Monies meant to benefit homeowners harmed during the Great Recession are being steered to private, progressive groups and no one is doing anything about it.
The Obama Administration is taking millions from bank settlements meant to go to consumer relief and steering moneys to progressive groups, according to a Wall Street Journal article.
The administration’s multiyear campaign against the banking industry has quietly steered money to organizations and politicians who are working to ensure liberal policy and political victories at every level of government. The conduit for this funding is the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, a coalition of federal and state regulators and prosecutors created in 2012 to “identify, investigate, and prosecute instances of wrongdoing” in the residential mortgage-backed securities market. In conjunction with the Justice Department, the RMBS Working Group has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with essentially every major bank in America.
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Combined, the banks must divert well over $11 billion into “consumer relief,” which is supposed to benefit homeowners harmed during the Great Recession. Yet it is unknown how much, if any, of the banks’ settlement money will find its way to individual homeowners. Instead, a substantial portion is allocated to private, nonprofit organizations drawn from a federally approved list. Some groups on the list—Catholic Charities, for instance—are relatively nonpolitical. Others—La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more—are anything but.
The Journal notes how many of the groups “engage in voter registration, community organizing and lobbying on liberal policy priorities at every level of government.”
Further, as the banks have years to pay out the settlements, the money pipeline to the progressive groups will continue well into the next administration.
Read the whole WSJ piece here.
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