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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Cops and movers in Atlanta refused to remove a 103-year-old woman and her 83-year-old daughter from their home in foreclosure proceedings. Nice to know some public servants still have consciences -- unlike bankers:

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In a heart warming story just in time for the holiday season, a 103-year-old woman in Atlanta avoided foreclosure of her home Tuesday afternoon, thanks entirely to the kindness of strangers.

According to WSBTV Atlanta, movers hired by Deutsche Bank AG and police were ready to go through with the bank’s request to remove Vita Lee and her 83-year old daughter from their home.

However, when they first got sight of Lee, they had a change of heart and declined to go through with it.

“I saw the sheriffs who came to put them out, take off and leave,” community activist Michael Langford said to WSBTV. ”I gave all glory to God.”

Lee, whose daughter was rushed to the hospital to the hospital from the stress of possibly facing an eviction, was relieved that the movers and police had compassion for their condition.

“I know God said when things go wrong, he’ll make it right,” she said.

And Lee decided to give Deutsche Bank a message if they pondered to still go through on the foreclosure.

“Please don’t come in and disturb me no more,” she reportedly said. “When I’m gone you all can come back and do whatever they want to.”

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We're going to have to start calling it a "Hannity Job": If you're a Republican candidate, you can go on TV, get free airtime, and get stroked by Sean Hannity! All thanks to Fox News, the Republican propaganda network that puts it money where its mouths are.

Last night it was Dino Rossi's turn. Rossi is the Establishment Republican who actually managed to defeat the Tea Party candidate in Washington state, and he's giving Sen. Patty Murray -- a steady progressive vote from the Northwest, and a player on the Appropriations Committee -- a run for her money. A few things went unmentioned, as usual, including the fact that the state's Tea Party candidate, Clint Didier, refused to endorse Rossi. (Rossi declined when Didier demanded he pay obeisance to the Tea Party agenda.) And then there's Rossi's millions made from foreclosures after the housing bubble burst.

You see, there's a reason Dino Rossi wasn't a favorite of the Tea Party crowd: He ain't no populist.

As TPM reported last summer:

Rossi's day job entails very publicly helping rich people profit off the misfortune of those unlucky enough to have obtained a mortgage in the last four years or so. And that's leaving some in Washington a little confused about his priorities.

Rossi is a former gubernatorial nominee, and national Republicans are stoked about him now that he's decided to run for Senate against incumbent Sen. Patty Murray (D). Sticking with the job he had before he announced his candidacy, Rossi has decided stay on as the headline speaker for a series of seminars advising real estate speculators on how to profit off the collapsed mortgage market. Today, his spokeperson told Salon that he plans do more before he's done.

The Democrats are reminding voters, too:

We'll be hosting Senator Murray here for a live chat Thursday the 7th from 5 to 6 p.m. Be sure to tune in. And be prepared to help out if you can. Her seat is one of the important ones.

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Stephen Meister, going to town on Wall Street's leg.

If Democrats get their way, we'll soon have a nationwide freeze on home foreclosures -- imposing vast new losses on mortgage lenders and taxpayers, sidelining panicked homebuyers and pushing off a housing-market recovery for years. You can thank bullying politicians, from President Obama on down to most state attorneys general.

I have yet to see news of a single borrower coming forward to say the bank foreclosed on his home when he wasn't in default on his mortgage.

Then you pretty much haven't been looking, jackass. This guy got foreclosed on even though he'd paid for his entire house in cash. This woman, meanwhile, watched in horror as thugs hired by her bank broke into her house to change the locks even though her house hadn't even been foreclosed on. There plenty more stories like those two. You just have to, you know, learn how to use the magic of Google News to find them.

Yet millions of pending foreclosures will now be halted. This is a massive overreaction to technical faults in affidavits.

And what "technical faults" did the banks make, you ask? Well let's start out with some of these:

In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in "foreclosure expert" jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.

In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word "affidavit." Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud.

And then add on some of these:

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It's a complicated problem that comes down to which lien takes precedence, and the previous administration attempt to help people who are in over their head due to second mortgages was a failure. The program was also stymied by the unwillingness of banks to take losses on the loans:

Programs to help distressed borrowers so far have focused on lowering the payments on their primary mortgage. But during the go-go years of the housing market, millions of homeowners took out a second or even third loan backed by their home. Many were piggyback mortgages, which enabled home buyers to put little or no money down, while others took advantage of rising home prices to secure home-equity lines of credits.

Now, these secondary loans are aggravating the foreclosure crisis, adding an extra burden that can be the difference between borrowers digging out of debt and losing their home. The extra mortgages also make it far more unwieldy for lenders to untie the knot of excessive debt and provide relief to borrowers. And even when borrowers do get help with their primary mortgages, the second loans can continue to bedevil homeowners, raising the risk they will default later.

The Obama administration is about to ramp up its efforts to tackle second mortgages as part of an aggressive program announced by the White House on Friday to address foreclosures. Other steps include a requirement that lenders offer temporary mortgage relief to unemployed borrowers and increased incentives for lenders to cut loan balances for borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth.

It disturbs me that the administration is so focused on property values instead of useful strategies like allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce mortgage values. But hey, what do I know?

The housing market is facing swelling ranks of homeowners who are seriously delinquent but have yet to lose their homes, and this is threatening a new wave of foreclosures that could hit just as the real estate market has begun to stabilize.

About 5 million to 7 million properties are potentially eligible for foreclosure but have not yet been repossessed and put up for sale. Some economists project it could take nearly three years before all these homes have been put on the market and purchased by new owners. And the number of pending foreclosures could grow much bigger over the coming year as more distressed borrowers become delinquent and then, if they can't obtain mortgage relief, wade through the foreclosure process, which often takes more than a year to complete.

Hmm. Maybe it would be a good idea to, oh, I don't know, add another tier onto unemployment benefits?

As these foreclosed properties add to the supply of homes for sale, they could undercut housing prices, which have increased modestly through December, according to the most recent figures in the S&P/Case-Shiller home prices index. That rise partly reflected a slowdown in the flow of foreclosed homes onto the market.

The rate at which J.P. Morgan Chase seized properties, for example, peaked in the middle of 2008 and fell steadily last year, according to a February investor report. But the bank expects repossessions to increase this year, nearly doubling to 45,000 by the fourth quarter.

There is a lot of despair out there, and the commercial real estate foreclosures are just beginning. Maybe it would be a good idea if we just helped people losing their homes instead of trying to reinflate the housing bubble?

That beautiful, sunny, smiling face belongs to Jessica Bucher, a twelve year old middle school student in Northern California.

At a time when most parents are worried about their twelve year old's grades, or first forays with the opposite sex, or cell phone usage, Jessica's parents have a much more urgent goal: keeping Jessica alive and pain-free.

Jessica Bucher was diagnosed with a rare disease that is almost always fatal: juvenile onset Sandhoff Disease. Thankfully, Jessica has responded well to an experimental umbillical cord stem cell treatment, but not without saddling her parents with astronomic health care bills. Those bills are now threatening their home to foreclosure. It's every parent's Faustian nightmare: save your child and lose your home or save your home and watch your child die. Jessica's classmates have opted to run regular fundraisers to help offset these medical costs because we as a country offer no such safety net to the Buchers.

Likewise, Brian Holben of Chester, Virginia, has a similar dilemma and thankfully, a community willing to step in where the government won't:

Improve Your Game, a Richmond-based youth fitness and conditioning organization, will raise money for the Holben family with the first IYG Kid’s Fitness Challenge, which will be held Dec. 12 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at the Sports Center of Richmond.

Brian Holben, who lives in Chester with his wife, Sheila, and their three sons, Zachary, Tanner and Nash, was diagnosed with a brain tumor during the summer. Two of the family’s sons play on baseball teams sponsored by IYG, which also offers fitness training for kids, said Charlene Frostick, who owns IYG with her husband, Joe.

Brian Holben is responding well to treatment, but his recovery will be a long process and medical bills, which are not all covered by the family’s insurance, will continue to mount, she said.

The stories grow exponentially. PleaseCutTheCrap, from whom I read about Jessica and Brian, also mentions an uninsured Kansas teen who needs a heart transplant. Or the attorney I spoke to last month, afraid to go to the doctors to confirm the diabetes diagnosis he suspects, because he's sure he'll be dropped from his insurance, like one of his colleagues. At this point, he admits he's controlling it with diet and careful monitoring of his glucose levels, but for how long will that work?

This is America. The "shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere", but we can't offer our citizens something that every single other industrialized nation does: health care. And why? Because Holy Joe would rather Jessica and Brian and the others die than give any little bit to the Democratic Party.

And even more obscenely, the White House and the Senate leadership are okay with that, willing to capitulate to the resident tantrum thrower for the sake of passing a bill, no matter how it actually affects Americans.

What can Holy Joe say to the Buchers? How can Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel face the Holbens? How can they justify mandates to that attorney when the insurance companies get all the benefits and little restrictions?

Joe Lieberman thinks nothing of damning Jessica Bucher and her parents to the hell of that existence of choosing between pain now or pain later. Worse, the Democratic leadership in both the White House and the Senate is letting him get away with it.

Via Ian Welsh, Dr. Peter Morici, a SUNY business professor, puts banker bonuses into perspective:

How much is $140 billion?

The U.S. economy grew at a $89 billion annualized rate in the third quarter. That was the first growth since the second quarter of 2008 and came to $22 billion in actual growth in the third quarter.

The bankers, after causing the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression, are rewarded with six times the growth accomplished so far in the much heralded “economic recovery.”

Meanwhile, seven million families face foreclosure and 25 million Americans can’t find full time work.

Oh yeah, I'd give that a "solid B plus"!

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