The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

For instance, while the San Diego District Attorney’s Office spent more than a decade sifting through thousands of dresser drawers and bringing felony cases all the way to court for frauds as small as four hundred dollars, executives in the same general area of Southern California, at companies like Countrywide and Long Beach Mortgage, were pioneering the brilliant mass fraud scheme that involved the sales of toxic mortgage-backed securities. One of the favorite targets of that fraud scheme was government and the taxpayer. These companies, along with their bankers, loved more than anything to sell worthless mortgage bonds to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed housing agencies. Just one Southern Californian company, Countrywide, dumped as much as $26.6 billion on the taxpayer and the state when it sold overvalued bonds to Fannie and Freddie. Bank of America, its eventual parent company, sold another $6 billion to Fannie and Freddie. Fifteen other companies also targeted the federal government for hundreds of millions and billions more. The state of California’s pension fund, CalPERS, was also the target of massive fraud schemes, as banks, mortgage lenders, and ratings agencies conspired to sell California workers billions more in worthless securities in exchange for their life savings.