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.

…

(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.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Terms Laid Out, But Holdout AGs Not Signed On

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Saturday January 21, 2012 9:38 am

When I started digging into whether this Monday meeting with HUD and DoJ officials to go over a proposal for a foreclosure fraud settlement was legitimate, I couldn’t find one state Attorney General who mattered actually committed to showing up. When I say AGs who “matter,” I mean the ones who have been critical of a settlement in the past. I mean the Justice Democrats. I mean Eric Schneiderman in New York, Beau Biden in Delaware, Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Kamala Harris in California, not to mention the AGs from Hawaii, New Hampshire, Missouri, Mississippi, Maryland, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon and Montana who showed up (either themselves or representatives) at the meeting in DC last week to discuss alternatives to a settlement. I mean them. They aren’t going to Chicago, by all accounts.

…

My sense is that this settlement proposal comes from the Obama Administration, Iowa AG Tom Miller and the small group of negotiators on the executive committee of state AGs, and pretty much nobody else. There’s just no guarantee that any of the Justice Democrats – or any of the Republicans, for that matter – will agree to any of it.

The Administration is trying to put the squeeze on the state AGs, particularly California, dangling $10 billion in “aid” in the deal. The aim, as Marcy Wheeler writes, is to increase pressure on Kamala Harris to agree to the settlement. The core issues haven’t changed, however. Harris called the settlement inadequate last year and it remains just as inadequate. This is a $25 billion settlement when there is $700 billion in negative equity in the country. This is a settlement that, according to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, will help 1 million homeowners, when 10.7 million are underwater and millions of others have been wrongfully foreclosed upon. This is a settlement that could put $17 billion of credits toward principal reduction (the rest of the money would go to legal aid, refis, short sales, token payoffs to foreclosed borrowers, and penalties), when there is more than twice as much sitting unused in an account as part of HAMP.

And these credits would get paid mostly by the owners of mortgage-backed securities, investors rather than the banks themselves.

…

According to previous reports, investors would not have approval on the modifications. So the majority of the settlement, where banks get the release of liability, would get paid with other people’s money. Servicers actually make out because they would reimburse themselves for the loan modifications, taking money that would otherwise go to the investors. The investors, in short, would get massively screwed by this deal.

But again, I’ve seen no evidence that anyone outside of the small circle of the Administration and the AGs on the executive committee negotiating the deal actually agree to it. Call it the 12-state deal, rather than the 50-state one. This is only closer to getting done in the sense that the folks who have wanted to cave all along are ready to do so.

Speaking of caving, why on earth would the Obama Administration in general and Eric Holder in particular want to do that?

Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks

By Scot J. Paltrow, Reuters

Fri Jan 20, 2012 9:31am EST

(Reuters) – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who’s Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington’s biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.

…

As Reuters reported in 2011, public records show large numbers of mortgage promissory notes with apparently forged endorsements that were submitted as evidence to courts.

There also is evidence of almost routine manufacturing of false mortgage assignments, documents that transfer ownership of mortgages between banks or to groups of investors. In foreclosure actions in courts mortgage assignments are required to show that a bank has the legal right to foreclose.

In an interview in late 2011, Raymond Brescia, a visiting professor at Yale Law School who has written about foreclosure practices said, “I think it’s difficult to find a fraud of this size on the U.S. court system in U.S. history.”

Holder has resisted calls for a criminal investigation since October 2010, when evidence of widespread “robo-signing” first surfaced. That involved mortgage servicer employees falsely signing and swearing to massive numbers of affidavits and other foreclosure documents that they had never read or checked for accuracy.

…

On Wednesday, John O’Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O’Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they “show a pattern of fraud,” forgery and false notarizations.

Corrupt guzzle to zatch (look it up).

Update: Newt Wins!  MSNBC @ 7 pm.

Stephen Colbert’s unfunny run for president

By Colbert I. King, The Washington Post

Published: January 20

I don’t find comedian Stephen Colbert’s involvement in the Republican presidential race the least bit funny.

…

I fail to see the humor in Colbert urging South Carolinians to vote in Saturday’s primary for businessman Herman Cain, who dropped out of the presidential race but whose name remains on the ballot. Throwing away votes degrades a system already brought low by the unprecedented airing of negative ads so early in the nominating process.

Besides, too much has gone into getting the right to vote to treat the ballot like a game. Cain, who held a joint rally with Colbert in South Carolina on Friday, should know better.

…

Acquiring the millions needed to get a presidential campaign off the ground requires grueling hours of asking people and groups to part with their treasures on behalf of your cause.

Now introduce into that mix an entertainer who takes neither himself nor the political process seriously, who lives for laughs and satire, and has the prominence and enough dough to form a super PAC and try to muscle his way into the nominating process. The result is a mockery of the race.

Maybe I’m becoming a curmudgeon. But I don’t see the humor.

As nearly as I can determine, that is his real name and he is a real contributor to the Washington Post.  You can’t just make this stuff up folks.

Chuck Todd @ Winthrop University

Part the First

Part the Second

Moron.

Stephen Colbert shows Republicans how to draw a crowd

By David Horsey, L.A. Times

January 21, 2012, 8:16 a.m.

Reporting from Charleston, S.C. — Under the looming live oaks at the College of Charleston on Friday, Stephen Colbert delivered a clinic on how to produce a whiz-bang political rally. Significantly, not one of the Republican candidates this year has exhibited the star power to bring off such an extravaganza themselves.

…

Before Colbert delivered his satirical address, he allowed Cain a good chunk of time to give a speech very similar to one he delivered the day before to a sparse audience at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. The multitude Colbert provided him was at least 20 times bigger, but Cain’s platitudinous profundities would have been better saved for a Kiwanis luncheon. Even if sexual harassment allegations had not caught up with him, it’s clear that, by now, he still would have been sidelined alongside Rick Perry, Jon Huntsman and Michele Bachmann. Colbert is not only more funny, he is a far sharper analyst of contemporary politics.

The pertinent question raised by Colbert’s attention grab on the day before South Carolina’s primary vote is why the four remaining Republican candidates are not drawing crowds as big and adoring as Colbert’s. Yes, Colbert is a celebrity. He’s an expert entertainer. And it’s not too hard to get a few thousand college kids to skip class on any day of the week. But four years ago at this point in the campaign, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were pulling in crowds as big or bigger. John McCain was packing the gymnasiums pretty well too. And, later in the campaign, Sarah Palin proved she could rock an arena.

This year’s candidates are avoiding big events because they do not want to be photographed in half-empty halls. Gingrich actually refused to speak to the GOP leadership conference because so few Republicans showed up.

Rally

Stephen on Morning Joe

Hardball

What’s up with that Occupy Wall Street stuff?  I don’t get it!

30 Rock

WH Correspondents’ Dinner

He’s talking about you Chuck.

I’m putting this up while it’s still early enough to get to the polls in South Carolina, home of sedition, treason, segregation, and slavery (not that I’m under any illusion about the penetration of our readership in the Palmetto State), but I’ll bump it to become our anchor Open Thread when the results start coming in.

For the next two weeks we will be finishing Season 2 of Duck Dodgers with the 2 part Of Course You Know, This Means War and Peace that aired February 25, 2005.

As always with these transitions it’s hard to know how complete the record of the 3rd Season is in advance and it’s always subject to change at the whim of the YouTube posters that originated them.

I hope it’s been an entertaining and educational experience for you because it certainly has been for me.

Our regular featured content-

• On This Day In History January 20 by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

These featured articles-

• Anonymous Strikes Back Against FBI & Music Industry by: TheMomCat
• Greek Default Appears Inevitable by: TheMomCat
• A New Head For The World Bank by: TheMomCat

This is an Open Thread

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Modern Stage Combat

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ek hornbeck, The Stars Hollow Gazette, and DocuDharma– your go to SuperSource for embeddable The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC advertising.

<iframes> use Suicidal Sweatshop Chinese Child Labor!

Meet me at Camera 3- (they’re people!).

Our story so far-

Mitt the Ripper- Serial Killer?

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Not Abel?

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What about NO do you not understand?

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Related-

• Truthiness-
• The ONLY Question of any Political Significance in 2012

ek, don’t you think you’re a little old to be scouring the InterTubes

Yes, yes I am.

Today’s EARTH SHATTERING DEVELOPMENTS!!1!

36%!!!!!!

Mothers I’d like to Focus Group.

And Cain has a great singing voice.