We all remember the Government Bailout of 2008 – the largest bailout gift by our government to the biggest banks in the country. That was the year when we also learned who is too big to fail: the same banks that brought our economy to the edge of the abyss.

What has changed since then? Have we seen any criminal prosecutions of those responsible for bringing our economy to the edge of collapse? No, but we did find out via the Freedom of Information Act that the official bailout dollar amount reported by our government wasn’t $700 billion, but a breathtaking $7.7 trillion.

Also, as to be expected, after the historic bailout the five biggest banks – JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs – became even bigger than before.

How to Settle Fraud?

In the last few years, we’ve witnessed numerous settlements between the biggest banks and various government agencies and investors. Many questions surface when you read about these settlements, such as: How and why is our government at peace with this process – to settle a crime instead of prosecuting it? And perhaps more worrisome: Is our society experiencing the frog-in-the-boiling-water effect? Otherwise how else do you explain the almost complete public silence even after many details about the bailouts and settlements are made public?

One problem is that these settlements have been spread throughout the year and people are getting used to hearing about them – that is, they're getting used to looking at them as a form of "business as usual," forgetting that our livelihoods will again be put in question, maybe very soon, if those responsible aren't prosecuted and brought to justice.

Why Wall Street is Still Permitted to Gamble With Our Lives

The wizards of Wall Street always believed our brains would never understand their brilliance – that we should just "sign these papers" with no questions asked. But the wizards underestimated one thing: the intelligence of the American people.

When people started facing foreclosure – after being pushed into default by banks’ suggestions that they qualify for HAMP, the Home Affordable Modification Program sponsored by the federal government – then ended in foreclosure to those banks and reported to the credit bureaus for missed payments, many of the homeowners started asking questions. And those questions opened Pandora’s Box.

When we signed the notes at the closing, we didn’t know that we had just participated in one of the biggest ponzi schemes ever. In reality, we became part of not loan origination, but instead fraud origination. We entered the realm of MBS: mortgage-backed securities, one of the juiciest gambling products that has ever come from Wall Street.

The banks committed many illegalities. For example, they abused pooling and servicing agreements guidelines. They did not transfer notes and mortgages into the trusts during the requested timeline. They did not record the transaction and sale of all notes as requested by the Pooling and Servicing agreement. Instead, they used the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a database that oversees about 60% of U.S. mortgages. For those who don't yet know it, MERS was founded by the banks, for the banks.

MERS also caused an enormous loss for counties’ registries of deeds. Massachusetts's Southern Essex County register of deeds, John O’Brien, says that the banks, while using MERS, avoided paying $22 million in mortgage transfers to his registry of deeds alone.

In order to foreclose on homeowners, the banks legally must show a clear paper trail of each and every transaction since the mortgage origination – which, as we all found out, they didn't have. In order to cover up their tracks the banks came up with another fraudulent system in this long line of irregularities: robosigning. They paid employees approximately $10 per hour to sign thousands of documents and affidavits per day – not only without verifying the information on those documents, but signing them under different names, in many cases pretending to be a vice president or other high-up executive of that particular servicer.

Register O’Brien says bluntly: “My registry is a crime scene.” On the desk in his office, O’Brien has compiled over 40,000 fraudulent, robosigned mortgage documents. It doesn't take a genius to realize why Bank of America agreed to pay $17 billion last week to settle its mortgage "irregularities" – because opening the Pandora’s Box of BofA activities only led deeper into the realm of criminality.

Why Are Our Elected Officials Silent?

Only a few government officials continue to talk about and demand answers from the banks. One of them is Sen. Bernie Sanders from Vermont. Another is Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts. But by and large, the rest of our elected leaders either publicly blame the homeowners or keep trying to minimize the banks’ illegalities. Years into this mess, the American people deserve – and should demand – answers.

In 2012, Sanders stated that the Great Recession was a result of greed and illegalities committed by Wall Street. However, it seems the same people responsible for that recession still haven’t learned their lesson. In a speech he gave to the Senate that has been seen by more than a quarter of a million viewers, Sen. Sanders said: “The CEOs of the largest financial institutions in this country have created the largest gambling casino in the history of the world."

Homeowners in the Biggest Fight of Their Lives

Wall Street and the government treat foreclosure fraud as numbers in the books – another job that, finally, gets swept under the rug. However, there are people behind these numbers and lives affected by the fraud as wide as a river streaming through our land.

Anita Reyes, a homeowner from Minnesota, lost her house to fraudulent foreclosure in December of 2012. She had to leave her dog with a friend in another town and went to see him a few months later. She told me how she realized that her dog had moved on, and she hadn't: “I can’t expect him to wait for me. I have nothing to offer him.”

Sherry Hernandez is a homeowner from California and has been in her foreclosure fraud fight for seven years now. She’s currently fighting PennyMac, which is laying claim to the Hernandez home. Sherry says, “They have no legitimate documentation. In fact, these former Countrywide executives have bragged about obtaining these loans for pennies on the dollar. They have not legitimately obtained our loan."

"Not one piece of evidence in their file can connect them to us," she adds. "We have no signed agreement and we have a multitude of evidence to show that the assignment of deed of trust is a completely fraudulent document."

Last year, Sherry was arrested in Washington, DC, during a protest against revolving door policies that enable U.S. government officials to go and work for the very banks and corporations they're charged with overseeing and holding responsible for financial crimes. She asserts, “The revolving door policies are still alive and well. Our leaders are well aware now that the fraud exists and the price of not dealing with it is allowing it to continue. If [we] continue to not address this fraud, we cannot recover."

Where To Go From Here

If we want a healthy society, a society that follows its laws and applies them equally to everyone, we must demand a full investigation and criminal prosecutions for everyone involved in the mortgage backed securities fiasco. How can we be so proud of our democracy when we have it only on paper? Until our faith in our government and judicial system is restored and we see officials prosecuting everyone who commits fraud, we cannot hope for a lawful future for our kids.

To bring back this faith in our system of justice, government must step up to the plate. The people demand criminal prosecutions and jail time for all those responsible for the enormous fraud that caused the foreclosure crisis. Otherwise, the same thing will happen again and the consequences next time will be even more catastrophic. America's middle class is being depleted, our homeless population has increased and our faith in our justice system is weaker than ever.

Equally important is restitution for millions of homeowners who lost their homes. Many of them took their own lives, being unable to face the magnitude of homelessness after they had invested so much in their homes. Let’s bail out the homeowners instead of those who perpetrated the crime. After hearing and witnessing many foreclosure fraud stories, I know that all the money in the world can't bring back people’s lost hopes, lost lives, and the time they have wasted fighting this unpunished fraud. But here are some suggestions about how to make it a little easier for those affected:

• Immediate foreclosure moratorium.
• Monetary reimbursement for lost homes.
• Clear title to all homeowners who are currently going through foreclosure and also to those whose mortgages have been infested with fraudulent documents.
• Compensatory damages for emotional pain and suffering during this process to all affected homeowners.
• Investigation of all government officials and judges who failed to do their job and protect this country and its people from the catastrophic consequences of bankers gambling with our homes and lives.

What we the people can do: we can unite, we can be aware of what's going on in our neighborhoods, we can organize protests during foreclosure sales and evictions, and we can write to our legislators demanding accountability and promising we'll never stop until we have it. As Benjamin Franklin said, "Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."

In the case of mortgage and foreclosure fraud, we’re all affected. The majority needs to realize this, and act, before new waves of fraud reach our shores again.

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