For the latest news about the foreclosure fraud settlement  check out the following:

Naked Capitalism's "Is the Mortgage Settlement Deal Starting to Unravel?"

David Dayen at Firedoglake with "Justice Democrats still angling for changes in foreclosure fraud settlement deal" opens with this:

"Well, the deadline for state Attorneys General to sign on to the foreclosure fraud settlement came and went yesterday, and the major holdouts – the Justice Democrats, the AGs from the five states who have objected to the settlement all along (Nevada, New York, California, Delaware, and Massachusetts), still aren’t signed on."

And from R.J. Eskow at Campaign for America's Future, "How to score a foreclosure fraud settlement deal" that includes this:

"We keep hearing about what is and isn't possible, practical, or politically feasible. Media discussions of the topic keep mixing the quotidien problems of the process with the underlying principles involved. So let's take a second to perform a moral and legal reset and put this issue in the right context.

"Legally, banks stand accused of securities fraud, investor fraud, racial discrimination, tax evasion, defrauding borrowers, and perjury (in the filing of false "robo-signed" documents). Each of the major banks has already settled charges with the SEC involving these crimes and more.

"Banks committed a number of moral offenses, too, some of which may also have been illegal. Here's a quick overview:

"We know that bank executives fueled the housing bubble, convinced borrowers to take out loans based on inflated home values, sold deceptively packaged mortgage-backed securities to investors (including state and local governments and working people's pension funds), concealed their true financial situation from investors while taking massive secret assistance from the Federal Reserve, were bailed out by taxpayers, took huge bonuses anyway ...

".... and never even said they were sorry.

"That's what we're dealing with here. But if that's the context, how do we evaluate a settlement proposal?

"Any deal should be measured against five basic principles: openness, justice, restitution, deterrence, and reconciliation.

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

"Justice means exactly what it says: Is the deal just? The American people should be able to review it and know in their hearts that justice has been served. The guilty have been held responsible, laws have been upheld, and we know once again that we live in a society of laws.

"Restitution: Have those that were wronged been made whole?

"Deterrence: Has the punishment been proportional to the crime? Is it severe enough to deter future criminal behavior?

"Reconciliation: When major crimes disrupt a nation, the final element is reconciliation -- the restoration of social calm, renewed trust between the parties involved, and a return to confidence in the institutions of government."

And part of his conclusion contains this:

"....these principles and ideals offer a way to interpret and measure whatever deal is announced. The deal may not be perfect, but it will have to be a whole lot better than the ones that have been proposed over the past few months or it will be completely unacceptable.

"The politicians and others who are negotiating this deal understand the "real world" of bankers, bank influence, and obstacles that make it hard work at times to prosecute bank fraud. But the world of justice is the real world, too. So is the world of morality. And those obstacles didn't prevent the conviction of thousands of people after the much-smaller savings and loan scandal of the 1980s."