A joint statement by Senators John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, Lindsey Graham, and Representative Peter King calls for a man accused of participating in the Boston Marathon Bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to be charged and handled as an enemy combatant and outside the constitution despite Tsarnaev being a U.S. citizen. “It is clear the events we have [...]

Hope and change strikes again. A provision many are dubbing the “Monsanto Protection Act” was covertly inserted into the Agricultural Appropriations Bill that President Obama signed Tuesday. The provision protects genetically modified food interests from litigation. The provision protects genetically modified seeds from litigation in the face of health risks and has thus been dubbed [...]

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has been complying with a “no press release” clause added to its settlements by banks that break the law. The clause is added to keep the regulator quiet on reputation damaging legal settlements. Typically settlements are announced by regulators in hopes of deterring would be law breakers but the [...]

Watch Alarm Bells In The Housing Market on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE. Last night Frontline aired a program on the Department of Justice’s failure to prosecute Wall Street executives over fraud in the mortgage market that caused the 2008 financial crisis. The program included compelling testimony from the “due diligence underwriters” those responsible for [...]

As I noted yesterday, the Justice Department ended its investigation into the final two cases of suspected CIA torture, both of which resulted in deaths of the detainees (two of the over 100 detainees who have died in US custody). Glenn Greenwald writes eloquently and comprehensively on that as the final immunity given to the [...]

The Sunday opinion section of the New York Times has an editorial they could have run every day for the last four years, asking why nobody has been prosecuted for the greatest financial collapse since the Great Depression. It’s really a familiar story, and while I appreciate seeing it in their pages, I hold no [...]

The Federal Reserve has decided to put their thumbs on the scales of justice, explicitly attempting to overturn state-based anti-foreclosure laws on the spurious grounds that they hurt the economy. This story by Tim Reid in Reuters cites the Fed arguing against the kind of laws in states like Nevada – and soon, California – [...]

The WaPo editorial board’s biggest problem with the “rough justice” foreclosure fraud settlement is that robo-signing is a “victimless crime” because all those people were behind on their payments anyway, and that lucky duckies foreclosed upon might be getting $2,000 erroneously. That’s the media we have. Put aside the looming presence of servicer-driven defaults, fee [...]

I think you can divine what I think of the foreclosure fraud settlement which releases liability on a host of fraudulent conduct for only a $5 billion guarantee from the banks, as well as $20 billion made up mostly of “credits” that HUD believes will translate into around $34.5 billion overall. The credits play out [...]

Molly Ball, a reporter who interviewed me at the very first Yearly Kos when she was at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and who now writes for The Atlantic, decides to make giant pronouncements about the “hard right” and “hard left” positions in the housing debate. In the politics of housing, “On the one hand, there [...]

I said in my initial story on the new refi plan for Fannie and Freddie-backed homes that it’s not a housing plan, but a stimulus plan. Really important to keep that in mind. The housing market is depressed because of $700 billion in negative equity. This plan wouldn’t touch dollar 1 of that. It’ll put [...]