Tag: TMC Politics

There was a deluge of news about banking and foreclosure fraud over the weekend much of it going unnoticed because of the Super Bowl. There was the revelation that Fannie Mae has known about mortgage and foreclosure fraud for 10 years, knew it was fraud but did nothing to stop it. This morning there was another surge with the news about the state attorneys general agreement. It looks like two of the biggest holdouts, New York and California, may sign the agreement even though public details are still very vague. I suspect that the secrecy about the final agreement may be because it let the banks off the hook for the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on investors, robosigning.

Here’s what we know:

New York AG Eric Schneiderman filed a law suit in NY State Court in Brooklyn on Friday charging them with deceptive and fraudulent practices that harmed homeowners and undermined the judicial foreclosure process. David Dayen at FDL thinks this is a “carve out” that paved the way for other state AG’s to do the same and still be able to sign onto the federally negotiated agreement:

The answer is, according to what I’ve learned, is that it’s a carve-out. Schneiderman can pursue this case and also theoretically join a settlement. This may or may not be true of other cases with other AGs. The timing of Illinois’ lawsuit against Nationwide Title Clearing yesterday seems significant in that regard; perhaps Lisa Madigan also secured a carve-out for her case. It’s plausible to think that AGs are being told to get out their lawsuits now, prior to a settlement, and they would be allowed in the event of a settlement. Schneiderman still hasn’t agreed to the settlement, but in the event that he does, the case dropped today would be able to go forward. [..]

Like me, Dayen doesn’t see the advantage for the banks to sign off on the agreement if they can’t stop suits like Schneiderman’s and others in Illinois, Massachusetts and Nevada. There are a lot of questions.

Late last night, during the Super Bowl, the story broke in the New York Times that the deal with the states was about to be closed:

The biggest remaining holdout, California, has returned to the negotiating table after a four-month absence, a change of heart that could increase the pot for mortgage relief nationwide to $25 billion from $19 billion.

Another important potential backer, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman of New York, has also signaled that he sees progress on provisions that prevented him from supporting it in the past.

The potential support from California and New York comes in exchange for tightening provisions of the settlement to preserve the right to investigate past misdeeds by banks, and stepping up oversight to ensure that the financial institutions live up to the deal and distribute the money to the hardest-hit homeowners.

The settlement would require banks to provide billions of dollars in aid to homeowners who have lost their homes to foreclosure or who are still at risk, after years of failed attempts by the White House and other government officials to alter the behavior of the biggest banks.

Yves Smith at naked capitalism was not surprised and expressed her doubts about Schneiderman’s ability to beat the Obama administration’s protectionism:

Kamala Harris, the California AG, was widely seen as “political” and therefore was not seen as a solid holdout. I remain disappointed by the conduct of our attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who is also now participating in the talks. His decision to join a Federal task force undermined the opposition to the settlement and looks to have cleared the way for the Administration to craft a win on this deal (note it is still possible it will not get done, but the odds were low as of last week and appear to be sinking further).

Assuming a deal is inked, Schneiderman and new partners in the Administration will no doubt contend that his involvement in the negotiations resulted in an improvement in terms for homeowners and states. I’m also told that he sincerely believes he can get a serious investigation underway and take advantage of Federal statutes with longer statutes of limitations than most state level ones.

Schneiderman may think he can beat the Administration at its own game, and if he can, more power to him, but I would not bet on him coming out on top.

It is too late (it was probably too late when Schneiderman sat in Michelle Obama’s box during the State of the Union address) but if you are in California or New York, you might as well call or e-mail your AG and give them a piece of your mind. Keeping the pressure on Schneiderman and Harris, and supporting AGs like Beau Biden of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Martha Coakley of Massachusetts, are the best hope we have at this point.

For New York, call 800 771-7755, 212 416-8000 or 518 474-5481 use the web form here or at his fundraising office. For Kamala Harris, call 916 445-9555 or this web form.

There are also questions about who will actually pay for this bank bailout which in actuality amounts to only $5 billion in cash and the rest in mortgage modifications. It does nothing to correct or compensate homeowners who have already been foreclosed on or who are so underwater that they don’t qualify for modification. Again Yves Smith explains the role of second liens in this bank bailout

To give a brief recap of the post: both a small group discussion with Shaun Donovan (reported by Dave Dayen of Firedoglake and separately by Shahien Nasirpour of the Financial Times) and the Schneiderman MERS lawsuit on Friday confirm our previously-stated hypothesis that the settlement is really a transfer from mortgage investors to banks. That is why the banks remain willing to participate as the release has been whittled down to appease the formerly dissenting attorneys general (remember, the old reason for the banks to go along was that it was a cash for release deal: the banks were willing to pay hard money to get a significant waiver of liability).

The reason this settlement amounts to a transfer is the banks will be given credit towards the total reported value of the settlement for modifying mortgages that they do not own, meaning that economic loss will be borne by investors. Servicers have an obvious incentive to shift losses onto other parties whenever possible, and so the only principal mods they are likely to do of loans they own are one they would have done anyhow.

In addition, default rates are higher among borrowers with second liens, and second liens are almost entirely held on bank balance sheets. Which banks? Oh, the ones that happen to be the four biggest servicers: Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Wells. And those second lien holdings are collectively in the hundreds of billions. Were they written down to the degree that some mortgage investors argue is warranted, it would reveal that these banks were seriously undercapitalized.

As we stressed, this plan is a serious violation of property rights (not that that should be any surprise at this point). The creditor hierarchy is clear: second liens should be written off in their entirety before first liens are touched. Yet we also linked to evidence in the post from top mortgage analyst Laurie Goodman that servicers were already doing everything they could to favor their second liens over firsts. This settlement would give official sanction to this practice.

I also want to flag, a second time, an appalling throwaway comment in a New York Times update tonight:

  The settlement, if all states participate, will also include $3 billion to lower the rates of mortgage holders who are current.

In other words, the agreement bails out homeowners that don’t need it while throwing those who are in the deepest trouble  because of that second lien (mortgage) to the sharks. Those second liens are a big problem, as Yves notes:

   As leading mortgage analyst Laurie Goodman pointed out in a late 2010 presentation, just over half of the private label (non Fannie/Freddie) securitizations have second liens behind them (overwhelmingly home equity lines of credit). Moreover, homes with first liens only have far lower delinquency rates than homes with both first and second liens. Separately, various studies have found that defaults are also correlated with how far underwater a borrower is. If a borrower is too far in negative equity territory, it makes less sense for them to struggle to stay current, no matter how much they love their home […]

   [Banks] also have been modifying first liens to preserve their second liens. If you reduce the payments on the first mortgage, the borrower has more money left to pay the second lien. From the transcript of Goodman’s 2010 presentation:

   “Clearly there’s a differential standard of managing second liens and securitizations versus second liens in bank portfolios. It’s very clear banks are doing all they can to get the, to keep, to get the first lien modified in order to keep the second intact, and that is just a huge conflict of interest.”

   Legally, the hierarchy of payment OUGHT to be clear: a second should be wiped out before a first lien is touched. That’s how it works in a foreclosure or a bankruptcy: only after the first lien was paid in full would a second lien get anything. But that isn’t what is happening now.

Homeowners with second liens are in far more trouble. Which brings us to this revelation that Fannie Mae knew all about the wide spread mortgage abuses for 10 years and ignored it:

YEARS before the housing bust – before all those home loans turned sour and millions of Americans faced foreclosure – a wealthy businessman in Florida set out to blow the whistle on the mortgage game. [..]

What Fannie Mae knew about abusive foreclosure practices, and when it knew it, are crucial questions as Congress and the Obama administration weigh the future of the company and its cousin, Freddie Mac. These giants eventually blew themselves apart and, so far, they have cost taxpayers $150 billion. But before that, their size and reach – not only through their own businesses, but also through the vast amount of work they farm out to law firms and loan servicers – meant that Fannie and Freddie shaped the standards for the entire mortgage industry.

Almost all of the abuses that Mr.(Nye) Lavalle began identifying in 2003 have since come to widespread attention. The revelations have roiled the mortgage industry and left Fannie, Freddie and big banks with potentially enormous legal liabilities. More worrying is that the kinds of problems that Mr. Lavalle flagged so long ago, and that Fannie apparently ignored, have evicted people from their homes through improper or fraudulent foreclosures.

This is a huge financial problem that will still loom over the economy, especially if the banks, Fannie and Freddie are not being held legally and financially responsible for setting this all in motion. The likelihood that Schneiderman will have any success in prosecuting or obtaining a satisfactory restitution for the victims of this massive fraud against an administration that has protected the perpetrators is slim to none. I wish him luck but I will be truly disappointed if he signs this agreement.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Chris Hayes: Sunday’s guests Amy Goodman of (@democracynow), Melissa Harris-Perry (@MHarrisPerry) host of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) MSNBC contributor and Slate political reporter, Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) politics editor for Business Insider, Eli Lake (@elilake) senior national security reporter for Newsweek / The Daily Beast, Anne-Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM) former director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State and University of Princeton professor of politics and international affairs, and Michelle Goldberg (@michelleinbklyn), senior contributing writer for Newsweek / The Daily Beast.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Guests are REpublican GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), former Obama advisor Lawrence Summers, top Romney economic advisor Glenn Hubbard, and Diane Swonk of Mesirow Financial. Roundtable guests are ABC’s George Will, political strategist and ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd, AOL Huffington Post Media Group president Arianna Huffington, and radio host and Bigjournalism.com editor Dana Loesch debate all the week’s politics.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: This week’s guests are GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The Boston Globe’s Michael Kranish, author of The Real Romney, CBS News’ Chief White House Correspondent Norah O’Donnell and CBS News’ Political Director John Dickerson analyze Campaign 2012. Former RNC chairman and co-founder of American Crossroads PAC, Ed Gillespie, discusses the impact of super PACs.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent; Michael Duffy TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast Editor, The Dish; and Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post Columnist.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Sunday’s guests are GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (D), New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R). Roundtable guests are Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), NY Times columnist David Brooks, GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Guests are Virginia Governor and Republican Governors Association Chair Bob McDonnell and Maryland Governor and Democratic Governors Association Chair Martin O’Malley, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI). Joining for a discussion panel are Former CBO Directors Alice Rivlin, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and CNN Senior Political Analyst Ron Brownstein.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Joan Walsh and Rebecca Traister: Susan G. Komen’s priceless gift

A radical decision woke the country up to an alarming rightward drift, and gave new life to women’s health advocacy

The startling intensity that we saw this week in response to Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s decision to pull its grants from Planned Parenthood – an intensity that prompted the Komen foundation to reverse its decision today – may be the best thing that’s happened to the conversation about reproductive rights in this country for decades. It certainly should be.

Practically since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, reproductive rights activists have been left to play stilted defense against ideological opponents who grabbed the language of morality, life, love and family as their own, always deploying it with reference to the fetus. The rhetoric around reproductive rights, which has more recently begun to creep into arguments over contraception, has become suffocating in its emotional self-righteousness, but too muscular, too ubiquitous to effectively combat.

But the overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency – armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they’ve been lacking for too long.

George Zornick: Schneiderman Goes After Banks for Foreclosure Fraud

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a major lawsuit today against three major too-big-to-fail banks, charging them with rampant foreclosure fraud in the wake of the housing crisis. It’s a crucially important lawsuit in its own right, but also raises major questions about the nature of the supposedly looming federal and state settlement with these same banks.

Schneiderman is acting here as New York attorney general-not as co-chair of the new federal task force on the financial crisis. That effort aims to uncover wrongdoing before the crash-or, “the stuff that blew up the economy,” as he put it last week.

This is different. Schneiderman, on behalf of New York State, is accusing Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo of serious and wide-ranging abuses with foreclosures-of improperly foreclosing on homes they didn’t have the correct ownership of or paperwork for. Specifically, Schneiderman is targeting the Mortgage Electronic Registry System (MERS), which he also names in the lawsuit. MERS is a private, national database of foreclosures created by the banks and used widely for taking people’s homes-but since it wasn’t public and run by the financial institutions that stood to gain from rapid foreclosures, there were (shockingly!) a lot of errors and improper filings.

Nothing surprising about the revelation in today’s New York Times that the SEC has failed to get tough with the big banks but it does highlight how Occupy Wall St. has change this conversation in the traditional media that is now taking a more critical look at what is wrong with the economy and why. Despite all the whining from the agency that it doesn’t have the resources or the tools, when in fact it does but has refused to use them against the biggest and repeat offenders. The SEC has repeatedly granted waivers to the laws and regulations that stop fraud:

JPMorganChase, for example, has settled six fraud cases in the last 13 years, including one with a $228 million settlement last summer, but it has obtained at least 22 waivers, in part by arguing that it has “a strong record of compliance with securities laws.” Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which merged in 2009, have settled 15 fraud cases and received at least 39 waivers.

Only about a dozen companies – Dell, General Electric and United Rentals among them – have felt the full force of the law after issuing misleading information about their businesses. Citigroup was the only major Wall Street bank among them. In 11 years, it settled six fraud cases and received 25 waivers before it lost most of its privileges in 2010.

The SEC also does keep an organized data base of the waivers it granted, so in its investigation the NYT’s had do some digging but found some very telling facts about the SEC’s failures to protect investors while protecting the big banks from lawsuits and prosecution:

JPMorganChase is among the big Wall Street firms that have been granted multiple waivers with nearly every settlement of S.E.C. fraud charges. Last July, it agreed to pay $228 million to settle civil and criminal charges that it cheated cities and towns by rigging bids with other Wall Street firms to invest the money raised by several municipalities for capital projects.

JPMorgan received three waivers related to that case for privileges that it otherwise would have lost. But the S.E.C. said the company’s fraudulent actions didn’t involve misleading investors about JPMorgan’s business. [..]

Despite six securities fraud settlements in 13 years, JPMorgan rarely if ever lost any special privileges. It has been awarded at least 22 waivers since 2003, with most of its S.E.C. settlements generating two or more. In seeking the reprieves, lawyers for JPMorgan stated in letters to the S.E.C. that it should grant a waiver because the company has “a strong record of compliance with the securities laws.”

JPMorgan isn’t the only big bank that has received a pass on fraud from the SEC, Bank of America has been a recipient of favored status:

In 2009, the S.E.C. was negotiating with Bank of America over charges that it had failed to disclose to shareholders that billions of dollars in bonuses were being paid to Merrill Lynch executives just as Bank of America was bailing out the firm.

Because the S.E.C. charges involved fraudulent statements by both Bank of America and Merrill Lynch about their financial status, the merged company was in danger of losing its special privileges for both offerings and forecasts. [..]

It settled the case by agreeing to a $150 million payment. The S.E.C., however, decided not to charge the bank with fraud, which could have endangered the bank’s special status. Instead, the S.E.C. charged Bank of America with violating disclosure rules for shareholder materials and proxies, and Bank of America kept its privileges.

It took years before the SEC finally took action against Citigroup for its violations of rules and regulations but in 2010. That only happened because Citibank blatantly lied to its investors about the amount of risk it was carrying on its balance sheets. In its disclosure the bank stated that it was only holding $13 billion in risks when in reality it was $50 billion. It settled the case for $75 million but because of the falsification of its financial statement it lost the ability to insulate itself from lawsuits over mistaken predictions about its business and had to wait weeks for the SEC’s approvals to make itself eligible to sell stocks, bonds and other securities to the public. Prior to those sanctions Citibank had settled six fraud cases and received 25 waivers. Meanwhile JPMorgan, Gold Sachs and others have avoided sanctions and continue their fraudulent practices.

Yves Smith at naked capitalism in pointing out the significance of this article makes this observation:

What the article does not make quite clear is the SEC rationale for this double standard. I’d hazard that it’s that big financial players are often in the market raising funds, and restricting their access is, well, just a bit too mean since they are money junkies. Just look how hard it was for Citi when it fell out of the SEC’s most favored nations status and lost its ability to use so-called “shelf registrations” to sell stock and bonds:

   And the companies continue to use rules that let them instantly raise money publicly, without waiting weeks for government approvals. Without the waivers, the companies could not move as quickly as rivals that had not settled fraud charges to sell stocks or bonds when market conditions were most favorable.

OMG, if you break the law, you might be put at a competitive disadvantage! Can’t have that, now can we?

She concludes:

[..] As we have said, one of basic rules of regulating is to make sure the regulated know you are not cowed by them. When I was a young person working on Wall Street, investment banks were afraid of the SEC. By contrast, this article reveals, as many have suspected, that regulators have plenty of tools to bring banks to heel. They choose not to use them.

The SEC does have a defense of sorts, which is (as we have recounted) that Congress has cut off funding when it merely tried to be tough in defending retail investors from abuses under Arthur Levitt in the 1990s. The passivity of the SEC is a symptom of elite corruption. A reform-minded President could choose to cross swords with Congress and defend the agency against harassment for tough minded enforcement. But that would be in a parallel universe where the banks were not in charge.

It was the Occupy Wall St. movement and a handful of state attorneys general who have changed the conversation from protecting the 1% to investigating them and looking at their practices and the agencies that regulate them with a more critical eye.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

New York Times Editorial: A Painful Betrayal

With its roster of corporate sponsors and the pink ribbons that lend a halo to almost any kind of product you can think of, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation has a longstanding reputation as a staunch protector of women’s health. That reputation suffered a grievous, perhaps mortal, wound this week from the news that Komen, the world’s largest breast cancer organization, decided to betray that mission. It threw itself into the middle of one of America’s nastiest political battles, on the side of hard-right forces working to demonize Planned Parenthood and undermine women’s health and freedom. [..]

In addition to harming women, the foundation has also tarnished, perhaps permanently, its brand, symbolized by the pink ribbon that adorns yogurt cups and running shoes and tote bags and Federal Premium Ammunition’s pink shotgun shells. Companies like Ford Motor, Dell and Yoplait may not find the same value in identifying themselves with the foundation after its sharp departure from political neutrality.

Paul Krugman: Romney Isn’t Concerned

If you’re an American down on your luck, Mitt Romney has a message for you: He doesn’t feel your pain. Earlier this week, Mr. Romney told a startled CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”

Faced with criticism, the candidate has claimed that he didn’t mean what he seemed to mean, and that his words were taken out of context. But he quite clearly did mean what he said. And the more context you give to his statement, the worse it gets.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

William Rivers Pitt’s reflection on the 10th anniversary of his first article for truthout is an inspirational message to all writers and why to keep writing more and often.

William Rivers Pitt: This Is What I Know

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”

~ Mark Twain

A bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.

I’m not going to lie and say this particular combination hasn’t come together before on my desk, but it has been rare enough to be considered special, and here we are. You see, something struck me out of the clear blue a while ago: the very first article of mine Truthout ever published happened somewhere in early 2002, so I did a little digging with the help of my Facebook friends, and hot damn, there it was: “Hell to Pay,” published on January 17, 2002. [..]

Yeah, we have plenty of work to do yet.

The rage is still there.

I said this a long time ago, many times over, but it is worth repeating: I do not expect to see the things I fight for happen in my lifetime. Matters have gone far beyond that. I expect to fail, to die in defeat. That does not matter to me. The fight is worth waging because these things matter, and I intend to give the years I have left to that fight, no matter the outcome. Sooner or later, we will prevail. Write it down; I just did. I probably won’t be here to see it, but victory is its own reward, because a better world is possible, and that is all that matters.

A bottle of whiskey, a shot glass, and an article to write.

Here’s to you, to us, to this.

Here’s to getting it done.

Here’s to the next ten years. May they be better than the last

(emphasis mine)

Michelle Chen: In Year of Uprisings, Reporters Brave Crackdowns from Wall St. to Tahrir Square

You wouldn’t think handling a notebook or a camera could be a hazardous line of work. But according to the latest global Press Freedom Index, abuse and oppression of reporters has made journalism an increasingly risky job in many countries. The past year has even left a notable taint on the U.S. press, despite the country’s mythos as a beacon of free expression.

While the United States certainly hasn’t descended into the ranks of the most oppressive regimes, the watchdog group Reporters without Borders observes that in 2011 the political barriers and outright attacks facing reporters had led to a steep drop in the rankings-27 places down, to number 47:

   In the space of two months in the United States, more than 25 [journalists] were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police who were quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behaviour, public nuisance or even lack of accreditation.

The most high-profile violations of press freedom took place during the Occupy protests, as reporters were abused by police and otherwise stonewalled by authorities.

Nothing is as it seems and all the optimism about how the mortgage settlement with the banks was about to be sealed with a kiss turns about to be premature. With a deadline of February 3 for states to declare whether they are joining the settlement, some major questions have been raised about just what the definition of “narrow” is for the Obama administration.

From Yves Smith at naked capitalism.

Yet More Mortgage Settlement Lies: Release Looks Broad, Not Narrow; Other States Screwed to Bribe California to Join

While there is every reason to believe there has been some improvement in terms due to the resistance of Schneiderman and other state attorneys general (Beau Biden of Delaware, Martha Coakley of Massachusetts, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Kamala Harris of California), the notion that, per Mike Lux, “the settlement release is tight” appears to be patently false.

Since there has yet to be any disclosure of the draft terms, we can’t be certain, but a reading of a letter sent by Nevada’s Masto gives plenty of cause for pause. Reaching inferences from her 38 questions is a Plato’s cave exercise, but some of the items seem pretty clear. [..]

Yves explains the concerns that the banks would be released of liability of not just robosigning but chain of title securitizations and origination issues. She then get to the latter from Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto who submitted a letter to settlement negotiators

Most of her queries are sufficiently technical so as to make it hard to guess with any certainty as to what the language of the agreement might be, but two questions at the top stood out:

This certainly looks as if Masto sees the origination release as broad. Asking for an itemization of what is NOT included suggests a lot seems to be included.

But this is the whopper:

From early on, we have stressed that this is a cash for release deal, and this looks like a VERY big release. The banks will pay an amount into the fund, and all issues relating to robo-signing and foreclosure will be released by the AGs: the banks will have a state level release from all bad assignment/transfer issues. [..]

Remember, bank executives piously swore in 2010 that they stopped robosigning, yet their firms continue to engage in that practice.

Then there is the matter of trying to bribe California’s AG Kamala Harris back into the fold by giving California 60% of the $25 billion. She notes this article from the Financial Times by Shahien Nasiripour

   California, home to the largest US property market, spurned an offer of roughly $15bn in lower monthly mortgage payments and reduced loan balances for its residents in talks to settle allegations of mortgage-related misdeeds by leading US banks…

   California would have received more than half of about $25bn of aid that would be available to borrowers in a nationwide deal under discussion to settle allegations that banks illegally seized homes using faulty documentation.

   Deal terms, sent to state attorneys-general late last week after nearly a year of talks between the banks and various states and federal agencies, did not include guaranteed minimums for any other states, people familiar with the matter said. Various state officials said they were unaware of the California offer.

Yves notes that AG Masto in question #24 asks for clarification of how much each state would receive.

I agree with Yves that it’s hard to imagine how any attorney general could sign onto this agreement and begs to question why Florida’s AG Pam Bondi would be pushing California to sign on to this and not pushing for a better settlement for the homeowners of her state. Masto certainly did her homework as David Dayen at FDL News Desk noted:

n other words, Masto did her homework and saw this settlement as little more than a framework, without specificity on the release, the level of relief on a per-state basis, and the level of enforcement. Or, in other words, everything. And by the way, they want an answer by the end of the week. That’s clear at the end of Masto’s letter, where she writes: “Because there is a sign-on deadline of February 3, 2012, I need this information as soon as possible to allow my office to continue to evaluate the proposal on behalf of the state of Nevada.”

Every AG should be asking these same questions including Eric Schneiderman.

And that leads to the question of Eric Schneiderman and his motivations for sitting on the sideline and not opposing what appears to be a walk from liability for the banks and screw the homeowners. This is a very disappointing development and it won’t win Obama any votes either.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Wednesday is Ladies’ Day

For some of us on the left, we were never invited to the “party.”

Taylor Marsh: The Party’s Over

There’s a reason Obama reelect doesn’t have a slogan.

All they’ve got is a question: Are you in? [..]

George W. Bush inspired the rise of the Tea Party, so one hoped that Barack Obama’s repeated applications of conservatism would unleash a requisite uprising on the left. However, there has been no challenge to Pres. Obama, with progressives in Congress and outside groups again and again rallying for him, while choosing to ignore his choice of conservatism over progressivism.

Pres. Obama can’t find a reelection slogan because his 2012 campaign boils down to the reality that “hope and change” has been reduced to “Republicans are worse.”

That’s not good enough for me anymore.

Katrina venden Heuvel: Eric Schneiderman: The Right Man, the Right Moment

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama announced what Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, describes as maybe “the most fateful political and economic development of the election year”-the formation of an inter-agency task force to finally investigate the mortgage and lending practices that led to the collapse of the economy and trillions of dollars in lost wealth, with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman named as co-chair.

It remains to be seen whether Schneiderman will be given the extensive resources and manpower he needs to conduct a thorough and aggressive investigation, or if the Wall Street faction within the Administration will stonewall the process. But I’m confident in this: Schneiderman is the right man for the job and he’s not about to let himself be co-opted for the President’s reelection bid. Throughout his career he’s been a steadfast champion of causes because they are right, not because they are popular or politically expedient. He’s been successful because he works to move voters closer to his positions, and sets a course toward a better future and better possibilities. If he’s being obstructed, he’ll let people know.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Maira Sutton and Parker Higgins: We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA

If there’s one thing that encapsulates what’s wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it. You wouldn’t know it from the name, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a plurilateral agreement designed to broaden and extend existing intellectual property (IP) enforcement laws to the Internet. While it was only negotiated between a few countries,1 it has global consequences. First because it will create new rules for the Internet, and second, because its standards will be applied to other countries through the U.S.’s annual Special 301 process. Negotiated in secret, ACTA bypassed checks and balances of existing international IP norm-setting bodies, without any meaningful input from national parliaments, policymakers, or their citizens. Worse still, the agreement creates a new global institution, an “ACTA Committee” to oversee its implementation and interpretation that will be made up of unelected members with no legal obligation to be transparent in their proceedings. Both in substance and in process, ACTA embodies an outdated top-down, arbitrary approach to government that is out of step with modern notions of participatory democracy.

The EU and 22 of its 27 member states signed ACTA yesterday in Tokyo. This news is neither momentous nor surprising. This is but the latest step in more than three years of non-transparent negotiations. In December, the Council of the European Union-one of the European Union’s two legislative bodies, composed of executives from the 27 EU member states-adopted ACTA during a completely unrelated meeting on agriculture and fisheries. Of course, this is not the end of the story in the EU. For ACTA to be adopted as EU law, the European Parliament has to vote on whether to accept or reject it.

Jim Hightower: Buying Our Future

Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas-based global casino baron who has long been a major funder of far-right-wing causes, is Newt Gingrich’s very special political pal.

Already, four of the top GOP presidential contenders have dropped out. Michele Bachmann went first, because she was too wacky, followed by Jon Huntsman, because he was too sane. Herman Cain gave up because he was too exposed, and Rick Perry because he was too dim-witted.

But the greatest surprise is the sudden surge of the Adelson campaign. Little-known until now, Adelson was the big winner in South Carolina, has made his mark in Florida, and looks to have the political kick needed to go the distance.

Never heard of the Adelson campaign? It’s the married duo of Sheldon and Miriam, neither of whom is actually on the ballot. Rather, they are running on the cash ticket.