Obama is giving the speech liberals have begged him to give for four years.

[JDPriestly]

92. The evidence is there.

If the evidence were not there, the big banks would have fought the fines that were imposed on them much harder. The failure to pursue criminal charges isn't due to a lack of evidence or the vagueness of the law, it is the cost of prosecuting banks who can dedicate nearly unlimited resources to defend their CEOs, but provide no money to help consumers, neither depositors, nor borrowers, nor homeowners facing default.

It's simply the 1%'s excessive influence over Obama's administration that is the problem here. The work, the many hours, that would be involved in examining documents in boxes scares them away. There have been lawsuits, and, in a field in which the banks virtually wrote the laws because nobody else cared (at least not since the Depression), some of the lawsuits have been won or settled.

Marcy Kaptur advised homeowners in default to stay in their houses. If more of them had taken here advice, we might see a few more bankers in jail. Wall Street and our government pulled the wool over the eyes of a lot of Americans who do not understand that, with a mortgage, the bankers are the more sophisticated partner in the deal and more responsible for making sure the "i"s are dotted and the "t"s crossed. Many Americans who lost their homes because of defaults still don't understand what happened to them. The bankers and mortgage companies made calculated misjudgments (mistakes on purpose) in determining the risks in individual mortgage applications. The crisis was no accident. It was fraud, a mix of blatant misrepresentations to government authorities and banks to whom mortgages were sold and of concealment of the facts from investors and mortgage borrowers.

I contrast the experiences of some of my friends who applied for second mortgages during the Bush administration with ours when we applied for mortgages during other administrations. What passed for qualifying under Bush was a joke in many cases. We, however, were very limited as to how much money we could borrow on our income.

Bush made a State of the Union speech in which he announced something to the effect that even the poor would be able to buy houses under his administration. Maybe I should put on my tin-foil hat as I write this, but I firmly believe that the mortgage crisis was caused by the surreptitious attempt by the Bush administration to jump-start a failing economy following the dot.com bust on Wall Street.

The wars may have been, in part, a Bush stealth stimulus effort too. The Bush economic boom was a mirage. Today's economists, the economists of the Bush era, are and were pretty good mathematicians. And they have powerful computers at their fingertips. There is no excuse for what the Bush administration did to our economy. And there is even less excuse for what Wall Street and the banks did to it. There was fraud. I saw it myself. I stand firmly on this.