President Obama’s star-studded fundraiser at George Clooney’s house went off without a hitch. But before the event, about 50 activists with the Campaign for a Fair Settlement, mostly low-income victims of foreclosure or predatory activity by the financial sector, made their appeal to the President in a protest on the motorcade route to the residence, asking for Obama to “light a fire under the Department of Justice” and step in to help homeowners stay in their homes.

The Florida Supreme Court heard oral arguments in an important case that could have wide-ranging implications for foreclosures in that state. The case, Roman Pino v. Bank of New York Mellon, could invalidate the ability of banks to refile documents in situations where the initial documents they filed to foreclose on homeowners were fraudulent. Pino went through a foreclosure on his house in 2008, but attorneys found that the mortgage assignment used in the foreclosure proceedings was signed by known robo-signer Cheryl Samons and stamped with a notarization that was out of date.

Campaign for a Fair Settlement hopes to mobilize the 11 million underwater homeowners in America as a constituency that will be heard throughout the election. Some of those underwater homeowners will be at the protest tonight.

And provided that Los Angeles traffic patterns cooperate, I will be there as well. My Twitter feed is probably the best place to find quick updates from the protest tonight, which should kick off around 6pm Pacific time/9pm Eastern.

One of the items Eric Schneiderman has been using to push back on claims that the Residential Mortage Backed Securities (RMBS) working group is being slow-walked and made ineffectual is that they have a funding stream earmarked for it that testifies to the seriousness of effort with respect to resources. But yesterday, House GOP members refused to add these funds to their budget.

The Sun-Sentinel in Palm Beach, Florida has been running an excellent series on so-called bad-neighbor banks. Over ten thousand bank-owned properties in ten South Florida cities, most of them acquired in foreclosure proceedings, had major property code violations. Their reporting uncovered that 40% of the bank-owned homes in this area had been cited with violations.

Bank of America says it began mailing notices to their borrowers about principal reduction opportunities under the foreclosure fraud settlement. Recall that BofA inked a side deal on the settlement that would allow them to extinguish an additional $850 million of the cash penalties by reducing loan balances more deeply than called for in the settlement. At the time it was announced, the thinking was that BofA could avoid that $850 million by reducing balances on loans it didn’t actually own, and now that seems likely to happen.

I wanted to take note of this one story from last week, about the fact that the foreclosure fraud settlement is only a three-year agreement, meaning that all the vaunted reforms of the servicing market end up expiring at the end of the time period. But the solution lies with Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s efforts to adopt permanent standards for servicers.

As people increasingly realize that the mortgage settlement was an enforcement fraud, attention’s turned to the “new” joint Federal/State task force that’s supposed to make the settlement into a “down payment,” by delivering much more. And so far people don’t like what they see, and are saying so. What’s striking about the resulting PR push back, however, is that it just highlights how banker-fraud-friendly our federal government is.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus met with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman today for a hearing on how to prevent a million foreclosures. Not much happened at the hearing. More interesting was a letter sent by members of the CPC authored by Maxine Waters to Eric Schneiderman asking him to hire Rep. Brad Miller to run the fraud task force.

Let’s get something straight: we did not have a housing “bubble”, in the usual sense of the word. The mainstream narrative of crazed, greedy, irresponsible homeowner-wannabes driving prices unsustainably high, causing the still ongoing crash is wrong.