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Guest Post: How Reporters Provide Cover For Darrell Issa's Lies On The Countrywide "Scandal"
Submitted by David Fiderer
How Reporters Provide Cover for Darrell Issa's Lies on the Countrywide "Scandal"
A year ago, Associated Press reporter Larry Margasak got caught
in a lie. He manufactured a false lede by concealing critical
information:
Despite their denials, influential Democratic Sens. Kent
Conrad and Chris Dodd were told from the start they were getting VIP
mortgage discounts from one of the nation's largest lenders, the
official who handled their loans has told Congress in secret testimony.
The witness also recanted his statement. When asked a second time
if he told Dodd that he was getting special treatment, he said, "I don't
remember... but, you know, it was conveyed in some way, shape or form."
No honest journalist would report that Dodd was "told from the start,"
about a mortgage discount.
In fact, the Senate Ethics Committee found that this witness had
no credibility. It wrote, "The Committee has found no evidence
that ...anyone communicated to you or your family that you were
receiving specific discounts or other special treatment not available to
other borrowers." It also wrote, "The loans you received appear to have
been available industry-wide to borrowers with comparable loan
profiles. There is no evidence that the interest rates for your
Countrywide mortgages were below prevailing interest rates." The
Committee concluded, after a year-long investigation into the matter,
that the 28,000 customers in Countrywide's VIP program offered terms
that, "were not the best deals available at Countrywide or in the
marketplace at large." Customers," were required to meet the same
underwriting standards," as everyone else. Overall, it appeared that
Countrywide's VIP customers were "often offered quicker, or more
efficient loan processing."
In other words, Countrywide's customers had no reason to believe that
its VIP program much different from the VIP customer programs at Verizon, Expedia, Acura
and Pizza Hut. The Senate Ethics Committee cleared both Dodd and Conrad of all ethics
charges, and anyone who reviewed the terms extended to Dodd could figure out right away
that no material "discount," was ever extended. Later, documentary
evidence would emerge to show that the Countrywide "whistleblower" had
been telling lies from the start.
Margasak pulled a similar
stunt yesterday, when he reported that Countrywide extended
"discounted mortgages" to employees government sponsored enterprises,
while failing to mention that the Senate Ethics Committee found no
evidence that the deals were better than those offered to anyone else.
He also put forth this whopper:
The documents reveal that when Countrywide was depending on
government-sponsored firms to finance billions of dollars worth of
subprime loans that touched off the housing meltdown, it was giving
employees at the largest of those companies -Fannie Mae-sweetheart deals
on their own home loans.
That claim is more than a little deceptive on a variety of levels.
The GSEs didn't buy or insure subprime mortgages. They only purchased
subprime mortgage securities sold by investment banks. (That was how the
GSEs did an end-run around their own underwriting standards.) There's
no evidence that Countrywide needed the GSEs to make its subprime bonds
marketable. Countrywide's primary connection with the GSEs, which long
predated its involvement in the subprime segment, was selling prime
mortgages. Countrywide was the biggest mortgage lender, period.
Margasak relies on a six-degrees-of-separation conflation, wherein some
Fannie Mae employee, who may or may not have had anything to do with
the firm's portfolio criteria, gets a loan from the nation's largest
mortgage lender at market rates, and suddenly there's a conspiracy
theory to explain the subprime meltdown.
Like other bogus right wing scandals--corruption
at ACORN, Climategate, Black Panther voter suppression--the media
narrative about the "sweetheart deals" given to Countrywide VIP
customers appears to be impervious to fact checking. The story keeps
emerging in new mutant forms, in precisely the same manner that new
"evidence" against global warming keeps emerging on Fox News, where
professional liars--Andrew Breitbart, James Inhofe, Karl Rove--are given an unfettered platform. Darrell Issa and his staffers pull the same kinds
of stunts that Breitbart does. He carefully selects his facts to
fabricate scandals out of thin air. Six weeks ago he was pumping, "The Sestak Affair - Obama's Watergate?" His new
Countrywide VIP "scandal" is equally spurious, as reported by Margazak:
"In 1999, Countrywide reached an exclusive agreement to sell
Fannie Mae billions of dollars in mortgages at a discounted rate," Issa
said in the letter.Records compiled by a trade publication, Inside Mortgage Finance,
show Fannie rapidly expanding its purchases of Countrywide mortgages and
a decline in sales of them to Freddie.In 1998, Countrywide sold $25.6 billion in loans to Fannie and $17.7
billion to Freddie. By 1999, the figures were $30.8 billion to $11.2
billion in Fannie's favor. By 2004, the spread was much wider: $67.7
billion in Countrywide mortgages sold to Fannie Mae compared with $2.9
billion in mortgages sold to Freddie Mac.
Mortgage lenders sell mortgages to the GSEs for the same reason that
Proctor & Gamble sells Tide to Walmart. That's their business model.
Every sale of of a pool of mortgages is "exclusive" because you can't
sell the same mortgage to two different people. And if, as Issa claims,
Countrywide sold mortgages to Fannie at a "discounted rate," then Fannie
got a windfall. Of course, Issa's amorphous reference to a "discounted
rate," in the context of nothing, is meaningless. By the way,
Countrywide was not a player in the subprime market in 1999.
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Regarding conrad and dodd:
This is not rocket science, but we don't have enough information. What is the type of loan? What was the interest rate? Did he buy points? Did he receive points? Was there an origination fee? Did he pay for the origination fee?
Find out this and you will know if he was getting a special deal.
Can't we change topics? How about Al Gore's (not Algo's) serial rapes?
Serial rapes?! Algore ain't Slick Willie.
Poor Wooden Al - he springs a Woodie or two, the result of a little Groinal Warming (ma'am, the Science is Settled - have a look at this!), and he's a serial rapist? He's a Randy Clod.
this planet will be better off when the cockroaches take over.
100 cockroaches would have far much more intelligence, honor, and integrity than the US Senate. (Or apparently the ZH team since they have not withdrawn this article.)
ZH, WTF ?????? Naked propaganda?
Whatever you were smoking when you thought this was worth posting, I'd like some so I can be in the happy Universe also.
Again I say: WTF????
Who let the ruling class apologist in here?
Well this post was a pretty useless read. The Senate found one of their own to have done no wrong, in an age were corruption is so blatant, that they do it right in front of you and the only time they are punished is when the required federal forms for graft and bribes haven't been properly filed. Of course the writer is so objective, that he threw in some totally unrelated topics for good measure.
This type of stuff is what causes me to hate election years. In this case, the progressive left is worrying big time about November and they are throwing out all the stops in the hopes of turning public sentiment in their favor. Me thinks they are doing nothing more than talking amounst themselves.
Issa is a head hunter, and predominantly a partisan head hunter. He funded the CA gov recall election because he thought he would run for the office himself. He had the SoDistrict AG, Bush appointee, Carol Lam, fired because she wasn't prosecuting enough immigration cases, even though he personally had the inland border checkpoints closed. He didn't say a thing about the war in Iraq, or the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, even though he has family there, and he visited them right after the invasion. In short he'll sell his soul for personal aggrandizement. He is one of the richest members of Congress. He's the puzzle, but so is the entire GOP.
We need head hunters in this Parliament of Whores.
I don't care which side they're on. Issa outs Democrat crooks. If there's an honest Democrat out there who'd like to out Republican crooks like Ted "Tubes" Stevens and John Doolittle, I would welcome that.
Worst article ever at ZH!
Dude, the GSE's INVENTED subprime mortgages and dumping those shitty mortgages to Fannie and Freddie was Countrywide's business model.
For more than twenty years, Mozilo used Fannie and Freddie as his personal cesspool, and I think you are asserting that Chris Dodd didn't understand this. That alone is reason enough to lock him up and throw away the key.
SNIP>>
"Common sense tells us that damaging a thing this old is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish—like invading Russia. The earth has suffered mass volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation, and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict, and it’s still here. It’s a survivor. We don’t know exactly how the earth recovered from these devastations, because the rocks don’t say very much about that, but we do know that it did recover—the proof of it being that we are here.
Nonetheless, damaging the earth is precisely what’s concerning a lot of responsible people at the moment. Carbon dioxide from the human burning of fossil fuel is building up in the atmosphere at a frightening pace, enough to double the present concentration in a century. This buildup has the potential to raise average temperatures on the earth several degrees centigrade, enough to modify the weather and accelerate melting of the polar ice sheets. Governments around the world have become so alarmed at this prospect that they’ve taken significant, although ineffective, steps to slow the warming. These actions include legislating carbon caps, funding carbon sequestration research, subsidizing alternate energy technologies, and initiating at least one serious international treaty process to balance the necessary economic sacrifices across borders."
>>>END SNIP
MORE:
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/what-the-earth-knows/#more-7077
Robert B. Laughlin is a professor of physics at Stanford University and a co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physics. This essay is adapted from his new book on the future of fossil fuels, which will appear next year.
Please move this thread to the Huffington Post.
Very odd that Zero Hedge would provide a soapbox for a such a political partisan as David Fiderer, especially when his article has little to do with economic issues. Can we expect guest posts from Tim Geithner and Barney Frank in the future? Perhaps they can clear up any confusion we might have about the Obvious Perfection and Path to Enlightenment that is the Democratic Party.
Here's a brief survey of some of Fiderer's articles, to give you a taste of what he's all about:
* Debunking the Bogus Story About Tim Geithner and the AIG "Coverup"
* Wagging the Dog With Fannie Mae: Republicans Explain the Financial Crisis With Racist Mythology
* You Know Fox News Is Lying Whenever The Words "Global Warming" Are Uttered
* Time Rewrote History With "25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis"
[In this piece, Fiderer opines that he doesn't think that Barney Frank should be considered one of the top 25 people responsible for the crisis and compares Larry Kudlow to Albert Speer(!). The piece also has some real gems that deserve mention here:
"The repeal of Glass-Steagall, which prevented common ownership of commercial banks and investment banks, had almost nothing to do with the crisis per se."
"The right blames the credit crisis on poor minority homeowners. This is not merely offensive, but entirely wrong."]
* Obama and the Media Invoke Senator Clinton's Pre-war Position By Way of Selective Memory
* Alan Greenspan's Financial History For Lobotomy Victims
* Neocon Strategy: The Military Solution Against Iran is The Final Solution
[I find it odd that a man who "married" another man (one Leonard Ritts Woods) should be so vocal in his support for an Iranian theocracy that has executed over 3000 men for the crime of homosexuality since 1979.]
* Why Goldman Got the S.E.C. to Back Off
* Fox News Embraces Cyber-Terrorism to Subvert the Copenhagen Summit
* Goldman's CDOs Had Nothing To Do with The Real Estate Bubble
* The Simple Arithmetic of Republican Failure
A final note: Fiderer donated to only one presidential candidate in 2008, namely Hillary Clinton, although he only gave $250 so I guess he wasn't too thrilled about her either.
Ouch. Totally discredited.
+1000
Well done, Jack.
Shame on ZH. Seems Tyler wants to hobnob with big libs at cocktail parties. It makes Goldman Sachs look downright moral.
This is precisely the kind of sham, hack-job "reporting" we turn to Zero Hedge to rid ourselves of. There are more holes in this piece of excrement than one cares to address, but really, the facts could have been completely solid and I would still have been put off by this thing.
If I wanted to watch grown men puke globs of politically opportunistic and factually absurd shit in defense of the crony-capitalism that got us here all over my screen, I'd be streaming Steve Liesman YouTube clips 24/7. I don't want that. So I, this POS notwithstanding, typically turn here to ZH.
If you want to take the position that Dodd / Frank / Mozilo et al had nothing to do with the crash, that the Congressional report was not, in fact, a complete whitewashing of the facts, and that Rep. Issa is a lying sack of shit, fine - just back up your position with something that doesn't resemble a White House press release. And please, don't make assertions like: "The witness also recanted his statement", when the article you're linking to and the subsequent quote from said article is factually at-odds with the statement you're writing. I mean, seriously, saying "Yes, something happened" and subsequently saying "I don't remember how something happened, but it happened" is about as far from a "recantation" as it gets. I expect this kind of horseshit from political hacks, but not from Zero Hedge.
I have no problem with ZH airing "the opposing view" - not enough of that is done around the web or in the greater news media, and ZH adds extraordinary value to the public discourse by courting wide-ranging fact-pattern interpretations. But there wasn't enough of the kind of fact checking in this thing - which usually starts as a matter of course at ZH where even good reporters / bloggers leave off - to pass muster at the laughingstock AP the author is so vehemently criticizing. It is, in fact, so out of character with the kind of hard-hitting, analytical stuff I'm used to seeing here that I'm having problems believing it was published.
Seriously - get it the fuck together.
Worst ZH Episode Ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzyd91NFx-Y
Yes, Frank Dodd is really an ethical, moral, upstanding public servant, and should clearly not be tarred, feathered and made to ride the rail like every other criminal in both of the political parties.
Give me a fucking break.
What's next, guest posts by David Frum or Bill Kristol?
+1000
Funny how most civic minded servants of the people leave office as millionaires, just a coincidence I am SURE. RFLMO
Can't
trust
anyone
anywhere
anymore
forever.
+1 to ZH for stirring their own antbed.
Yah, and the vast right wing conspiracy lives on and on and on and on and on etc, etc, etc, etc, etc....
It is a free country, yet, so this is in the class of thinking that allows a hundred flowers to bloom and thoughts to fecund.
Look you jackals, so one guy comes along with some truth that rattles your cage. Good for him! Fiderer is only trying to show how readily you can be tooled by reporters who serve agendas of those seeking to shape public opinion in order to meet strategies of political groups or interests of industry. Your ad hominem attacks offer nothing to further understanding of serious issues facing us today. Maybe when you all recover from this sudden outbreak of CRI you'll put your heads together and constructively expand awareness at a time when it is so critically needed.