Hosted by Tami Winfrey Harris and Andrea Plaid with featured guest, Sikivu Hutchinson, author of “Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars”

http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/10/us_sues_bank_of_america_for_over_1_billion_in_mortgage_fraud_case.html

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are suing Bank of America for more than $1 billion for mortgage fraud against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced Wednesday that the U.S. has filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit against Bank of America and its predecessors Countrywide Financial Corporation and Countrywide Home Loans, Inc. Specifically, the Complaint alleges that from at least 2007 through 2009, Countrywide, and later Bank of America after acquiring Countrywide in 2008, implemented a new loan origination process called the “Hustle,” which was intentionally designed to process loans at high speed and without quality checkpoints, and which generated thousands of fraudulent and otherwise defective residential mortgage loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that later defaulted, causing over $1 billion dollars in losses and countless foreclosures.

“For the sixth time in less than 18 months, this Office has been compelled to sue a major U.S. bank for reckless mortgage practices in the lead-up to the financial crisis. The fraudulent conduct alleged in today’s complaint was spectacularly brazen in scope, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. “As alleged, through a program aptly named ‘the Hustle,’ Countrywide and Bank of America made disastrously bad loans and stuck taxpayers with the bill. As described, Countrywide and Bank of America systematically removed every check in favor of its own balance – they cast aside underwriters, eliminated quality controls, incentivized unqualified personnel to cut corners, and concealed the resulting defects. These toxic products were then sold to the government sponsored enterprises as good loans. This lawsuit should send another clear message that reckless lending practices will not be tolerated.”

The governments of Cambodia and the United States are locked in a legal battle with the auction house Sotheby’s over a thousand-year-old statue. The two governments say the statue was looted from a temple of the ancient Khmer empire. Sotheby’s says this can’t be proved, and a court in New York will decide on the matter soon.

The case could affect how collectors and museums acquire artifacts, and how governments recover lost national treasures…

“We must not stay silent. We must reclaim the statues by any and all legal means,” says Cambodian archaeologist Phin Samnang. “If we don’t take action, it means we do not love our antiquities which have been looted and taken overseas.”

Sotheby’s declined to be interviewed for this report, but provided documents arguing that Cambodia has no physical evidence of exactly when over the past 1,000 years the statue was looted (but regardless of when it occurred, there is no dispute over the plain fact that it was looted).

Anne LeMaistre is the Phnom Penh-based representative for the U.N.’s cultural organization, UNESCO, and adviser to the Cambodian government on the Koh Ker statues. “There is evidence that all this looting occurred at the end of the ’60s,” she says. “The Duryodhana [statue] was looted from Cambodia because this site was looted at the same time, and several pieces were found on the art market at the same time, for the first time.”

The two statues, of Duryodhana and Bhima, appeared on the international art market in the mid-1970s.

The Cambodian government has now asked for the return of the matching Bhima statue, which is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif…

“In terms of the author, Seth Rosenfeld, was this something that he had misread, did sloppy work and, from there, set off a hailstorm? That’s possible. One person’s sloppy academic research…I mean, that’s possible, too, that there was a misreading and bad analysis, bad historical research and documentation on Seth Rosenfeld’s part, which is actually what a lot of the academics in the Chronicle of Higher Education who were interviewed for that essay were saying. But one thing though that made me kind of angry about Rosenfeld was that he seemed to have a certain conspiracy theory in his mind, to the point where any bits and pieces that he could pull together he would use to draw his own conclusions. He doesn’t seem to be that thorough…

“I would say that by latching onto this issue, the conservative media is helping promote a certain summation of the 60s and 70s. I think Rosenfeld himself is part of that conservative media and he has that summation also. If you look at his book he makes a sharp dichotomy between the politics of the Free Speech Movement, which actually happened in 1964, and the politics of the Third World Liberation Front, which took place in 1968 at SF State and continued on the UC Berkeley campus in 1969. Whole different time period, whole different move in terms of the nation, whole different move in terms how politicians and how the government viewed social movements…”

Diane Fujino is also speaking tomorrow at Oakland Public Library’s Temescal Branch at 6:30 p.m, 5205 Telegraph Ave.

http://rafu.com/news/2012/09/author-fujino-to-speak-at-oakland-library/