Over the next several weeks, these bank accountability leaders told me they will step up their direct efforts against the banks and also the Administration.

How could a private citizen’s whistleblower suit get extinguished in a federal settlement? We haven’t seen the terms, of course, but apparently the Mackler suit could have been filed under the False Claims Act on behalf of the US government, which was being defrauded. Mackler probably got a payout for his services, but the suit sought $5,500-$11,000 in fines per violation, which could have ranged into the billions. So when faced with documented proof of noncompliance with and abuse under HAMP, the government simply passed it off and folded it into their settlement, and for good measure gave back all the incentive payments owed to the same banks alleged to have defrauded them in this lawsuit.

If there’s anything approaching accountability in the Obama Administration’s actions against the banks, I’m not seeing it.

I was just on KPFK in Los Angeles with RJ Eskow, and we have fairly similar ideas about the foreclosure fraud settlement, even though they may sound different. He thinks that we need to use the pressure available to ensure that the settlement is a beginning and not an ending. I’m just trying to be realistic about what the settlement means. But one area we agreed is that the lack of deterrence implied by this settlement is absolutely corrosive for the future. Eskow described it as socially corrosive, and a way that people lose faith in their government. I concur completely.

It’s not just that a failure to prosecute makes it more likely that the same bad actors engage in the same bad actions over and over again. It’s not just that this furthers a financial oligarchy that has been historically responsible for most major economic crises in this country. It’s that a two-tiered system of justice is terrible for civil society.

I really only have one question. “Will we put people in jail?”

Beyond the details now pouring out from Dayen, Yves Smith and others, what are we seeing?

The Obama Administration has followed a predictable pattern we now recognize. It has consistently functioned like criminal defense counsel, whose mission is to get their criminal clients, the major corporations and executives who fund their elections, off with no admission of guilt, no forced resignations, and as little harm to their reputation, or that of the counsel, as possible. To do this, they neutralize anyone with an ounce of public purpose in their veins.

I think you can divine what I think of the foreclosure fraud settlement, which releases liability on a host of fraudulent conduct for only a $5 billion guarantee from the banks, as well as $20 billion made up mostly of “credits” that HUD believes will translate into around $34.5 billion overall. The credits play out over three years, so you can adjust for inflation, and in fact if you adjust in that way, as Matt Yglesias does, you find that this is around 10 times less than the tobacco settlement of the late 1990s.

But there’s justice in the form of just compensation and there’s justice in the form of, well, what justice is always described as in a criminal context – deterrence. No financial penalty will do as much to prevent future conduct of this type as a senior executive being sent to jail. And the failure of having accountability on that level is like a festering wound at the heart of our politics.

I actually find it positive that no settlement has been reached, because the driving forces behind the settlement – the Treasury Department, DoJ and HUD – did no meaningful investigation that would dictate the amounts needed for a reasonable settlement. In fact, to the extent that anything has happened on foreclosure fraud over the past year, it has come from the only entities willing to do their jobs and follow the law: a handful of state Attorneys General doing the investigations and handing out the indictments that others won’t. Beau Biden, Eric Schneiderman, Martha Coakley and Kamala Harris, among others, have pointed the way forward for legitimate accountability for banks involved in systematically stealing homes. And Catherine Cortez Masto, the Attorney General of Nevada, needs to be singled out for special praise. Because thanks to the law she helped push in the state, criminalizing wrongful and fraudulent foreclosures, evictions have slowed to a crawl.

It was inevitable that some apologist would claim that Martha Coakley actually holding banks accountable for following the law would stunt the nation’s recovery and cause us all to queue up on soup lines. That ignominious honor goes to Liz Peek of the Fiscal Times (a Fox News contributor). I apologize in advance for the fifth-grade writing level of this excerpt.

What could possibly make a human being torture another human being?

That’s a question that, as a young boy, I recall asking my grandparents—Holocaust survivors—after they described to me in vivid detail the torture they and other members of my extended family were subjected to by the Nazis during World War II.

It’s a question I returned to earlier this year when I had the opportunity to interview a veteran of the US Army Reserves who was torn up about the torture he says he witnessed and participated in against some “war on terror” detainees while serving as a guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. [That guard, Pfc. Albert Melise, has since been barred from reenlistment for speaking to me.]