A Yes Vote for a National Ballot Initiative

While the long-predicted tsunami of voter anger is about to break across the national political landscape, oddly enough this may just be one cataclysmic event that California won’t experience. Yesterday the New York Times has pronounced the House of Representatives all but lost to the Democrats, but today’s Los Angeles Times reports that Jerry Brown’s lead over Meg Whitman doubled over the last month.

That might have something to do with Whitman’s obscene spending for the post – Californians have a tradition of rejecting the candidacies of people who treat high office as a new found hobby – and it couldn’t have helped that Whitman hired (and then cruelly fired) an undocumented housekeeper.

But wait. The Times’ polling also showed that in California, “Democrats have gained strength and GOP motivation has ebbed slightly in the last month.”

So what’s up with California voters? People elsewhere might attribute it to the weather, or our mythical blessed out state. But that’s not it: 81% of Californians told the pollsters that the state is “seriously off on the wrong track.”

I have a theory to explain why California voters aren’t reflecting the national trend, and it’s based on a political safety-valve unique to California: our often-maligned ballot initiative process.

This year, as in most elections, California voters will not only fill over a dozen federal, state and local elective offices. They will get to decide some major public policy issues, including legalization of marijuana, reapportionment, climate change, and majority rule in the state Legislature – a total of nine ballot propositions.

Californians rightly complain about the initiative process – that it’s increasingly invoked by the powerful special interests, that we shouldn’t have to do the politicians’ jobs for them – but the fact is, we love initiatives. Ballot measures empower Californians, giving us the opportunity – for better or worse – to shape our own destiny.

For many Californians, politicians are already a lost cause. What excites and inspires people to pay attention to politics here is the dynamic, creative and often chaotic opportunity to sidestep the political establishment and take matters into their own hands.

“For all the problems ballot initiative politics present today, the ballot measure offers the best part of modern politics,” says California citizen leader Jamie Court in his new book, “Raising Hell.” That’s “the ability to directly change injustice, without the main problem with politics today, politicians who are too corrupt or inept to make changes.”

In most states, angry voters can only vent their frustration by choosing from an often deeply unsatisfying list of candidates, a  desperate exercise in the “lesser of two evils.” When politicians are the only available target, the electorate’s outrage is by necessity narrowly focused. And it also gets amplified, like when you pump water through a fire hose. So it’s “throw the bums out” – as is likely to happen next week throughout the nation, whether or not they deserve it. Then the voters get to welcome a whole new bunch of bums.

Ballot initiatives offer a much more precise weapon: for example, an initiative to roll back auto insurance premiums, like I wrote in 1988, in the middle of public indignation over skyrocketing insurance premiums, when California lawmakers were too afraid of their industry patrons to do anything about it.

I’m as angry as everyone else these days about how Washington and Wall Street got together and betrayed us. If we had a national initiative process, I’d propose a cap on the interest rates banks and credit card companies can charge us for borrowing our own money from them.

Harvey Column - 10/25/2010

Around the Web: They Told Us So

The foreclosure robo-signing scandal may not have been making headlines until a month ago, but nobody should be surprised that it has finally erupted.

There have been warnings after warnings, all of them ignored by politicians, policy makers and the mainstream media.

Among those who have been ringing the alarm bells is Florida lawyer April Charney, with Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, who has traveled the country to train lawyers how to challenge foreclosures. In California, Walter Hackett, of Inland Empire Legal Services, has overseen a listserv for consumer attorneys representing borrowers facing foreclosure. Web sites like 4closurefraud.org have also been relentlessly focused on the issue.

Earlier this year, Mother Jones ran a stinging story, “Can Anyone Stop The Predatory Lenders?” detailing the misdeeds of mortgage servicers. Reporter Andy Kroll pointed out that the feds were basically paying the same shoddy characters who engineered the subprime crisis to fix the mess.

And Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil cautions against taking comfort from the big bankers who are now trying to minimize the impact of the fiasco they created. “Three years ago, as the subprime mortgage crisis began to spiral, one of the lessons the public should have learned is that the leaders of these companies often have no idea what’s going on inside them,” Weil writes. “We may be witnessing the same phenomenon again. There’s no excuse this time for anyone to be surprised.”

Around the Web / Foreclosures / Martin Column - 10/21/2010

BIPARTISANSHIP FOR BIG BANKS

With 2 weeks to go to the midterm elections, President Obama and the Republicans have found an issue they can agree on: if they just do nothing, the foreclosure scandal will go away.

They’re betting that the use of robo-signers to process foreclosure documents without actually reading them will just amount to a pile of sloppy paperwork.

They’re betting that blaming borrowers will trump public outrage over banks holding themselves above the rule of law that states they have to prove that they own a mortgage note before they can foreclose.

You can understand the Republicans’ position; they argue that the government has no responsibility and is only capable of making any problem worse.

President Obama’s approach can’t be much of a surprise either, after leaving his financial policy in the hands of Wall Street apologists, fighting the most robust financial reform, providing a failed foreclosure relief program and not raising a finger to help when banks opposed his own proposal and not using his bully pulpit to push it. The president, despite his occasional bursts of rhetoric, has never assumed the role of tough regulator and reformer he promised on the campaign trail, preferring to act as the big bank’s collaborator-in-chief.

The president’s name may not be on the ballot November 2. But many of the Democrats who are facing the voters advocate a more robust response: a foreclosure moratorium while the very real legal issues are sorted out.

The Obama administration has taken to sending signals to the voters, hoping that might allay their worries. The feds announced the formation of that entity designed to show concern while guaranteeing that no action will be taken for the foreseeable future: a task force.

A number of banks had started their own voluntary moratoriums on some foreclosures. But two of those banks, Ally and Bank of America, have already canceled them. Meanwhile all 50 state attorney generals have announced their own investigations into the mess.

Despite the efforts of bank apologists to minimize it, the foreclosure debacle continues to shape up as a series of nasty legal battles, with a dramatic, unsettling impact on the housing market.

Opponents of a foreclosure moratorium portray it as a way of giving homes to people who haven’t been making their mortgage payments. But that’s a phony argument. A moratorium will not end up causing anybody who hasn’t been paying their mortgage to own a house they didn’t pay for.

As far as borrowers living in their houses for free, let’s be clear: that’s happening now, and it’s not the fault of any moratorium. It’s happening as a result of the banks’ own chaotic approach to foreclosure, often not wanting to take possession of property that has lost its value or not hiring enough staff to manage the properties properly.

This is the terrible irony about the banks’ fear-mongering. While they’re always predicting awful consequences to any action that limits their own power, the banks create the consequences all by themselves, or with the help of their willing collaborators.

Bank of America (BoA) / Foreclosures / Martin Column / President Barack Obama - 10/20/2010

SEC TO Mozilo: Fraud Pays

The SEC is at it again. They’re bragging that the agency nailed the largest penalty of its kind in history against the king of the subprime lenders for defrauding his shareholders.

And no doubt, $65 million dollars sounds like a lot of money.

But when you remember how much money Angelo Mozilo raked in during his reign, and when you break down the details of the SEC fine, it doesn’t add up.

It certainly doesn’t add up to much in the way of punishing Mozilo.

As usual when the SEC settles the civil charges it files, Mozilo and his two former colleagues admitted no wrongdoing as part of their settlement.

The SEC accused Mozilo, the butcher’s son who rose to be the president of Countrywide, of keeping from shareholders his fears that his collection of subprime loans was trash while reassuring his stockholders that everything was hunky-dory.

Federal prosecutors are still poking around in the ashes of Countrywide, and maybe they will come up with something.

But so far here’s the scorecard on Mozilo: the SEC said he received $141.7 million as a result of fraud and insider trading. They fined him $22.5 million.

As the Center for Public Integrity points out, that means he has give back just 16 cents of every ill-gotten dollar he got.

In addition, the SEC touts the $45 million that Mozilo will have to turn over to Bank of America shareholders, though that money won’t come out of Mozilo’s very deep pockets. That will come from his insurer and the company that bought Countrywide, Bank of America.

The fines seem even slighter when you contemplate what Mozilo was paid in his days as master of the universe.

In his time as executive chairman of Countrywide between 1999 and 2008, he was paid a total of $410 million in salary, bonuses and stock options.

In 2007, when the company’s stock tanked, dropping from $40 to under $10, Mozilo had an off-year too. He was only paid $10.8 million.

In perspective, this doesn’t seem like much for the SEC to brag about. Sixteen cents on the dollar certainly isn’t going to strike fear into the heart of any business titan.

Martin Column / Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - 10/19/2010

Around the Web: Outsourcing Foreclosure `Catastrophe'

You wouldn’t think the leader of the free world would be so willing to outsource a massive foreclosure scandal to state attorneys general, judges, regulators and the big banks that created the mess in the first place.

But that’s exactly what President Obama has done, standing aside while 50 state attorneys general launch investigations, while banks implement their own voluntary moratoriums, announcing they have halted some, but not all, foreclosure proceedings.

A growing number of politicians, civil rights and consumer groups and labor unions have called for a nationwide moratorium amid allegations that banks violated foreclosure laws by using sloppy, false or fraudulent paperwork to kick people out of their homes.

But President Obama doesn’t like the idea of a foreclosure moratorium, which he fears could put the kibosh on his fragile recovery.

Where is the administration’s effort at finding some other creative solution to the mess the big banks have created across the country? What we find instead are regulators that have been ignoring clear warning signs about the banks’ troubled foreclosure crisis.

The federal response so far has been limp at best: a Justice Department inquiry (short of an investigation) and a call by a federal regulator for the banks to voluntarily verify that their foreclosure paperwork is in order.

Recent press reports call into question whether the banks have even implemented the foreclosure moratoriums they promised. Meanwhile more banks, this time Wells-Fargo, acknowledge they have also violated the laws governing foreclosure by submitting unverified documents to take people’s homes. Isn’t there an election coming up where the Democrats are fighting to maintain control of Congress, with their entire agenda at stake? Isn’t there already one party that has expertly cornered the whole do-nothing stick-your-head-in-the-sand approach to unemployment and foreclosure? Doesn’t the president know how awful it looks to most people to have the bailed-out banks getting away with yet more hanky-panky?

You would think the president would want to appear more engaged in this issue that’s so close to the heart of our on-going economic troubles.

His treasury secretary fears “unintended consequences". Apparently the administration would prefer the banks continue to foreclose on people using phony documents. While Wall Street predicts a catastrophe if a moratorium is implemented. If the big bankers want to know who created a catastrophe that will cost them billions, they only need to look in the mirror.

Bank of America (BoA) / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 10/15/2010

The Republican Who Tackled Foreclosures

President Obama isn’t the first politician to have to stare a massive foreclosure crisis in the face.

The last time foreclosures loomed so large in the economy and the national consciousness was during the Great Depression, when farmers and homeowners were losing their land in massive numbers.

Several states passed laws including moratoriums on foreclosure. Not because the banks couldn’t prove they owned the farms, or because they screwed up the paperwork. The moratoriums were implemented in recognition that the country was in an economic emergency and that having so many people lose their homes was bad for the country.

Minnesota passed such a law in 1933. After a judge allowed a couple to postpone foreclosure, the building and loan association that owned the mortgagee challenged the law. The firm appealed to the Supreme Court, contending that law was a violation of the Contracts Clause of the Constitution. But in its  landmark ruling in Home Building v. Blaisdell, the high court upheld the law. By a 5 to 4 vote the court ruled that the contracts clause wasn’t absolute and it didn’t outweigh the rights of the states to protect the vital interests of its citizens. In dissent, Associate Justice George Sutherland warned that the ruling would be just the beginning of further erosion of the contracts clause.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, an appointee of President Herbert Hoover, wrote the majority opinion. Hughes wasn’t some ivory-tower judge but a seasoned and fascinating Republican politician who had served as two-term governor of New York, with a record for establishing a public service commission, as well as pushing through labor law and insurance reform. He ran unsuccessfully for president against Woodrow Wilson before serving his first stint on the Supreme Court before running for president. After a stretch as secretary of state under President Calvin Coolidge, he was in and out of private life before President Hoover appointed him chief justice in 1930.

Though liberals gave him a hard time in his confirmation hearing, he often provided a swing vote in favor of the New Deal on a highly contentious court. But Hughes also repeatedly tangled with Roosevelt, voting against the constitutionality of the National Recovery Administration and opposing FDR’s court-packing scheme.

What do we get from this excursion into history? There’s some comfort in knowing the country has grappled with these tough times and issues before and survived. But it’s hard to encounter a figure like Hughes and not wish that some of his courage and unpredictability could rub off on our current crop of leaders, who seem so timid and tame by comparison, and who seem to have forgotten that protecting the vital interests of citizens isn’t just a matter of bailing out banks and tax cuts for the rich and hoping some of the booty will trickle down to the rest of us.

Foreclosures / Martin Column - 10/13/2010

Don't Foreclose on the Rule of Law

As the foreclosure process implodes in the U.S., the big banks and their defenders are scrambling to defend the mess they’ve created, dismissing serious legal issues as mere technicalities.

I covered courts as a reporter for years and I learned something about legal technicalities.

What I learned was that whenever some lawyer started dismissing some legal rule as a technicality, they were about to try to heave some of their adversary’s fundamental rights out the window.

In the foreclosure mess, those adversaries would be the banks’ former business partners, their borrowers, the people they loaned money to.

Now the big banks are trying to dismiss the rules that govern the foreclosure process as legal technicalities.

Take for example the Florida case in which a judge ruled earlier this year that a document that was supposed to show that U.S. Bank owned the mortgage in December 2007 wasn’t created until the following year. The document filed by the bank, the judge wrote in March, “did not exist at the time of the filing of this action…was subsequently created and…fraudulently backdated, in a purposeful, intentional effort to mislead.” She dismissed the bank’s case.

The bank’s lawyer blamed carelessness. He explained: “Judges get in a whirl about technicalities because the courts are overwhelmed....The merits of the cases are the same: people aren't paying their mortgages.”

One of the other things I learned was that judges tended to use very precise wording in their rulings. If the judge in the Florida case was feeling overwhelmed, she didn’t mention it. What she did say what that somebody had fraudulently created a document.

That’s not a technicality. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been making your mortgage payment or not. Banks are not allowed to foreclose on a home using fraudulent documents. Period.

One of the aspects of the rule of law is that it applies the same to everybody: a bank isn’t allowed to submit fraudulent documents to a court any more than a pauper is. That’s not a technicality. That’s the rule of law.

In the most recent brouhaha, a number of big banks, Ally, PNC Financial, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co and Bank of America, have acknowledged that their officials didn’t actually read key foreclosure documents before submitting them in court. Some documents appeared to have been forged; others appeared to contain false information.

A number of state attorney generals across the country have threatened legal action against the banks. Faced with a firestorm, some banks have voluntarily halted foreclosures in 23 states: the ones where judges oversee foreclosures. Only Bank of America has halted foreclosures in all 50 states.

One of the first banks to acknowledge that its own paperwork hadn’t been properly reviewed was Ally Bank, formerly known as GMAC. The latest controversy wasn’t the first time GMAC’s legal work on foreclosures came under scrutiny.

In 2006, Bloomberg News reported, another Florida judge sanctioned the company, finding that it submitted false affidavits to the court in a foreclosure case. The judge ordered GMAC to submit an explanation, certify that its policies had changed and pay the opposing party’s legal costs of more than $8,000.

As a result, GMAC’s legal department issued a statement that told employees “not to sign verifications on court pleading documents unless you have independently reviewed and checked the facts.”

The new policy, the Journal reported, was distributed in June 2006; it also stated in italics and boldface that GMAC employees should sign documents only in the presence of a notary. GMAC told the court  that the policies were “being corrected.”

Three and a half years later, a GMAC employee said in a deposition that his team of 13 people signed about 10,000 documents a month without reading them.

Deborah Rhode, a Stanford Law professor, told Bloomberg, “It’s not ‘technical’ when people attest under oath to knowledge they don’t have, and it doesn’t matter that in fact there isn’t actual error or discrepancy,” Rhode said. “Any court would take this very seriously.”

Bank of America (BoA) / Foreclosures / Martin Column - 10/10/2010

In this “Bust Bowl,” It’s Every Person for Themselves

During the 1930s, drought and dust storms combined to devastate farms in the heartland of the United States, already decimated by the Great Depression. One quarter of the population of the “Dust Bowl” lost their farms and ranches when the banks foreclosed on them. Millions left the Great Plains for California or elsewhere.

Today, the entire nation is trapped in a “Bust Bowl,” laid low from coast to coast by the collapse of an economy based largely on finance and speculation. The “official” unemployment rate, which has been above 9.5% for the last fourteen months, understates the true devastation wrought by the Wall Street debacle. Vast numbers of our citizens have descended into poverty: 42 million Americans – one in seven – are considered poor.  Just an hour or two outside LA, 15 to 20% of residents in towns like Bakersfield and Riverside are below the poverty line.

Back in the Thirties, farmers joined together to protect each other against foreclosures: trying to block authorities from seizing the farms, moving furniture back into the homes of the evicted, and refusing to bid on properties that were foreclosed. But there’s little sympathy for our neighbors evident these days.

To the contrary, speculation has ingrained itself so deeply in the American psyche that people view foreclosures as an opportunity to snatch up a home at distressed prices. And now that some banks are pulling homes off the market because they can’t prove they hold the mortgages, as my colleague Martin Berg has described, would-be purchasers are unhappy. The New York Times quoted a Florida mother who was supposed to move into a foreclosed “three bedroom steal” when Fannie Mae took the house off the market. “Now I’m sharing a room with my son,” she complained. “What the hell is up with that?”

It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who is trying to reap some kind of a windfall from someone else’s tragedy.

I know, everyone’s just trying to get by. The Times noted that one man who had lost his own home to foreclosure after falling behind on his payments had made a successful bid on another foreclosed home – his “dream house” – only to have the deal frozen by the bank.

But is the solution to beggar thy neighbor?

Consider the debt collector profiled in the New Yorker this week. A former drug dealer who did some time, “Jimmy” now runs a small operation in Buffalo, New York. He buys bad debts from businesses like banks and credit card companies for a few cents on the dollar, and then does what he can to collect from the people who owe the money. Anything he can get, he keeps. With so many Americans out of work and deeply in debt, the collection business is booming these days. Buffalo’s home to quite a few such firms these days, because, as Jimmy explains, “Buffalo is broke!” Jimmy’s got five kids and he’s trying to make a living and meet the payroll for his staff, whose job is to nag and cajole people into paying something on what they owe. Plus he’s up against some bigger firms that are willing to break the law in order to collect. But it’s not a pretty picture, especially because it soon becomes clear that Jimmy’s company is in trouble, and he may soon find himself among the debtors of Buffalo.

The average American is not going to be able to leverage himself out of this economic nightmare.

In the Thirties, the federal government ultimately came to the rescue: prodded by Roosevelt, Congress authorized the courts to reduce a farm mortgage to its diminished market value, and to suspend a farm foreclosure for three years. (A conservative US Supreme Court initially struck the law down as an improper intrusion of the government in the banking business, but it was later upheld.) Farmers were also allowed to borrow money through the federal government to pay off their old mortgages. This was the New Deal.

This time around, Wall Street firms have been given access to trillions of dollars of federal money at rates approaching zero interest, but with no requirement that they lend this taxpayer money back to taxpayers at all, much less at fair interest rates. Thus the banks, credit card companies and investment firms are back in business and in fact, most are rolling in dough. The rest of us have to pay exorbitant interest to borrow our money, if it is offered at all. And at the behest of Wall Street, the US Senate rejected a proposal to allow federal bankruptcy courts to modify mortgages so people could stay in their homes. A few days ago, the Obama administration rejected a nationwide moratorium on foreclosures. "While we understand the eagerness to make sure that no American is foreclosed upon in error, we must be careful not to over-reach and apply a remedy that will make the underlying problem of foreclosures worse," according to the Federal Housing Administration.

I'd call this a "Raw Deal."

Foreclosures / Harvey Column / Outrage - 10/10/2010

"Conspiracy of Ignorance" Demands Attention

In California, the nation’s largest real estate market, the robo-signing scandal has produced many calls to halt foreclosures, but little real change so far.

For several years, lawyers who represent borrowers in foreclosure have been complaining about massive and gnarly problems in the foreclosure process.

Because of the way Wall Street sliced and diced mortgages into derivatives and sold them off, the ownership of the mortgage had often not been properly documented, these lawyers said.

Such documentation is a basic legal requirement of foreclosures.

But they couldn’t get many judges to go along with them, especially in California, where, by state law, judges don’t typically oversee foreclosures. They only get involved if a borrower files suit to block a foreclosure, and even then, the courts are reluctant to do anything that would benefit borrowers who haven’t been paying their mortgages.

But disclosures over the past week in the robo-signing scandal may change that, after bank officials disclosed that they signed thousands of foreclosure documents without reading them first. Among the problems were documents that appeared to be forged or inaccurate assessments of how much borrowers owed on their mortgages.

In states with court-supervised foreclosures, the big banks voluntarily called a halt to foreclosures. But not in non-judicial foreclosure states like California.

The banks’ position so far is that the robo-signing doesn’t represent any substantial problems in the documentation, just that they were overwhelmed and understaffed and couldn’t keep up with the paperwork.

Walter Hackett disagrees. He’s a former bank executive who now represents borrowers in foreclosure at Inland Empire Legal Services. Hackett also runs an online bulletin board for lawyers fighting foreclosure. “Sloppy paperwork is too nice a way to describe it,” Hackett told me. “It’s a conspiracy of ignorance.”

He recalled dealing with Wells Fargo on behalf of one client. They were promising his client a loan modification; however, by the time Hackett untangled the paperwork, it turned out the mortgage was actually owned by another bank.  “Before a bank can foreclose on a property, they have to prove that they own the note,” Hackett said.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Jerry Brown has issued cease and desist orders against some of the big banks that have acknowledged problems in their paperwork. But Brown’s concern is not actually the robo-signing, a spokesman said, but whether the banks are complying with a California state law that requires the banks to attempt to work out a loan modification before they foreclose on a borrower.

Brown spokesman Jim Finefrock said, “We’re talking to them [the banks]. We’re hoping for a resolution of the matter.”

He acknowledged that Brown was focused on compliance with the California law, not the larger issues of whether documents had been improperly filed in foreclosure cases.

The implications of the foreclosure fiasco are potentially huge, what Reuters business blogger Felix Salmon describes as “the mother of all legal messes.” If the problems with the paperwork prove substantial, they could undermine previous foreclosures and home sales, leading to a waves of litigation involving borrowers, homeowners banks and investors. The bad news for the economy is that the robo-signing scandal will only prolong the foreclosure crisis, keeping those facing foreclosure, and the entire housing market, from attaining some kind of stability.

While politicians and organizations have been calling for investigations and moratoriums on foreclosures, those are only a start. We need real leadership to forge long-term solutions, instead of the weak half-measures we’ve gotten so far. Maybe the robo-signing mess will offer the opportunity for the administration, the banks and the investors to try again to solve the foreclosure debacle and to get it right this time.

Foreclosures / Martin Column - 10/08/2010

Fear Factor, Financial Crisis Edition

The administration has been touting what a good deal the Troubled Asset Relief program turned out to be for taxpayers – most of the $700 billion has been repaid; the banks after all, did not collapse, and it only ended up costing us around $50 billion after repayments.

“TARP undoubtedly helped to stem the financial panic in the fall of 2008 and contributed to the stabilization of the financial system,” Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, said in a statement today.

But now we’ve got a whole new threat to the financial system, according to the bankers. They contend that if the public ever finds out the facts surrounding the rest of the bailout, it will cause them “irreparable harm.”

This is the part of the bailout the administration doesn’t talk about, with costs that dwarf the piddling billions spent on the TARP program. These are the trillions in secret loans the Federal Reserve provided financial institutions.

If it wasn’t for a dogged reporter at Bloomberg News, it would all still remain a big secret.

But the reporter, Mark Pittman, convinced his employer that the public had a right to know who the Fed was loaning the taxpayer’s money to, and under what terms. Bloomberg filed suit in November 2008.

The Fed and the banks fought the lawsuit for nearly two years. But in August a federal appeals court rejected the Fed and the banker’s arguments. Fed president Ben Bernanke announced in late September that the agency would finally make the information public by December 1.

Anybody care to bet on the chances that the big banks will fold when the information comes out? Any bets on revelations that will graphically show just how cozy both Bush and Obama administrations were with the big banks?

The banks’ response to the lawsuit reminds me of the atmosphere of fear and crisis the previous administration and the banks created, with the major media’s assistance, at the time of the original bailout. No time for questions, no time for debate. Hand over the blank check now or the whole economic system will blow up, they screamed.

Pittman died last year at 52. He remains one of the few heroes that emerged from the financial collapse, who raised tough questions in the months and years leading to the meltdown and was not intimidated by the banks’ fear mongering, continuing to demand answers.

Meanwhile, at some point, the bureaucrats will get around to the audit of the Federal Reserve’s activity since 2007. Congress passed that audit with broad bipartisan support in the face of fierce opposition from the administration, as part of financial reform. No doubt we will hear another round of predictions of disastrous consequences as the results of that audit are readied for release. It’s supposed to be conducted by the General Accounting Office.

From the beginning of the crisis to today, fear has been the most potent weapon used by the bankers and the bureaucrats to get their way, along with the complexity of the system the banks are always ready to clobber the public with. The spirit of reporter Mark Pittman remains one of the strongest antidotes we’ve got.

Around the Web / Federal Reserve / Martin Column - 10/06/2010