Puppet Masters
On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations - the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities - that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.
The idea behind this federally-guided "settlement" is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.

Court documents show how a network of US private companies profited from rendition operations.
The scale of the CIA's rendition programme has been laid bare in court documents that illustrate in minute detail how the US contracted out the secret transportation of suspects to a network of private American companies.
The manner in which American firms flew terrorism suspects to locations around the world, where they were often tortured, has emerged after one of the companies sued another in a dispute over fees. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the mass of invoices, receipts, contracts and email correspondence - submitted as evidence to a court in upstate New York - provides a unique glimpse into a world in which the "war on terror" became just another charter opportunity for American businesses.
As a result of the case, the identities of some of the corporations involved in the rendition programme have been disclosed for the first time, along with the names of some of the executives who knew the purpose of the flights.
The court files of more than 1,700 pages shed new light on the U.S. government's reliance on private contractors for flights between Washington, foreign capitals, the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and, at times, landing points near once-secret, CIA-run overseas prisons. The companies included DynCorp, a leading government contractor that secretly oversaw a fleet of luxury jets, and caterers that unwittingly stocked the planes with fruit platters and bottles of wine, according to the court files and testimony.
The business dispute stems from an obscure four-year fight between a New York-based charter company, Richmor Aviation Inc., which supplied corporate jets and crews to the government, and a private aviation broker, SportsFlight Air, which organized flights for DynCorp. Both sides cited the government's program of forced transport of detainees, or "extraordinary rendition," in testimony, evidence and legal arguments. The companies are fighting over $874,000 awarded to Richmor by a New York state appeals court to cover unpaid costs for the secret flights.
The court files - they include contracts, flight invoices, cell phone logs and correspondence - paint a sweeping portrait of collusion between the government and the private contractors that did its bidding - some eagerly, some hesitantly. Other firms turned a blind eye.
"We don't have a problem with Western countries like the Italians, French and U.K. companies. But we may have some political issues with Russia, China andBrazil," Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager at Libyan rebel oil firm AGOCO, told Reuters.
Talk like that has many Western oil companies licking their chops. Meanwhile, officials from China and Russia are foundering for ways to deal with the emerging Libyan government, the National Transitional Council (NTC).
Although Libyan oil production before the uprising comprised just 2% of global output, it is prized because it is of the light sweet crude variety - it contains less sulfur than most other oil and is thus cheaper to refine.

The 'Bettencourt affair' began with a family quarrel between the L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt , pictured, and her only daughter, Françoise Meyers-Bettencourt
A judge will today accuse President Nicolas Sarkozy of accepting illegal cash contributions to his 2007 election campaign from France's wealthiest woman.
The accusation, levelled in a new book, threatens to launch an explosive new season of last summer's long-running politico-financial soap opera known as "The Bettencourt Affair".
Judge Isabelle Prévost-Desprez tells the authors of the investigative book that pressure from the Elysée Palace forced her to be removed from her inquiries into political aspects of the affair. Earlier, she said she had received evidence from an eyewitness that Mr Sarkozy accepted a cash payment in 2007 from the L'Oréal heiress, Liliane Bettencourt, now 88.
For the last 12 months it has been illegal to buy a mobile phone in China without presenting ID, but Chinese customers seem as reluctant to be identified as everyone else.
Just like Google, the Chinese are concerned about the use of false, or non-existent, identities in the online world. Rumours abound that local versions of Twitter will soon require real names to be used, and since 1 June one can't even get a high-speed train ticket without presenting a state-issued ID, but attempts to lock down the identity of mobile phone users have proved more challenging.
China's real-name registration system was introduced a year ago, in an attempt to reduce the number of anonymously owned phone numbers, but an investigation by local publication IT Times demonstrates that Chinese retailers are more than willing to help customers fake the data to get the sale.
The only commodity the troll state offers is fear. The corporate trolls, such as the Koch brothers, terrify the birthers, creationists, militia lovers, tea party militants, right-to-life advocates, Christian fascists and God-fearing red-white-and-blue patriots by proclaiming that unless they vote for Perry or Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann or some other product of the lunatic fringe of our political establishment, the American family will be destroyed, our children will be corrupted and the country will turn socialist. Barack Obama, who they whisper is a closet Muslim, will take away their guns, raise their taxes and bring homosexual couples into kindergartens.

The bulk of the Bay of Pigs training took place in Guatemala thanks to the patronage of then President Manuel Ydigoras Fuentes, according to a recently released CIA history. Cuban anti-communist paramilitary trainees are shown here learning how to fire a mortar at a base in Guatemala in early 1961 in this photo courtesy of former Brigade Pilot Esteban Bovo, now a Miami-Dade County Commissioner.
The report, in chronicling how American secret agents dealt with the '60s-era governments of Guatemala and Nicaragua, provides important evidence, in official U.S. government words, to the truth of the old adage that the most powerful people in Central American embassies were the CIA station chiefs.
Ambassadors step aside and allow the CIA to negotiate deals for covert paramilitary bases in a newly released portion of the CIA's "Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation." CIA pilots and Cuban foot soldiers then help suppress a Guatemalan Army coup attempt that threatened their foothold in the country. Gen. Anastasio Somoza hits up the CIA for a $10 million payoff, development loans, as the price of letting the Americans launch the Cuban exile invasion from Nicaragua.
"What you're reading in this report shows again that in the hypocritical name of democracy the United States and CIA were willing to prop up some of the most cut-throat dictatorships," says researcher Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He sued the CIA for release of the Top Secret document that dissects one of the agency's greatest failures.
Khalifa Hifter was once a top military officer for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, but after a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s, Hifter switched to the anti-Gadhafi opposition. In the early 1990s, he moved to suburban Virginia, where he established a life but maintained ties to anti-Gadhafi groups.
Late last week, Hifter was appointed to lead the rebel army, which has been in chaos for weeks. He is the third such leader in less than a month, and rebels interviewed in Libya openly voiced distrust for the most recent leader, Abdel Fatah Younes, who had been at Gadhafi's side until just a month ago.
At a news conference Thursday, the rebel's military spokesman said Younes will stay as Hifter's chief of staff, and added that the army - such as it is - would need "weeks" of training.
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.