Blog Archive: December, 2011

On the menu this morning:

• MORNING MESSAGE: That $335 Million BofA Settlement: The Good, The Bad, And The Very Ugly
• Bank of America Settles Up
• Fat Cats Bite Back
• GOP Payroll Tax Cut Damage
• GOP Payroll Tax Damage Control
• Breakfast Sides

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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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One good thing you can say about 2011 is that it is a year in which lots of wrong-headed undertakings finally came to their ignominious conclusions -- including, among others, the Iraq War, the Gadhafi regime, the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, and "The Oprah Winfrey Show".

Also among the train-wrecks is undoubtedly our failed national education policy, No Child Left Behind. more »

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David Brancaccio's Marketplace story Tuesday, Decline of Kodak offers lessons for U.S. business traced the decline of Kodak and the loss of Rochester, NY's good, middle-class jobs to Kodak's failure to tend its "industrial commons." This is a national problem. more »

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Yesterday, a chief House Republican talking point was they really, really, really wanted a compromise on a payroll tax cut extension, and were "willing to work over the holidays" to get one. 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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Sometimes my brain finds connections the strangest, seemingly most disparate stories among the many I read online every day. Two years ago, I wrote a rather longish blog post titled "Reclaiming 'We'." It was partly inspired by NY Times columnist Thom Friedman's declaration that "There is no 'we' in American politics." Earlier this week, Tom Engelhardt brought full circle the ideas I started to flesh out in that post, in a wonderful post inspired by the chant shouted by Russian demonstrators protesting ballot-stuffing and election fraud: "We exist!"

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• MORNING MESSAGE: GOP, Basta! Stop Sabotaging Our Economy.
• House GOP Blows Up Payroll Tax Cut, Jobless Aid Compromise
• Presidential Challengers Praise Inequality, Irresponsible Corporations
• New Housing Plan Considered, Resisted
• EPA Readies Mercury Rule
• Breakfast Sides

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The following was written by Robert Borosage and Roger Hickey.

House Republicans have left no doubt: all they want is economic pain for political gain.

Instead of accepting the bipartisan Senate bill, passed 89-10, to extend the payroll tax cut for a few months so a deal can be worked out, House Republicans killed it today. more »

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If you take a government program, change everything about it, destroy its core purpose, but keep the same name, is it the same program? Politifact.com says yes, and even goes so far as to say it is "The Lie Of The Year" to say it isn't -- because it still has the same name. more »

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