The bank accountability movement that has grown parallel to the #OccupyWallStreet protests, and has benefited from its energy, won a high-profile victory today. Rose Mary Gudiel is a California public employee facing eviction because of a two-week delayed payment at a time when her brother was shot and killed. She can make the payments now, but her mortgage holder and servicer refused to accept payments for two years, and pushed Rose Mary into foreclosure. She had her story taken up by The New Bottom Line, which orchestrated a week of protests in Los Angeles with Gudiel in the spotlight. They took Gudiel to the CEO of her bank, OneWest, and sat her down at a negotiating table, demanding a mortgage modification. Family and neighbors of the Gudiels stayed in the home, resisting any effort by the LA County Sheriff’s Department to carry out the eviction. Gudiel engaged in a sit-in at Fannie Mae while asking for a decision on her mortgage, and she was arrested with 8 other activists, including her disabled mother.

I guess the bad publicity was too much. Gudiel got her modification.

I’d like to announce that the bank called me today to arrange a meeting, to discuss a modification proposal from Fannie Mae. I have also learned that my eviction has been canceled. We are very happy that they have finally come to the table, and I hope they are serious about negotiating a reasonable modification, which is what I have been requesting for over two years. And I hope that they will change their policies to stop taking the homes the thousands of hardworking families facing preventable foreclosure. Thank you.

This is a tangible victory for the bank accountability movement, and it shows that if the banks can do right by Rose Mary Gudiel, they can do right by anyone. And this will actually improve their bottom line in the process, by converting a foreclosure into a performing mortgage.

The announcement from Rose Mary Gudiel comes amidst a volley of actions in Los Angeles. 1,500 activists are marching downtown, in a Refund California event that members of the Occupy LA movement are participating in. In addition, 25 activists have occupied a Bank of America branch downtown.

We can now see that public pressure can have an impact on one woman’s life. Now it’s time to build and grow from there.

The Eurozone, led by Germany, is preparing to undertake a massive series of bank bailouts to deal with their banking crisis (don’t call it a sovereign debt crisis).

Germany has begun to throw its weight behind measures to guard Europe’s financial system from a possible Greek or other government debt default, as Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday that she would support a continent-wide plan to pump more capital into banks if they need aid.

Merkel’s comments add momentum to an effort urged by U.S., International Monetary Fund and other officials for Europe to ensure that its banking system can survive if Greece needs to restructure its $300 billion in outstanding bonds.

Once considered unthinkable, that possibility — a sovereign default inside a major world currency zone — is now a central facet of the planning among European and IMF officials, who are trying to both keep Greece afloat and buffer the broader regional economy against the chance that they may not succeed.

I suppose the idea here is that a Greek default would be too disruptive and cause too much of a collapse of confidence in the Eurozone without being paired with free money to bankers. Essentially, Greece is a pass-through for European banks relying on their bailout cash, so if you allow Greece not to pay back the bankers and pay them directly, problem solved! Sigh.

This is being put into less conspicuous terms like “recapitalizing” the banks, but I don’t see any effort to nationalize them, to remove boards of directors, to give shareholders and bondholders a major haircut, or anything else other than providing European banks with free money to make up for a Greek default.

This has been the IMF recommendation as well, so it is may garner unified support among the Eurozone. But that’s not certain:

Germany, the euro zone’s wealthiest member, seems politically inclined for each nation to protect its own banks. So is the affluent Netherlands. But France, the most dominant euro economy after Germany, is cautious about the whole exercise and is likely to lean toward an approach drawing upon the resources of the euro zone’s bailout fund — an approach the I.M.F. favors. “Germany is prepared to move to recapitalization,” Mrs. Merkel said in Brussels, adding that other European countries should do the same with their banks. “We are under pressure of time,” she said. “I think we need to take decisions quickly.”

The implosion of the French-Belgian bank Dexia, which led yesterday to an increasing series of withdrawals of cash by depositors, seems to have been the linchpin for this new policy. Dexia was a bank that passed previous European stress tests. The European Banking Authority readied a new round of stress tests to determine why Dexia so quickly went south.

While European Commission leaders aren’t saying much, and downplaying the preparations, it’s pretty clear that there’s a big bailout plan on the way.

For perhaps the first time, President Barack Obama was forced to explain why there have been no prosecutions of Wall Street executives for their fraudulent actions during the run-up to the financial crisis. Asked by Jake Tapper to explain this behavior, Obama basically suggested that most of the actions on Wall Street weren’t illegal but just immoral, and that his Administration worked to re-regulate the financial sector with the Dodd-Frank reform legislation.

“Banks are in the business of making money, and they find loopholes,” the President said. Apparently forging and fabricating documents to prove ownership of homes that are subsequently stolen from borrowers is now a loophole.

Many of the practices on Wall Street “weren’t necessarily against the law but they had a huge destructive impact,” said the President. The work of Bill Black, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and a host of other official studies, analyses, and even court cases cut against that. Just the other day, a new whistleblower lawsuit against banks for setting illegal fees against military personnel wasn’t joined by the Justice Department.

In a follow-up, the President said that “if somebody they violated laws on the books, they need to be prosecuted, and that’s the Attorney General’s job.” Of course, investigations have to actually be carried out, and the President’s Justice Department has been at the lead of a foreclosure fraud settlement which would bail out banks that would otherwise owe in the trillions for fraudulent practices with the origination and securitization of loans, for a pittance of a sum. Only the work of a few Justice Democrats have put a stop to this.

The question came up in the context of Occupy Wall Street, the series of protests in New York City and across the country over the past few weeks. Obama, much like his Chief of Staff, Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve chief, made some guarded remarks about how the protesters were speaking to a general frustration with some problem that he claimed to have worked to solve. Obama confined his remarks to Wall Street and particularly the Dodd-Frank financial reform, which the Republicans want to roll back. He touted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose director nominee, Richard Cordray, just passed the Senate Banking Committee on a 12-10 vote. But he did not seem to understand the broader context of the protests, against an economy that only works for the top 1% at the expense of the other 99%.

Obama also added this, approximately: “I expended a lot of political capital to keep the banks afloat, and I have the scars to prove it. And I still think it was the right thing to do, because otherwise our economy would have been worse off.” This is the President taking ownership of TARP, which did not pass under his Presidency but which he whipped as a candidate for President in 2008. He took ownership of the extraordinary financial support given to banks as they teetered on the verge of collapse. And this is a central grievance of the protesters on Wall Street and across the country.