With all the former banking executives in the top posts in your administration, how can we expect you to ever propose to hold the banks and bankers accountable for their crimes? Eric Holder’s former law practice was heavily involved with the banks.

I have already asked my questions in response to this email that I received. Use holder as a search term and give it the thumbs up or thumbs down. Then ask your own question.

Yahoo is carrying the Associated Press story $25B nationwide mortgage deal goes to states.

A draft settlement between the nation’s major banks and U.S. states over deceptive foreclosure practices has been sent to state officials for review.

Those who lost their homes to foreclosure are unlikely to get their homes back or benefit much financially from the settlement, which could be as high as $25 billion. About 750,000 Americans could receive checks for about $1,800 under the deal.

This is the first report I have seen and is very sketchy as to details.

$25B seems like a paltry sum for the whole country. The direct damage the banks caused to the people they enticed into mortgage traps must be far more than that. The profits the banks made and the bailouts that they received is far larger than this.

I wonder how the banks would negotiate if nationalization of the banks were one alternative to a negotiated deal.

We will have to await a full analysis by the States Attorneys General and more thorough blogosphere to know if this is a reasonable deal.  I can only hope that the wording of the deal limits it to crimes committed over deceptive foreclosure practices, and that crimes created in initiating the mortgages in the first place are still open to prosecution.

Here is an email I received that outlines what a fair bank settlement might look like and what we could hope the President will say in Tuesday’s State Of The Union Address.

Talking Points Memo has the article Scott Brown: What About All The Rich Schoolteachers?  It starts with the paragraph:

Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) made the case in Lowell, MA on Friday that letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire would create a burden for well-off teachers, firefighters, and police officers.

The tenor of most of the comments was about how dumb Scott Brown is  to not understand that there would be little burden to these public servants even for the tiny minority that did manage to earn incomes above $250,000.

It is not Scott Brown who is too dumb to understand the concept of the higher marginal tax rates only applying to the part of the earnings that are above $250K.  He knows that the people listening to him don’t understand.  When he makes these comments, he is just reinforcing their misunderstanding to use for his advantage.

When I was in college, I had a friend who was studying accounting.  He was afraid that if he earned more money he would be in a higher tax bracket and would therefore take home less money.  I never could explain to him the concept that there is no marginal tax rate that is above 100% which is what would be necessary for his nightmare scenario to be true.  In other words for each extra dollar he earned in the new tax bracket, he would get to keep a large share of it after taxes.  So his total income after taxes would increase for each extra dollar he earned.  He wasn’t going to be richer by refusing a salary increase.

I have been competely unsuccessful in explaining to the Warren campaign that she cannot just assume everyone will recognize the flaws in Brown’s ideas.  He is spending a lot of time miseducating the voters.  If she doesn’t spend a greater amount of time educating the voters, then she might lose.  And even if she wins, she won’t be able to be an effective Senator because of all the misinformed voters that will not want her to do the things that need doing.  Large numbers of middle-class people will be against her raising taxes on the wealthy, because of their flawed understanding of what that means.  These people will be against regulating the banks because they mistakenly think it will be bad for the economy.  These people will be against more economic stimulus because they mistakenly believe that raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for the stimulus will be bad for the economy.  They mistakenly believe that higher taxes on the wealthy is penalizing success, when it is in fact penalizing the taking unfair advantage of the rest of us.

Some of the wealthiest of the wealthy 1% made their money by vulture capitalism stealing the pension funds from the corporations they take over and then walking away from the debts they made the company incur in order to pay the vulture’s high earnings above what they took in pension funds. They also sold off all the company’s productive assets that were no longer needed after all the jobs had been shipped overseas.  They got rich by all their schemes that made other people poor.  This also had the salutary effect for these vultures of getting rid of the labor unions who might be strong enough to resist them.

Others of this class made money by enticing unsuspecting homeowners to take out mortgages with low initial teaser interest rates, so that they would borrow more than they could really afford to when the interest rose to its final, real rate.  These mortgage scammers then sold these mortgages to unsuspecting investors who were falsely given assurances that these were high quality mortgages.  Moreover, the mortgages were valued as if the borrowers would eventually pay the higher interest rates, which the lenders were assuring the borrowers that they never would have to pay. When the trap was sprung, the borrowers lost their homes, the investors lost their investments, and the con artists walked away with huge profits. Of course the profits grew even more when the tax payers bailed out the banks and bankers that had done the scamming.

The Moyers & Company episode David Stockman on Crony Capitalism starts with:

Moyers & Company explores the tight connection between Wall Street and the White House with David Stockman, former budget director for President Reagan.

Now a businessman who says he was “taken to the woodshed” for telling the truth about the administration’s tax policies, Stockman speaks candidly with Bill Moyers about how money dominates politics, distorting free markets and endangering democracy. “As a result,” Stockman says, “we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism.”

Stockman shares details on how the courtship of politics and high finance have turned our economy into a private club that rewards the super-rich and corporations, leaving average Americans wondering how it could happen and who’s really in charge.

“We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do… whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward,” Stockman tells Moyers.

This episode is a perfect example of why I sometimes stop watching Bill Moyers’ shows. The truth he tells is just too depressing. For someone like me, whose faith in President Obama has already been severely shaken, this show makes it even more difficult to conceive of supporting Obama in the 2012 election.

Can the President’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday contain anything that will change my mind? There are many things he could say, but I have my doubts he will say them. Is he going to say that his administration is now going to promote policies that are against the best interest of all of his own senior advisers? If he fails, that will just further cement my disappointment.

My previous post Elizabeth Warren And Hillary Clinton Trade Lessons has this disheartening quote from Elizabeth Warren:

…I believe that Mrs. Clinton was responsible for President Clinton’s veto of that bankruptcy bill. Ultimately, Congress passed the bill again in 2005 and George Bush signed it into law. But in that five-year period in between, eight million families went through the bankruptcy system, while the law was still intact. So the veto was important, and I believe she was the cause. And that’s what’s so disheartening. She changed her vote in the Senate. If Hillary Clinton, one of the strongest, most independent politicians of her generation, felt that she needed to conform her voting to the desires of the banking industry once she held elective office, what hope is there for the rest of the politicians?

I think I can detect in the way that the Warren campaign is running, that Warren has already found the need to conform her votes to the desires of the banking industry.

I did find the video of our protest. Pardon the commercial.

Wouldn’t you know that they would pick the snip-it of the part of the interview where I was most tongue-tied and conveyed the least amount of information. They also picked the part of the statement that did not implicate the big banks and bankers.

For a little background on this rally, see my previous post Robert Reich: Why We Should Investigate Banker Mortgage Fraud.

I found the link to this video in The Real News article Banksters and Gangsters.

Dylan Ratigan talks to Eliot Spitzer, former NY Attorney General, on what’s wrong with Wall Street, and what needs changing in the $700 Trillion-plus global swaps market, which our tax dollars subsidize. Part of it should be deemed “online gaming” they say.

To clarify, they are doing “online gaming” with your pension fund unbeknownst to you.

I know that Eliot Spitzer speaks very rapidly, but I hope you can get an understanding of what he is describing in amongst the jargon and the rapid fire delivery.

It is yet another explanation as to the way in which some of the ultra-rich get that way by gambling and scamming rather than working hard at useful pursuits. They get rich by ripping you off, not by selling a product or service that helps you in any way.

With enough repetition of the many ways this ripoff is legalized, I am hoping that enough people will hear about this so as to get a clue at what is being done to them in the name of not being socialist or European.

I came across the Reuters story, Analysis: Holder, top DOJ lawyers were partners with big banks, on Rawstory.com

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.

One of the issues that the law firm worked on was described thusly:

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. — roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS “vice presidents” or “assistant secretaries.”

Once again, I was protesting bank corruption yesterday without a full understanding of how deep that corruption really is.  Just when you think you know what illegal acts make the 1% as rich as they are, a whole slew of new ways they scammed the system comes out.

Here is Robert Reich explaining the purpose of our demonstration in Springfield, MA at noon today.

Later today I should have some pictures of our rally.

Well, I never had a chance to get my camera out and take pictures. I was interviewed by two TV Reporters/Videographers. See the video at my subsequent post Video of Rally on Yes He Can Day.

Meanwhile, you can watch this video:

The New York Times has the story Russian Says Western Support for Arab Revolts Could Cause a ‘Big War’.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, warned Wednesday that outside encouragement of antigovernment uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa could lead to “a very big war that will cause suffering not only to countries in the region, but also to states far beyond its boundaries.”

It is hard to know what to make of a story like this. Everyone involved including The New York Times has hidden motives. So you take it all in, hoping that some day the information might be useful, and some day you might find out the truth of what is going on here.