January 19 - Mnuchin and His "Foreclosure Machine"; Mnuchin's "Vulture Fund"; The Women's March and the Fake News Claiming Trump Won the Women's Vote

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the Senate confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s choice for the next Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin and speak with Saied Kashani a lawyer whose clients have included the largest homebuilders in California. He has litigated extensively against OneWest Bank and its former owner Steve Mnuchin. We discuss the numerous documents involving private agreements between the government and the owners of One West Saied acquired through court orders and the Freedom of Information Act, some of which were passed on to Senator Elizabeth Warren who asked pointed questions of the nominee who appears to have gotten rich by evicting people from their homes using fraudulent “robo-signing” documents to foreclose on 36,000 family homes using what was described today as a “foreclosure machine”.

Part 2

Then we look into the systemic fraud in the aftermath of the housing crisis that Steve Mnuchin was able to capitalize on and speak with William K. Black, distinguishes scholar in research for financial regulation at the University of Minnesota and a Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Missouri Kansas City. The litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board who investigated the Savings and Loan disaster of the 1980’s, he joins us to discuss how Mnuchin ran what is aptly called a “vulture fund” which enabled Mnuchin and his partners to profit from the misery of Americans who were defrauded by “liars loans” and lost their homes when the housing market collapsed. A financial crisis that allowed OneWest to swoop in and foreclose on the homeowners using fraudulent documents that opened up government coffers to reward Mnuchin and make him rich.

Part 3

Then finally, ahead of Saturday’s Women’s March in Washington and across the country and around the world, we look into the fake news disseminated by Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren (now on MSNBC) and others that perpetuate the myth that Donald Trump won the women’s vote in the last election over Hillary Clinton. Kelly Dittmar, a Professor of Political Science and Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, joins us to discuss how this fake news, along with Trump’s repeated claim that he won a landslide, flies in the face of the real statistics that show Hillary Clinton won 54% of the women’s vote to Donald Trump’s 42%.