Update on Goldman Sachs

Ms. KAPTUR. Madam Speaker, please allow me to update my colleagues and citizens across the country on some recent news about Goldman Sachs, one of the white shoe Wall Street outfits that got bailed out by the American taxpayer 2 years ago. We've learned that the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice are looking into Goldman Sachs, but there is more you should know.

Today, it was revealed that this privileged firm also wholly owned a mortgage servicing company back from 2007. So it claims it had no knowledge of the housing meltdown, but in fact, it owned a loan servicing company.

Back in 2007, Goldman Sachs scooped up Litton Loan Servicing in Houston, Texas. Litton specialized in collecting money from borrowers in California and Florida. Goldman now services around 320,000 loans worth around $50 billion according to the Financial Times.

Litton does not seem to be quite on the up-and-up. In fact, it was just recently forced to settle a class-action lawsuit in Los Angeles for over half a million dollars, and the Financial Times reports that the Better Business Bureau has listed almost 800 complaints on Litton. Worse, Litton has only put up about 29 percent of their loans into permanent modifications, leaving the rest of the consumers who tried to get one trying to find money to make up the difference they immediately owe Litton, and oh, of course, then they will owe the accrued late fees.

Goldman Sachs says little about this, of course. This is business as usual for them, but bad business as usual it appears.

However, the customers of Litton are not the only ones receiving poor services from Goldman Sachs. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress is getting similar treatment. Despite saying that they will cooperate fully, Goldman Sachs is not cooperating fully with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In fact, a subpoena had to be issued last week to get documents from Goldman Sachs.

The New York Times quotes the chairman of the commission, Mr. Phil Angelides of California, as saying the following: ``Goldman Sachs has not, in our view, been cooperative with our requests for information or forthcoming with respect to documents, information, or interviews.''

Should that surprise any of us? It certainly shows that Goldman Sachs does not respect the law, nor the Congress, nor the executive branch, nor the American citizens, whose hard-earned dollars have poured into Goldman leading it to record profits, huge bonuses, and no results for ordinary people.

Worse, it makes one wonder what Goldman Sachs has to hide. Otherwise, why send irrelevant information to the commission and withhold other information? Yet Goldman continues to drag its feet in responding, and the commission had to subpoena.

Goldman Sachs could and should do better. They could lead Wall Street in corporate citizenship. We now know that Goldman Sachs could easily reduce the principal on every loan at Litton, write off all the late fees, and give 320,000 citizens some relief from the housing crisis that Goldman, along with the rest of Wall Street's biggest investment banks--or I should say speculators--had in creating.

How much do you want to bet that they won't? Anyone want to hedge a bet with a credit default swap or a synthetic collateralized debt obligation? I bet Goldman would be willing to sell you one, but you know, what they're really doing is they're trying to send their lobbyists to try to meet with members of the commission that Mr. Angelides heads.

The New York Times reports that, ``Lobbyists representing Goldman in Washington tried to arrange one-on-one meetings with a handful of those commissioners, including Mr. Angelides, but he declined to meet with them.''

Congratulations, Mr. Angelides. Guess what, they do the same thing to the Members of Congress. They wait for us in the hallways. They get on the elevators with us if we refuse to meet with them. They pay their lobbyists here lots of money.

So you keep doing what you're doing, Mr. Angelides. You keep digging. I'm glad you declined to meet with them.

And you know, according to the people who spoke with the New York Times, many of them said they spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the commission's inner workings. So I'm glad to see that there are some Americans out there who are trying to get to the truth, trying to get to the heart of the matter, trying to get justice for the American people in the housing market where the deck is so strongly stacked against ordinary citizens who should hold one piece of paper they call their mortgage, and yet the note for that is locked up somewhere upstream, held on Wall Street or one of its subsidiaries. And most Americans who are getting thrown out of their houses across this country and being forcibly removed don't even have enough legal advice to know that they should be asking the judge to produce the original note in those proceedings, not a Xeroxed copy.

The American people: get yourself legal assistance back home from your fair housing agencies, your counseling agencies. You have a right to your own mortgage, and no one should take it away from you if you have a leg to stand on. And the judge should be on your side if you ask for that original note.

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