to foul up the global financial system. Did the banks fudge mortgage documents simply to grease the way to securitizing loans? Did they trigger foreclosures even when homeowners were paying their bills? Did they push people into bad loans they knew they would default on? If any or all of these things were true, it certainly wasn’t because the banks were over-regulated…

Credit abuses are rampant – Take a look at your credit card disclosure statement. Do you have any idea how much you will owe if you’re late or lose your job and can’t pay? This is not a mystery to the banks, who have conceived elaborate formulas for charging you more money for credit…

Junk fees are abundant – You ever wonder what all those fees are that creep into your mortgage closing statement? They seem to come out of nowhere. A lot of them are negotiable or completely unnecessary…

Making simple math simple again – Do you know what a LIBOR index is and “lifetime maximum rates?” The banks don’t want you to know this because this is how much your monthly payment can climb based on a variable index. If the index goes up, so does your payment…

So nothing personal Elizabeth Warren.

It’s not the way you dress or the fact that you teach at Harvard and have been an advocate for banking customers. Or that you’re “so bloody disagreeable,” as one former Wall Street banker put it. It’s just that you’re so darned honest about banking abuses and are one of the best people in the country to enact change.

Bravo! RTFA. I probably disagree with John Wasik as often as I agree – about economics, investing, finance. That’s why it’s called the dismal science. This opinion piece is about honestly and competence. Something Congress knows little about – and cares even less.

This week, a federal jury in Virginia convicted mortgage executive Lee Farkas on fraud and conspiracy charges that could send him to prison for life.

Authorities say Farkas tried to defraud banks out of almost $3 billion, in one of the biggest cases to come out of the mortgage crisis. And that, critics say, is the problem. Almost three years after the economy nearly collapsed, most top Wall Street banks and their executives have emerged with no criminal trouble. And that’s making people angry.

The argument that prosecutors have gone light on the nation’s largest banks for their role in the financial meltdown has become really popular — even if it’s not true.

Not so for Farkas, 58, who cut a larger-than-life figure in his north Florida community. In his heyday, Farkas collected cars — including a 1963 Rolls Royce and a Ford Model A. He served caviar in the dining room at his mortgage lending company Taylor Bean and Whitaker, or TBW…

“Farkas was really the mastermind of one of the largest bank fraud schemes in history,” says Lanny Breuer, who runs the criminal division at the Justice Department. “What he did led not only to the downfall of TBW, perhaps the second largest mortgage lending company in the United States, but also led to the failure of one of the country’s largest commercial banks, Colonial.”

Late Tuesday, a federal jury in Virginia convicted Farkas of all 14 charges against him. A judge immediately ordered Farkas into custody. He could get life in prison when he’s sentenced July 1…

Breuer of the Justice Department says public opinion doesn’t influence his decisions.

“When we believe we have a criminal case where we can prove each of the elements beyond a reasonable doubt, we’re going to do it,” he says. “When we don’t believe we can prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt, we’re not going to do it, no matter … how popular it would be.”

Two parts of the same problem. The lawyers who seem to set the standards for judges and legal beagles alike have slowed down the system of justice so radically that you could die of old age before you have a chance at justice in America. And the bits and pieces that fade away over time diminish the likelihood of a conviction.

Probably little need to note lobbyists paid by Wall Street who carry the message to an outraged Congress – whose wallets are as open as their mouths. They’re most often a subset of the same group of lawyers chartered and funded by corporations to rebuild that edifice in the image of corruption and shame.

A Mesa minister with a worldwide following has been arrested on charges that he orchestrated a $5.5 million mortgage-fraud scheme involving nearly a dozen Valley homes.

Clint Rogers and his wife, Angela Faith Rogers, were indicted this month by a federal grand jury that accused them of conspiring with three others to inflate the value of homes, obtain loans on the bloated price and then pocket the difference.

“They are the leaders,” said Patrick Cunningham, chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Arizona. “They got $2.5 million in alleged cash back. That is a tremendously high number.”

The couple’s home purchases were detailed in a 2009 investigation by The Arizona Republic, which found that they bought 26 homes in less than two years and that nearly all of them went into foreclosure…

Clint Rogers, head of Mesa-based Clint Rogers Ministries, conducts faith-healing events and other services at churches throughout the U.S., Africa, Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

According to the indictment, the ministry was used to launder money from the bogus real-estate transactions…

They obtained a total of $5.5 million in financing and in five months directed about $2.5 million of it into their own accounts, according to the indictment.

Good thing they’re Christian crooks. They’re guaranteed forgiveness and salvation. Right?

Meanwhile, they’ll find lots to keep them busy with faith healing in the slammer.

Federal prosecutors have charged 1,215 people in hundreds of mortgage fraud cases that resulted in estimated losses of $2.3 billion, said administration officials unveiling a crackdown after the housing market collapse…

In the last three-and-a-half months, authorities have made 485 arrests in the fraud cases, obtained 336 individual convictions and recovered more than $147 million, the Justice Department said.

“We have seen cases that have resulted in dozens of foreclosures and millions in losses, as well as fraudsters who have bankrupted entire companies and national lenders who were not playing by the rules,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder said.

The announcement came a day after prosecutors accused the former head of a defunct mortgage lender, Lee Farkas, of a scheme that led to multibillion-dollar losses.

Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, said that authorities were pursuing more than 3,000 mortgage fraud cases, a number that has nearly doubled since 2008.

You didn’t seriously think the politicians who removed oversight and regulation were going to be prosecuting the fraudsters they unleashed, did you? That required – ready for the word? – CHANGE.

Throw away the key!