The NY Times is reporting that NY and California have agreed to sign on the 50 state deal and that is will immunize robo-signing. If that is true, it’s over folks. The housing market is not going to recover any time soon and the court system will be permanently corrupted by forged and perjurious documents.

This settlement is an incredible breach of the social contract between the government and the governed.

Dylan Ratigan is well positioned to author a book, designed to be an enjoyable and informative read by normal humans, on the ongoing financial crisis. He is the wunderkind who became Global Managing Editor for Corporate Finance of Bloomberg, the premier news service that specializes in finance, at an exceptionally young age. He was at CNBC while that network was hyping the housing bubble as a non-bubble offering fantastic investment opportunities.

In the summer of 2011, 14 million Americans were unemployed and 16% of the country was officially poor. Student loan debt eclipsed credit card with over $1 trillion outstanding. One in five mortgages was underwater. Our leaders said the economy was recovering from the recession caused by the financial crisis, but their soothing pronouncements seemed to mock the evidence of our senses. On September 17, a group of activists converged on a small concrete plaza in lower Manhattan, determined to Occupy Wall Street.

Apparently the Fed didn’t take kindly to that Bloomberg News investigation of their $7.7 trillion largesse to domestic and foreign banks during the financial crisis. The Fed took the rare step of publishing a public rebuttal, with a cover letter by Ben Bernanke, objecting to the report.

The horse is out of the barn already. Krup’s comment about ‘if we can do it the right way’ is totally moot. Companies like Cabot Energy and Chesapeake have been doing shale gas production through fracking for years (oh and there were four 4+ on the Richter scale earthquakes in Oklahoma recently; don’t tell me this is NOT from the fracking that is going on down there). You’d think they’d know how ‘to do it the right way’ all ready. They don’t and they don’t have any control over the negligence of the crews.

But they sure don’t want to have to pay for it once it’s happened; and once the brine hits the water table, it’s pretty hard to stuff it ‘back in the barn.’

The United States was founded on the principle that no individual is above the law. We are, as John Adams said, “a nation of laws, not men.” But that principle is under assault, as Glenn Greenwald explains in his powerful new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

The seven OccupyMN protesters arrested Thursday are: Peter Leeman, Devin Wynn, Ben Egerman, Katrina Plotz, Merritt Benton, Misty Rowan and Jason St. John. If one of these names, that of Ben Egerman, might sound familiar to you, it’s because the last time he was in the news, it was for glittering Karl Rove when Rove came to the Twin Cities for a book signing two weeks ago

Tim Geithner went on CNBC today and said that the Administration is getting right on the whole “prosecuting the people who defrauded the economy” thing.

You might have noticed this past week that the Department of Justice has seemingly declared war on Medical Marijuana dispensaries. The first salvo was probably at the end of September when the ATF issued a statement that it is illegal for medical marijuana users to use firearms. Since then, the four California US Attorneys have declared that California Medical Marijuana dispensaries have to close within 45 days:

The SEC has told Standard and Poor’s that they may file civil charges over the rating agency’s role in a 2007 mortgage backed securities deal. The formal warning of potential imminent charges, known as a Wells notice, was delivered yesterday.