Hold Fast

Freddie De Boer: I could never vote for Ron Paul, for a thousand reasons. I have been arguing against many of his policies and the worldview that generated them for the entirety of my adult life. But I have to value his voice in the national debate because almost no other national political figures will [...]

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Like Atrios, I have no idea who is assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. Odds are that it’s the US or Israel or both. But this is unquestionably terrorism. Advocating for the murder of civilians, as Glenn Reynolds did in the Bush years and Rick Santorum is doing now is clearly sick. But actually perpetrating these attacks [...]

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Via Yves Smith, Financial Times is reporting new developments in the talks between the nation’s five largest banks, 40+ state Attorneys General, and the Obama administration around robosigning and foreclosure fraud. Not so shockingly, the news isn’t good: Investors in US home mortgage bonds may have to swallow losses as part of a wide-ranging settlement [...]

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Matt Stoller has another great piece in Politico on the criminal behavior of the mortgage industry and the failures of the Obama administration to prosecute these crimes. President Barack Obama has argued, as recently as last Sunday on “60 Minutes,” that what happened on Wall Street wasn’t criminal. “Some of the most damaging behavior on [...]

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Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) issued a blistering letter calling on the Department of Justice to investigate big banks for fraudulent foreclosure practices before agreeing to any settlement deal which would grant them immunity for these practices. In her letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Cantwell writes: I am concerned that recently reported settlement proposals will [...]

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Metaphor fail: This time it is the Wall Street bankers and not the Occupiers who are getting hit with pepper spray. The spray comes straight from the laser printer in the chambers of a federal judge, Jed Rakoff, in New York. The victory that Rakoff gave to the Occupy Wall Street movement Monday came from [...]

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The New York Times is reporting that federal judge Jed Rakoff has thrown out a proposed settlement between Citigroup and the SEC. The SEC had agreed to $285 million in exchange for no admission of wrongdoing in a complaint about Citigroup defrauding investors in a 2007 residential mortgage backed security. Citigroup had told the investors [...]

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This is from early this past week, but is brutal. Keith Olbermann just utterly destroys Michael Bloomberg for his violent crackdown on Occupy Wall Street.

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Earlier this week Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto indicted two mid-level employees of Lender Processing Services (LPS) for 606 counts of robosigning, specifically “directing fraudulent notarization and filing of foreclosure documents.” LPS is a major company hired by banks to process foreclosure documents and has been at the center of the robosigning scandal. LPS [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog.com New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden have a joint op-ed in Politico yesterday. The dynamic duo have lead the charge to investigate the nation’s largest banks around robosigning, foreclosure fraud, and mortgage securitization fraud. They’ve also resisted a deal being worked out by Iowa AG [...]

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