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General News    H2'ed 3/14/14

When The Government Compounds Crimes Rather Than Fights Them: The Case of Mortgage Fraud

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Weil  reports, "The actual number of defendants was 107, or 80 percent less charges against 530 criminal defendants, including 172 executives. The actual number of defendants was 107, or 80 percent less, and the department hadn't tracked how many of them were executives.

"Similarly, Justice originally said the losses to homeowners were $1 billion. It later cut that figure to $95 million, while the number of victims was revised to 17,185 from 73,000, and the department hadn't tracked how many of them were executives."

Considering reports that as many as 14 million Americans suffered, this is,   on its face, pretty pathetic, and perhaps even worse than that.

This March, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice's own audit division issued a report. They couldn't make sense of the numbers cited by their own boss and found that rather than leading the charge against mortgage fraud, the Department of Justice was making it worse.

Read this: " The Department's October 9, 2012, press release and the press conference transcript of the Attorney General's remarks, both available on the Department's website, now include disclosures citing the inaccuracy of the originally reported statistics, and the language in each has revised wording and statistics based on the FBI's August 2013 memorandum.

Despite being aware of the serious flaws in these statistics since at least November 2012, we found that the Department continued to cite them in mortgage fraud press releases that it issued in the ensuing 10 months. We believe the Department should not have continued to issue press releases with these statistics once it became aware of the serious flaws."

They found that the stats on criminal fraud were, er, fraudulent and misled the public.

It gets worse. What we have also learned is that a government publicly  decrying mortgage fraud, and saying it had reached "crisis proportions" made eliminating it its lowest priority.

Reports the New York Times , "the F.B.I. considered mortgage fraud to be its lowest-ranked national criminal priority. In several large cities, including New York and Los Angeles, F.B.I. agents either ranked mortgage fraud as a low priority or did not rank it at all." And this, after Congress pumped $196 million from 2009 to 20011 to fund Holder's vow to "fight back."

The truth of all of this--which few cover as well and intensely as the writer Mandelman, is that the government's policy to stop foreclosures masks a practice of encouraging foreclosures in a housing market has not recovered, even as bank profits have.

Mandelman reports: "The government's plan to increase the number of homeowners unable to make their mortgage payments in order to boost the number of foreclosures is about to start working more effectively, as tens of thousands of HAMP modifications that lowered rates to teaser levels in 2009 and 2010, are about to experience payment shock once again.  

The program, known by the acronym HAMP, which stands for "How About More Problems," that reduced rates for borrowers to two percent a few years ago, are about to start seeing their rates heading back up to 4 -- 5.4% according to a TARP Inspector General Report.  Treasury estimates that 30,126 mortgage payments will reset to higher rates starting this year, so with any luck we should see foreclosures rising again soon."

Talk to me Mr. Holder.

Aren't you supposedly and nominally in the business of dispensing or at least insuring justice?

You should be ashamed!

Could these discrepancies and deceptions be a possible cause of your recent physical problems?  Lying can't be good for your health.

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News Dissector Danny Schechter is blogger in chief at Mediachannel.Org He is the author of PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books) available at Amazon.com. See Newsdisssector.org/store.htm.
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