Holder & Donovan Open Comedy Act in Vegas

The editorial in yesterday's Las Vegas Sun might have been titled "Moving Forward, Stabbing You in the Backward". Allegedly co-written by Attorney General Eric Holder and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, it's a cringe-worthy, craven apologia shamelessly directed at residents of one of the states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

You have to read it to believe it.  I'm posting a somewhat condensed version, with translation (you can peruse the whole slimy thing here. And the daffy duo also crossposted their self-parody at the Obama-friendly Daily Kos for the even greater convenience of the koolaid-bloated masses) --

Too often, real progress in Washington can be stymied by bureaucratic red tape, turf fights, or conflicts between federal and state authorities. Unfortunately, it has become a place where partisan deadlock and political games can threaten to crowd out substantive debate.
In times of crisis – when people’s livelihoods are in jeopardy and families are losing their homes to foreclosure – they deserve better than intransigent bureaucracy. They need and deserve a government that actually solves problems.
This past week, the Obama Administration and a bipartisan coalition of 49 state attorneys general demonstrated what can be accomplished when people put aside turf wars and focus on what they can do to make things better. By working closely with one another across federal agencies, state boundaries, and party lines, we reached a historic mortgage servicing settlement on behalf of American homeowners.

(Translation: We have been putting pressure on a few recalcitrant Attorneys General for well over a year now, trying to get them to cave to a sweetheart deal letting the banksters off the hook. We are absolutely blaming the AGs for their altruistic foolishness -- and we are also accusing them of allowing even more homeowners to be foreclosed on while they diddled about trying to do the right thing instead of the expedient thing. We finally co-opted them through our sheer brute force. We worked closely with them by getting right in their faces. We are disdainfully reducing their bravery in the face of an overreaching federal government to a political "turf war.")

The need for a settlement on this scale has long been clear. Some five years after the housing bubble burst, America continues to pay a steep price. Lenders sold loans to people who couldn’t afford them and packaged mortgages to make profits that turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. Their actions hurt millions of families who did the right thing, but still lost their houses or saw their home prices drop. And, unfortunately, as our extensive investigations found, abuses continued long after consumers bought their homes.

(Translation: we were well aware this whole time of massive fraud and conspiracy. Even though our "extensive investigations" uncovered abuses, we did nothing. How unfortunate. We are not mentioning in this editorial that the crimes continue to this very day. Because we are corrupt, do-nothing political hacks. We are also throwing minorities under the bus by putting equal blame on some of the victims who were snookered into signing fraudulent documents. They rose above their station by buying into our American Dream malarkey. Even though many are uneducated and barely literate, we brazenly claim that they knowingly bit off more than they could chew. We continue to insinuate that poor black and brown people hurt the "responsible" homeowners just as much as the mega-banks did.)

In response to thousands of mortgage servicing complaints fielded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), state attorneys general, and banking regulators across the country, HUD initiated a large-scale review of the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) 10 largest servicers in the summer of 2010. Devoting some 6,000 hours to reviewing servicing files for thousands of FHA-insured loans, the scope of this review soon broadened to encompass a long list of mortgage servicing issues, including lost paperwork, long delays, and missed deadlines for loan modifications. The Justice Department’s U.S. Trustees Program reviewed more than 37,000 bankruptcy claims and motions filed by the top five servicers. And HUD’s Office of the Inspector General, the Justice Department, and state authorities discovered that the country’s five largest loan servicers routinely signed foreclosure-related documents without knowing whether the facts they contained were correct.

Some have asked why we don’t address these actions by taking the banks to court. But rather than pursuing hundreds of lawsuits with varying degrees of success, the goal of this settlement has been to benefit struggling homeowners and to do so now – not sometime in the future, when it may be too late to help many families. 

(Translation: our chutzpah knows no bounds. We started this huge investigation a year and a half ago, spent 6000 hours reviewing files, looked at 37,000 pieces of paper filed by mortgage servicers and banks. We chose not to prosecute, because the success would only have been "varied". So we decided to give up while we were ahead, sweep the whole thing under the rug, and throw a few pennies at the victims before they die and it's too late.  Why we are not being investigated ourselves for legal malpractice and dereliction of duty is beyond the scope of this editorial and may be chalked up to our unbridled arrogance.) 

This settlement also forces banks to clean up their acts – and to fix the problems covered during our investigations – by committing them to major reforms in terms of how they service mortgage loans. This is significant, given that these banks service nearly 2 out of every 3 mortgages. And these new customer service standards are in keeping with the Homeowners Bill of Rights recently announced by President Obama – a single, straightforward set of commonsense rules that families can count on, requiring lenders and servicers to honor a long list of rights for those facing foreclosure.

 (Translation: We choose to call the crimes of the banksters "problems" in order to further absolve them and us, their willing and able co-conspirators and accessories during and after the fact. Slapping them on the wrist will scare the bejesus out of them and make them honest. They need a dose of common sense, not a jail term.)

 While this historic settlement isn’t designed to address all the issues of the housing crisis, it will offer significant help to those who suffered the most harm. Alongside the broad-based refinancing plan President Obama announced to help homeowners, it provides a path toward stability for our housing market and our broader economy. And, by ensuring that banks and mortgage servicers fulfill their essential obligations – and taking major steps to hold these institutions accountable – it proves that we can make real progress, and achieve extraordinary results, when we work together.

(Translation: A path toward stability for our housing market and our broader economy is simply doublespeak for more profits for the banks and a surge in their stock prices. This travesty proves that not only can they get away with murder, they can always count on us, their 'umble servants, to help them and cover up for them as they continue their stranglehold on the entire planet. They own us lock, stock and barrel; they pay us and keep us exactly where they can see us.)

In a related development sure to be swept under the rug as soon as the Obama Administration can make them an offer they can't refuse, San Francisco officials discovered that of the 400 foreclosures they audited recently, nearly all of them were fraudulent at worst, suspicious at best. The intrepid Gretchen Morgenson broke the story in today's New York Times. You can read it here. 

Donovan & Holder Share a Conspiratorial Chuckle At Our Expense