It’s hard for Dday to get good numbers when he is forced to rely on the Wall Street Journal, and Dday debunked the terms as laid out by WSJ as well as he could. But just look at the headline numbers: 100,000 bucks per underwater borrower times 200,000 borrowers equals how much?

For those who enjoy exponential numbers, that would 1 x 10 e5 times 2 x 10 e5 = 2 times 10 e10 = $20,000,000,000. Twenty Billion. The claimed writedowns for just those lucky BAC customers would wipe out all but $5 Billion of the whole multi-state/federal settlement. It’s all bullshit.

ding ding ding! Bingo!

We do have royalists in this country. We’ve had them since before the Revolutionary War. It seems obvious to say it, but many were wealthy landowners and merchants (mercantilists). Not all, but many. I don’t know enough history to say “most” of the Tory traitors left behind in America were wealthy, but lots of them were. And they were all anti-democratic elitists. They burrowed in after independence and it seems obvious that they never went away. They and their spawn have plagued the country ever since, pumping up the Gilded Age (1890s) and the Roaring Twenties and the Internet Bubble and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 to feed their insatiable greed. The wealthy anti-democrats are directly responsible for the country’s worst economic calamities.

Steny Hoyer is just one of their many court jesters and mountebanks. He would object that he had a blue-collar upbringing and, since he’s Catholic, he could not by definition be a “royalist” since the aristocracy loathed Catholics. Well, I didn’t say he is an aristocrat, I said he is their fool.

Hoyer is a tool. He needs to be retired.

was everybody watching the actual hearing instead of joining in the comments? so quiet over here …

I join DW in enjoying your rapier wit. This was remarkable:

The process for creating [plutonium], (and weapons grade U-235 for that matter) is so infrastructure and electrical power intensive that you’d hardly be able to miss it.

And this @46:

Unless Iran has a self contained electrical grid, the “tell” would be power usage. You don’t just plug that kind of technology into the wall.

I did not know that. I love that basic physics. Or even more rudimentary, basic factory mechanics.

I have no idea why anybody would call your basic science “verbal self-gratification.” Unless they just had no factual rebuttal.

Bottom line: the war mongers are failing so far to steer our military into engagement with Iran, regardless of how ignorant and susceptible to jingoism our American public may be. Thank you for explaining the nuts & bolts which underpin the NIE.

The Quakers and AFSC were very big in the draft resistance movement in Philadelphia area where I grew up. Cut my organizing teeth stuffing envelopes at The Red Door on Walnut Street in 1966 when I was 14. I never became a pacifist but I marched or protested against every war since then. Except, I guess, the first Gulf war which over so quickly — in what? three weeks? — that it was over before I realized it was a real war.

Don’t forget Ken Kesey and the Magic Bus. Actual footage was finally released last year in “Magic Trip”.

we let Nixon come to power

No, we didn’t, the Democratic Party self-destructed in 1968 over the Vietnam war and Nixon squeaked in. Then he stole the 1972 election, after which we promptly got the fuck rid of him. We celebrated his resignation in August 1974, me in a bar up in Lander, Wyoming, after a fabulous week in the Rockies wilderness. I was only 22; the anti-war & anti-facist forces were on a roll. Progressives had a glorious run for the rest of that decade. Progressive Dems had a landslide in Congress in 1974; Dems re-took the White House in 1976 (although Carter was no DFH, he was a peacenik).

what hilarious old memories! Thanks for that. The Whole Earth Catalogue definitely belongs on Ruth’s list.

Also, apologies if I someone else already mentioned this, but Underground Newspapers also go on the list. As in, the one I worked on in high school which put out the first environmental-awareness screeds in my area in 1969.

As much as I loathe preznit, I do agree this is an especially important disinformation campaign by corporate oligarchs & billionaires & war-mongers that we need to crush, if possible. So thank you very much for keeping the spotlight on this.

Would that be a criminal conspiracy, or just typical Realtor (TM) sleaziness? Or both?

Thanks for constantly drilling into this bottomless pit, Dday. Every day that goes by brings another bucket of stoopid to the surface.

(I was trying to squeeze in another clown-car metaphor, but drifted into geological references.)

The whole framework of the settlement uses the past tense when referring to foreclosure fraud, instead of admitting that it is a chronic, continuing, systematic & deliberate abuse. This is how the official PDF of the Executive Summary speaks of foreclosure fraud:

Unnecessary foreclosures occurred due to failure to process homeowners’ requests for modified payment plans. And where foreclosures should have been concluded, shoddy documentation led to protracted delays. This misconduct threatened the integrity of the legal system and had a negative impact on communities and the overall housing market

The restitution payments will only go to homeowners whose homes were stolen through foreclosure fraud on and after January 1, 2008 through December 31, 2011. (PDF of official Fact Sheet, p. 1.)

It is obvious these clowns at DOJ & HUD expect us to buy their lame suggestion that foreclosure fraud is a thing of the past. But this discovery of extremely recent continued fraudulent conduct at the very least justify moving the dates of the period covered by the settlement so that there is no cutoff date of “December 31, 2011.” That cutoff date must be deleted, so that the the number of homeowners who are eligible for restitution includes everyone whose homes are being stolen right now.

I would exempt California AG Kamala Harris from my accusation. I feel morally certain that she did get at least some written commitments. Dday has revealed that Harris got her own separate monitor, independent of the Carolinas banking guy who will supposedly monitor the settlement for the other 48 states. I think at the very least she probably got that commitment in writing for a separate monitor for her state. And if she got that in writing, she probably got several of the terms in writing that will guide and empower that monitor.

As usual, I am late getting to Dday’s fabulous work, since I now spend the whole day in the capitalist cesspool. But I have skimmed the 31 comments and didn’t notice anybody reacting to this graf in the middle of Dday’s post:

The state and federal regulators may complain that this is just a distortion, and that they have a very difficult job to figure out the term for 49 states and multiple federal agencies, and they’re just working out the complexities. Well, they should have thought of that when they announced a settlement to great fanfare. Terms matter, and without them, the settlement is no more than a theory. So the leadership shouldn’t get upset when they open themselves up to criticism – and a far worse deal once the language is written – by handling things in this way.

For a minute, I was miffed that Dday actually cared about whining from “state and federal regulators” (which I assume includes AGs). But then I saw his concluding graf:

But the larger point is this: HUD and the other state and federal agencies are mad that their settlement has been mischaracterized. There’s a really, really simple remedy for that: release the terms. Then everyone can work off the same set of facts. Until then, I don’t really want to hear about how “progressive bloggers” are saying “fundamentally not true” things. Unless and until terms are released, everybody’s just guessing at the outcome.

So, basically, STFU, you “state and federal agencies.” So, good.

But I’m still wondering if Dday really believes that we are “just guessing” about the terms of the deal. We know a lot. We know enough to condemn the entire deal. It doesn’t really matter what the AGs get in writing at this point. The state AGs, who swore to uphold their state & federal constitutions, have completely abdicated their sworn duties to protect us from predatory financial institutions. We know that. We don’t need to see “the written terms” to be convinced of that. Indeed, there is nothing they can put in “the written terms” to persuade us that they didn’t abdicate their sworn duties.

encouraged millions to examine other teachings, and eventually to leave the faith of our ancestors

I was gonna say something about my personal history, which I tell everyone offline. But then I remembered all those Jesuit hit men sent from Rome in the 1530s to deal with The Tudors, and I had second thoughts.

But thank you, masaccio, for having the guts to dig into this so deeply. I, too, remember Vatican II, and let me just say it has all been downhill since then.