Bank of America

The Susan G. Komen breast cancer fund reversed its Planned Parenthood action, and the right wing anti-choice politician it hired has resigned. But the real lesson of this incident is broader than one decision or one person.

Our society is permeated with a cultural of corporate greed, aggression, and power that reaches from the boardrooms of New York to the meeting rooms of Washington, and from to the hospital rooms of the sick and suffering.

The Susan G. Komen foundation has raised millions to support vitally important work, but it has also reinforced some of the worst tendencies in our society. It has leveraged big-company resources so that it could dominate its 'marketplace,' usually by serving as a marketing arm for a client list that includes some very poorly-behaved corporate citizens. Then it has used its market dominance to bully other organizations, push its own political agenda, and tried to reshape the course of US cancer research in dangerous ways.

Just like its most prominent sponsor, the Susan G. Komen foundation has become too big to fail. more »

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The Susan G. Komen foundation has reversed its defunding of Planned Parenthood, at least temporarily, but the falsehoods and hypocrisy haven't ended. more »

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Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, in the State of the Union this week President Obama struck some of his most populist themes yet. He wants to tax millionaires, bring back manufacturing and prosecute the big banks. He touted his Wall Street reforms saying the big banks are “no longer allowed to make risky bets with customers deposits” and “the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again.” more »

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The Obama Administration announced a $335 million settlement deal with Bank of America to settle charges of discriminatory lending practices. Here is, in ascending order of importance, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Justice Department deserves praise for responding to illegal bank behavior more aggressively than it's done in the past. So does the Occupy movement, and so do the many Americans who have expressed their outrage over the lack of prosecutions and sweetheart bank deals. Without them it's unlikely we'd be seeing a deal like this at all.

But while the Justice Department has taken a first step, the proposed agreement seems designed to do only the bare minimum its framers hoped would be needed to quell public outrage. While it will be sold as bold and decisive, it's not. In fact, this deal perpetuates some of the worst failings of past settlements the government's made with big banks.

As we said, it has good features. But where it's ugly, it's very ugly indeed. Hopefully the judge who reviews it will bear that in mind. more »

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On Monday, Bank of America (BofA) stocks briefly traded for under $5. Yes, you could buy a share of BofA for less than the noxious debit card fee they tried to force down your throat.

BofA is massive, with assets equivalent to 15 percent of U.S. GDP. So why is it trading for the price of a latte? more »

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It took the journalists at Bloomberg News two years - and presumably lots of legal fees - to pry information out of the Federal Reserve that should have been made public long ago. We now know that the Fed's secret $7.7 trillion lending program wasn't just the most massive bank bailout ever seen, and it wasn't just free money for mega-bankers - though it was certainly both of those things. It was also the greatest hoax in stock market history.

No, scratch that. It was the greatest hoax in the history of money. And it was built on lies. How many? Let us count the ways.

Here's the first one: The banks paid back all the money back that they were given. No, they didn't. They paid back the principal on these loans. But by obtaining loans at rates far below market value, we now know they received the equivalent of $13 billion in cash giveaways.

Here's another lie: Fed economists support a free-market economy.

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Wall Street waged war on the American economy and middle class with its reckless gambling.

It wasn’t Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac that crashed the economy. It wasn’t the federal government. It wasn’t hapless homeowners who were sold mortgages they couldn’t afford. more »

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Voting doesn’t work anymore. If it did, Americans would get what they want -- or at least some of it -- from Washington.

But they don’t. more »

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In a piece called "Wall Street: Not Guilty," financial columnist Roger Lowenstein attempts to defend Wall Street against allegations that it's a viper's nest of rampant criminality. His mischaracterization, mockery, and vague suggestions of McCarthyism are strident, flat, and fail to get the job done. But Lowenstein's piece is well worth reading, if only as a case study in the moral and cognitive blindness that's reached epidemic proportions in influential Washington and Wall Street circles.

Lowenstein shows us how people who are undoubtedly thoughtful and ethically-minded in their personal lives can lose their way when confronted with complex moral and legal issues, especially ones involving people they know personally. And his misdirection and vituperation suggests how unsettled they become when their worldview is challenged.

It's a shame. The analytical and moral flaws in Lowenstein's piece obscure some of the very sound points he makes about the wrongheadedness of our country's financial culture, a topic that deserves more thoughtful discussion. Without a clear rebuttal, this wrongheaded view is likely to become tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

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Some of the headlines about the conviction of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam are misleading or just plain wrong. The Rajaratnam guilty verdict won't "change the way Wall Street does business" - not where it matters most. Too Big to Fail banks will continue to endanger the economy because they know they'll be rescued again. And they'll keep on breaking the law, knowing that even if they're caught they'll be protected from prosecution.

And yet, instead of being grateful, bankers like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon will continue to publicly sulk about their own perceived mistreatment. That can be annoying, since the U.S. taxpayer saved their corporations, their careers, and their wealth from the consequences of their own mismanagement.

But in the end all this public posturing is just a form of territorial primate display, like mandrills showing their brightly-colored posteriors to zoo visitors. These bankers are reminding us that this country's economy and government are their territory and we're just trespassing on their mating grounds. To paraphrase an old Sam and Dave song, "It's their world, we're just living in it."

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