New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is getting glowing press for beating up on predatory banks. But he betrayed his colleagues who have been working a lot longer to fix our broken financial system—and may have sabotaged their progress.
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That would take more time, of course. It would mean bringing in new sets of players and, most important, putting on indefinite hold a settlement plan that would both help fix a broken foreclosure system and force lenders to sit with individual homeowners to work out a loan modification. That’s a plan that old warriors in the fight like Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, wish Schneiderman would get behind.
“He’s probably right that his approach would get more money, but that’s not the most important thing for people like me,” says Rheingold, who has been battling predatory subprime lenders dating back to his days as a Legal Aid attorney in the 1980s. “It’s fixing the damn system. It’s making sure people who can save their homes have the right to save their homes.” Then, with the sigh of someone who's been engaged in the same fight for a very long time, he adds, “I think sometimes we lose sight of what’s possible to achieve.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/05/is-eric-schneiderman-s-ego-sabotaging-bank-reform.html