Measures would protect Californians from some of the most egregious tactics of lending servicers.

by Brian Leubitz

Since Kamala Harris pushed for additional concessions in the mortgage fraud settlement, she’s been pushing in the Legislature as well. The “Homeowner’s Bill of Rights” would enshrine many of the substantive provisions of that settlement into California law.

The legislation would require large lenders to provide a single point of contact for homeowners who want to discuss loan modifications. It would prohibit lenders from foreclosing while the lenders consider homeowners’ request for alternatives to foreclosure. And it would let California homeowners sue lenders to stop foreclosures or seek monetary damages if the lender violates state law.

The protections would benefit all California homeowners, not just those whose mortgages are with the five banks that signed the national settlement in February. And many of the restrictions would become permanent, while those in the nationwide agreement will end after five years.

Attorney General Kamala Harris said the compromise legislation negotiated with lawmakers “is going to bring transparency and fairness to California homeowners in a way they’ve never had before.”(HuffPo)

This legislation most assuredly doesn’t go far enough. There have been compromises all along the way, but this is legislation that will benefit many, many Californians. It would be a big step forward.

The Courage Campaign is following the latest action on their twitter account. KQED’s Forum aired a show on the legislation this morning, that is embedded above or available here.

From Saturday’s General Session:

In another setback for troubled bank, Attorneys look into possibly false claims

by Brian Leubitz

It’s not easy being Bank of America these days.  Oh sure, you get to have the pride of advertising on Hulu and well, everywhere, but are there people out there that don’t hate you?  You have those Occupy Wall Street folks, the people who hate you over the ridiculously greedy $5 debit card charge, and, oh right, their sketchy dealings in the foreclosure crisis.

Add a different (but related) worry onto the pile:

Investigators with the state attorney general’s office have subpoenaed Bank of America Corp. in connection with the sale and marketing of troubled mortgage-backed securities to California investors, according to a person familiar with the probe.

The state is trying to determine whether the bank and its Countrywide Financial subsidiary sold investments backed by risky mortgages to institutional and private investors in California under false pretenses…

Harris has created a mortgage fraud strike force with a mandate of looking into all aspects of mortgage fraud, including securitization. Many of these investments plunged in value as the housing market collapsed. Under California’s False Claims Act, which makes it a crime to defraud the state, damages of up to three times the amount of the claim can be awarded if the victim was an institutional investor, such as one of the state’s pension funds.(LA Times)

It is possible this is part of the 3-dimensional chess being played with the foreclosure mess, but if the AG’s office can prove that BofA made the false claims, we are talking about a lot of money for a bank that already has capitilization issues.

But don’t worry Brian Moynihan is still doing a-ok!

Yesterday, Ami Bera wrote about Karl Rove protecting Dan Lungren.  Today he went statewide. A shadowy Virginia-based group funded by the oil industry, tobacco companies, and health insurance industry — and run by Karl Rove — is trying to sway the outcome of the race for California Attorney General.  This is an unprecedented move in a down-ballot race, and the money is being used to create cynical commercials for political gain.

Rove’s group, the “The Republican State Leadership Committee,” has purchased $1.1 million of TV airtime to run vicious ads attacking our campaign. And who exactly is funding this group’s attacks? The very polluters, cigarette manufacturers, and insurance industry giants who I will stand up to as Attorney General.  

Of course we are going to stand up to this outside money.  You can contribute online to help us fight back.

To be clear, these are many of the usual Republican suspects. Organizations that fight against environmental and consumer protections are lining up to come to the aid of Steve Cooley, because they know that Cooley will fall into line with their agenda. (There is more in the extended diary.)

The oil industry, tobacco companies, insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies think that the Attorney General race can be bought. They know, as you know, that I will fight for all Californians, combating mortgage fraud, promoting a green economy, and working for a fair health care system.   This is only a partial list of some of the donors to this shadowy effort funding the attack ads.

Major Special Interest Contributions to the Republican State Leadership Committee

U.S. Chamber of Commerce — $1.15M

American Justice Partnership — $925,000

Blue Cross/Blue Shield — $918,068

Reynolds American – $690,161

Altria Group — $483,545

Devon Energy — $350,000

Citigroup Inc — $200,399

Wal-Mart Stores — $195,276

PhRMA — $150,861

We are committed to fighting these attacks, but we need your help to do it.

There are just eleven days remaining until Election Day, and the special interests are trying to sway the outcome of this race. We can’t let them win.

Now in Orange.

Oh, the old phrase IOKIYAR. So useful, especially back in the old Jack Abramoff days. In case you are just joining the show already in progress, it stands for It’s OK if you’re a Republican.  Get it? Good.

And here we have the latest contestant, Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley.  You may know Cooley from such one-hit wonders as initimidating and attempting to crush the union in his office and living the good life through gifts, but this one has to be the pièce de résistance:

In 2003, District Attorney Steve Cooley had a billionaire in his sights. Alan Casden was a real estate developer with a history of generosity toward political campaigns, especially those of local Democrats.

After a grand jury investigation, Cooley brought felony charges against a Casden executive, John Archibald, and 13 other defendants for reimbursing friends and associates for donations to city politicians, thereby violating contribution limits. …

At the time of the investigation, however, Cooley was accepting the same kinds of contributions for his own campaign. While he pursued Casden and others who engaged in similar finance schemes, he did not go after his own contributor, Gladwin Gill. (LA Weekly, emphasis added)

To be clear what was going on here, Gill was giving money to other people to contribute to Republican candidates. He plead guilty to these charges on contributing money for George W. Bush through this scheme.  But, importantly, the same people that he used for the Bush scheme? Yeah, they show up on Cooley’s donor lists.

Gill was prosecuted by the federal prosecutors for his federal crimes.  Archibald and Casden were thoroughly investigated by Cooley’s office.  Pierce O’Donnell, another Democratic contributor was dealt with by Cooley’s office.  As for Gill’s local involvement, well, there has been no word from Cooley’s office on that. IOKIYAR, I guess.

Note: As you may know, I do some work for Cooley’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.

UPDATE: Cooley’s campaign consultant, Kevin Spillane, has responded by noting that the statute of limitations has expired, and that the money has been spent anyway. Now folks, that’s how you play IOKIYAR.  

Kevin Spillane, FTW!

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has launched a Karl Rove-style attack against Kamala Harris, the San Francisco District Attorney who has raised conviction rates in SF to the highest level in 15 years.

The San Francisco Examiner takes a closer look at Chris Kelly’s latest false claims in his new video, which Chris Kelly has surely expertly placed on your Facebook homepage, Google searches, email inbox, or all three in recent days.

According to the Examiner, Kelly’s attacks are just plain wrong.

then Kelly’s ad claims, “Under Harris SF Homicide is Up 32%” and “SF has the highest homicide rate in the state.”

Whoa! That’s news to this city crime reporter.

While homicides were the highest they’d been in more than a decade in 2008 – there were 98 – that’s nowhere near the tally in Oakland, where there were 124 homicides in a smaller population.

And Kelly uses statistics from the state Department of Justice, which are only complete through 2008. If he considers 2009, then that 32 percent number goes way down. There were only 45 homicides last year, the lowest tally in five decades. (SF Examiner)

As of today, Kelly has contributed $4 million-and-counting of his own Facebook bucks in an attempt to become the first-ever candidate for Attorney General to successfully buy the office. While Kelly has thus far demonstrated an impressive ability to churn out platform papers that coincidentally read like a checklist of Kamala Harris’s actual accomplishments, he has so far stuck to attacking Kamala rather than explaining why Democratic voters should make him our nominee.

Disclosure: I work for Kamala Harris, but all opinions are entirely my own.

(For identification purposes only, I’m the Executive Director at Netroots Nation)

Last week yet another poorly crafted Jerry Brown email went out to his email universe. That’s not news, I’ve been cringing at their emails since they first started sending them. Most cringe worthy so far? Jerry Brown’s ring tone.

The subject line was decent, “You wouldn’t believe…” works for me. But the rest of the email violated about every best practice that’s been written for emails. Here’s some simple ones from Blue State Digital for starters.

There’s this weird screen capture of a YouTube video that actually goes to YouTube instead of their donate page (you just lost anyone that intended to donate with that link). Instead of highlighting specific text 2-3 times in the email they opted to use these weird huge contribute images. The email is rambling and without focus. The type is small, nothing is bolded to catch your attention. There’s all sorts of other links to distract you like facebook, etc.

And at the time it was originally sent the lowest contribution you could make without entering something in the “other” box was $100 even though they asked for $10, $25, whatever you can give in the email. And the highest donation was $51,800–now where’s my credit card that’s got that much spare room on it?

You can see a partial shot of it here.

Epic FAIL, the conversion rates have to be terrible.

More on the flip about how Jerry Brown’s email “best practices” are infecting the California Democratic Party and Alberto Torrico’s campaign for Attorney General…

But now this is spreading like a virus in some bad end of the world thriller movie. And it’s doing serious violence to online organizing knowledge.

The California Democratic Party decided to forward Brown’s email this past Thursday night to everyone on their list. They didn’t change a thing, they just forwarded this crappy email verbatim with a little header on top from Burton. You can see a partial screen shot of that here.

And then on the same day Torrico sends something very similar, but actually worse due to lack of focus, to his email list. See that partial screen shot here. I mean hey I’m a Kamala supporter so maybe that’s ok 🙂

Brown has obviously been in politics a long time, and the combination of his team running with these techniques and the CDP supporting them is providing some kind of weird signal to others to adopt them. If Brown’s doing it this must be what it feels like at the top of the game.

So in the hope Brown’s people, CDP people, and folks with other campaigns that read Calitics see this, please stop looking to these emails as examples.

* If you want to follow some good models look at what groups like Courage Campaign, MoveOn and OFA are sending out just to name a few. You’ll notice that fundraising emails are short, carefully constructed and focused, make specific asks, and if there is a video it’s on the donation page. Messaging, unfortunately, is a much longer conversation. But technique is important.

* There’s all kinds of help out there ranging from national consultancies like Blue State Digital (you know, the folks that worked for Obama) to folks like Trilogy Interactive to close to free help like New Organizing Institute provides to scores of articles and blog posts written on the subject. I love Wired for Change tools as much as the next guy but just having their toolset doesn’t cut it, you need to know how to use it.

* If you’re running against an insanely well funded candidate like Meg Whitman, as Brown is, then you need to take online organizing seriously and do it right. It’s an incredibly low cost multiplier to every other aspect of your campaign: fundraising, field, messaging, media, volunteers. All you need to do is look at the story of how a 1 term Senator named Barack Hussein Obama beat one of the most well established and financed candidates in recent political history. It wasn’t by sending emails like this.

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