The $25 billion settlement among 49 state attorneys general, the Justice Department, and five major banks to compensate victims of wrongful foreclosures is a small but significant step toward easing the housing crisis.

But as one wary homeowner’s advocate put it, “the devil is in the details.” It always has been.

* EDITORIAL * 

This much-heralded settlement seeks to end the practice of “robo-signing” employed by mortgage servicers that foreclosed on homes without proper documentation. Considering the Center for Responsible Lending reports that the nation is only halfway through the foreclosure crisis, settlement guidelines for future takings may clarify the process.

Victims who lost their homes and life savings get a mere $2,000. “It is too little for the damage that has been caused,” said Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, of New Jersey Citizen Action.

Others will be able to refinance homes at lower interest rates. Banks will be forced to offer troubled homeowners principal and or interest rate reductions.

But that’s where the devil really is still in the details. As the crisis deepened, states, including New Jersey, and the federal government asked banks to help homeowners modify their mortgages by renegotiating payments. But banks weren’t set up to modify mortgages nor were some inclined to do so, which prevented those programs from having much impact. Worse, help often came when it was too late for homeowners to dig out of financial holes. The settlement wisely calls for a monitor to make sure banks are working with customers to avoid foreclosures.

Banks are protected from robo-signing prosecutions but Attorney General Eric Holder said other forms of criminal and civil prosecutions are permitted. That’s good because in some cases mortgage brokers tricked families into taking out loans with exorbitant interest rates and falsified documents to secure mortgages for people who could never afford them. On the financial side, some institutions bundled toxic mortgages into investment instruments, sold them, and poisoned the market.

Those practices and many others still need to be addressed and attorneys general in New York, California, and Delaware were right to hold out until they received guarantees that they could pursue investigations.

Economists say this settlement could begin to stabilize home prices, which are pushed down with every foreclosure. Optimists say that while the settlement probably effects less than a fifth of the mortgage market at best, industry standards may be set for the rest.

However, Americans can never forget how the combination of too little regulation, poor enforcement, and rapacious greed torpedoed the economy.

Tony Auth celebrated his 40th year as The Inquirer’s editorial cartoonist during 2011. He holds the Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1976, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the mid-1980s and, again, in 2009. Tony has won numerous other awards, including five Overseas Press Club Awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award for distinguished service in Journalism, and the Herblock and Thomas Nast Prizes.

Featured above is Tony's latest cartoon. Click on the "gallery" link to see his work from the last few days.

The story is familiar. Beautiful, talented singer, actor, dancer, and on down the list, succumbs in a tragic, likely accident that may have involved drug abuse. Whitney Houston was added to that roll call Saturday. She was 48. Like so many others, she is gone too soon, and yet she will always be with us.

Almost from the time the little girl from Newark opened her mouth in song, it was clear she would one day be a star. And why not, given her lineage? Gospel great Cissy Houston was her mother, pop music icon Dionne Warwick her aunt, and the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin, her godmother. Little “Nippy,” as they called her, surpassed them all in the millions of records she sold globally.

* EDITORIAL *

But the singing sensation, who as a youngster gained a reputation as being too squeaky clean to be believed, passed into maturity with an appetite for cocaine and marijuana, she admitted. Her tempestuous marriage to equally drug-dependent R&B singer Bobby Brown failed. Three times she went to rehab. Her voice suffered. The comeback that always seemed so close never came.

Houston’s life may serve as a cautionary lesson to some, and that’s fine. It’s a lesson that can’t be taught too often, or too early. But that’s not the only Whitney Houston that should be remembered.

Remember her as the only pop singer to have seven consecutive No. 1 singles on Billboard. Remember her as the singer who put Francis Scott Key on the Top 10 charts as a lyricist for her thrilling rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Remember her as the memorable actress in films like Waiting to Exhale. Remember her as the voice heard on tape in countless weddings, singing her signature hit, “I Will Always Love You.”

Remember her as the extraordinary singer that she was.

On a mobile phone? Click HERE to join the chat!

To read Frank Wilson's Sunday Inquirer column on the subject, CLICK HERE.

There is plenty not to like in Gov. Corbett’s proposed $27.1 billion budget plan, but his disregard for the state’s most needy tops the list. Children would lose Medicaid benefits and thousands of adults would be tossed off General Assistance rolls, including the disabled, recovering drug addicts, and battered women.

For the second year, Corbett held firm on his pledge to avoid tax increases by making drastic cuts to balance the budget. His proposed “lean and demanding” budget targets two of the costliest state departments — education and public welfare. Corbett’s efforts to be fiscally responsible are commendable. He has difficult choices to make. But his priorities when it comes to where to cut are downright disturbing.

By targeting the poor, he risks exacerbating conditions rooted in poverty that in the long run will end up costing the state even more money to correct.

Corbett proposes eliminating the $300 million General Assistance program, which provides only a subsistence benefit to the most vulnerable residents, roughly $180 a month in most counties. About 60,000 Pennsylvanians receive this assistance, which serves as a lifeline for the very poor who are temporarily disabled, victims of domestic violence, or caring for an elderly parent.

The governor says he wants to “right-size” welfare, and he suggests that the system has been abused by people who should be steered from the public coffers. But there is no evidence of the General Assistance program’s being misused. Even with more people out of work due to the economy, less than 0.5 percent of Pennsylvanians receive General Assistance dollars. Eliminating the safety net will save an estimated $150 million annually. But the cuts will likely send the poor to already overwhelmed churches, shelters, and community agencies struggling to meet growing demands.

By Gary Alexander

Swamped by federal mandates, a crazy quilt of programs, and the burdens of recession, the public-assistance system stands revealed for what it is — a clumsy monster of increasing appetite that consumes 40 cents of every state tax dollar.

At last count, 5.8 million Pennsylvanians were employed, and that number pays for 2.7 million of their fellow citizens who receive some form of public assistance. This ratio is a formula for failure. We are focused on maintaining the safety net for Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable and most in need. However, Pennsylvania taxpayers cannot sustain the continued growth of public assistance.

Public welfare was created to provide temporary assistance for most recipients and to be a last resort, not a way of life.  Since 2001, the welfare budget has grown by 75 percent — more than double the 30 percent growth in poverty over the same period. Our system is broken and the cost-saving reforms made by this administration are key to ensuring its survival and preserving access to services for the truly needy.

The General Assistance program, which is solely state-funded, provides cash assistance and medical assistance to those individuals, mostly adults, who do not qualify for federal programs. It has over the years become a sort of catch-all in a widening welfare budget. Our proposal is simple: If we eliminate the cash portion of General Assistance, we can maintain the medical assistance benefit for these recipients. This is not a decision taken lightly, it is taken out of necessity to preserve services.

If nothing else, motorists and mass transit users across Pennsylvania are learning a great deal about patience from Gov. Corbett. While setting out his latest budget proposal last week, the governor deferred yet again on mapping out his strategy to repair the state’s crumbling highways and prevent its 5,000 structurally deficient bridges from falling down.

Corbett even trimmed transportation funding by about 9 percent, slashing several hundred million dollars from the $6.43 billion being spent this year. But for the fact that the governor said it’s “critical that we address our transportation issues,” it looked like he might be headed the wrong way down the road.

Without question, it’s time for Corbett and Republican state legislative leaders to start their engines, and map out a route to deal with a funding crisis that’s only gotten worse in the year since Corbett’s been in office. The crisis stems from years of deferred maintenance, as well as the collapse of a 2007 highway and transit funding plan that called for tolling Interstate 80. The tolls never went up. As a result, road and bridge work has been deferred and such critical transit projects as the overhaul of the Philadelphia City Hall subway station are on indefinite hold.

A task-force study pegged the state’s annual funding need at $3.5 billion to repair roads and bridges across the state. SEPTA’s capital needs dictate that the transit agency should be spending twice what it receives each year from Harrisburg. It’s certainly the governor’s prerogative to carve out transportation from the budget process, as he explained on Tuesday. As long as that’s followed by decisive action, and soon, it won’t really matter — provided that the end result is a long-term solution for rebuilding the state’s infrastructure.

The which-came-first question is a tough one, but we can agree that eggs tend to produce chickens and other things. And thanks to one imperious state cabinet official, a few eggs from Harrisburg are still hatching — long after they were supposed to have ended their life cycle in the form of a sandwich.

The eggs at issue are the ones that Pennsylvania Health Secretary Eli Avila deemed insufficiently fresh after he ordered them up with all haste at a diner near the Capitol a year ago. Their progeny now includes a lawsuit by the diner’s owner, who charges that Avila abused his rather limited authority in a quest to exact revenge over the impudent sandwich.

Avila’s antics aren’t just for breakfast. His regime has also attracted attention by ordering up a special badge and windbreakers — perhaps for SWAT-style raids on nursing homes — and for attempting to evict an insubordinate bloodmobile from the secretary’s parking space.

But the sandwich suit raises the troubling possibility that the secretary’s peacocking has crossed the line between tragicomic sideshow and taxpayer expense. The owner of the diner, Richard Hanna, has sued for $500,000 on the grounds that Avila “abused his power as a public official in a personal vendetta based upon personal animus.”

He appears to have a point. After engaging in a heated dispute with Hanna — which apparently ended with the secretary demanding (what else?) “Do you know who I am?” — Avila lodged a complaint with local health authorities. They inspected the diner but found no major violations.

The secretary also e-mailed another department in an effort to kill Hanna’s bid to manage the Capitol cafeteria, writing with palpable hauteur, “It is my professional opinion that they should not have any nexus to food services with the Capitol.” Hanna didn’t get the contract.

An Avila spokeswoman says the lawsuit is frivolous, and Gov. Corbett has so far stood by his Marquis de Health. Now his loyalty may come at the cost of taxpayer-funded legal representation and more. We may never know whether it was the egg or the chicken. But there’s clearly no doubt in Dr. Avila’s mind which comes first: He does.

No doubt about it, Sister Mary Scullion is a warrior. But The Inquirer 2011 Citizen of the Year, who received the award in a program Wednesday, admits the battle has been made more difficult by governments shrinking their budgets.

In off-the-cuff remarks to guests at a luncheon, Scullion paid particular attention to Gov. Corbett’s proposed budget, which goes so far as to cut general-assistance welfare funds. As she rightly noted, political leaders need to understand that cutting some costs can be more expensive in the long run.

Taking money from the poor increases the likelihood that some will end up joining the ranks of the homeless, whom Scullion tries to help through the Project HOME organization she and Joan Dawson McConnon cofounded in 1989. Under their leadership, Project HOME has grown from an emergency shelter into an agency that provides more than 500 units of affordable housing, employment services, and jobs through three other agencies.

Scullion said she still fervently believes that homelessness can be eradicated in Philadelphia, but it requires more effort to address the root causes of the problem, one of the most glaring being a poorly educated population.

That’s certainly a message that Corbett, who wants to cut higher-education dollars and stand pat on K-12 funding, needs to hear. But it also should add some urgency to local efforts to improve city schools. It helps that new city School Reform Commission chairman Pedros Ramos is a long-time member of the Project Home board.