A Fighting Chance

The hearing was held in a bright new auditorium at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas. A practice space for law students, the auditorium was outfitted as a mock courtroom. Damon, Richard, and I sat in front where the judges would sit, and I had the gavel. The room was crowded with people in jeans or work uniforms, and they were fired up. A few bank lobbyists may have been sitting in the audience, but if so, they were lying low.

A number of reporters showed up, and the hallways were crowded with television cameras. We had scheduled several people to testify, including policy wonks and businesspeople. But we also heard from some of the people whose lives had been torn apart by the crisis. The witness I will never forget—the man who made it clear what this catastrophe was all about—was Mr. Estrada, the father of two little girls.

Mr. Estrada wore a jacket over his T-shirt and had on a red US Marine Corps baseball cap. He and his wife both worked, and they had stretched their budget to buy a home that would get their girls into a good school. Their home meant everything to Mr. Estrada: “This is my dream house, because I can open my garage door and see my daughters playing right directly across the street because that’s where their school is at.” When the payments on their mortgage jumped, they fell behind. He tried to negotiate with the bank, and he thought he and the bank had arranged a settlement. Then—poof!—the house was sold at auction. “So at the end,” he said, the bankers “tell me that I have fourteen days to get my children out of the house.”

Mr. Estrada explained what happened next:

My six-year-old came home the other day with a full sheet of paper with all of her friends’ names on it. And she told—she told me that these were the people that were going to miss her because we were going to have to be moving. And I told my daughter, I says, “I don’t care if I have to live in a van. You’re still going to be able to go to this school.” I’m trusting in God that we’re going to be able to be back into this home again.



Several times Mr. Estrada paused to try to get control of himself, and his pain and desperation seemed to push all the air out of the room. I held my breath, hoping I wouldn’t cry, and I noticed that Damon’s hands were shaking. Even now, I think about Mr. Estrada and his little girls. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Others came forward to tell similar stories. The oversight panel didn’t have any money to give out, and we didn’t have the power to stop any of the foreclosures. But we promised to tell their stories and to remember them when we did our work. It wasn’t anywhere near enough, but at least it was something. People thanked us for coming and filed quietly out of the auditorium.

After the hearing, Damon, Richard, and I drove through Las Vegas neighborhoods not too far from the beautiful hotels and dramatic fountains. We saw vacant homes and a pickup loaded with furniture, foreclosure postings, and abandoned construction sites. No glitzy casinos here. Instead, we saw evidence everywhere of the countless people who had believed in the American dream, worked hard to make it a reality, and then lost it all.





Treasury Ignores COP

I left Las Vegas and spent the next week worrying about Treasury’s response. Our report had asked just ten questions of the Treasury Department. If they planned to cooperate, we should be getting some good answers any day now.

Bruce and I went to California for Christmas with our children and grandchildren. By this point, Octavia was seven and Lavinia was three. The girls were at delicious ages—they loved baking holiday cookies and dressing up like princesses. They thought their “Gammy” (as Octavia had dubbed me) was the best. But that Christmas holiday passed in a blur, as I paced up and down the sidewalk in front of Amelia’s home, exchanging anxious cell phone calls with other panel members, while the rest of the family was inside wrapping presents.

On December 30, I got the call: Treasury had responded. I opened my laptop and downloaded their letter, eager to see what they had given us. The answer? A big nothing sandwich. I was stunned. Later, ABC News summarized the Treasury response this way:

Cut-and-paste reports were once the domain of high school cheats cutting corners on their term papers.… Rather than write original answers to questions posed in December by a congressional oversight panel, U.S. Treasury officials appear to have creatively repurposed old testimony and even Web site copy into a 13-page report that left some questions entirely unanswered.



The secretary of the Treasury had just blown off the COP panel.

As I saw it, this was a make-or-break moment for us. We had asked the simplest possible questions in the bluntest possible language so that everyone could see the insiders’ plan for rescuing our economy. By not taking our questions seriously, the Treasury Department had treated oversight as irrelevant. In effect, they had said, “Trust us to do the right thing. Now go away.” This time we had a choice: We could either call them out on it or go hide in a corner for the rest of our tenure.

The next COP report was due in ten days. What should we do?