Politics, Society

Obama Denounces “Special Interests” At The University of Chicago . . . And Then Quietly Accepts $400,000 For First Speech From Wall Street Special Interests

President Barack Obama was at my alma mater yesterday and used his first public statements to decry how  “special interests dominate the debates in Washington.” Then will now be setting off for his first speech . . . to Wall Street special interests at Cantor Fitzgerald, which will pay him $400,000.  This is the same politician who called such banks “fat cats” who exercise undue influence over our leaders.


Cantor Fitzgerald, a bank, has been touting how it is making a killing on health care investments.  Now, the man who created the health care program will be receiving almost half a million dollars for a single brief speech.  It raises visions of Hillary Clinton who cashed in on Wall Street  speeches while denouncing the influence of Wall Street (and later refused to disclose the content of those speeches to the public).

One distinction is that Hillary pulled in only half of what Obama is demanding from Wall Street and powerful interests.

Of course, Obama was criticized for the level of influence of both Wall Street investors and powerful lobbies like the pharmaceutical industry on his policies. He was accused of packing his administration with lobbyists and breaking his promises on limiting the power of lobbies.

What is hilarious about our current system is that we have all of these bribery and influence peddling laws in place.  However, if Wall Street or lobbyists give a former president half a million dollars for less than one hour of speaking soon after leaving office, it is entirely acceptable from a legal standpoint. So long as there is no quid pro quo, there is nothing legally wrong with absurd amounts of money going to a president as soon as he leaves office.  At this rate, just 100 hours of work will put Obama near the $100 million goal surpassed by the Clintons, who virtually walked around with credit card swipers on their belt to facilitate payments from special interests.

In his speech, Obama encouraged people to work on the community level to influence change.  He appears to be starting with the small Wall Street community of influence peddlers in his own quest for social justice.

191 thoughts on “Obama Denounces “Special Interests” At The University of Chicago . . . And Then Quietly Accepts $400,000 For First Speech From Wall Street Special Interests”

  1. Like it or not, Obama’s legacy is that he paved the way for the Trump presidency.

  2. Chicago turned into a combat zone just a few blocks from the U. of Chicago. And this happened on Obama’s watch. He sh!t on black folk. He’s embarrassed by black folk unless they’re celebrities.

    1. Obama’s not responsible for failures in local policing. That’s on the city government in Chicago. What Obama-Holder-Lynch-Perez are responsible for is harassing local police departments trying to do their jobs – the bogus ‘consent decrees’, vapid paperwork, &c.

  3. In his speech, Obama encouraged people to work on the community level to influence change.

    Of course that’s inane. The world we live in doesn’t need ‘change’, it needs to be properly curated and maintained. To the extent that policy needs to change, it would be in the direction of putting Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry out of business, restructuring higher education and beating up the Bourbons employed in it, beating up the Bourbons in the legal profession, more assiduous police protection in slums, replacing public schools with vouchers, and amending modes of local finance and governance. Obama hasn’t the slightest interest in any such projects.

  6. Naturally, his supporters won’t say boo, regardless of the fact that it is exactly how he ran the White House. What a disappointment he was and is.

  7. “In his speech, Obama encouraged people to work on the community level to influence change.”

    I doubt this means teaching people how to manage their money more effectively or help them better understand investments, insurance, and finance so they can better meet their own needs. Considering the staggering amount of debt Americans have, the terrible mortages people have obtained, and the difficulty people have covering emergencies, educating people would be a great thing to speak about. Wall Street would be helping people. But, I am cynical.

    1. Debt service and financial obligation ratios are near 36 year lows. The ratio of mortgage debt stocks to personal income flows has fallen to about what it was in 2002. The delinquent share of residential real estate loans held by commercial banks has been declining for 7 years and is now at pre-crisis levels. The mortgage maws are no longer haemorrhaging.

      1. Yeah, and for those people who are delinquent, bankrupt, or just plain broke because of poor financial decisions, it still hurts, regardless of your ratios and decreased percentages. Many people have not learned how to effectively manage their money, floating along without knowledge or a plan, instead. I have family in that boat.

        The average person carries $5000 in credit card debt. Paying the balance every month still means they are paying hard-earned cash into a hole. People need better financial education.

        1. There is nothing new or peculiar about people having financial problems. Neither is it an indicator of a systemic policy failure that people have financial problems.

          1. “Neither is it an indicator of a systemic policy failure that people have financial problems.”

            Huh? I have never brought up policy failures. I was remarking on the unlikelihood of President Obama speaking to Wall Street folks about improving financial literacy at the community level. That would be a positive change, but I doubt that was his message.

            ““In his speech, Obama encouraged people to work on the community level to influence change.”

        1. You’re confusing interest rates which the consumer faces and which business face with the interest rates the Federal Reserve is charging banks and the yield on Treasuries.

  8. Wow! Love how the professor touts his liberal views and support of the disgusting vomit remark by his Drexel comrade, yet my earlier post, an exact quotation (available on Youtube) by Mr. Larry Wilmore at the 2016 Correspondents dinner was just removed by who? Who is the blogs censor Gestapo? The professor? Someone else maybe? You have my email and if you feel I violated your elitist liberal standards, then have the professional decency, backbone and courage to say so.

  9. Some official of Cantor-FitzGerald threw away $400,000 of their stockholders’ money for 50 minutes of pap from this man? It’s no wonder the country’s economy has been getting progressively less dynamic for a generation and a half.

    I don’t know why you’re surprised BO did this. Self-indulgent cupidity is one thing manifest about BO and Mooch and one obtrusive thing they have in common.

    In 1976, Richard Nixon was taken to task for accepting a $600,000 fee for 29 hours of one-on-one interviews with David Frost. (A contextually similar sum today would be about $4,000,000). Obama’s hourly would appear to be 3x Nixon, and BO doesn’t have to answer questions from an experienced and skeptical reporter. James Fallowes thought the Nixon-Frost deal was an example of Nixon’s unusually crass character (“who else would have asked for a fee?”). Well, since 1976, every quondam president (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter) has engaged in buckraking of a sort that the impecunious Harry Truman eschewed. Only the Clintons had Nixon’s overdue legal bills as a justification, and it’s a reasonable wager the Clinton’s lawyers were paid off 15 years ago. (The Bushes have enough of a regard for appearances to stick to confidential fora). The smart money says Fallowes and his ilk have no complaints at all about the Clintons or the Obamas and will ignore the subject except when it comes time to review what W is getting from trade associations.

    If we want royalty, nobody does it better than the Windsors, and we should reclaim the Queen, acquire a governor-general as an on-site chief of state, and acquire a prime minister as chief executive. The public budget for looking after the 22 members of the royal family on the payroll is a small fraction of the cost of maintaining the presidency and post-presidency. It’s time to take the toys away.

    2. Wasn’t it Japan that paid Reagan $2 million after he left? Or was that Bush Sr. ?
      I’m pretty sure we don’t know 1/2 of what’s going on in with the elite.

      1. Reagan received $2 million for a speaking tour in Japan in 1989.

  10. Just as with Drexel University, investors that don’t want $400,000 to be paid for 1 hour speeches have a choice to move their investments to another brokerage firm.

    1. I think the technical term is ‘principal-agent problem’. As Danny DeVito said, “Dogs, doughnuts, and money. Especially Other People’s Money.

  12. The operative word, however, is QUIETLY. Yes, QUIETLY. This story will never receive widespread press exposure, and the complicit media will, undoubtedly, fail to ever cover the the fact that the community organizer, the product of Communist parents and grandparents, is demanding $400,000 a pop to speak for a few minutes. Yes, demanding. What? You don’t think that Bathhouse Barry has a price? You think that the $400,000 is a fluke? I wonder if he started his speech with–I was born a poor black child? Did the community organizer offer up any of it–even a fraction of it–to assist those poor and needy students, desperate for a college education? Communist dictators never do. They just rail against the excesses of a society, which they then pocket for themselves. This story won’t be covered because it conflicts with the carefully crafted image of the man-of-the-people persona that we have been inundated with, incessantly, for a decade. Still pushing that community involvement crap, where the emphasis is placed upon turning society on its head and decrying the big banks and special interests, while raking in millions from the same players. How predictable.

    1. For pity’s sake.

      His maternal-side grandmother was a banker who specialized in managing escrow accounts and his maternal-side grandfather sold furniture and insurance for a living. Obama wouldn’t have known his paternal side grandparents from a cord of wood and there does not appear to have been much remarkable about them other than his grandfather was literate, spoke English, and was both a soldier and a civilian employed by the British Army (who may or may not have been detained and beaten for Mau Mau affiliations). This quartet is your idea of what a ‘Communist’ is?

      As for his parents, through the course of the man’s life, BO spent a grand total of nine weeks in the same city as his father. His step-father was a cartographer for an oil company, a good-natured lush. His mother was a self-centered and self-aggrandizing perpetual student / Ford Foundation functionary who put her mother, father, and 2d husband to work cleaning up after her for a period of nearly 20 years. She was never a Communist Party member (something rather passe by 1960) and her son hasn’t hid his disrespect for her actual politics.

      1. Old fashioned Marxism-Leninism is discredited and obsolete. Neo-Marxist cultural Marxism is the de facto official ideology of Wall Street and the City of London, Harvard and the MSM.

        1. There is no such thing as ‘Cultural Marxism’. That’s a nonsense internet meme. In any case, Ann Dunham spent much of her life in Indonesia observing local blacksmiths, not producing literary criticism.

          1. dss – if you don’t believe in Cultural Marxism, could I refer you to the Cultural Revolution.

            1. Mao Tse-tung fancied the ‘superstructure’ can influence the base. How that is relevant to contemporary political discussion in North America and what mob violence during the period running from 1966 to 1969 (or 1971 or 1976 – choose your terminal date) is a matter of conjecture.

              Political terminology properly provides a short-hand which is indicative of something more elaborate. “Cultural Marxism” does not do that and not one person in 20 who uses it in these fora has a clue what they’re babbling about. You might as well use ‘poopy pants’.

          2. Cultural Marxism is what happened when the left abandoned the fading industrial working class for new constituencies like immigrants, feminists, sexual minorities and self-important urban SWPL’s who want to feel superior to the “rednecks” and “white trash” they left behind when they moved to Brooklyn and North Side Chicago.

            Prof. Paul Gottfried:
            http://www.vdare.com/articles/yes-virginia-there-is-a-cultural-Marxism

            In my book, The Strange Death of Marxism, I argued that these ideas established themselves as leftist programs and progressive rhetoric throughout Western Europe, Canada, and the US before the fall of the Soviet empire. They evolved into a form of leftist radicalism that could coexist with consumer societies and mixed economies, because they focused on culture and society much more than they did the economy. Frankfurt School ideas have encouraged a war without quarter against bourgeois institutions and national identities—but that war does not necessarily require far-reaching change in the structure of the economy.

            It is hard for me to imagine that the founders of the Institute [Frankfurt School], when they began their enterprise in 1923, would have objected to being called “cultural Marxists”. They defined themselves as social-cultural critics and theorists who had been influenced by Marxism. Why would “cultural Marxist” be an inaccurate way of characterizing their identity or vocation—before that term acquired a pejorative sense?

            Similarly, it seems to me that we entirely justified in describing leftist vigilante groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC—$PLC to VDARE.com) as “cultural Marxist”. They may or not have views on government control of the economy, but they are unmistakably totalitarian in their drive to suppress and destroy deviationists from the party line on race, gender, “discrimination” etc.

            1. Cultural Marxism is what happened

              No, it’s not, and the latest bit of crankery from Paul Gottfried does not make it so. ‘Marxism’ means nothing apart from a particular historiography and social theory, one in which cultural manifestations are a function of ‘modes of production’.

              1. OK, call it “end stage liberalism” or whatever you like. The phenomenon remains the same despite your pedantry.

                1. What makes it a good term is that traditional Marxist parties and movements have adopted it as the core of their current ideology. It works well cladistically.

  13. Does he need more vacation money? I found it atrocious that he would speak in the very city that he deserted to crime and murders. Sick.

  14. Did you know:
    1) North Korea has a high number of doctors in proportion to patients right behind health care leader Sweden. ( A. Laverov , famous author)
    2) All 100 senators will be briefed today about North Korea.

    Perhaps, U.S. doctors are paid too much, and many (but not all) have too much prestige. Mr. Obama might be getting $400,000 in swag
    from a dysfunctional system. A north Korean doctor can set a dislocated broken bone but has about as much prestige as a bank manager (Prof Andrei Lavorov)

      1. There are plenty of ways to spank arrogant NK short of full scale war. You can read at freekorea.us.

  15. Finally we have humility back in the White House. I mean the Country Club.

    It’s not like a special interest was elected directly this time, like some litigious cameo-actor who, while campaigning, bragged about buying politicians for decades, as a special interest would. Definitely not.

    And isn’t Obama just engaging in the free market now? I thought Republicans love and cuddle the free market. So Obama is a businessman.

    1. Yep, Obama is not on the government payroll so what is the big deal. I don’t think he ever plans to run for office again so who cares. The truth is Obama was never a Marxist like the Trumpkins claimed.

      1. When did anyone in Trump’s employ ever refer to BO as a Marxist?

          1. The article is an inventory of some of the people in BOs circle over many decades. There’s nothing new or inflammatory in the article. The sentence fragment quoted of Rudolph Giuliani is a bland statement of what’s been known for a decade about BO – that Frank Marshall Davis was a mentor – something Obama has not and would not deny. There’s no disputing Frank Marshall Davis’ affiliations. A precis of his biography is well-known.

      2. “Marxism is summed up in the Encarta Reference Library as “a theory in which class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies.””

        Who’s to know what anyone’s philosophical worldview is without an examination of their words and their actions. Clearly Obama’s political philosophy aligned with the above definition during his presidency. The fact he has enriched himself at the trough of capitalism is merely a reflection of his character. He is the definition of an opportunist as well, and his philosophical hypocrisy is the hallmark of the political class. Our body politic, by-in-large, lacks the intellectual curiosity to question the motives of our public servants. Instead they are routinely bedazzled by the gimmickry used to divide us into our “proper” place and then feed us as one would sheep on the way to the slaughter.

        1. Clearly Obama’s political philosophy aligned with the above definition during his presidency.

          Rubbish. Obama shows little evidence of any well-delineated views on normative questions or historiography or the sociology of political life. He has attitudes, just like any other bourgeois. Go talk to the deputy dean of students at a local college about what he fancies about the world around him, and you’ll hear what the president thinks. Obama’s a manifestation of a type and has little manifest individuality. That type knows little or nothing of Marxism.

          1. Rubbish right back at you. Why are you looking for “well-delineated” evidence? Obama’s not going to produce the manifesto that would bury his legacy. His body of work both in words and actions speak volumes about his political philosophy; it just might not be found so easily by your search engine. We can differ about what “type” that makes him, but his “type” still has a ‘pen and a phone’ and access to influence a large percentage of our population. The fact he’s being paid to do so by the private sector is one thing; but should the American taxpayer, that is paying for his lifetime pension and security, sit idly by as he leverages his access? And to what end? Oh that’s right, “just like any other bourgeois”, nothing to see here, move along.

            1. You mean we ‘know’ he’s a ‘Marxist’ even though he utters not one word derived from any Marxist historiography or social theory?

              You seem to define ‘Marxist’ as ‘annoys Olly’.

    1. No mention of the slush fund for Russian oligarchs that is being run out of the Trump white house.

  17. Gotta make rent on that fancy Kalorama bungalow and muster Sasha and Malia’s tuition payments at Sidwell Friends!

    1. Hear the place is very close to the home of Princess Ivanka and Prince Jared. They get to run their business out of the WH.

    2. Yeah, like Bubba Bill Clinton said to justify all the cash he took in while his wife was Secy of State and running for prez….”I gotta pay my bills, man”

  18. Pingback: #Obama Denounces “Special Interests” At The University of Chicago . . . And Then Quietly Accepts $400,000 For First Speech From Wall Street Special Interests | Eatgrueldog

  20. He is back. Smells like the undrained swamp. At least, he didn’t abuse the interns while in office. Oh, there are no longer interns because of Hillary’s husband.

    1. Trump runs the swampiest of swamps. Do you know that Goldman Sachs literally runs the United States financial operations?

      1. Tarries on Canadian softwood timber (AP news today), so Goldman-Sachs is not running everything. Study Donald J’s whole cabinet like Professor Navarro. Japan is trying to block certain members in discussion out of fear.

        2. A meaning less tidbit is tossed out as a sideshow while at the same time the Goldman Sachs’ proposal for a corporate tax rate of 15 percent will be unveiled tomorrow. Mnuchin and Cohen are in charge and Wall St. is applauding. The border wall is being postponed. Happy investment bankers are celebrating as regulations are being rolled back. Maybe trickle down will work this time around.

          1. You sound conspiratorial. Corporate tax rate was a campaign pledge, no surprises.

        3. Yeah, it could be that DJT is running a complex double game and we’re underestimating him. One of his first acts was dumping TPP. It’s not like that there were many anti-globalists with administrative experience available to run his administration. Even fewer could be confirmed by the the thoroughly bought and sold globalist Senate.

      2. Do you know that Goldman Sachs literally runs the United States financial operations?

        No I don’t and you don’t, because that’s false.

        1. I do believe it because his economic staffing is thin and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and top economic Gary Cohen are clearly in charge. It is good for markets for now.

          1. What, he hired two people who once worked for Goldman Sachs ergo Goldman Sachs ‘runs the United States financial operations’. Gary Cohn has a staff job running a redundant White House advisory task force. Mnuchin actually has a consequential cabinet post. The Treasury department has a jumble of functions – the Mint, the payments system, federal debt issues, and banking supervision. They don’t write the budget (that’s the Office of Management and Budget), they do not make monetary policy (that’s the Federal Reserve), and they do not have a lock on banking supervision or financial regulation generally, either (they share it with the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Farm Credit Administration).

            1. Bannon’s done a lot of things over the years. Like Cohn, he has an advisory position on the staff. He’s not a line administrator.

      4. No difference from the last administration. No banker went to jail during the eight years of Obama. Despite all the crimes associated with the 2008 financial meltdown. Despite all the banks found to be laundering billions for the drug cartels. It looks like change can only come from an armed revolution. Fat chance of that.

        1. Despite all the crimes associated with the 2008 financial meltdown.

          Bad business decisions are not crimes. For years, I’ve been asking people kvetching in this vein who they want prosecuted and for what. It’s pretty much crickets, except for one fellow who offered a laundry list of securities industry esoterica that he insisted Goldman Sachs had been responsible for (“front running”). I am acquainted with a finance professional in Rochester who offered a sequence of shady practices (again, the sort of thing which would be understood by finance professionals, not comboxers), but he did not comment on legal liability. I have it on passable authority (from a commercial real estate appraiser in Virginia) that residential real estate appraisal is a crooked business and that real estate lenders are responsible for that. Goldman Sachs isn’t responsible for the depredations of residential real estate appraisers.

          The one company which was let off quite incredibly was MF Global (for misappropriating funds in customer accounts). And, guess what, the CEO was a quondam Democratic pol.

          1. ‘desperatelyseekingsusan’ said:
            “For years, I’ve been asking people … who they want prosecuted and for what. It’s pretty much crickets, ”

            Really? You’ve been talking to the wrong people!
            – How about The Fed (US Federal Reserve), for starters?
            – Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations (HRC’s buddies …)
            – The Clintons
            – Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet, Koch Brothers
            – Bank of America, Barclays, Chase, HSBC, etc.
            – Lloyd’s of London
            – [your favorite financial criminal here]

            Crimes? Too extensive to list here; but for starters:
            – Monetary manipulation;
            – SEC violations;
            – Tax evasion;
            – [your suggestion here]

            Too many/big to be prosecuted, you say? I don’t think so.

            WHY do you think these culprits want take The People’s guns? Because even having ALL the wealth is not enough for these b@stards …

            1. I’m afraid the reference to the ‘Bilderbergers’ is a tell. You should take your meds and quit bothering the normal.

              “Monetary manipulation’ does not exist as a distinct phenomenon. It’s a character string only. As for ‘tax evasion’, who do you fancy is guilty of that? Dr. Bernanke? Melinda Gates? Why would you fancy that? As for ‘SEC vioations’, that’s rather like saying they’re in violation of the penal code. The question is always going to be ‘which provision’ and ‘you know that how’?

              You don’t know what you’re talking about.

          2. Thank you for posting this. I’ve felt the same way. People have a real misunderstanding about what happened with the banks. Most don’t even know that a lot of small banks were forced to take money that they didn’t want/need.

          3. Not saying that William K. Black could be wrong, legally speaking:
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_K._Black#Bill_Moyers_Journal_appearance

            On April 3, 2009 Black appeared on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS and provided critical commentary on the U.S. banking crisis.[6] In the interview with Bill Moyers,[7] Black asserted that the banking crisis in the United States that started in late 2008 is essentially a big Ponzi scheme; that the “liar loans” and other financial tricks were essentially illegal frauds; and that the triple-A ratings given to these loans was part of a criminal cover-up. He said that the “Prompt Corrective Action Law” passed after the Savings and loan crisis mandated that ailing banks should be put into receivership. Black also stated that trying to hide how bad the situation is will simply prolong the problem, as happened in Japan and resulted in Japan’s lost decade. Black stated that Timothy Geithner was engaged in a cover-up, and that the administration did not want people to understand what went wrong or how bad the banking situation was.

            Testimony before Congress on the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers[edit]
            On April 20, 2010, Black testified before the House Financial Services Committee in a hearing titled “Public Policy Issues Raised by the Report of the Lehman Bankruptcy Examiner.” He testified about the role that Alt-A mortgages, what he called “liars’ loans,” on residential real estate played in the downfall of Lehman Brothers. His testimony was that “Lehman’s failure is a story in large part of fraud. And it is fraud that begins at the absolute latest in 2001, and that is with their subprime and liars’ loan operations.”[8] As explained in his prepared statement, his reference was to Aurora Loan Services, Inc., which was a subsidiary of Lehman: “Lehman’s principal source of (fictional) income and real losses was making (and selling) what the trade accurately called ‘liar’s loans’ through its subsidiary, Aurora. (The bland euphemism for liar’s loans was ‘Alt-A.’) Liar’s loans are ‘criminogenic’ (they create epidemics of mortgage fraud) because they create strong incentives to provide false information on loan applications.”[9]

            1. The term ‘Ponzi scheme’ is nonsensical in this context.

              ‘Liar loans’ would refer to Alt-A loans wherein the applicant made fraudulent statements of assets and income. IIRC, about 8% of the value of various loan portfolios (held by banks, finance companies, insurance companies, the GSEs, other conduits, and miscellaneous) were Alt-A loans. Last I checked, they had a high default rate (something like 12%). Sour Alt-A loans were a modest portion of the overall set of loans delinquent and loans in defaul.

              Newsflash! Countrywide was a shady enterprise (and, if what I’ve read is correct, 46% of its loan portfolio at the time of its purchase by BoA went sour). They were also a shady enterprise who’d ingratiated themselves with the Washington insider nexus by giving sweetheart loans to people like Christopher Dodd and going all-in in the political project of expanding homeownership among the renter population (minority homeownership in particular). Countrywide was a large finance compahy ($211 bn in assets), but not much more than 0.5% of the financial sector generally.

              Notable about Angleo Mozilo and Jon Corzine was that both were deep inside the Democratic Party. That should tell you something.

          4. Maybe not a crime, but rather dubious:
            http://www.unz.com/isteve/countrywide/?highlight=countrywide

            On the other hand, Countrywide appears to have pretty much known the score about the quality of the mortgages it was writing. It seldom hung on to mortgages it originated, instead bundling them up into mortgage-backed securities and dumping them on deluded buyers.

            Countrywide chased hard after likely deadbeats, and piled on seemingly minor fees and conditions that added up to huge profits during the height of the housing bubble.

            Why? Because borrowers who aren’t good with money were easy to exploit upfront. (The problem turned out to be that just as these debtors weren’t good at negotiating the terms of their mortgages, they also weren’t good at earning enough to pay their mortgages, so defaults skyrocketed once housing prices in California, Countrywide’s home base, stopped rising.)

            How to explain Countrywide’s behavior?

            Generally, I find most people aren’t cynical villains. They really come to believe as a general principle whatever they think is in their interest.

            I’m not sure if that applies to Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, however. Countrywide, it appears, was less a Kool-Aid drinker than a Kool-Aid peddler.

            Perhaps one reason it was a big fan of the CRA was because Countrywide sold its junk mortgages to CRA-regulated banks who needed CRA credits for lending to minorities and low income folks. From Countrywide’s old website (now scrubbed from the Internet after B of A’s acquisition of Countrywide):

            “The result of these efforts is an enormous pipeline of mortgages to low- and moderate-income buyers. With this pipeline, Countrywide Securities Corporation (CSC) can potentially help you meet your Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) goals by offering both whole loan and mortgage-backed securities that are eligible for CRA credit.”

          5. WAMU wasn’t Goldman Sachs, but it acted as a bank:
            http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2011/09/william-black-why-nobody-went-to-jail.html

            Now that is obvious when you look at the lies about appraisals, because homeowners cannot inflate appraisals. But lenders can and how they did it was shown in an investigation by then New York Attorney General Cuomo, now Governor, who found that Washington Mutual, which is called WAMU, and is the largest bank failure in the history of the United States, and indeed the history of the world, had a black list of appraisers. But you got on the black list if you were an honest appraiser, and refused to inflate the appraisal.

            1. WAMU was a savings bank. They were notably bullish on subprime lending and going the extra mile on the Community Reinvestment Act. These were bankers doing the bidding of politicians.

              1. You admit to the “shady” part, but still no banker (or politician) was prosecuted.

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