China is like a bunch of yelping dogs. So says Senator Sherrod Brown. When it comes to doing anything about our massive trade deficit with China, out come the pundits, corporate plants, threats and misinformation, all in an effort to stop our government from taking any action. Will the Senate actually listen to the statistics and the cries of the U.S. worker, ignore the snapping dogs, barring their teeth, nipping at their heels, and vote to do something?
Update: Yes the Senate did man up and voted for cloture, allowing the the vote for passage to occur. Here are the votes and it was 62 to 38. The bill still has to pass and Boehner is blocking the bill in the House.
Bloomberg has one whooper story. It seems the Koch Brothers made sales to Iran:
A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries -- in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East -- has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.
In case you've been dead, the Koch Brothers are the uber-rich guys out to destroy your social security, health care and, oh yeah, government as we know it.
No wonder they hate regulations and government. Doesn't help when you're doing something probably illegal, like making sales to a government under sanctions for being a terrorist state.
Beyond getting into the international bribes business, a crime the Koch Brothers are assuredly not alone in (see this Frontline documentary on how common international business bribes are), we have them losing one of the biggest civil wrongful death suits:
In 1999, a Texas jury imposed a $296 million verdict on a Koch pipeline unit -- the largest compensatory damages judgment in a wrongful death case against a corporation in U.S. history. The jury found that the company’s negligence had led to a butane pipeline rupture that fueled an explosion that killed two teenagers.
For the most part it seems the Senate likes to blow smoke when there is little fire to take action. Will this time be different?
Today the Senate voted 79 to 19 to allow Bill S. 1619: Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act of 2011, to proceed for amendments and a floor vote. The bill is a long overdue measure to provide for identification of misaligned currency. The bill provides a mechanism to require corrective action by the offending currency manipulator nation to correct the currency peg misalignment or face anti-dumping type tariffs. Reuters has a plain English summary of what the bill does. Beyond this cloture vote, the question becomes, will the Senate really do something and pass something to take on China and their flagrant undervaluing of their currency?
Do you think the $5 monthly charge Bank of America announced for its debit card customers is all about squeezing the consumer? Think again. What we are really witnessing are the death throes of an industry – the Too Big To Fail Banks. These are the banks that, at the height of the housing bubble, acted like they were hedge funds. They expected to earn 20% a year on their equity, and they rewarded their top executives accordingly, with bonuses in excess of $10 million for the CEO. Now all sorts of forces are conspiring to drag these banks into the boring, and decidedly non-lucrative status of utilities, earning maybe 5% a year on their equity, with their income capped by government decree. The bank executives don’t like this one bit. They see themselves being sucked down into the quicksand of $100,000 annual bonuses, and they are fighting back with everything they’ve got, even if it means making their cash-strapped customers pay ridiculous fees for services that used to be free.
By now all of America has heard about BoA's $5 dollar a month fee to use a debit card, or $60 dollars a year just to use a standard feature of any checking account in the digital age.
The question becomes, why would anyone keep their money with Bank of America? Switch! It's easy! There are all sorts of online banks, credit unions which offer free checking, assuredly free debit card use, free ATMs and even offer interest on low balance checking.
America, vote with your consumer power and leave BoA, Wells Fargo or any other financial institution nickel and diming you to death. All these banks care about is keeping their executive bonuses rolling in.
Today we've heard from the 2008 TARP bank bail out inspector general, SIGTARP, that banks left TARP early, not because they wanted to pay back the taxpayer, or because they were financially stable....they left the bank bail out early in order to increase executive pay. The terms of TARP limited executive pay so banks were hell bent on getting out of it, despite their flimsy financial footing.
Guess who was at the top of that list? Bank of America.
Remember those time bombs called derivatives which threatened to economically blow up the world in 2008? Not only were they never really regulated, they are back with a vengeance. A new report, by the Comptroller of the Currency, on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activities, Q2 2011, shows derivatives have increased 11.6% from one year ago to a U.S. holdings of $249 trillion dollars.
Five large commercial banks represent 96% of the total banking industry notional amounts and 86% of industry net current credit exposure.
According to DealBook, those banks are, pretty much the same banks who were given massive bail outs via TARP. BoA especially is already in trouble due to their Countrywide holdings. 99% of all derivatives are held by just 25 banks.
The nation’s four biggest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs — are the biggest players, holding roughly 95 percent of the industry’s total exposure to derivatives. JPMorgan, which holds the most among commercial banks, carries some $78 trillion worth of derivatives on its books, according to the report. Citi is next on the list, with $56 trillion, up from $54 trillion in the first quarter.
China is like a bunch of yelping dogs. 
Bloomberg has one whooper story. It seems the Koch Brothers made 
For the most part it seems the Senate likes to blow smoke when there is little fire to take action. Will this time be different? 
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