The Federal government and the Attorneys General from 49 states have signed a deal with five major banks over charges of fraud, including reported acts of widespread perjury and forgery, in the so-called “robo-signing” scandal.

A few days ago we suggested that any deal be scored against five basic principles: openness, justice, restitution, deterrence, and reconciliation. It's clear that this deal falls short in every category. The best thing that can be said about it is that, thanks to a few tough holdouts led by New York AG Eric Schneiderman, it now allows additional civil and criminal investigations to proceed.

That's far from nothing, and it could be a big deal. But it will only be a big deal if the Administration stops coddling banks and devotes a lot more resources to helping homeowners and upholding justice.

Up to now, the fight has been to prevent the Administration from doing another cushy bank deal. Now that the door's been left open to further action, there's a new fight: to demand that they devote the Federal government's resources to investigating Wall Street crime.

Our own scoring of the agreement follows, based on the criteria we set out last week. Others may have a different opinion. But now that the deal's done, the way forward is clear. To paraphrase Joe Hill, don't mourn or celebrate: Organize.

The Score

Openness: Has the truth been brought to light? Do we finally understand what happened to us, why it happened, and who's responsible?

The agreement trades away the leverage that investigators gained by essentially catching bankers dead-to-rights as they broke laws on a mass scale through robo-signing. That means they can't use that leverage to “sweat” more information out of the banks.

We wrote in our scorecard that “there's a lot we don't know about bank malfeasance,” including the guilt or innocence of individual bankers. Sadly, we may never know. This deal appears to end ongoing investigations into “robo-signing.” If you see a bank CEO whining on television about his industry's bad reputation, we're not likely to ever learn if he ever personally signed off on criminal behavior. (Which would make him a criminal too, of course.)

There is, however, an upside. We wrote that “any settlement which closes the door to further investigations gets a much lower score.” This settlement does allow investigations to move forward in other areas. As the Washington Post notes, it “leaves open the possibility of other lawsuits regarding fair housing and fair lending laws, civil rights claims, and claims dealing with how loans were packaged and sold, a process known as securitization. In addition, it does not shield the banks from any criminal violations that arise.”

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Lawrence O'Donnell started his show off this Wednesday evening by stating the obvious. If we'd gotten single-payer, Medicare for all as a solution to the broken health care system in America instead of the compromise which left employers in the business of providing insurance for their employees, we wouldn't be dealing with this debacle of the Catholic Church fighting the Obama administration on whether they're going to have to cover birth control in their health care plans.

As he noted, employers and the Catholic Church shouldn't be in the business of providing health care and we should not be settling for a system that still leaves millions of Americans uninsured if they lose their jobs and can't afford to pay for the premiums that are sky high when you're out there on your own.

Sadly we're seeing our politicians and a good deal of the media gladly turning this into another culture war and trying to paint the Obama administration as waging some war on religious institutions, instead of it leading to a discussion on exactly what O'Donnell was talking about here and the fact that this debacle is proof of exactly why we should have single-payer and everyone insured at a reasonable cost instead of lining health insurance company CEO's and stockholders pockets.

Why should women in America be put in a position where birth control pills, which have health benefits beyond just preventing pregnancy, and which are a far cheaper to pay for than the cost of a woman becoming pregnant, be subjected to the whims of their employers if those employers happen to be a religious institution? It's wrong. And as O'Donnell said, this is a debate we shouldn't even be having right now, but here we are, still having arguments about birth control and listening to right-wingers try to conflate it with abortion. I feel like I died and landed back in the 1950's listening to this nonsense.

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On the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I asked Andrew Breitbart and film director Steve Bannon what would make their upcoming video "exposing" Occupy Wall Street successful despite being panned by critics and audiences for their previous work, "The Undefeated" by about Sarah Palin.

Breitbart immediately went off.

Breitbart: Who's Andrew Metcalf, I want to see, this is always a fun gesture, is that your name?

Me: Yes that's my name, I just checked IMDB and ["The Undefeated"] got a 1.7; on Rotten Tomatoes it got a 0 percent.

Breitbart: Who do you work for?

Lady sitting next to me: Crooks and Liars!

Breitbart: Crooks and Liars, that's it, it's a radical left-wing website, he can answer for himself, the way you've presented yourself you represent Occupy very well.

Me: I'm actually asking a legitimate question, about one of your previous movies being panned by both critics and audiences. What's going to make this one any different?

At that point, Steve Bannon took over and notified me that the Sarah Palin flick did have a broad audience in DVD sales and pay-per-view orders. He said the movie was well-received by conservative critics and there wasn't one factual error in it.

Bannon: Professional entertainment critics, yes, they went after the film quite harshly, just like they did her... I showed the... the useful idiots of the entertainment business that completely vilified and eviscerated a woman that has a track record as a performer that actually stands for a populist agenda... you kind of asked it in a snarky way, but it is a legitimate question.

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The latest stories from the front lines of the labor fight across the country...

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The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Thursday to ban insider trading by members of Congress and to impose new ethics requirements on lawmakers and federal agency officials.

(Let's pause a moment to note that Congress had to pass a law that bans them from doing something illegal. Crickey.)

Now the bad news:

Democrats said that House Republican leaders had weakened the Senate-passed bill by stripping out a provision that would, for the first time, regulate firms that collect “political intelligence” for hedge funds, mutual funds and other investors. Under the Senate bill, such firms would have to register and report their activities, as lobbyists do.

Nothing like giving the hedge funds a little kickback in a bill that's supposed to create a firewall from members of Congress and Wall Street.

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Madam Speaker just uploaded this bit of winningness.

In a first step to reform the money in politics, House Democrats are reintroducing the DISCLOSE Act today to get unlimited, secret donations out of politics. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates to unrestricted special interest campaign donations in American elections—permitting corporations to spend unlimited funds, directly or through third parties and Political Action Committees organized for those purposes, to influence Federal elections and opened the door for the emergence of Super PACs.

Learn more at http://www.facebook.com/StopColbert

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In the wake of Rick Santorum's recent three-peat, he's drawing more scrutiny, and the results are predictably awesome.

Check out this completely ahistorical take on the French Revolution.

SANTORUM: They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you right, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.

If a junior high student had written this gibberish in an essay on the French Revolution, he'd deserve an F.

Santorum has this exactly backwards, of course. It was under the French absolute monarchy and the Ancien Régime that one had no "unalienable rights" and had a government that could tell you "what you'll do and when you'll do it."

And the Revolutionaries, inspired by Enlightenment figures like Rousseau and the American Revolution, wrote and signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which

...defines a single set of individual and collective rights for all men. Influenced by the doctrine of natural rights, these rights are held to be universal and valid in all times and places.

The first of these include:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.
2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.
4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

Obviously, none of these rights existed under King Louis, and unfortunately for Santorum, the Catholic Church stood in direct opposition to the French Revolution and in support of the Ancien Régime.

Of course, this is all an aside to the fact that the notion President Robespierre Obama is about to unleash a Reign of Terror and start beheading clergy is well beyond insane.

Keith Rivers, an organizer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in North Carolina, is fighting to build union strength in one of the toughest anti-labor states in the union. North Carolina is a right-to-work (for less) state with the lowest percentage (only 2 percent) of unionized workers in the United States. In a video released Wednesday, Rivers describes the challenges he and other organizers face in the state, and while he describes it as very challenging, but is happy to say that they've had some success in recent years.

IBEW in North Carolina's mission is to:

Ensuring our member electricians and linemen receive the representation they need and the wages and benefits they deserve; and

Recruiting capable apprentices and furnishing them with top-quality, certified career educational programs in state-of-the-art training facilities.

Rivers works on letting North Carolina electricians and linemen know what IBEW stands for and trying to get people to join the union.

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I know this has been out there for a few days, but I still wanted to respond. Conservatives have long tried to carry the mantle of America exceptionalism are our global superiority. They say the left doesn't believe Americans are the kings of the universe. Hey, we're tree huggers, aren't we? Rove wants Americans to think we're giving up being the leaders of the free world to China and the terrorists. It's quite childish and has been for a long time. They also prop up their straw man that all a person has to do is strap on their boots, pull them tight and they too can host a show like Bill O'Reilly and join the 1 Percenters club. It's so easy if only you try. That's all it takes you lazy rubes -- but you'd rather live off the dole then go to college, work and feed your family.

Well, here comes Super Bowl XLVI and it's usually the most watched TV event every year. For years many people tuned in to actually watch the ads because it was the one time that there was a greater creative license bestowed upon the ad agencies to produce as clever an ad as possible. That changed after conservatives hijacked the SB and the ads with the Janet Jackson flap which was created by conservatives lame attempt to attack Hollywood once again. This time it worked. Movement conservatives even went on TV and said their kids had been permanently damaged by the brief Jackson areola flashing. Wow, for an exceptional people, conservatives are very scared of nudity. They pressured networks and the NFL into thinking children never have seen nekkid body parts before. Heaven forbid if their kids walk in on them right after a shower. They could be damaged for life seeing a reflection of their own bodies.

I bet you don't remember many of the ads from Feb. 5th now except one: Clint Eastwood's ode to Detroit. I was caught up in the game and angry that the Giants blew their first half lead, but Clint's voice momentarily caught my interest and I tried to figure out where what was happening. Ha! It was all about American Exceptionalism and the resilience the auto industry had endured to recover after the global financial crisis. Paulbots screamed to let them all crumble, but Eastwood's message was we can find a way through tough times because the second half is coming. You'd think this would cross party lines since Clint is known to be a center right guy. Not so. See, Karl Rove can't have anything said about America now that makes a case for a positive future. How dare Eastwood praise us.

Karl Rove: I was frankly offended by It. I'm a huge Clint Eastwood fan. It was an extremely well done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.

Say, what? Is he kidding me? Clint was shocked too and so he felt he had to call out his spinning.

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A Missouri grand jury handed down multiple felony indictments for foreclosure fraud on Monday. That's the same kind of crime being negotiated in nationwide settlement talks with America's big banks. If people can be indicted for doing it, why should bankers be allowed to write a check and walk away?

"Robo-signing" is the nickname that's been given to the practice of hiring large groups of inexperienced workers (they called them "Burger King Kids" at JPMorgan Chase) to file false statements with local courts in order to process foreclosures. In a typical "robo-signing," someone signs a statement testifying that they had personally reviewed documents that prove the bank has title to a home that's being foreclosed — and might do that many times every hour. That's either perjury or forgery, depending on the way in which the "robo-signing" was done.

Forgery and perjury are serious crimes. It's an even more serious crime to ask others to do it for you.

Banks, and some friendly and lazy journalists, were quick to dismiss the whole issue as a "paperwork problem." If "robo-signing" is a "paperwork problem," then the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was a "misplaced bullet problem."

"Robo-signing" alone is an enormous cloud of alleged criminality hanging over this country's banks. If you throw in all the well-documented instances of investor fraud, which have led to hundreds of millions in settlements, then our banks have committed a massive serial crime wave around mortgages.

But Monday's indictments weren't issued against a bank or a banker. They were issued against a home foreclosure processing company and its chief executive. That's today's news. Stay tuned.

Deal in Limbo

Meanwhile those settlement charges appear stalled, thanks to holdout Attorneys General from key states who refuse to give the banks blanket immunity. Another announcement deadline was missed on Monday, and the administration negotiators' subsequent announcement that "more than 40 states" have already signed on was just smoke and mirrors. More than 40 states signed on to a weaker agreement months ago, so the administration was hyping a non-event.

Tea-leaf readers have another busy day on Tuesday. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is a pivotal player for several reasons. He was the first and most influential holdout Attorney General, he was named co-chair of the president's heretofore lackluster mortgage fraud task force, and he filed a lawsuit last week against several major banks for their use of the electronically-driven shell game of a pseudo-corporation known as MERS Inc.

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