MNUCHIN IS NO MUNCHKIN

Munchkin:  A person who is notably small and often endearing. 

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, is neither notably small physically, nor endearing.  He’s six feet one inch, which puts him in the top 16% of American males, height-wise, but he doesn’t stand tall in any other respects.

• As a banker he made a fortune foreclosing on working families homes.

• His bank targeted seniors who had reverse mortgages, which tanked in the Great Depression, and homes in low income neighborhoods, where his victims were Blacks and other minorities.

• He profited by leading an investment group that in 2009
purchased  IndyMac, a leading subprime home lender which failed in 2008. According to the FIDC he paid “pennies on the dollar for the assets being acquired.”  Mnuchin renamed it One West and eventually sold it for over $3.10 billion, more than twice what he paid for it. Since FDIC covered the overwhelming majority of IndyMac’s losses on bad loans, Mnuchin’s bank profited mightily on the deal (all at the expense of suffering homeowners and our tax dollars).

• OneWest falsified and robo-signed fraudulent documents in order to criminally foreclose on homes.  It admitted its wrongdoing in a consent decree.

• OneWest discriminated against minorities in its lending practices, locating its branches so as to avoid neighborhoods of color and minority census tracts. *   So now we will have a bigoted Attorney General and a bigoted Secretary of the Treasury.

• Mnuchin has no experience in politics or policy.
(But then again the President-elect has no experience in governing, politics or policy. It is the blind leading the blind.)

When it became clear that Trump had been elected, I uttered, “Oh, God, save us!”   Then I thought about St. Paul, who was on his way to Damascus to round up Christians, take them to Jerusalem for persecution and even execution.  Suddenly in the middle of his journey, he was blinded by a bright light, spoken to by the Lord and converted from a persecutor of Christians to their defender.

So, I offered a silent prayer: “Lord, may Donald Trump experience a St. Paul Epiphany as he travels down Pennsylvania Avenue to his inauguration.”

After all, miracles do happen.

Kerry Gough, 12/1/16

*(Source of the above facts, Chris Isidore and Danielle Wiener-Bonner, CNN, Nov. 29, 2016)