Paul Sperry (whose book The Great American Bank Robbery is pretty good) writes in Investor's Business Daily:
Justice spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said the anti-discrimination notice "does not compel the banks to make loans to people who do not qualify." She said such measures are "essential to remedy the harmful effects of the banks' conduct."
But industry analysts fear Attorney General Eric Holder is rekindling an anti-bank witch hunt launched by Attorney General Janet Reno in the 1990s, when Holder served as her deputy.
Some blame that in part for the subprime boom, because banks were ordered to throw open their lending windows to credit-poor minorities. That crackdown spurred the American Bankers Association to distribute to its thousands of members "fair-lend ing tool kits" advising the adoption of more permissive underwriting criteria to help inoculate them from prosecution.
In the new prosecutions, Justice acknowledges in every case it did not prove charges of intentional discrimination, while banks have denied any wrongdoing. Many, in fact, earned outstanding ratings from anti-redlining regulators enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act.
Istook calls Holder's crusade an "egregious overreach by the government." He says many of the targets are smaller banks without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle.
The House Judiciary Committee plans to investigate.
"This is an expansion of the law," said a congressional investigator. "They're pushing the envelope as far as they can go in the enforcement of civil rights."
As part of settlement deals, prosecutors have required banks to sign "nondisclosure agreements" barring them from talking about the methods used to allege discrimination. Bank lawyers contend the prosecutors are trying to hide the shaky legal grounds on which the cases are built. "It's horrible what they're doing at the civil rights division," said Reginald Brown, a partner at Wilmer Hale in Washington, who has represented banks in connection to recent race-bias investigations. "They don't have any proof, just theories."
He added, "They want you to sign something saying you agree, under the condition of any settlement with them, that you won't disclose what their theories were. That's because their theories are loopy and wouldn't stand the light of day."
If Paul Krugman ever admitted this kind of thing played any role whatsoever in the Recent Economic Unpleasantness, Mrs. Krugman would have him sleeping on the couch for a month.
The title is a reference to the wonderful J.K. Simmons' last lines in Burn After Reading.
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But Krugman makes the point that Europe too had a housing bubble and crash though it didn't have Fannie Mae. Could it be possible that some Europeans--Spanish, Irish, Greeks, etc--are the defacto minority groups in Europe while nations like Germany are morally pressured to lend to such nations either in the name of righting historical wrongs or for the sake of promoting greater equality among nations? Could the difference between Germans and southern Europeans be comparable to that of white americans and blacks/hispanics?
Xochitl Hinojosa?
...said the anti-discrimination notice "does not compel the banks to make loans to people who do not qualify."
No, disparate impact lawsuits do that.
Among other remedies: favorable interest rates and down-payment assistance for minority borrowers with weak credit.
Grow up, Holder -- pipe-dream-ia is so 2007.
He says many of the targets are smaller banks without the resources to fight a protracted legal battle.
If the small banks are especially hard-hit, then the witch hunt gives the advantage to their competitors, the... um, what's it called? Big Can Never Fail banks... something like that. I forgot already.
Tammany with a Harvard Law degree.
"Now, there's a double M in Tammany,
And there's a double L in gall, Just like the double-dealing, double-crossing, double-talking, double-dyed duplicity of Tammany Hall!"
"Justice spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa"
The rest of the article is unnecessary after these four words. The reader can fill in what's going to happen.
"Some blame that in part for the subprime boom, because banks were ordered to throw open their lending windows to credit-poor minorities."
Give me a break. The banks were making money hand over fist during the subprime boom, and didn't need the government to jump into the bubble. Fannie and Freddie jumped headfirst into the game in 05-06 to try to recapture market share.
The prosecution itself, is wrong, of course, but nothing new. The non-disclosure clause in settlements pertaining to the theory of prosecution strikes me as genuinely creepy, however. An important part of any prosecution is that it will deter future wrong acts, not just by the person who is prosecuted himself (specific deterrence)but also other persons who might otherwise be tempted to do the wrong act (general deterrence). Holder is attempting to prevent the public from finding out just what strange theory he's using. Could it be based on white skin privilege, disparate impact, or one of the other theories that have crawled up out of the fever swamp of modern civil rights scholarship?
This is a purely political act by a very political A.G.
The US government and MSM never cease to amaze me with the sheer idiocy of their tragicomic policies and Orwellian pretzel logic. People like Eric Holder and Tom Perez should be serving time for discrimination as well as slander, rather than being allowed to run public institutions.
We have some pretty stupid politicians and media figures in the Netherlands, but they can't touch America's political elite as far as malicious, intentional stupidity goes.
Xochitl Hinojosa
...
Seems like the Freedom of Information Act that the lefties so famously signed into law in the '60s could be increasingly a thorn in their side these days.
We have got to get these people out of office.
I've been reading libertarian blogs lately, and getting a big dose of the greatness of free markets and meritocracy.
But posts like this remind me that people (e.g. Eric Holder) happily go for corruption over merit.
OK everyone, take a moment to picture what you think Xochitl Hinojosa looks like... and then click here. Surprised? Or not surprised at all?
Along with the rest of college-educated D.C., she looks like she's having, as Forbes would put it, "a good recession".
I was curious to attach a face and bio to the name "Xochitl Hinojosa".
Incredibly, neither immediately come up in a Google search for "Xochitl Hinojosa DOJ" or "Xochitl Hinojosa DOJ bio". This, for the public face and spokesperson for the DOJ.
I suspect that "Xochitl Hinojosa" is another white male blogger.
Apparently "Xochitl" is Nahuatl for "flower".
Definitely not a good sign if they're abandoning Christian names in favor of aboriginal gibberish...
"They don't have any proof, just theories."
Leftism in a nutshell.
Xochitl Hinojosa....that about says it all, doesn't it?
Xochitl? Hinojosa?
Anyway she is the daughter of a well-connected Tex-Mex former judge, and power broker, Gilberto Hinojosa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Hinojosa
Xochitl (pronounced So-chill) is a Mixtex name. There's a vogue among well-educated Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for pre-Columbian names. They are usually La Raza believers in Reconquista types. In short: dangerous. There are no illegal aliens in their opinion.
In short, the enemy is in the gates.
Or maybe I have it all wrong and she's a poor wise Latina who worked her way up from grinding poverty.
Give me a break. The banks were making money hand over fist during the subprime boom, and didn't need the government to jump into the bubble. Fannie and Freddie jumped headfirst into the game in 05-06 to try to recapture market share.
Exactly! Clearly, there was some Leftist/NAM conspiracy which forced all the Wall Street banksters to spend so many years making endless tens of billions in profits, and then toss a few crumbs (like maybe 0.1% of the money) to the real puppetmasters responsible.
Also, weren't some of the largest profits and the biggest disasters based on "synthetic CDOs", securities built up from derivative-generated mortgages which didn't even exist in the real world? So I guess we can blame the "synthetic NAMs" living in West Atlantis for those.
And what about the earlier Dot-Com Bubble, which also made endless billions in profits for Wall Street and various Dot-Com Entrepreneurs, while impoverishing vast numbers of small investors? I guess the culprits there must be "invisible NAMs" or something.
Basically, the difficulty with certain people is whenever there's something bad going on, they always first blame the NAMs and then afterward try to figure out how the NAMs might possibly be somehow connected. Which is a really great way to destroy one's credibility...
Zero sympathy for these banks. You'd think all these rich white people might do something to undermine the ideological basis for these law suits, but they won't because they are in fundamental agreement with Eric Holder.
""Justice spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa"
The rest of the article is unnecessary after these four words. The reader can fill in what's going to happen.""
ha- so true....
Can you imagine getting the memo that your new boss is Xochitl Hinojosa??? Yes Xochitl comes to us from a Mayan temple where she presided over sacrifices.... Eric Holder is really exicted about her coming aboard.
Dan in DC
'We have got to get these people out of office."
Why stop there?
Since these people are also invariably open borders, why not strip them of their American citizenship (they're also all anti-American), drop them into international waters--I mean, open waters--and let the swim to the shore of the nearest country stupid enough to take them in?
Wow, Xochitl Hinojsa is so pale she makes the red-cheeked blonde standing next to her look like a person of color.
RKU and ATBOLT make a good point that NAMS and the whole diversity racket are often merely fig leaves used by our elites to cover their egregious cons like Wall Street.
RKU and ATBOLT are wrong to deny or trivialize the diversity racket elites use to pull off ever-outrageous ripoffs. The manifestly ludicrous anti-scientific goals of PC dogma encourage our elites to abuse the rest of us without restraint or even organized dissent.
Xochitl Hinojosa:
Worried that your children's Euro looks will hold you back in the diversity sweepstakes? Then do what my oh-so-prescient parents did, and give them uber-Amerind first names.
LOL at those pictures. Imagine a pale Minnesota politician named Sitting Bull Thordahlsen.
See also Diego Luna's role as Tenoch Iturbide, son of rich, white, Mexican politicos in Y Tu Mama Tambien.
Gay Girl:
The thing about the redlining bit is that it was (and remains) a small-scale way to scam some money from banks in the name of diversity. But PC literally makes people stupid--not just in the sense of making them say silly things they don't really believe, but by making it hard for them to think straight.
Suppose you basically accepted the "party line" about redlining. That doesn't require being stupid--most people accept the party line from their team with little real thought, especially in areas outside their own experience. Having accepted it for reasons of team membership, you probably have a hard time thinking clearly about what's wrong with it as a justification for lowering lending standards, approving liars' loans, or underwriting riskier mortgage-backed securities.
Suppose you never accepted the party line in your own mind, but you mouthed it to get along. Almost any argument you can come up with for why using redlining to justify these imprudent business decisions is nuts requires breaking your previous decision to mouth the party line to get along.
This is basically how people make themselves stupider than they naturally are.
When our politicians propound such preposterous policies, their preface is always simultaneously a predication and a pooh-poohing of the logical outcome of the policies.
"The Civil Rights Act will not breach property rights."
"Affirmative action will not lead to reverse discrimination."
"High taxes will not hurt businesses."
"Mandating loans to underqualified groups will not result in loans to underqualified groups."
"The bullet I am firing into your body will not penetrate your body."
They're always peeing on our leg and telling us it's raining.
How long will we put up with it? How long will we play the chump, the Charlie Brown of the world - believing Lucy as she holds the football?
Seems like the Freedom of Information Act that the lefties so famously signed into law in the '60s i have been following an eminent domain case in NYC pretty closely - FOIL is next to useless.
>Eric Holder is rekindling an anti-bank witch hunt<
Racist = witch
How about Laquisha Hearthunder Abromowitz Jones de la Rosa?
>Xochitl (pronounced So-chill) is a Mixtex name. There's a vogue among well-educated Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for pre-Columbian names. They are usually La Raza believers in Reconquista types. In short: dangerous. There are no illegal aliens in their opinion. In short, the enemy is in the gates.<
She looks mixed, with Scotch-Irish predominating.
What percentage of Scotch-Irish are such revolutionists? Would it be a crime to publish it? Inquiring minds want to know.
There's another Xochitl at the DOJ website, a "white male":
Xochtl BOTELLO-SANTIAGO,
FUGITIVE NCIC#: W-618445975
WANTED FOR: The Following Alleged Federal Drug Violations:
Conspiracy, 21 USC 846
JURISDICTION: Corpus Christi,TX
AKA: N/A
RACE: White
SEX: Male
HEIGHT: 5’4”
WEIGHT: 170
HAIR: Brown
EYES: Brown
YOB: 1966
POB: Mexico
LAST KNOWN ADDRESS: Reynosa, Mexico
NOTE: Armed & Dangerous
HEIGHT: 5’4”
WEIGHT: 170
Hate facts.
i think the problem in here :Since these people are also invariably open borders, why not strip them of their American citizenship..
"i think the problem in here :Since these people are also invariably open borders, why not strip them of their American citizenship.."
Yes, let them be citizens of the world, free of the oppressive, racist nationalistic yoke of American citizenship.
Where's the problem in that?
You mean the problem that arises when they apply for political asylum for some Third World hellhole? We all know that won't happen, since it's America that's the most criminal country on the planet.
This article from 2007 mentions at least one of the banks being persecuted:
The few banks that improved their net charge-offs year-over-year included Citizens National Bank, Midwest BankCentre, Rockwood Bank and Royal Banks...
"During robust times, the question is: Do you throw out the time-tested principles for lending that have served banks well?", asked Barnes of Midwest BankCentre.
Those principles include requiring borrowers to verify income and assets, and lending only to people who have a history of paying their bills and can afford a down payment.
Apparently "Xochitl" is Nahuatl for "flower".
Definitely not a good sign if they're abandoning Christian names in favor of aboriginal gibberish...
Her name is Hinojosa. That means she's from a Sephardic Jewish family.
Her name is Hinojosa. That means she's from a Sephardic Jewish family.
So is it supposed to be a good sign that they are abandoning Hebrew names in favor of aboriginal gibberish?
>>Anonymous said.. . .
i have been following an eminent domain case in NYC pretty closely - FOIL is next to useless.>>
In my experience the FBI is pretty good about answering FOIA requests, but other government agencies to which I have sent them simply ignore me. I think you need to hire a good lawyer to get them attended to in many cases. (That was the advice I got from someone I spoke to in a military records office.)
In my lifetime, harry, dwight, john, Lyndon, gerald, jimmy, Ronald, George, bill, George, barracks hussien, Obama, where was your head????
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