There’s nobody who hates navel-gazing more than I, so I will try to dispense with this quickly. Glenn Thrush thinks I’m wrong to attribute the same perspective on Eric Schneiderman to Tom Miller, who dissed him on the record, and Shaun Donovan.

Whether you believe in Eric Schneiderman’s ability to deliver a legitimate investigation on mortgage securitization fraud or not, you have to admit that the united front on opposition to a settlement on foreclosure fraud collapsed the moment that he agreed to helm that federal investigatory task force. Now Iowa AG Tom Miller is publicly denigrating Schneiderman’s role in setting the terms, claiming he didn’t do much.

You’ve heard enough from me. And actually, you’ll hear plenty more later. But I thought I’d line up what some other people are saying about the foreclosure fraud settlement, the terms of which have not yet totally been released (which, I repeat, is a travesty of justice).

I think I’ve made my position on the foreclosure fraud settlement pretty clear. Nevertheless, there’s a time to stew and a time to figure out how to make this work as well as possible. I think there are some tangible steps that can be taken, if not to improve the deal, then to improve housing policy overall to the benefit of homeowners rather than bank balance sheets.

The fact is that as the elected chief legal officers in their states, no one had the power to make Harris or Schneiderman accept the deal. Yes, a lot of indirect political pressure was applied to them, but that is all it was. No one literally put a gun to their heads. Nothing actually prevented them from fighting longer or harder. The deal happened because they choose to agree to it. It would not have happened without them.

No one should get a pass. Everyone should be held responsible for the choices they make.

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

If you or anyone you know have been affected by foreclosure fraud, we want you to share your thoughts on the settlement with us. Unlike some who laid ground cover for this carnage by hailing Schneiderman a hero but remain silent today, we will not allow this deal — and what it means to the victims of foreclosure fraud — to be buried under a mountain of pro-settlement propaganda.

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.

This settlement arises from multiple abuses found in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past several years. At the height of the housing bubble, banks sliced and diced mortgages and traded them with little regard for the rules following land recording or securitization to such a sloppy extent that they lost track of the true owner on potentially millions of homes.

To cover up for this massive failure, banks and their servicing units have been found to have routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages. In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including illegal fees charged to borrowers, putting borrowers into foreclosure at the same time as they were working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous settlements where promises were made on modifications, and countless other errors that maximized servicer profits and gouged homeowners.

There are also cases of wrongful foreclosures where homeowners have been turned out of their homes without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where servicers illegally added late fees and applied payments inaccurately, pushing the homeowner into foreclosure. This is but a smattering of the examples of foreclosure fraud and servicer abuse found in a series of interlocking investigations, court depositions, reviews of documents in registers of deeds offices, and homeowner testimonials.

How do you get puff pieces on the cover of Time Magazine? Inquiring minds want to know.