Matt Taibbi is one of the few jourmalists worth reading these days - while all the others faithfully repeat the corporate party line, he looks at the sneaky shit our government and the lobbyists and teh big corporations with their interlocking directorates and 1 percenter owners - and then he says, right out loud, "Hey look at that sneaky shit they are trying to pull!".

And he does it again with his latest piece on the massive sneaky "AG Settlement": deal being done right now, all hush hush behind-closed-doors and in the smokiest and darkest of back rooms.

Go read the whole article - but if you don't - remember these paragraphs - remember when they pass this deal and let the bankers who own the government make off with trillions of dollars of stolen and mismanaged wealth. This is what the politicians want to cover up - this is the bankers "get out of jail free" card.

I talked to one foreclosure activist over the weekend who put it this way: “[The AG settlement] will be a bigger bailout than TARP.”

How? The math actually makes a hell of a lot of sense, when you look at it closely.

Any foreclosure settlement will allow the banks to pay one relatively small bill to cover all of their legal liabilities stemming from the monstrous frauds they all practiced in the years leading up to the 2008 crash (and even afterward), when they all schemed to create great masses of dicey/junk subprime loans and then disguise them as AAA-rated paper for sale to big private investors and institutions like state pension funds and union funds.

To recap the crime: the banks lent money to firms like Countrywide, who in turn created billions in dicey loans, who then sold them back to the banks, who chopped them up and sold them to, among other things, your state’s worker retirement funds.

So this is bankers from Deutsche and Goldman and Bank of America essentially stealing the retirement nest eggs of firemen, teachers, cops, and other actors, as well as the investment monies of foreigners and hedge fund managers. To repeat: this was Wall Street hotshots stealing money from old ladies.

Along the road to this systematic thievery, a great many other, sometimes smaller offenses were committed. One involved the use of the MERS electronic registration system. By law, banks were supposed to register with county-level offices in each state every time they sold or resold a mortgage, and pay fees each time.

But they didn’t, instead registering with the private deed-transfer agency MERS, allowing them to systematically, and illegally, bypass local taxes.

So any “AG settlement” might allow the banks to avoid legal damages being sought from three different set of enraged creditors: the public institutions who invested in these sham securities, the private investors who did the same, and the localities who were cheated out of their taxes.

Attorneys General Settlement: The Next Big Bank Bailout?