NEW YORK (

TheStreet

)--

While it doesn't exactly affirm one's faith in humanity to learn that to learn that

Bank of America

(BAC) - Get Report

,

JPMorgan Chase

(JPM) - Get Report

and

GMAC Mortgage

appear to have been improperly booting people out of their homes, it shouldn't be surprising.

Two middle managers at JPMorgan and GMAC have admitted to signing off on 28,000 foreclosure documents a month between them even though they were supposed to have reviewed each case individually, according to a

report

in

The Wall Street Journal

. The report says Bank of America has not identified a robo-signer, though the bank says it has temporarily halted foreclosures in the 23 states where courts have jurisdiction over the issue.

So far,

Wells Fargo

(WFC) - Get Report

which Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove estimates owns 18-20% of the mortgages in the U.S., says it will not halt foreclosures, despite demands from various states that it do so. Bove, a longtime fan of Wells Fargo's management, thinks that is the right move, even though he assumes the bank has botched its share of foreclosures.

"You had a complete breakdown in the system because the volume of loans being put through it is beyond what can be handled in a reasonable fashion and there I'm sure there have been numerous errors in the way that these foreclosure papers have been, if you will, filed," Bove says.

Don't think for a moment that the robo-signers weren't being cheered on by their bosses--complete with incentives bonuses for those who handled the most foreclosures in the shortest amount of time. After all, robo-signing is what America is all about in 2010, though we have different names for it in different contexts. Economists call it "productivity." Job postings refer to it as "multi-tasking." Baltimore school administrators in the HBO series

The Wire

call it "curriculum realignment,"--teaching students to take tests instead of teaching them to learn.

"The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can't," is how one teacher in

The Wire

puts it.

The Baltimore cops depicted in

The Wire

refer to the numbers game as

"juking the stats."

"Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I've been here before," says

The Wire

's cop-turned-teacher, Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski.

David Simon, the creator of

The Wire

, a former journalist, and present-day America's unofficial poet laureate, describes the social phenomenon in an

interview with Bill Moyers

.

"You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable."

But of course they weren't valuable. They were done on the cheap. And if banks were cheap about getting people into their homes when times were flush, how could anyone possibly expect them to be anything but cheap when it comes to throwing people out now that the economy is in the tank.

Again, Simon puts it best: "I have the utmost confidence in the ability of any ambitious soul anywhere to take what is not progress and what is not valid and to gloss it up and to say, "We're doing a great job," he tells Moyers.

Little wonder, then, that legislation that will allow banks to speed up the foreclosure process

sped swiftly through the Senate last week

and is already awaiting President Obama's signature.

The President now looks likely to veto the bill, something sure to attract further accusations that he is hostile to business interests who will spend all they can to get him bounced out in 2012.

Can't stand in the way of progress.

--

Written by Dan Freed in New York

.

Readers Also Like:

>>Over 50 Bank Execs in FDIC Crosshairs

Disclosure: TheStreet's editorial policy prohibits staff editors, reporters and analysts from holding positions in any individual stocks.