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

Once the bubble burst, lawsuits were filed everywhere and whistle-blowers emerged by the dozen, showing, in graphic documentary detail, how nearly every major financial company in America had chosen to participate in this enormous fraud. It was the very definition of systemic corruption, but curiously, despite what looked like mountains of evidence, almost nobody with any connection to the crisis was even threatened with criminal prosecution. For instance, court filings showed that Bank of America—a Covington & Burling client, remember—had teamed up with the unscrupulous, now-defunct mortgage lender Countrywide to sell more than a billion dollars’ worth of questionable loans to Fannie and Freddie. They had done so through a special mortgage loan program that, unbelievably, was named “Hustle” in internal bank documents. Under “Hustle,” Bank of America intentionally removed underwriters and compliance officers from the loan origination process, explicitly aiming to make sure that loans “moved forward, never backward.”