Andrew Cuomo's Predatory Heart Of Darkness

A journey begins into a modern "Heart of Darkness."   Reuters reports, "Racial predatory loans fueled U.S. housing crisis."

      Predatory lending began in the first Bush administration reports Lucy Komisar and was refined under Andrew Cuomo where, "As Secretary of HUD, Andrew Cuomo reversed the policy of selling defaulted mortgages so that families could keep their homes. Instead, he chose to foreclose on mortgages, which meant that families lost their homes and insiders cleaned up on fire-sale priced properties. The US Treasury also lost billions."    "Cuomo reinstated the old HUD cash-cow-for-political-friends system.   Cuomo took the profits from the loan sales and used them to justify huge new [mortgage insurance] originations, creating a huge housing bubble with the elimination of down payments, encouraging people who could not afford houses to buy them. Defaults went up.   And now instead of working out the defaulted single-family mortgages, he was foreclosing. There was a spike in families losing their homes and investments. But contractors and people handling property management and disposition made money. And there was sharply reduced recovery for the government."

Cuomo enlarged the trough and the swine came running.

   And who benefited from Cuomo?   "The General Accounting Office (GAO)...in 2000 found that the Department was allowing lenders in the federally-insured mortgage business to engage in fraud and “flipping” that left homebuyers with crumbling houses and unaffordable mortgage payments. The fraudsters would buy property, often in poor neighborhoods, make cosmetic repairs and get puffed up property appraisals based in part on falsified documents attesting that homes had been renovated. They would sell them at high prices, with inflated mortgages, to unsuspecting buyers who trusted the appraisals. The owners of the houses quickly discovered their state, but often couldn’t afford to repair their homes, or pay the mortgages, so the mortgages were foreclosed, generating fees for property managers. And “flipped” again. It was the fraud dramatized by the Sopranos."

     "In fiscal 1999, HUD announced that it required $59 billion of “undocumentable adjustments” to balance the books...It had lost track of $59 billion! [But] Cuomo did not order the HUD IG to investigate the reason for the missing billions or to try to get the money back."

       Who was Cuomo protecting?   "The most important man in Andrew Cuomo's personal and political life, topping even his ex-governor father, is obscure, 46-year-old developer Andrew Farkas, who's ponied up over $2 million for the front-running attorney general candidate in recent years.   That includes $1.2 million in salary that Farkas's firm, Island Capital, paid Cuomo in 2004 and 2005, as well as over $800,000 in identifiable campaign contributions from varied Farkas companies, family members, and business associates. It does not include an undisclosed amount Island paid Cuomo up to June 2006.", "

  And what Cuomo did:  Although, "Farkas personally signed a preliminary settlement that August, agreeing to repay HUD $5 million of the management fees it had diverted. In March 1998, the final settlement required the company to pay another $2.4 million, still $200,000 less than the amount the government said Insignia had diverted. The company admitted no wrongdoing, paid no penalties, and was explicitly not required to surrender any of its HUD contracts."       Cuomo's  "HUD even said in the 21-page agreement, also signed by Cuomo's top counsel Howard Glaser, that it would not in any way seek "to limit Insignia's participation" in agency programs."

     Looking into Andrew  Cuomo's heart reveals his "love" for the those benefiting from his tenure at HUD and for his benefactor, Farkas.    While, Andrew Cuomo's rapacious heart could feel nothing for the unfortunate who were foreclosed to flip properties to his preferred, or the HUD tenants deprived of services,  it wasn't racial as implied in  "Racial predatory loans fueled U.S. housing crisis.".   It was Andrew Cuomo and the Devil demanding their due.  Andrew's heart, like the heart of his parabiosis, Gollum, encloses the darkest depravity.  Is Cuomo or the Devil racist?   No, Black, White, Brown or Yellow sheeple are equally fodder to be picked clean by the Devil's vultures circling their local chieftain, Andrew Cuomo.

   As in "Heart of Darkness, where, "Themes developed in the novella's later scenes include the naïveté of Europeans (particularly women) regarding the various forms of darkness in the Congo; the British traders and Belgian colonialists' abuse of the natives and man's potential for duplicity,"  the same themes repeat with the naïveté  of New Yorkers regarding HUD's (Cuomo's) evil intent, the government employees' and HUD lenders' and contractors' abuse of the Black and White natives of NY and Cuomo's duplicity.

  Why could this happen?   Because the "Devil's running dogs" covered and are still covering Cuomo's tracks.  i.e., Fred Dicker (The Post), The NY Times, The Times Union