Now, another new lawsuit, featuring a separate whistle-blower, contains additional remarkable revelations – and may shed light on Bank of America’s strategy in getting out from under the mountain of legal exposure and costs in which it now finds itself. Simply put, the bank seeks to pocket quick cash and evade practices set forth in major settlements – by cashing out of the subprime mortgage servicing business. The result would be to leave struggling homeowners back at square one, with even fewer protections to avoid foreclosure.

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“Bank of America’s practice is to string homeowners along with no apparent intention of providing the permanent loan modifications it promises,” said Erika Brown, one of the former employees. The damning evidence would spur a series of criminal investigations of BofA executives, if we still had a rule of law in this country for Wall Street banks.

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At a time when overall student debt approaches $1 trillion, the facts reveal that student loans aren’t loans, not in the traditional sense. They exhibit none of the qualities of modern consumer financial instruments, and are often sold under false pretenses, with the promise of a lifelong benefit that never materializes. We need to change how these loans work and have a broader conversation about what we should be doing -- including bankruptcy and refinancing -- to help future generations obtain a quality, affordable education, which is critical to our economic future.

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It’s a nice sentiment. It’s also wrong. No politician in California is more invested than Brown in taking a very specific position – demanding restraint in allocating post-recession surpluses to attend to human needs. This pro-austerity pose, a defining characteristic of Brown’s entire political career, now threatens the pace of recovery in the nation’s largest state, the perception of the federal healthcare overhaul, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians.

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The amendment was clearly created as a wedge issue, a perennial Republican effort to get Democratic senators to vote for something that can get used against them later in attack ads. Tom Coburn is a master of this; during the healthcare bill he offered an amendment banning sex offenders from receiving health insurance benefits for Viagra.

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The Cincinnati incident, which has already cost the job of Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller (who was not the commissioner when the scandal occurred – this would be like the State Department reacting to the tragedy at the Libyan consulate by firing a low-level bureaucrat coincidentally named Ben Ghazi), is definitely scandalous in its own right. As the Treasury Inspector General report details, it’s completely inappropriate for the IRS to burden any subset with invasive information requests based merely on keywords or policy positions.

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Warren was discussing the first bill she has introduced in the Senate, a plan released on Wednesday to address the crisis of outstanding student debt – which topped $1 trillion this year, with over 37 million Americans owing thousands of dollars in higher education costs that could take decades to pay back.

Student debt is now the second-highest form of debt in America – behind only mortgage debt – with the number of borrowers and the average balance increasing 70 percent since 2004. Research from the New York Federal Reserve Board indicates that this has begun to have an impact on the broader economy, with young people burdened by student debt more reluctant to take out auto or home loans. And without congressional action, this will get worse: on July 1, interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford student loans will double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. This will effectively raise costs for 8 million student borrowers by $1,000.

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But new evidence reveals the nation’s largest banks have apparently continued to fabricate documents, rip off customers and illegally kick people out of their homes, even after inking a series of settlements over the same abuses. And the worst part of it all is that the main settlement over foreclosure fraud was so weakly written that it actually allows such criminal conduct to occur, at least up to a certain threshold. Potentially hundreds of thousands of homes could be effectively stolen by the big banks without any sanctions.

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The case falls within a sadly predictable continuum for the Roberts Court, which virtually always sides with the corporate litigant over the government or individual. This time, the arguments in FTC v. Actavis revolve around an insidious tactic common to the nation’s largest drug companies, and known as “pay for delay.” As a result of the likely ruling in this case, drug companies will be able to charge consumers as much as five times the potential cost of their products. And both government regulators and consumers will watch helplessly as pharmaceutical companies bribe generic drug makers to retain their exclusive holds on the lifesaving medicines we all inevitably require.

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This is the story of how the world’s largest banks came to love the House Agriculture Committee.

In Washington, we often witness politicians forgetting the lessons of a year or five years or 10 years ago. It takes some special obliviousness to forget the lessons of Friday. Five days ago, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., delivered a critical report and held an explosive hearing detailing the “London Whale” trades, made by a JPMorgan Chase satellite office in London. As you may have read, these trades turned sour and led to a $6.2 billion loss for the bank in a matter of weeks. More important, JPMorgan misled regulators about the nature of the trades, altered its internal processes to take on more risk, and then hid the losses by improperly mismarking the value on its balance sheet, pretending the shortfall was inconsequential to avoid oversight and present a positive financial picture to investors.

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Imagine that you’re serving at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. You’ve been in country nine months, coping with hazardous and punishing conditions, trying to survive and return to your family. Then you get a call from your spouse that they’re about to be evicted from the family home. The sense of anxiety is acute, and so is the feeling of helplessness – you’re thousands of miles away, focused on your mission, and you’re wracked with regret and guilt, unable to protect your family from the tragedy and shame of foreclosure.

This has happened at least 700 times to service members on missions overseas since the beginning of the foreclosure crisis in 2008. And it’s actually illegal; it violates the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a statute that carries criminal penalties. The nation’s biggest banks have admitted to the conduct before Congress and in regulatory filings, and they only recently acknowledged that they illegally foreclosed on 10 times as many service members as they previously claimed. Any serious effort to hold banks accountable for routine abuse of homeowners should include prosecutions of this execrable behavior. But the government rolled out settlements years before the true depth of these violations ever began to come to light.

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This interview with the New York Times’ Dealbook (sponsored today by the financial firm Allianz) is no different. As a prelude, he gets a commendation from former Attorney General and current corporate lawyer Michael Mukasey (always good to have the lawyer from the other side of the table, defending those you could have but chose not to prosecute, praising your work). He gets phantom criticism from unnamed members of “the Occupy Wall Street crowd” and “Rolling Stone magazine,” a reference to Matt Taibbi. There’s no easier way to marginalize critics than to refuse to name them.

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No officers who authorized and directed the torture and detainee abuse, either in that prison, at Guantanamo Bay or anywhere around the world, ever faced trial. But Lynndie England became a symbol for the sorry state of the rule of law in America, where a few small “bad apples” get held to account, and the higher-ups who devised and directed the criminal activity get off scot-free.

There’s a Lynndie England for the financial crisis, too.

Meet Lorraine O. Brown, an individual singled out for actual jail time for her role in the massive mortgage document fraud that plagued this nation. Like England, she stands alone among the multitudes of fraudsters, including those at the highest reaches of the financial industry.

Brown was the President of DocX, a company that created and processed mortgage-related documents, first as a stand-alone unit, and later as a subsidiary of the document processing giant Lender Processing Solutions (LPS). And like Lynndie England, Brown committed a series of legitimate crimes. From 2003 until 2009, DocX routinely forged mortgage documents.

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Recent profiles of this event have called last night’s State of the Union the “anniversary” of the formation of the working group.  But you can’t really have an anniversary of something that never existed in the first place.  There never was a Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, never a so-called task force dedicated to ferreting out Wall Street fraud -- the deceptive origination of mortgage loans, sale of worthless mortgage-backed securities for huge sums, and subsequent unloading of toxic debt to unsuspecting buyers. The working group fails to exist as a tangible entity to this day.  What does exist is the same years-old Financial Fraud Enforcement Group that serves as a conduit for press releases about investigative actions already in progress.

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Under current law, a principal reduction like this would be exempted from tax liability. However, that law, the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, expires at the end of the year, and after that, any mortgage debt forgiveness provided to a borrower will count as gross income for tax purposes, potentially costing millions of families several billion dollars. In the above case, the borrower would be required to pay taxes on the entire $177,000 amount forgiven by the bank, as if it were earned income. And that’s money that struggling homeowners simply don’t have.

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