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Once again, the banks are given a pass for their criminal behavior, while homeowners are given the shaft: 4 million people wrongfully foreclosed on. Can they get their houses back?:

Imagine you are a homeowner who has made your mortgage payments on time. Or pretend for a moment that you have been informed you are entitled to relief or promised a modification. Now, imagine that in spite of all that, you receive a foreclosure notice, which the bank follows through on.

That is the reality for the 4 million people the banks wrongfully foreclosed on between 2009-2010. Tuesday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve announced the beginning of payments for some of those people whose homes were wrongfully taken from them.

As Hayes explained in the clip above, "given the scale of the deception and error, the amount of money on the table for those who've been victimized, is in most instances, cartoonishly small."

Here's more from Salon on Alexis Goldstein's What You Can Buy for Having Your House Stolen Tumblr page -- Bank stole your house? Have 10 pitchforks’ worth of compensation:

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Jon Stewart took the members of the United States Senate Banking Committee to task after their disgusting display this week where they were fawning all over JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon. Not surprising, as Stewart pointed out, given Dimon is one of their largest campaign donors. As Stewart concluded after going through the list of reforms that these Republicans have opposed in regulating the banks:

STEWART: Must be nice to be a Republican Senator sometimes, because you get the fun of breaking sh*t and the joy of complaining the sh*t you just broke doesn’t work.

Here's more from TPM on this week's hearing: Senators Fawn Over JPMorgan CEO After Massive Trading Debacle:

The long-shot big hope for Wall Street reformers Wednesday was that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon would trip up before the Senate Banking Committee and expose the need for tighter rules governing big banks. His firm, after all, recently lost billions making risky bets with depositor funds on the line.

Instead, with some notable exceptions, the senators themselves turned the cross-examination into a coronation, and exposed the extent to which elected officials still feel compelled to genuflect to powerful financial interests.

“You’re obviously renowned, rightfully so I think, as being one of the most, you know, one of the best CEOs in the country for financial institutions,” crooned Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN). “You missed this, it’s a blip on the radar screen.”

Most of the fawning came from GOP senators who in addition to relying on Wall Street largesse remain engaged in a political campaign against President Obama’s 2010 financial reform law. But some Democrats also treated Dimon if not quite like royalty then perhaps as a trusted confidant. [...]

His exchanges with GOP senators were even more saccharine. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — a tea party hero — gave Dimon a full pardon. “I really appreciate you voluntarily coming in to talk with us,” he said. “It is important that we talk about things happening in the industry. It helps us as we look forward and, hopefully, it will contribute to best practice scenarios in industry. I appreciate your emphasis on continuous quality improvement. We can hardly sit in judgment of your losing $2 billion. We lose twice that every day in Washington.”

Stewart went after DeMint for that ridiculous remark, asking if he thought spending money was the same as losing money.

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Tea party favorite Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) on Wednesday asked JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who recently announced that his company had lost at least $2 billion in the derivative market, to "guide" Congress in creating friendly banking regulations.

During a U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing, DeMint told Dimon that lawmakers had no right to judge JPMorgan for their massive losses.

"We can hardly sit in judgement of your losing $2 billion," the junior senator from South Carolina explained. "We lose twice that every day here in Washington and plan to continue to do that every day. It's comforting to know that even with a $2 billion loss in a trade last year, your company still, I think, had a $19 billion profit. During that same period, we lost over a trillion dollars."

"As you can tell, there's a temptation here. Every time something goes amiss, we want to add a regulation, and we've surrounded the banking industry with so many regulations and we still seem to have problems here and there," DeMint added. "I think we do need to recognize that you are a very big bank, the biggest in the world. You've got very big profits. Periodically you're going to have big losses and we need to look at that as part of doing business."

The senator continued by asking Dimon "for some ideas of what you think we need to do ... to allow the industry to operate better."

"I believe in strong regulation, not always more," the CEO replied. "I would prefer a simple, clean, strong regulatory system with real intelligent design. And that's not what we did. We created a really complex, hard to figure out who's responsible, no one could adjudicate between all the various regulatory agencies."

"Obviously as we've seen, the laws and regulations are not necessarily improving things," DeMint agreed. "Some of the things you've done voluntarily -- and other banks -- like capital requirements. I think a best practice -- if we could do anything to encourage the industry to develop a lot of its own voluntary rules, that would guide us a lot better."

"So I guess if I could just leave you with any one thing, if you could come back this time next year and talk about how the industry has put together large-scale, best-practice committees, that would help us keep banking as a private enterprise rather than as a government institution."

Dimon announced in May that his firm had lost $2 billion gambling on derivatives, but only days later, experts said the losses had surged to at least $3 billion.

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Shortly after Jamie Dimon's appearance on Fox last month, PBS's Bill Moyers had former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and head of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Paul Volcker, whose namesake is the Volcker rule that Wall Street has been lobbying so hard to water down or get rid of, as his guest.

In light of the recent debacle at JPMorgan Chase where Dimon's company lost at least $2 billion on high risk derivatives trading, his advice for Dimon during this interview is downright prescient; If you want to participate in proprietary trading, give up your banking license.

Paul Volcker on the Volcker Rule:

You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening. Business and political forces, including hordes of lobbyists, are working hard to diminish or destroy these protections. One of the biggest bull’s-eyes is on the Volcker Rule, a section of the Dodd-Frank Act that aims to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling it on their own — sometimes risky — investments. [...]

Volcker contends the rule aims to curb conflicts of interest between bankers and their customers. He suggests that former investment companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which sought banking licenses during the economic crisis in order to access federal protection against failing, should now turn in those licenses if they want to do speculative trading.

“You shouldn’t run a financial system on the expectation of government support. We’re supposed to be a free enterprise system,” Volcker tells Moyers. “The problem of course is once they get rescued, does that lead to the conclusion they’ll get rescued in the future?”

Transcript of the clip below the fold and you can watch the entire interview at the link above.

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Rachel Maddow took a look at Scott Brown's record since entering the Senate where he has been called one of Wall Street's favorite Congressmen and for good reason. As she reminded us, Brown's contribution to the Wall Street regulatory overhaul was to make sure that the $19 billion it cost to pay for additional oversight was going to be dumped on the tax payers instead of the financial institutions footing the bill. And now he's got donations flooding in from New York even though he's running for office in Massachusetts.

And of course the other reason Wall Street is opening their wallets for Brown is because he's the only thing standing between Elizabeth Warren and the United States Senate.

Elizabeth Warren called for Jamie Dimon to resign from the New York Fed this week:

Elizabeth Warren called on JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to resign from his post on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's board, citing the need for "responsibility and accountability" in the financial industry.

Dimon, who disclosed a $2 billion loss by the banking giant last week, should "send a signal to the American people that Wall Street bankers get it and to show that they understand the need for responsibility and accountability," Warren said in a statement following Dimon's Sunday appearance on "Meet the Press."

During that interview, Dimon said he "absolutely" believed that the enormous loss would give regulators more ammunition against the banks. Warren latched onto that comment, stating that Dimon's place on the board of directors gave him the power to advise the New York Fed on "management oversight and policy," creating what the Massachusetts Democrat feels is a clear conflict of interest.

"We need to stop the cycle of bankers taking on risky activities, getting bailed out by the taxpayers, then using their army of lobbyists to water down regulations," Warren said. "We need a tough cop on the beat so that no one steals your purse on Main Street or your pension on Wall Street."

You can watch her interview with Rachel below the fold.

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As Steve Benen noted, on the heels of the $2 billion loss by JPMorgan Chase, here was the RNC Chairman Reince Priebus' reaction on Meet the Press this Sunday -- RNC Chief: Leave Wall Street alone:

JPMorgan's reckless, $2 billion fiasco appears to have a silver lining of sorts: the bank's bad bets help demonstrate the need for safeguards in the system. In his new column, Paul Krugman thanks JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon for offering "an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated."

And yet, somehow, some still don't see it that way. On NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus, common sense be damned, argued that the JPMorgan mess changes nothing.

Host David Gregory asked a straightforward question: "In light of the losses on Wall Street this week, you think we need less financial regulation rather than more?" In Preibus' mind, it's not even a close call: "I think we need less." The RNC chief added that Democrats have "made things worse" by approving new safeguards and adding new layers of accountability to the financial system.

It reminded me of an Upton Sinclair line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

This really isn't that complicated. In 2008, Wall Street, left to its own devises, nearly collapsed the global financial system. Four years later, institutions like JPMorgan are still taking enormous risks in reckless schemes. It's hard to even conceive of a straight-face argument against sensible regulations in light of recent developments, but the chairman of the Republican National Committee was on national television anyway, arguing that policymakers should be doing less. Read on...

As Steve pointed out, this is Mitt Romney's position as well and they're counting on the public hating regulation as much or more than they hate Wall Street. That's the talking point they've been hammering home regardless of how reckless Wall Street and the bankers have been in the aftermath of the crash and ever since President Obama took office, so I don't expect them to change now. Forget about the fact that Wall Street took our economy down, regulations are terrible. I suspect our media doing a terrible job of explaining why their views are wrong and why we ought to keep the gambling separate from the banking industry has a lot to do with why Republicans have not suffered more greatly when it comes to public opinion on the matter. Interviews like this one with David Gregory sure aren't helping any.

Transcript below the fold.

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After the news that JP Morgan Chase lost $2 billion on high-risk credit derivatives this week, as usual, Sen. Bernie Sanders was one of our few voices of reason out there about what to do with these still too-big-to-fail institutions -- break them up.

From the Senator's press releases: Break Up Big Banks:

J.P. Morgan Chase revealed that its in-house trading operation lost $2 billion in the past six weeks. "The debacle at J.P. Morgan Chase reaffirms my view that the largest six banks in this country, including J.P. Morgan Chase, which have assets equivalent to two-thirds of our GDP, must be broken up. This is important in order to bring more competition into the financial marketplace and to prevent another ‘too-big-to-fail' bailout," Sen. Bernie Sanders said. "At a time when 23 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed, huge financial institutions should not be involved in ‘making wagers or high-stake bets.' They should be investing in the productive economy creating jobs and improving our standard of living."

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If it sounds unusual to hear the head of a country's central bank speak so positively about the protests going on around the world now it's probably because it is. Mark Carney though is one of more reform-minded of the central bankers (somewhat equivalent to the role Ben Bernanke plays as the head of the Federal Reserve). Carney was notably the target of a profanity-laced tirade by Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan Chase) last month at a meeting of world bankers and officials. Dimon said the new rules discriminated against American banks and called the new capitalization rules "anti-American".

Mark Carney - a former Goldman Sachs Co. investment banker himself – is being pushed by Canada to head the G20's Financial Stability Board, a position that would put him even more at odds with people like the "business-as-usual, now-move-along" Jamie Dimons of this world who'd just as soon keep the casino open forever.

via The Globe and Mail:

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and other expressions of frustration with the global economic and financial system highlight the need for policy makers to show they are serious about forcing change, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney says.

In a television interview, Mr. Carney acknowledged that the movement is an understandable product of the "increase in inequality" – particularly in the United States – that started with globalization and was thrust into sharp relief by the worst downturn since the Great Depression, which hit the less well-educated and blue-collar segments of the population hardest.

"You’ve had a big increase in the ratio of CEO earnings to workers on the shop floor,’’ Mr. Carney said, according to a transcript of the interview with Peter Mansbridge of CBC News, parts of which aired on Friday evening. "And then on top of that, a financial crisis.’’

But Mr. Carney – a former Goldman Sachs Co. investment banker – suggested that while he understands the frustration, some of it is rooted in an overly pessimistic view of policy makers’ resolve to make it harder for financial firms to take the sort of risks that led to the meltdown of 2008 and the brutal recession that followed.

“There’s a frustration with policy and a frustration that, `are things going back to business as usual,’’’ Mr. Carney said in the interview. ``If I may say, that is not going to happen, but I can understand the frustrations.’’

Demonstrations like the Occupy Wall Street protests, which will hit Canadian cities this weekend, are a “democratic expression of views’’ and “entirely constructive,’’ Mr. Carney said.

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What the hell is David Gergen smoking? When asked about the upcoming hearing by Carl Levin's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, David Gergen compares the Congressional hearing to a hanging. I've watched David Gergen who's been moving further and further to the right with a lot of his rhetoric ever since President Obama got elected and who has been showing himself to be just another rightie and not a centrist as CNN loves to portray him as, but this one really takes the cake for just being ignorant. Since when is the Congress doing oversight before any action by the Justice Department akin to a lynching? Shameless. Just shameless. David Gergen, you just jumped the shark here with being an apologist for these Wall Street masters of the universe that just about took our entire economy down. Unbelievable.

Transcript via CNN.

BLITZER: Let's get back to one of the big issues in this mid-term election year, anger over Wall Street's role in the economic crisis. Executives of Goldman Sachs will be in the hot seat on Capitol Hill tomorrow as they fight allegations of fraud. Our senior political analyst David Gergen is here. He's joining us now.

David, the court of public opinion versus the legal court. They've got two major agenda issues concerns Goldman Sachs right now.

DAVID GERGEN: Absolutely. And Goldman Sachs is going to be in effect put on trial in the court of public opinion tomorrow but then they go later on to defend themselves in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission in a formal courtroom proceeding. Their chances of losing the court of public opinion are much, much higher than in a legal court. What we have tomorrow in this hearing, it's supposed to be an investigation. It has all the signs of a hanging.

BLITZER: A hanging?

GERGEN: Yes. You can almost hear the gallows being built right now. What happens when you put these -- you put the CEO of a company up there, you put him in front of a bunch of other people. It all looks like they're guilty of something and then you hit them pretty hard. We're going to have a lot of sound bytes out tomorrow berating them.

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Rep. Marcy Kaptur cites an example of how bailing out the banks has done little to help struggling home owners in Ohio. Bill Moyers also asks Kaptur about her speech on the House floor where she urged foreclosed homeowners to be squatters in their own homes.

This was a really fantastic segment from Bill Moyers Journal and I encourge everyone to watch the entire interview with Kaptur and Simon Johnson at Moyers' site.

MARCY KAPTUR: Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, 'What should I know?' They said, 'Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us.'

I said, 'Well, give me the top one.' They said, 'J.P. Morgan Chase.' I went back to Washington that night. And one of my colleagues said, 'You want to come to dinner?' I said, 'Well, what is it?' He said, 'Well, it's a meeting with Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase.' I said, 'Wow, yes. I really do.' So, I go to this meeting in a fancy hotel, fancy dinner, and everyone is complimenting him. I mean, it was just like a love fest.

They finally got to me, and my point to ask a question. I said, 'Well, I don't want to speak out of turn here, Mr. Dimon.' I said, 'But your company is the largest forecloser in my district. And our Realtors just said to me this morning that your people don't return phone calls.' I said, 'We can't do work outs.' And he looked at me, he said, 'Do you know that I talk to your Governor all the time?' He said, 'Our company employs 10,000 people in Ohio.'

And I'm thinking, 'What is that? A threat?' And he said, 'I speak to the Mayor of Columbus.' I said, 'Why don't you come further north?' I said, 'Toledo, Cleveland, where the foreclosures are just skyrocketing.' He said, 'Well, we'll have someone call you.' And he gave me a card. And they never did. For two weeks, we tried to reach them. And finally, I was on a national news show. And I told this story. They called within ten minutes. And they said, 'Oh, we'll work with you. We'll try to do some workouts in your area.'

We planned the first one after working with them for weeks and weeks and weeks. Their people never showed up. And it was a Friday. Our people had taken off work. They'd driven from all these locations to come. We kept calling J.P. Morgan Chase saying, 'Where's your person? Where's your person?' And they finally sent somebody down from Detroit by 3:00 in the afternoon. But out people had been waiting all morning and a lot of people that's how they treat our people.

BILL MOYERS: You did a remarkable thing on the floor of the House recently. And I want to show my audience a clip of a speech in which you urge people to break the law.

(BEGIN VIDEO)

MARCY KAPTUR: So why should any American citizen be kicked out of their homes in this cold weather? In Ohio it is going to be 10 or 20 below zero. Don't leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don't have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can't find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don't you leave. In Ohio and Michigan and Indiana and Illinois and all these other places our people are being treated like chattel, and this Congress is stymied.

(END VIDEO)

BILL MOYERS: Wow. You are urging them to resist the law when the Sheriff shows up to throw them out of their home.

MARCY KAPTUR: I'm saying that they deserve justice, too. And that the scales of justice in front of the Supreme Court are supposed to be balanced, and they're not. And that possession is 90 percent of the law. And that you have legal rights, as a home owner. You have a right to legal representation. You have a right before the judge to have the mortgage note produced by whomever in the system has it. Judge Boyko of Cleveland threw out six cases, because when the foreclosures came up, the financial institutions couldn't produce the note. Our people deserve their day in court.