WASHINGTON, D.C.—Wait, what's this now? Some ordinary people in a congressional hearing room, who are telling tales of how their ordinary lives were disrupted by the president-elect's nominee to be the Secretary of the Treasury? Very few cameras around? This is unusual. On Thursday, Stephen Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary-designate, will have his formal meeting with the Senate Banking Committee. Mnuchin used to run OneWest, a large bank that made a very large profit from various forms of financial chicanery that often ended up in foreclosure proceedings dropped on people he would never know.

In fact, in advance of his appearance, Mnuchin's opening statement was leaked on Wednesday afternoon. From The Hill:

OneWest quickly became profitable, but was investigated for violating California state foreclosure laws and is the subject of complaints it violated federal fair housing and discrimination laws. Democrats have called him the "foreclosure king," and progressive advocacy groups are running television ads targeting vulnerable Republican senators from states devastated by the 2008 housing. Mnuchin has defended his time at OneWest, pointing to the portfolio of risky mortgages he inherited and the more than 100,000 loan modifications he said the bank offered. Mnuchin also said he helped save thousands of jobs by salvaging OneWest before it was taken apart. "My group had nothing to do with the creation of risky loans in the IndyMac loan portfolios," Mnuchin will say. "We did this because we believed in our ability to rebuild and create a successful regional bank. We believed in recovery for the American economy."

Christina Clifford was one of those people who, when her business cratered during the 2008 recession, applied to Mnuchin's bank to modify the loan on her condominium in California. Twice, Clifford went through the application process. Both times, the bank said it had not received her paperwork even though it cashed the checks she'd sent along with it. Then, the bank foreclosed and gave her five days to move. "So, basically, all the work I did was null and void," Clifford said. "It was a nightmare."

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Clifford was one of five witnesses that Democrats on the committee wanted to testify at Mnuchin's confirmation hearing. Committee chairman Richard Shelby refused to allow it, so Senator Professor Warren and several of her colleagues arranged for them to tell their stories on Wednesday afternoon.

Besides Clifford, the witnesses included Colleen Ison-Hodroff, an 84-year old widow from Minnesota who got played on a reverse-mortgage by a OneWest subsidiary that demanded she pay the full balance a few days after her husband's funeral, as well as Heather McCreary and Sylvia Oliver, both of whom are currently going through the loan-modification maelstrom. Oliver was able to make the trip only because she got a 30-day extension of a foreclosure that was scheduled for Wednesday.

"As Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Mnuchin will touch the lives of every American," Warren said. "Here we have the stories of Americans whose lives he already has touched." It is an article of faith—or it should be —that the human damage of the 2008 financial catastrophe never has been properly litigated in the public mind. That seems less likely as the days go by. But the testimony of these women left a stark fact on the table for Stephen Mnuchin's confirmation hearing.

The disaster was not an accident. It was an engineered failure off of which some people are still getting rich. The economy crashed, but the burning continues.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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