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Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Iowa AG Miller Claims No Foreclosure Fraud Settlement This Week

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Monday January 23, 2012 2:55 pm

Perhaps Tom Miller, the head of the executive committee negotiating a foreclosure fraud settlement, is feeling a little too much heat today.

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(L)et’s just go back to what this is all about, because it has very little to do with the usual media storylines and narratives running about. Somewhere along the lines the financial industry stopped keeping the records they were legally required to keep to ensure that they had standing to foreclose on borrowers. Instead of untangling the mess, they participated in a cover-up, by fabricating documents and affidavits on a mass scale to sucker courts into allowing foreclosures. That is no different than criminal theft. If I came into a courtroom looking to foreclose on a homeowner, and my proof of ownership was a plastic bag with the words “I OWNZ THAT” scrawled on it, that would be little different, under the eyes of the law, from what the banking industry has done over the last decade. Strip away all the complexities in the law and that’s what you’re left with.

So state and federal regulators attempting to settle with banks for stealing homes are really violently upsetting any pretense of a rule of law in America. Setting aside the fact that the penalty is completely inadequate and there’s no indication that banks will actually follow through on the specifics, some things are more important than a financial settlement can provide. The current group of big banks and loan servicers broke the richest market in the world, the residential US housing market. They really do need to pay for this. Because if they don’t, they will continue to violate the law as they have been doing unchecked for the past several years.

The lights will be burning late tonight as they frantically re-write the State of the Union.

Good.