Recently, three major banks — Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Ally Financial (a wing of GMAC Mortgage) — have instituted foreclosure moratoriums in some states, in the face of a growing numbers of revelations regarding the “robo-signers”: bank employees who were approving foreclosures, sometimes hundreds a day, without properly verifying documentation, in potential violation of the law. They were joined by a fourth, PNC Bank, late yesterday. And now Bank of America has taken its moratorium another step, freezing foreclosures in all 50 states:

Bank of America Corp. is placing a moratorium on all foreclosure proceedings and sales across the U.S. amid mounting political pressure on big U.S. banks to examine foreclosure-documentation problems…The decision by Bank of America to extend its postponement to all 50 states takes effect Saturday. The bank doesn’t intend to lift the moratorium until its assessment of all documentation is complete, a spokesman said.

The banks are realizing that they have a real mess on their hands. As the Washington Post detailed today, the banks have relied on a system of electronic document processing of questionable legality, so now the lenders can’t come up with the proper documents showing title to the homes they’re trying to foreclose upon. They don’t really understand what sort of legal trouble these revelations are going to bring them, so they’re stopping the foreclosure train in its tracks until they can sort it out.

At this point, the other large banks should be following BofA’s lead, particularly those like Wells Fargo that have yet to implement a moratorium of any kind (despite one Wells official testifying that he only checked the dates on the paperwork for the up to 150 foreclosures he approved daily). And while they’re pausing, it’s time for the government to gets its own foreclosure prevention programs in order.

President Obama’s veto yesterday of legislation that would have forced states to accept documents notarized documents from all over the county was a good step that preserved due process for homeowners, but that doesn’t address the underlying weakness in federal anti-foreclosure efforts, which have been quite disappointing. As I laid out here, there are some steps that the government can take, including allowing housing counselors to approve loan modifications and significantly ramping up mortgage mediation programs, that would significantly help troubled borrowers stay in their homes.

As David Dayen put it, “the lenders can assess the risks, and make the conclusion that the best-case scenario for them is to modify loans on a massive scale.” And the government should be doing all it can to facilitate that.

Read more about fighting back on foreclosures in today’s Progress Report.

A whole host of Republican congressional candidates and lawmakers — including former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) — have tried to run away from their support for Social Security privatization, denying that they favor such a move (despite continuing to call for the creation of personal Social Security accounts). Last night, Colorado’s Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck became to latest to deny that his privatization plan would actually privatize the system:

“I’ve never said we should privatize Social Security,” [Buck] told [Sen. Michael] Bennet, whose committee has made that accusation against Buck in television ads.

Buck doesn’t seem to have much of a mind for policy specifics, as he thinks extending the Bush tax cuts will help pay down the deficit. But in the course of the same debate, as the Pueblo Chieftan reported, Buck “said he supported redesigning Social Security so that younger workers in the future would have the option of investing in separate retirement accounts.” That is privatization, whether Buck likes the term or not.

And in the past, Buck has been a full-throated supporter of privatized accounts:

We’ve got to peg Social Security to individuals so those individuals have the ability perhaps to invest in various funds that are approved by the government. But those individuals also own that fund.

In fact, Buck has questioned whether the federal government should have any role in a retirement plan at all. “I don’t know whether it’s Constitutional or not,” Buck told the Constitutionalist Today Forum in March. “It should be a plan that certainly once people pay into it, they have the expectation of getting a return and they’re entitled to that, but the idea the federal government should be running health care or retirement or any of those programs is fundamentally against what I believe and that is that the private sector runs programs like that far better.”

Supporters of privatized Social Security accounts, like Buck, contend that only safe investments will be allowed under their plans. Proponents of President Bush’s failed privatization push in 2005 said much the same thing, and held up companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Citigroup — the poster-children of the economic collapse — as fail-safe bets for retirement accounts.

Instead of acknowledging the many flaws in their privatization plan (including the fact that it wouldn’t set the system on a path to solvency), Republicans are just trying to change the terms used in the debate, insisting that privatization is something else that sounds nicer. They’re focused on the semantics, but anyone who would have to live with their riskier system should focus on the specifics.