I hate banks and Wall Street almost as much as I hate retail. This is one reason why.

In violation of a law intended to protect active military personnel from creditors, agents of Deutsche Bank foreclosed on his small Michigan house, forcing Sergeant Hurley’s wife, Brandie, and her two young children to move out and find shelter elsewhere.

They refuse to make amends. The criminal element here is that these banks broke the law. They foreclosed on an American service member.

In court papers, lawyers for Saxon and the bank assert the sergeant is entitled to recover no more than the fair market value of his lost home. His lawyers argue that the defendants should pay much more than that — including an award of punitive damages to deter big lenders from future violations of the law. The law is called the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, and it protects service members on active duty from many of the legal consequences of their forced absence.

They are wrong. They are like bank robbers who might say that giving back the money should be the end of the story.

So after they basically screwed up the whole economy, a mess we are finally begining to claw our way out of. These guys have the sociopathic gall to spend to lobby against regulatoin.

Leaders of the nation’s financial industry are turning up the heat on lawmakers to put the kibosh on some of the stiffest regulatory proposals pending in Congress — lobbying expenditures have leapt from 12 percent in 2008 to nearly 30 percent this year in an effort to quash financial-reform proposals such as a bank tax, limits on big bank size and curbs on lenders’ flexibility in risky hedge funds and private equity funds. JP Morgan is the biggest lobbying spender, followed closely by Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley.