Last week, mega-bank Wells Fargo refused to implement a foreclosure moratorium like those put in place by Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and GMAC Mortgage, stating that no such step was necessary because its foreclosure process was sound and not plagued by some of the “robo-signer” issues that other banks have found. This, as it turned out, wasn’t true; a desposition uncovered by the Financial Times showed that Wells had, in fact, relied on a robo-signer to process foreclosures.

Mortgage giant Citigroup has also, thus far, been adamantly opposed to putting a foreclosure moratorium in place. This morning, on a conference call, the bank reiterated its opposition to a foreclosure freeze, saying that it’s “fairly confident” that it didn’t engage in fraudulent foreclosure practices:

Citigroup sought to allay investors’ fears over the US mortgage crisis, saying it had not uncovered any irregularities in its foreclosure process and downplaying the potential cost of buying back home loans from government entities…“We have not found evidence of robo-signing as we have gone through our review,” John Gerspach, Citi’s finance chief, said. “We are fairly confident we have not relied on robo-signers.”

“Fairly confident” doesn’t sound all that confident to me. And it’s even less convincing considering that last week, the Palm Beach Post reported that Citigroup was using a law firm — run by “foreclosure king” David Stern — that processed foreclosures using robo-signers:

Attorney Tom Ice of Royal Palm Beach-based Ice Legal said the problem is that law firm employees were doing the work, not Citi employees. “In truth, CitiMortgage not only engaged in the same practice of using a robo-signer for its cases, they used a robo-signer who is actually an employee of the foreclosure mill attorneys representing them,” said Ice, who deposed Stern operations manager Cheryl Samons last year. Samons signed as “attorney-in-fact” for CitiMortgage in some foreclosure documents.

As the Associated Press reported, a former paralegal in Stern’s office told the Florida attorney general about “a boiler-room atmosphere in which employees were pressured to forge signatures, backdate documents, swap Social Security numbers, inflate billings and pass around notary stamps as if they were salt.” Citi was so spooked by the allegations that, as of last week, it is no longer sending business to Stern’s office.

At this point, it’s really hard to tell how widespread fradulent foreclosures are (though there definitely are some), which is why it makes sense for the banks to freeze actions until the extent of the problem is known. In addition to the issues facing people who were improperly foreclosed upon, as David Dayen put it, “you just feed homebuyers into a wood chipper if you let them buy a foreclosed home in a market with such confusion.” Emptywheel has more on Stern’s antics here.

Deficit fraud Dino Rossi, who is running on the Republican ticket for Senate in Washington, spends a lot of time fearmongering about the deficit while advocating for policies that would make that deficit worse. Rossi would also like to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans — at a cost of $830 billion over ten years — and as he made clear during a debate last night, he has no intention of cutting the budget in order to cover that cost.

During a portion of the debate during which the two candidates were given an opportunity to question each other, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) asked Rossi what he would eliminate from the budget in order to offset the cost of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Rossi refused to answer, instead attacking Murray’s record.

Murray asked a second time, to which Rossi replied, “I answer your questions, it’s just not your answers.” But in both instances, Rossi failed to identify one single item he would cut from the budget. Watch it:

According to the Tacoma-Seattle News Tribune, Rossi “said after the debate that there should be measures to offset the extension of the tax cuts, but said that as with any budget cuts, it’s impossible to detail them, since it involves cutting thousands of budget line items.”

Of course, Rossi is far from alone in being unwilling to identify one item in the budget that could be cut to begin reducing the deficit. Yesterday, Carly Fiorina, California’s Republican senate nominee, was asked seven times what she would cut from the budget to offset extending the Bush tax cuts and failed to name anything.

Finding the money to offset the Bush tax cuts (and Democrats want to extend a lot of them without paying for it as well) would require cutting huge swathes of the budget, including popular and vital social safety net programs. So, in order to avoid offending any portion of the population, it seems that Rossi is subscribing to the Linda McMahon version of campaigning: elect me first, and then I’ll tell you what budget cuts I’m for.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post provided some more details about the ongoing foreclosure fraud scandal, noting that “virtually everyone involved – loan servicers, law firms, document processing companies and others – made more money as they evicted more borrowers from their homes, creating a system that was vulnerable to error and difficult for homeowners to challenge.” Many borrowers have been left in limbo as the banks sort out how extensive their problems are.

A bevy of Democratic lawmakers have called for examinations of the banks’ potentially fraudulent activities, while the Attorneys General of all fifty states have pledged a coordinated investigation. Republicans, however, have been largely silent on the issue.

And according to Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA), who is slated to take over the House Committee on Government and Oversight should the Republicans take the House, the GOP is not really interested in the banks’ malpractice. Instead, Issa wants to “launch aggressive inquiries” into whether the government helped poor people buy houses they couldn’t afford:

The conservative Republican from California, who would become chairman of the powerful House oversight and government reform committee, said hearings would focus on whether the federal government should be involved at all in sponsoring home loans for the poor.

Such hearings would evidently “centre on the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” which Republicans have blamed for the financial collapse of 2008, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In fact, it’s been a favorite conservative tactic to blame the economic meltdown on the Community Reinvestment Act and other government efforts to spur affordable homeownership and undo some of the inequities in housing finance. This is a convenient way to deflect attention from the malfeasance of Wall Street (which is contributing heavily to Republicans in this election cycle) and to try and blame the country’s economic woes on the government, instead of a deregulatory ideology that allowed financial behemoths to run wild.

But the statistics just don’t support the GOP’s story. The CRA was around for decades before 2008′s troubles, and CRA-covered institutions and loans have performed better than their non-CRA counterparts.

While the GOP likes to blame homeowners for our economic troubles, in the last decade, as the Center for American Progress has documented, banks were still systematically charging minorities higher costs for loans and pushing them into expensive subprime mortgages, even when they could afford standard prime loans, making government policies to ensure fair access to credit a necessary step. It says a lot about the Republican mindset that banks evicting homeowners who aren’t in foreclosure doesn’t merit an investigation, but a low-income family receiving a mortgage in a traditionally under-served community does.