Country Wide (or rather, its parent company Bank of America) has to pay an FTC fine for ripping off homeonwers in distress. A fine of only 2 ents per $100 dollars of its enterpise value. Cry me a river.

Many of the banks lack the proper paper trail to prevail in foreclosure and that judges are beginning to wake up to this, and sometimes even cancel mortgages outright, it is not surprising that the banks are beginning to realize that their own bad faith, their own shoddy dealing, their own rupturing of the social contract has put them in a position where they may not be in the driver’s seat on foreclosures much longer. No wonder the baks are starting to preach the gospel of mortgage modification.

Last night, Senate Republicans proved beyond any doubt that when it comes to the economy, they stand with Wall Street and against everybody else. Joined by lone Democrat Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Republicans successfully filibustered the procedural technicality of opening debate on Wall Street reform. It’s an unmistakable ploy to kill the bill and collect campaign cash from bigwig bankers. The coming weeks won’t be pretty.

Supporting states’ rights to regulate predatory lending, Scalia penned a 5-4 majority Supreme Court decision today. He was joined by the more liberal justices. Clarence Thomas wrote the minority dissent.

Many people do not know that GMAC owns several subprime mortgage companies. I suggest that the difficulties facing them have as much to do with the accounting fraud they engaged in as it does anything else. This was originally posted on Dkos.