The Movement to Block Foreclosure King Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary is Growing

We wrote last month about the many reasons that Steven Mnuchin is not the right person to become our new Treasury secretary. Well, it turns out I’m not alone in that opinion!

Mnuchin has yet to have his position confirmed by Senate. Yesterday, the Allied Progress group launched a series of six-figure ads that outline Mnuchin’s shady banking background, asking Republican senators to reject Mnuchin’s nomination.

The US Department of the Treasury website outlines exactly what the role of the Treasury secretary is:

“The Secretary of the Treasury is the principal economic advisor to the President and plays a critical role in policy-making by bringing an economic and government financial policy perspective to issues facing the government.”

The Treasury secretary is responsible for defining financial, economic and tax policy. He or she carries out law enforcement responsibilities, and serves as the financial agent for the United States Government. In addition, the Treasury secretary is fifth in the United States line of presidential succession. It is therefore crucial that any possible nominee for the position has a stellar track record: they must have both the experience and a high ethical standing to properly carry out the responsibilities of this extremely important Cabinet position.

I explained in my previous article some of the reasons why Mnuchin is the wrong person for this job. He is a second-generation Wall Street banker, which makes it difficult to know whether he can truly regulate Wall Street without bias. But, even worse, his own bank foreclosed on thousands of American homeowners via procedures that many have deemed to be both unfair and illegal.

These allegations stem from the period that Mnuchin owned OneWest Bank. Mnuchin acquired the bank by purchasing the failed bank IndyMac, which had been seized by the government, paying a discount price for it. He rebranding the bank as OneWest. Mnuchin eventually sold OneWest to CIT Group for a huge profit - twice what he paid for it - leaving CIT to clean up his foreclosure mess.

More information about the exact nature of the allegations against Mnuchin’s bank has been brought to light by CNN this week. Among these allegations are:

• The new bank OneWest preyed on elderly homeowners by expanding its reverse mortgage program, without clearly explaining the terms of the reverse mortgages, then increased its pace of foreclosures. When the elderly homeowners died, not only did OneWest immediately foreclose on the homes, they also booted out surviving family members including spouses, children and grandchildren. Over 16,000 such foreclosures took place in the first six years of Mnuchin’s leadership - a rate that is double that which would be expected of a lender that size.
• Included in the foreclosures was one case where a OneWest subsidiary foreclosed on a ninety year old woman because she was $0.27 short on her mortgage payment (yes, that’s right, twenty seven cents). Instead of working towards fixing the problem, they pushed to continue with the foreclosure.
• In 2013, lawyers in the California Attorney-General’s office called for a civil enforcement action against OneWest Bank over 35,0000 foreclosures it was carrying out, for what was called “widespread misconduct, including back-dating records, facilitating unlawful bids and other actions”

Allied Progress is an “advocacy organization that uses hard-hitting research and creative campaigns to hold Wall Street and other powerful special interests accountable.” Their two new ads are aimed at Republican Senators from Arizona and Nevada, two of the states that have been hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

The ads ask senators to vote NO on Mnuchin as Treasury secretary, explaining: “We need a Treasury secretary who will help us, not himself.”