Today a bipartisan group of 130 members of Congress, ranging from Dennis Kucinich on the left to Joe Wilson on the right, wrote to President Obama asking him to stop Chinese currency manipulation. The crisis with China is accelerating quickly, and is so severe that economist from all over the political spectrum are calling for the U.S. to take drastic action against China currency manipulation.

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Several traditional media outlets are regurgitating the conservative spin that if the House uses the parliamentary procedure known as a "self-executing rule" or "deem and pass," it will be passing the Senate health care vote "without a vote."

Yet that is a false assertion.

MSNBC's First Read succinctly explains the process, in case any other professional journalists care to do their jobs.

...the health-care bill would be voted on INDIRECTLY, tucked into what's known as "the rule." The rule essentially outlines the rules for an upcoming vote -- in this case, it would be the vote on the package of reconciliation fixes.

By passing "the rule," the House also would "deem" the Senate bill passed (with a "hereby" statement. "We hereby deem..."). The House would then vote on the package of reconciliation fixes. But the Senate health-care bill would be considered passed even if they never vote on the reconciliation fixes [and] the bill must be signed by the president before the Senate takes up the reconciliation.

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Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., unveiled his latest financial reform proposal on Monday, and the stakes for the new legislation couldn’t be higher. After consumer groups raised a major ruckus, Dodd has dropped one of his most egregious concessions to the bank lobby—cutting enforcement authority from the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). That’s good news: Without a major regulatory overhaul, the U.S. economy’s destructive boom and bust cycle will start all over again.

We’ve been down this road before. The Enron fiasco should have served as a wake-up call for policymakers, but instead, the weak federal response to Enron’s major fraud helped pave the way for the current economic slump.

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China argues that some American companies will suffer if China stops subsidizing manufacturing and adjusts their currency to market levels. They're right. The fight over Chinese violations of trade rules is also another story about Wall Street and big, monopolistic corporations vs Main Street and American workers.

A China Daily story says China's huge export surplus is being "misread." The Chinese government says that US companies -- the ones who close US factories, lay off workers, devastate communities and throw the costs onto the government -- are also beneficiaries of China's government subsidies. From the story,

China's large trade surplus is often used by the United States to argue why China should allow its currency to rise.

Yet most US officials ignore a very important fact: a majority of China's exports to the US are produced by US-funded companies and huge profits go back into American pockets. . . .

"China's cheap labor helps foreign companies cut wage costs and increase their profits. Ironically, the rising profits go into foreign bosses' pockets and China is left to take the blame for the trade imbalance," said Tan Yaling, an expert at the China Institute for Financial Derivatives at Peking University.

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Eighteen former members of the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council (CAC) strongly endorsed the idea of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency in a letter released last week . Draft legislation released yesterday by Sen. Chris Dodd would instead place the CFPA in the Fed, an idea that the former CAC members specifically rejected.

The letter says that "The Federal Reserve has its hands full with responsibilities relating to safety and soundness and monetary policy." It singles the Fed out for special criticism in its handling of consumer issues under both Democratic and Republican administrations: "In 1994 Congress gave the Federal Reserve the power to outlaw unfair and deceptive practices in the mortgage market. The Federal Reserve waited until 2008 to issue their rule, long after the problem had become a crisis and after the market had collapsed. During that time, we and other consumer protection experts issued reams of comment and testimony calling on them to exercise their authority to protect consumers."

The full text of the letter is below:

Friday, March 12, 2010

Senator Chris Dodd
448 Russell Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Dodd,

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• GOPers Complain About Rules They Used ... Again
• Dodd Tries To Thread Needle With Financial Reform Bill
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Democracy requires vigorous public debate in an open forum, conducted by leaders willing to take a public stand and face the consequences. Today's proposal on banking reform from Sen. Dodd is the product of backroom negotiation and holds nobody accountable. It allows Senators to dodge one of the most critical issues of the day: the financial security of the American public.

Financial reform is complicated, but the principles behind it are simple. Here's one: Should the needs of the American consumer be given as much weight as those of big banks? The proposed bill Sen. Dodd unveiled today doesn't meet that test. It puts bankers first, giving consumers protection only when it doesn't make the Wall Street crowd too uncomfortable.

That's not acceptable. American should insist on an up-or-down vote for this simple question: Do American households deserve the strong protection of an independent agency, or should their fate remain in the hands of regulators who are more concerned with how well the big banks are doing?

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Chinese companies are using technology transferred from other countries to bid on US high speed rail contracts after building 4,000 miles of such railways at home, but they say they'll share:

... China produces high-speed trains using French, German and Japanese technology. Its manufacturers have developed a homegrown version but have yet to produce a commercial model.

... "China is willing to share its mature and advanced technology with other countries to promote development of the world's high-speed railways," [Wang Zhiguo, a Chinese deputy railways minister] said.

If they really will share, that would mean doing the same things other countries' companies did in China: managing the contracts, licensing the technology, and training local workers to build the bulk of the components in country.

That'd be great. Because we have less of a high speed rail industry than we do a wind industry.

When you don't have much of a domestic industry to produce something the public wants, like clean energy or rapid surface transit, the choice can be between not having it and buying it from someone else. Though there are smart and less smart ways to buy from someone else.

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Many armchair pundits have taken whacks at the President and his communications team for having "lost control of the message behind his drive for health care."

This critique is based on the faulty logic that the President can control everything.

It ignores the fundamental obstacle to strong messaging that a "big tent" party like the Democratic Party will always face during massive reform efforts: a party can't coordinate messaging while disagreeing with itself.

The President can be on-message day-in and day-out (and, I'd contend, he was.).

But if the rest of his party is busy jousting over the details -- during the strange process known by high school social studies teachers as "legislating" -- the media coverage will be about the uncertain outcome of the conflicts, which will swamp any messaging effort.

Only upon a final agreement can coordinated messaging begin. And since so many Democratic congresspeople keep their cards close the vest to maximize bargaining leverage until the very last minute, Democrats don't seem to get to a final agreement until the moment the bill passes.

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China is holding down the value of its currency, which means goods made there cost less everywhere else. This undercuts American companies that make things, so they close factories here and buy from there. This costs us jobs, forces down our wages and savings rate, and forces the country to borrow heavily. This imbalance has built up to a breaking point. It is past time to face facts and something about it.

Just how much is China undervaluing their currency? Paul Krugman today: "This is the most distortionary exchange rate policy any major nation has ever followed." Yes, that much. And the result? Krugman says: "And it’s a policy that seriously damages the rest of the world."

A NY Times story yesterday explained how it works,

China buys dollars and other foreign currencies — worth several hundred billion dollars a year — by selling more of its own currency, which then depresses its value. That intervention helped Chinese exports to surge 46 percent in February compared with a year earlier.

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(Or "CPAC: Sideshow and Snake Oil, Pt. 2")

The circus sideshow that was CPAC folded its tent and left Washington weeks ago. However, its apparent ringmaster and chief snake oil salesman still sweats, struts, and sobs across the "stage" of conservative media — that medicine show never stops rolling and never stops hawking its "solutions" to Americans who are in desperate need of something to ease their economic aches and pains, and heal their political maladies.

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• House Begins Reconciliation Process, Aims For Final Vote This Week
• Dodd Bill To Be Released Today
• China Digs In On Manipulating Currency

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Republicans in Congress have introduced a breathtaking new budget plan that would essentially put America's plutocracy on steroids.

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There's a lot of buzz in health care circles about an editorial in today's Washington Post entitled "If Democrats ignore health-care polls, midterms will be costly." That could be dangerous: the author's conclusions are contradicted, not supported, by the available facts.

The editorial's written by Patrick Caddell, described as a "political commentator and former pollster," and Douglas E. Schoen. Caddell and Schoen play the "pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents" card prominently, but here's what they don't tell you: Schoen's been on a third-party kick since he wrote a paean to centrism called Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System. And Caddell's a "commentator," all right: he's now a right-leaning Fox News regular. There's plenty of YouTube video of Caddell clucking tongues with Glenn Beck over Van Jones' "violent past," or whatever the right-wing outrage of the day happens to be.

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President Obama spoke yesterday at the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank, where he discussed the creation of the Export Promotion Cabinet and last year's efforts by the Export-Import Bank to directly extend financing for the purchase of American exports.

It remains to be seen what the initiative will come to, but Obama hit the nail on the head regarding public sentiment on trade:

... And meanwhile, if you ask the average American what trade has offered them, they won’t say that their televisions are cheaper, or productivity is higher. They’d say they’ve seen the plant across town shut down, jobs dry up, communities deteriorate. And you can’t blame them for feeling that way. The fact is other countries haven’t always played by the same set of rules. America hasn’t always enforced our trade rights, or made sure that the benefits of trade are broadly shared. And we haven’t always done enough to help our workers adapt to a changing world. ...

Scott Paul, Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, responded to Obama's remarks:

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