Beginnings of Accountability? Beginnings of the End of Our New Gilded Age?

Businessweek:

Merscorp Inc., the operator of a national mortgage registry used by banks, was sued by Delaware’s attorney general for allegedly using deceptive practices that hide information from borrowers. The MERS database, which tracks ownership interests in mortgages, impeded the ability of homeowners to fight foreclosures and obscures its data, Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden said in a complaint filed today. “MERS engaged and continues to engage in a range of deceptive trade practices that sow confusion among consumers, investors and other stakeholders in the mortgage finance system, damage the integrity of Delaware’s land records, and lead to unlawful foreclosure practices,” Biden said…

Biden described MERS as “a front organization” at a news conference today in Delaware… Separately, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed Merscorp for information about how mortgage servicers including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. use the system... MERS faces multiple unrelated lawsuits by counties over allegations that the company cheated them out of mortgage filing fees…

“The MERS system has raised serious questions about who owns what in America,” Biden said at the press conference... Biden asked the court to bar MERS from initiating any foreclosure actions in the company’s name, from acting as a nominal mortgage lender when it didn’t have a “beneficial interest” in the property and from recording such mortgages in the company’s name. Biden also asked the court to stop MERS from assigning or taking any other actions on Delaware mortgages until the company’s system has been “audited and corrected,” according to the complaint. The court should order MERS to correct the chain of title on Delaware mortgages that were recorded in county offices, Biden said.

Follow the link for an edifying glimpse of the defensive crouch produced in the accused by Biden's blisteringly strong charges, and try to savor before you spit out the weasel words that spew from that ignominious posture. It seems to me that these lawsuits, Obama's nationwide campaign for the Jobs Bill, various state-based recall efforts against GOP union-busting and mass voter disenfranchisement overreach, as well as the Occupiers on the front pages spotlighting that lethal concentration of Harrington's Other America into our new Gilded Age's 99% versus the 1% are hardly identical or seamlessly continuous, but they are productively complementary and cross-pollinating, rhetorically, organizationally, agitationally, practically.

To complete the picture, to grasp the discordant backdrop against which these forces are buttressing one another despite their differences, just listen to Republican Presidential candidates out-crowing one another about tax cuts for the rich at their circus debates while the Republican Congress (with a ruling majority in the House and a ruling minority in the filibuster Senate, yes, it's a Republican Congress that has historically unprecedented disapproval ratings right now) continues gleefully to obstruct every effort, however modest, of the Democrats to invest in jobs in the midst of universal catastrophe, and while Paul Randroid Ryan weeps fat wet tears from his dead doll-eyes at the very thought that abused starving wronged punished Americans might stop patriotically sucking corporate cock for a split second.