Third Way “Solution” to Foreclosure Fraud? Limits on Rule of Law

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The Third Way has just released a response to the US Bank v. Ibanez decision that purports to offer a solution to the foreclosure problem.

I’m sure others will point out other problems with this document: its embrace of the “strategic default” myth, its focus on the Uniform Commercial Code rather than the Pooling and Servicing Agreements that govern securitization, its confusion of the dual track problem with the robo-signer problem, its apparent ignorance of other problems in foreclosure fraud, such as insufficient notice to homeowners, even though that, too was an issue in Ibanez.

But I wanted to point out something about the first step in its purported remedy, in which it describes how to protect injured homeowners. It includes among its injured homeowners:

  • Those who were current on their mortgage payments but who were foreclosed on anyway
  • Those who were robo-signer foreclosed via on while awaiting a modification decision
  • Those who were robo-signer foreclosed while in the process of short-selling their home
  • Those who had made a payment on delinquent mortgage but were foreclosed “because of a faulty process that failed to take that payment into account”

Note how carefully this paper avoids admitting the improper payments that servicers often use to force people into foreclosure, which are a separate problem from robo-signing?

In any case, here’s the remedy the Third Way advocates:

These aggrieved borrowers should be entitled to four things: (1) the immediate suspension of foreclosure proceedings; (2) the right to sue for actual damages caused by a wrongful signed foreclosure; (3) access to a 30-day expedited application process for loan modification if they have an application pending (but without a guarantee the modification will be granted); and (4) a refund of any fees and charges assessed by the bank, as well as protection from any deficiency judgments (if a borrowers was seeking a modification or short sale). [my emphasis]

It goes on to suggest that banks should be in charge of points 1, 3, and 4. That is, while elsewhere it espouses putting the Consumer Finance Protection Board in charge of standardizing servicing, it does not want the government involved in the process of “protecting injured homeowners.” Maybe that’s so it can retain for the banks–as it does later in the paper–sole discretion whether or how to modify loans. That is, even while the paper admits Ibanez shows that the banks still have a shitpile problem, it doesn’t want banks to take the hit for the fact that they don’t have legal standing to foreclose on the loans they’re foreclosing on. Nor does it really provide a solution for what to do with truly delinquent loans on which banks do not have legal standing to foreclose. Nor does it say what happens when people are denied a modification by a bank that doesn’t have the legal right to foreclose.

Meanwhile, the paper remains silent on who should be in charge of point 2.

You know, the right to sue, that right protected by the Constitution?

But of course, point 2 is not actually a protection. Rather, it is a limitation on their protection. Rather than admit that property owners have the right to sue in this country, the Third Way thinks that we can best protect them by limiting their right to sue to actual damages.

And the Third Way supported limit to rule of law goes further. It calls for Congress to bail out the banks holding shitpile by:

  • Eliminating foreclosure challenges on vacant or abandoned homes
  • Eliminating foreclosure challenges on borrowers who defaulted 18 months ago who have not cured the default
  • Instituting 12-month statutes of limitation on “paperwork-related” lawsuits

To begin with, their envisioned bailout doesn’t account for many realities: homeowners who were harassed into leaving their home, homeowners who are only in default because of the often-undisclosed and exorbitant fees banks slap onto late payments, and homeowners who did not get proper notice of the foreclosure. The Third Way wants to take away the right to sue of all these people, even though they have a legitimate grievance.

But don’t worry, Third Way says, this does not amount to letting banksters avoid any consequences for their actions:

What it emphatically does not do is shield bad actors from the consequences of their behavior. A safe harbor and statute of limitations will do nothing to protect banks and their lawyers from the investigations currently underway by state attorneys’ general across the country.15 Nor will it prevent disbarment and other consequences that are likely to be suffered by lawyers at the “foreclosure mills” at the heart of the robo-signing scandal. The now infamous firm headed by David J. Stern in Florida, for example, “has seen its fortunes plummet, with major clients, like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Citigroup, cutting ties to Stern. Stern’s operation has also laid off hundreds of employees in recent weeks.”

The consequences the Third Way believes are adequate for bankster trying to take property they don’t have legal standing to take, resorting to legal fraud to do so, involves an Attorney Generals’ investigation that itself says will include no criminal charges, disbarment no one expects to happen, and the loss of business.

But nowhere does the Third Way envision the banksters will have to take a financial hit on the value of these loans, much less any legal consequences for fraud. Now, ultimately, the former may well be negotiated by the Attorneys General. But the Bill Daley-connected Third Way seems to see the Ibanez decision as a moment to offer pseudo-solutions that are not only inadequate, but stop short of what would otherwise come out of the Attorneys General “investigation.”

In short, this seems like an admission by the Third Way that the shitpile remains a serious problem. But also an attempt to preempt processes already underway to solve the shitpile. Not to mention eliminate legal recourse for many of the people who have been wronged here.

Update: The more I think about this paper, the more it seems like Third Way is saying, “Congress, we’ve had a major setback in the courts. Can you please make sure to 1) limit access to the courts and 2) preventing any more of these judgments that will reveal just how deep the shitpile really is?”

Our (We) Working Class Pundits

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Digby has a righteous rant about a discussion between Wolf Blitzer, Mary Matalin, and Paul Begala in which they revealed their utter divorce from the reality lived by most Americans as they discuss whether the $172,000 Robert Gibbs made as Press Secretary was a sacrifice. Here’s a taste:

According to these guys [Robert Gibbs’] job is right up there with curing cancer for sheer importance to the future of mankind.

Look, you can’t blame these two. They are both glugging from the same taxpayer trough half the time and have a big investment in believing that what they do is so special and so unique that they are just a little bit better than lesser people who toil at less exalted labor.

And evidently, they truly believe regular people don’t eat lunch at their desks and work long hours and have huge responsibilities. Or if they do, they are in very important jobs like media and investment banking where people are paid what they are “worth.”

You ought to read the whole thing.

I just wanted to add two things.

First, in the discussion, Matalin argues that, when you work at the White House “you really do work three shifts a day. You work 24 hours a day.” In response to which Begala elaborates,

The President’s trying to make a point here — he’s not trying to say that 172 thousand dollars a year is not a good paycheck. But compared to what the guy could be making… And, as Mary points out, if it’s a hourly wage, then Gibbs is probably making about fifty cents an hour. [my emphasis]

If Gibbs’ $172,000 annual salary were broken down into hourly salary, Begala says, with the assumption that he was working 24 hours a day 365 days a year,  then his hourly wage “is probably … about fifty cents an hour.”

Ahem.

There are 8,760 hours in a 24/7 year. Gibbs’ $172,000 salary for those 8,760 hours would work out to be $19.63 an hour. For someone working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to be a yearly salary of $39,260. Which for household salaries–not individuals–falls in the middle quintile of yearly income in this country, and less than $3,000 less than what Wolf says is the “mean” salary in this country (he actually means “median” and he may be using just full time workers).

Gibbs needs a break, Obama says, and Begala and Matalin agree, because even assuming he’s been working 24/7, he’s been working as hard for the same money as half the country. So we should feel sorry for him.

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MA Court: Banks Must Own a House to Foreclose on It

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A radical thought, I know.

But still only definitively true in Massachusetts.

At issue is a Massachusetts case, U.S. Bank v. Ibanez, which challenged a foreclosure because of processes banks have widely used in securitizing a bunch of loans into something they can sell investors chumps. Here’s how Bloomberg described the case earlier this week:

Massachusetts’s highest court is poised to rule on whether foreclosures in the state should be undone because securitization-industry practices violate real- estate law governing how mortgages may be transferred.

The fight between homeowners and banks before the Supreme Judicial Court in Boston turns on whether a mortgage can be transferred without naming the recipient, a common securitization practice. Also at issue is whether the right to a mortgage follows the promissory note it secures when the note is sold, as the industry argues…

“This is the first time the securitization paradigm is squarely before a high court,” said Marie McDonnell, a mortgage-fraud analyst in Orleans, Massachusetts, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of borrowers. The state court, under its practices, is likely to rule by next month…

If loans weren’t transferred properly, the banks that sponsored such trusts may have to repurchase them, Adam J. Levitin, an associate professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, said in prepared testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives in November.

If the problem is widespread enough, it may cost the banks trillions of dollars and make them insolvent, Levitin said.

The court just ruled against the bank.

This is just one state, just one ruling, but it may well mean the efforts to help banks avoid accountability for their shitpile mess will fail.

Update: Here’s dday on this.

The point here is that the mortgage assignment and the securitization process was improper. US Bank and Wells Fargo did not have possession of the mortgage note, and thus did not have the standing to foreclose. In addition, they put the endorsement in blank, without naming the entity to which they were assigning the mortgage. This violated Massachusetts law, according to the original judge in the case, and now the MA Supreme Court agreed. And as we know, this is more the norm than otherwise. But this is one of the first major cases, decided by a state Supreme Court, that affirms that a lack of securitization standards means that the bank who thinks they have the power to foreclose on a delinquent borrower actually does not.

If this ruling gets applied far and wide, you’re basically going to have a situation where most securitized mortgages in the country cannot be foreclosed upon. It depends on state law and the associated rulings, but you can see the Ibanez case being used as precedent.

They Don’t Even Use the “Time with the Family” Excuse Anymore

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Apparently, the White House has decided it had one too many adults on its economic recovery board, so now Paul Volcker has been decided to step down.

I realize that “has been decided” is not proper grammar, but look at how Reuters refers to this decision:

The departure of Volcker as head of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board is among a series of changes that have been under review at the White House.

The decision to leave the PERAB was Volcker’s.

A series of changes has been under review at the White House. But this decision, the Volcker departure, was entirely Volcker’s.

I guess that means Volcker only ever reflected on this decision when he was at the White House, and he just stopped considering it when he was elsewhere?

Or perhaps this means the White House has been talking about how to get rid of Volcker for some time, but they only recently told him he could decide to step down or he could be decided to step down.

Whatever the grammar, I’m wondering why they got rid of Volcker and not the geniuses who invented HAMP. I’m also wondering whether the Administration has decided the Volcker rule, one of the biggest restrictions on big finance in the financial reform, is bad for recovery.

Republicans Vote to Ban the Terms “Wall Street” and “Deregulation”

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Apparently, the Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have abandoned the commission because the other six members would not agree to ban the phrases “Wall Street” and “deregulation” from the final report.

The four Republicans appointed to the commission investigating the root causes of the financial crisis plan to bypass the bipartisan panel and release their own report Wednesday, according to people familiar with the commission’s work.

[snip]

Frustrated in part by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s chairman, Phil Angelides, and the tenor of the panel’s preliminary findings, the Republicans are choosing to ignore the five Democrats and lone independent and issue their document ahead of the commission’s Jan. 15 release.

[snip]

During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.

[snip]

“I certainly felt, and I think the majority of the commission felt, that deleting those phrases would impair the commissioners’ ability to give a full and fair and understandable report to the American people about the causes of the financial crisis,” Born said.

“Certainly, it’s hard to imagine Wall Street wasn’t involved,” she added.

It all sounds so childish. But then, it’s no more childish than holding a bunch of unemployed Americans hostage to make sure the very wealthy get tax cuts and an estate tax cut. So, as much as the Obama Administration seems intent on giving the banks what they want, Republicans seem insistent on using nuclear tactics to steal even more for the banks.

I guess both parties really are going to insist on pushing us into a Depression and/or full-on feudalism, aren’t they?

Timmeh Geithner to House of Representatives: Fuck Off And Die

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A month ago, Brad Miller and a dozen other Congressmen — including House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank — wrote the Financial Stability Oversight Council to ask that they look into the systemic dangers of foreclosure fraud. The letter requested that three very specific things be included in upcoming stress tests and overall consideration of the systemic threat this represents to the economy:

  1. Examine random collateral loan files to see if they include all required documents, notably the note, the mortgage, and documents recording the assignment of the mortgage
  2. “Examine the servicing of first mortgages by servicers that hold second liens … [as some people contend] there is an indefensible conflict of interest for servicers of securitized first mortgages to hold second liens on the same property”
  3. Consider using the authority of Dodd-Frank to “require that financial companies divest affiliates or other holdings involved in servicing securitized mortgages”

Timmeh Geithner just responded to that letter. His response makes it clear he actually read Miller’s letter — because he references the first item I’ve laid out above, though rather than actually respond to that request, he describes what the FSOC is actually doing instead of examining collateral loan files. His response to the second and third requests is even more insolent; he refuses to even repeat the second one, and rather than consider either one seriously, he just says FSOC will take action “if abuses are found.”

Here is Timmeh’s response to Miller’s request that the Council examine random collateral files:

With regard to your suggestion of examinations of financial institutions by FSOC member agencies, these reviews are currently ongoing as part of a foreclosure task force formed by the Administration in early September.

[snip]

The main objectives of the task force are to determine the scope of the foreclosure problems, hold banks accountable for fixing these problems, protect the homeowners, and mitigate any long-term effects this misconduct could have on the housing market.

Note that even though Timmeh admits the banksters have engaged in “misconduct,” he makes no mention of holding them legally accountable. Instead, he simply repeats the Administration line that banks will “fix[] these problems.”

But rather than address Miller’s specific request — that investigators look at random collateral files — Timmeh describes how the investigators will examine other things, and then boasts of the (inadequate) number of investigators on the job.

Regulators are conducting onsite investigations to assess each servicer’s foreclosure policies and procedures, organization structure and staffing, vendor management, quality control and audit, loan documentation including custodial management, and foreclosure prevention processes. The task force is also closely reviewing related issues that include loss mitigation, origination put-backs, securitization trusts, and disclosure put-backs.

These examinations are extensive and resource intensive. For example, the Office of Thrift Supervision has approximately 80 examiners on-site at their four servicers, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has 100 examiners at the top eight national bank servicers.

Now granted, some of the things the FSOC is investigating might cover Miller’s request. “Loan documentation including custodial management” might get at the issues Miller specifically requested FSOC examine. But Timmeh makes absolutely no promise that these 20 examiners per non-bank servicer or 8 examiners per bank servicer (Really, Timmeh!?!?! You think 8 people can investigate Bank of America’s morass?!?!) will actually look in detail at the actual loan files, much less a randomly selected collection of loan files.

That’s enough of a non-answer.

But here’s how Timmeh summarizes Miller’s two other requests.

You also suggest that the FSOC consider the potential risk associated with the role of large financial institutions in the servicing of mortgages and to consider requiring these firms to divest of their servicing affiliates.

Note what phrase Timmeh doesn’t utter there?

“Second lien.”

That little matter of the half a trillion dollars in conflicted exposure these banks have, which goes to the heart of the reason this is systemic issue.

In fact, Timmeh doesn’t utter the phrase “second lien” anywhere in his letter. It is, apparently, the elephant in the bank vault that shall not be named, for fear Timmeh would have to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem. Timmeh apparently wants to spin the problem of second liens as nothing more than part of the size of the institutions in question, and not the very real conflict of interest that provides motivation for all the foreclosure fraud Timmeh doesn’t want to criminally prosecute.

And while Timmeh does use the word “divest,” here’s his actual response to Miller’s description of the very real and very avoidable problem of having the banksters service the loans that threaten to expose their insolvency.

As you suggest, the Dodd-Frank Act also provides the FSOC, and its member agencies, with a variety of tools to recommend heightened prudential standards and take other remedial actions when necessary for financial stability. With that in mind, the FSOC and its member agencies will remain critically focused on working with the foreclosure task force, and will use all appropriate authorities available to them if abuses are found.

So while Timmeh can manage to at least utter “divest” (unlike his apparent allergy to “second lien”), when push comes to shove, he won’t admit that FSOC has the ability to force bankster to divest of a part of their business. More importantly, he envisions using the power granted him under Dodd-Frank (and remember, Frank is one of the recipients of this letter) only “if abuses are found.”

Because it would be too much to ask for Timmeh actually take an obvious proactive move to fix one of the problems weighing down our housing market and with it our entire economy. I guess if he did, he might actually have to think about those second liens he’s refusing to acknowledge.

Bernie Sanders Quotes Jeff Immelt: “I am a Nut on China”

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This was, IMO, the highlight of Bernie Sanders’ non-filibuster on Friday:

GE is of course one of our major corporations, and in fact this recent disclosure pointed out the taxpayers of this country, through the Fed, provided $16 billion in bailout to General Electric during the recent crisis. This is what the head, CEO, of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, said in 2002, December 6. Quote, Jeff Immelt, head of CEO [sic].

“When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China. [Five Chinas] You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion. We are building a tech center in China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive. You can take an 18 cubic foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we can make an 18 cubic foot refrigerator ourselves.”

End of quote. Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman, CEO of General Electric, quoted in an investor meeting, on December 6, 2002.

Gee! When GE had, a couple of years ago, some really difficult economic times, they needed $16 billion to bail them out, I didn’t hear Mr. Immelt going to China, China, China, China, China. I didn’t hear that. I heard Mr. Immelt going to the taxpayers of the United States for his welfare check. So I say to Mr. Immelt, and I say to all these CEOs that have been so quick to run to China, that maybe it’s time to start reinvesting in the United States of the America.

No word yet whether Jeff Immelt will be among the CEOs Obama hosts at the White House tomorrow. Though the companies of the CEOs who have been publicly invited–Google, Cisco, IBM, AmEx, Dow, and Pepsi–have been all pushing into China.

On Sunday, Masaccio described this entire CEO summit as just Obama’s effort to outsource the effort the government should, instead, be leading: job creation. I guess Obama has gone to the experts on that front!

A Tale of Two Bailout Paybacks

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As promised over the weekend before I realized I had forgotten my Toobz, I wanted to compare the behavior of two bailout recipients, the UAW and the banksters.

A number of people have pointed to this intriguing interview about the Korea Trade deal with the UAW’s President Bob King. In addition to confirming my math showing that the most the UAW could reasonably expect to get out of his deal is 75,000 additional exports–or 800 extra jobs for the UAW–King also had this to say:

It was important to endorse in order to reward the administration for its good behavior of including labor in negotiations.

While not directly an admission that UAW endorsed this NAFTA-style trade deal in thanks for the US bailout of the auto industry, it does seem to support that overall sentiment. The UAW capitulated further when it endorsed the Obama-McConnell tax deal giving 2 years of relief to the very rich, 1 year to the medium-term unemployed, and nothing to the 99ers whose Unemployment Insurance has expired (many of whom used to work for the auto companies).

Compare that to the behavior of JP Morgan Chase Vice Chairman Jimmy Lee during negotiations under the Chrysler bailout. According to Steven Rattner, Lee,

demanded to know why, if the government thought banks important enough to give them tens of billions in TARP money, it wanted to squeeze them on [the Chrysler] deal.

Mind you, JPMC wasn’t getting squeezed. Timmeh Geithner had specifically instructed Rattner not to ask for any special favors because the government had also bailed out JPMC (Timmeh apparently didn’t mention the additional support JPMC got from the Fed).

Tim had instructed me not to be taken in [by Lee’s complaints] but to maintain strict neutrality. I was not to demand anything of JPMorgan just because it had received an infusion of TARP money; nor was I to show it favor because of Bear Stearns or anything else.

And as Rattner calculates, Lee was asking for full value on their debt even while it was only worth about $.15 on the dollar.

In our phone calls, he also relentlessly reminded me that creditors deserve to be paid. “When you lend somebody $6.9 billion,” he would say, “you expect to get $6.9 billion back. And not a penny less.” I listened knowing that Jimmy’s position was patently ridiculous. Chrysler debt was trading at around 15 cents on the dollar (admittedly, infrequently), and according to Chrysler’s own analysis, the liquidation value of the company was perhaps as low as $1 billion. Clearly, Jimmy didn’t believe that the Obama administration would be willing to push back and let the banks take over Chrysler rather than cave in to their demands.

So unlike the UAW–which endorsed the kind of trade deal it has spent the last decade railing against–JP Morgan Chase responded to getting bailed out by asking for more special deals.

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UAW Sells Out American Workers for 800 Jobs

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The White House appears to be calculating that by getting the UAW to support the NAFTA-style trade agreement with South Korea (KORUS), it can avoid any discussion of the jobs that will be outsourced as a result of the agreement. Their big accomplishment, then, has been changing the original 2007 agreement enough to get the UAW–and Ford–to buy in.

The price for their buy-in?

55,500 additional cars.

800 jobs.

As this Congressional Research Service report on the original deal explains, one of the biggest reasons why a free trade agreement with South Korea sucks for the auto industry is that South Korea puts odd safety requirements on their cars. Because the market is relatively small, it is cost prohibitive to adapt existing models to meet those requirements.

For years, unique South Korean automotive safety and environmental standards have been a major concern for U.S. and European carmakers. Some of the flagged technical import barriers include front tow hooks, headlamp standards, tinted rear-windows, and vehicle emissions changes. Safety and environmental standards have the potential to add costs associated with compliance, thus both the KORUS and KOREU FTAs include provisions to address those standards viewed as unfair by some U.S. and EU automakers.

[snip]

A country like South Korea can decide to require compliance with its own standards, making it expensive for foreign-based manufacturers to export cars to the relatively smaller South Korean market, or in some cases effectively shutting foreign producers out of the market altogether. Some in the United States government and industry claim South Korean auto standards are “unique, non-transparent and out of sync with international standards.”71

[snip]

KORUS FTA permits “low-volume seller exemptions,” which allow each U.S. automaker to sell up to 6,500 vehicles per year in South Korea built to U.S. safety standards without any additional modification.72 The low-volume seller exemption nearly equals the number of cars sold by all three U.S. automakers combined in South Korea in 2009 (see Table 3). Some worry the exemption could act as a ceiling and effectively become a disincentive for U.S. carmakers to export more cars to South Korea.

In other words, the KORUS agreement signed in 2007 basically didn’t address the “non-transparent” safety issues that effectively exclude non-Korean cars; it just made an exemption that would cover the small number of cars already being imported in Korea.

Here’s how the White House hails their big improvement over that:

Safety standards have effectively operated as a non-tariff barrier to U.S. auto exports. The 2010 supplemental agreement announced today allows for 25,000 cars per U.S. automaker – or almost four times the number allowed in the 2007 agreement — to be imported into Korea provided they meet U.S. federal safety standards, which are among the most stringent in the world.

So one of the big concessions (it’s not the only one) in the renegotiated deal is the allowance for 55,500 additional cars a year into Korea.

It takes about 30 hours of labor to build a car. So the UAW got bought off for an extra 1,665,000 hours of work a year, not all of which will go to union employees. 41,625 weeks of work. Or work for 800 workers a year. In exchange for a trade agreement that the Economic Policy Institute estimates could cost 159,000 jobs in the next five years. (And in 10 years, after the duty on trucks expires, it would remove the biggest incentive for Hyundai to keep its SUV factories in Alabama, which account for 16,900 jobs, though those aren’t union jobs.)

800 jobs in exchange for losing 159,000 jobs–that’s the math the UAW has done.

White House Brags about Exporting our Pyramid Schemes to Korea

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The list of statements of support for the Korea Trade Agreement the White House sent out last night tells you a lot about what you need to know about the trade agreement. Among others on the list are Tom Donohue, whose laundering of foreign money into election coffers had a significant role in the shellacking Democrats took in November. Donohue thinks this deal is great:

This agreement will create thousands of new jobs, advance our national goal of doubling exports in five years, and demonstrate that America is once again ready to lead on trade. The administration has done its part. Now it’s time for the new Congress to make passage of KORUS a top priority in January. We will do everything in our power to round up the votes.

Then there’s John Engler, who for a while as head of the National Association of Manufacturers instituted a policy of refusing to meet with Democrats.

Then there’s the CEOs of credit card nation, Vikram Pandit and Jamie Dimon.

But to me, the most telling endorser of this agreement is Dick DeVos, the CEO of Amway and perennially one of the biggest single funders of the Republican Party. DeVos is thrilled because this will help Amway meet their growth targets.

Like most companies, we support a more competitive playing field. This new trade agreement allows Amway to continue meeting aggressive growth targets, and gives a much needed boost for all export business in Michigan.

So we’re going to push through this trade agreement so Dick DeVos can expand his pyramid scheme, get richer, and funnel that money into the Republican Party.

But then, I guess that’s what Pandit and Dimon have in mind, too.