> ...unless you are somehow claiming that money to La Raza is actually consumer relief
I'm claiming three things:
1. It's not at all clear what the best way to provide "consumer relief" for financial fraud on this scale even means. No one is even kidding themselves that it's possible to undo or compensate for the damage caused. Therefore, a relief strategy that basically spreads a lot of money throughout a bunch of charities and non-profits generally helping big classes of people isn't an unreasonable consumer relief strategy.
2. the vast majority of the donations made as part of these settlements went to decidedly non-partisan groups that could very plausibly support consumers most effected by the prosecuted financial fraud. La Raza received 1M among hundreds of millions provided to an enormous variety of types of charities and non-profits. Is your claim really that DoJ crafted a 16B settlement is such a way that they could funnel a measly million dollars to their "cronies" at La Raza et al.? Or is it perhaps more likely that DoJ and BoA agreed on a large set of organizations meeting certain criteria (like "provide housing/community assistance") and started spreading the money around?
3. Even to the extent that money went to partisan groups, it's not at all clear a) why that's a bad thing (see: EFF comment); or b) that this effect was intentional and the settlement calculated to achieve this outcome (as opposed to: here's a more-or-less unbiased massive list of charities, pick some and spread the money around).
The WSJ article claims there's a list of DoJ-approved non-profits that these defendants could select from.
But I've been unable to find such a list. The list you provide here is the list of organizations that actually received money* from BoA. Not the list of organizations that DoJ stated it was OK to give donations to. Which is presumably a subset of a DoJ-approved list.
> Do you claim any of the facts I've cited are false, or are you merely criticizing my tone?
I'm not even sure how in the hell one goes about separating tone from factual claim in a statement like "...significant chunks of money that go to political cronies of the justice department..." The tone is the claim. But to be concrete, I think the intent ascribed to DoJ by the tone of your statement is non-existent.
I'm claiming three things:
1. It's not at all clear what the best way to provide "consumer relief" for financial fraud on this scale even means. No one is even kidding themselves that it's possible to undo or compensate for the damage caused. Therefore, a relief strategy that basically spreads a lot of money throughout a bunch of charities and non-profits generally helping big classes of people isn't an unreasonable consumer relief strategy.
2. the vast majority of the donations made as part of these settlements went to decidedly non-partisan groups that could very plausibly support consumers most effected by the prosecuted financial fraud. La Raza received 1M among hundreds of millions provided to an enormous variety of types of charities and non-profits. Is your claim really that DoJ crafted a 16B settlement is such a way that they could funnel a measly million dollars to their "cronies" at La Raza et al.? Or is it perhaps more likely that DoJ and BoA agreed on a large set of organizations meeting certain criteria (like "provide housing/community assistance") and started spreading the money around?
3. Even to the extent that money went to partisan groups, it's not at all clear a) why that's a bad thing (see: EFF comment); or b) that this effect was intentional and the settlement calculated to achieve this outcome (as opposed to: here's a more-or-less unbiased massive list of charities, pick some and spread the money around).
> If you want to see the list it's not hard to find... http://bankofamerica.mortgagesettlementmonitor.com/Reports/F...
This is not the document I was looking for.
The WSJ article claims there's a list of DoJ-approved non-profits that these defendants could select from.
But I've been unable to find such a list. The list you provide here is the list of organizations that actually received money* from BoA. Not the list of organizations that DoJ stated it was OK to give donations to. Which is presumably a subset of a DoJ-approved list.
> Do you claim any of the facts I've cited are false, or are you merely criticizing my tone?
I'm not even sure how in the hell one goes about separating tone from factual claim in a statement like "...significant chunks of money that go to political cronies of the justice department..." The tone is the claim. But to be concrete, I think the intent ascribed to DoJ by the tone of your statement is non-existent.