A Day In The Life

Your U.S. House & Senate have voted themselves $4,700
and $5,300 raises.
1. They voted to not give you a S.S. cost of living raise in
2010 and 2011.


2. Your Medicaid premiums will go up $285.60 for the 2-years
and you will not get the 3% COLA: $660/yr. Your total 2-yr loss and cost is -$1,600 or -$3,200
for husband and wife


3. Over 2-yrs The House & Senate each get
$10,000 raises

4. Do you feel SCREWED?
5. WILL your cost of drugs - doctor fees - local taxes - food,
etc., increase? You better believe they will!

WILL THEIRS...NO WAY . They have a raise and better benefits. Why care about you? You never did anything about it in the past.
You're obviously too stupid or don't care. No offense; just making a point!
6. Do you really think that Nancy, Harry, Chris, Charlie, Barnie, et al, care about you?

SEND THE MESSAGE-- You're FIRED.

IN 2010 YOU WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO GET RID OF THE SITTING CONGRESS AND Up to 1/3 OF THE SENATE,
AND 100% OF THE HOUSE.

MAKE SURE YOU'RE STILL MAD IN NOVEMBER 2010 AND TELL THEIR REPLACEMENTS NOT TO SCREW UP.


It is ok to forward this to your sphere of influence if you are finally tired of the abuse.
Maybe it's time for the........
Amendment 28

"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United
States that does not apply equally to the Senators or Representatives,
and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators or
Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the
United States ."

Let's get this passed around, folks - these people in Washington have brought this upon themselves!!! It's time for retribution. Let's take back America .

If you don't forward this to all your friends you're just part of the problem of national apathy.

IT'S TIME!!!!!!!
JUST DO IT!

Labels: crooked government, crooked politicians, tax money

Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.
Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.
Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC-insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.
“The concern is that there is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the insured institution,” said William Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. “We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”
Accommodating Clients
Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesman for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, declined to comment on the transfers or the firm’s discussions with regulators. The company “continues to accommodate the needs of our clients through each of our multiple trading entities, including Bank of America NA,” he said in an e-mailed statement, referring to the company’s deposit-taking unit.
Barbara Hagenbaugh, a Fed spokeswoman, said she couldn’t discuss supervision of specific institutions. Greg Hernandez, an FDIC spokesman, declined to comment.
Bank of America posted a $6.2 billion third-quarter profit today, compared with a loss of $7.3 billion a year earlier, ascredit quality improved and the firm booked one-time accounting gains. The lender rose 7.3 percent to $6.47 at 1:54 p.m. in New York trading, making it the day’s best performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Credit-default swaps on Bank of America eased 10 basis points to a mid-price of 380 as of 11:49 a.m. in New York, according to broker Phoenix Partners Group.
Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Bank of America’s long-term credit ratings Sept. 21, cutting both the holding company and the retail bank two notches apiece. The holding company fell to Baa1, the third-lowest investment-grade rank, from A2, while the retail bank declined to A2 from Aa3.
Moody’s Downgrade
The Moody’s downgrade spurred some of Merrill’s partners to ask that contracts be moved to the retail unit, which has a higher credit rating, according to people familiar with the transactions. Transferring derivatives also can help the parent company minimize the collateral it must post on contracts and the potential costs to terminate trades after Moody’s decision, said a person familiar with the matter.
Bank of America estimated in an August regulatory filing that a two-level downgrade by all ratings companies would have required that it post $3.3 billion in additional collateral and termination payments, based on over-the-counter derivatives and other trading agreements as of June 30. The figure doesn’t include possible collateral payments due to “variable interest entities,” which the firm is evaluating, it said in the filing.
Dubrowski declined to comment on collateral or termination payments after the downgrade.
‘Be Prepared’
Bank of America’s rating is now four grades below the one Moody’s assigned to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the biggest U.S. bankby deposits at midyear, and a level below the rating given toCitigroup Inc. (C), the third-biggest. Bank of America is the only U.S. lender that lacks a rating of A3 or higher among the five firms listed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as having the biggest derivatives books.
“We had worked very hard over the course of the last nine months to be prepared to the extent that we did receive a downgrade, and feel very good about the way that we’ve minimized the potential impact” Bank of America Chief Financial OfficerBruce Thompson said in a conference call today with analysts.“Since the downgrade, we have not seen any change in our global excess liquidity sources.”
Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events such as changes in the weather or interest rates.
Dodd-Frank Rules
Keeping such deals separate from FDIC-insured savings has been a cornerstone of U.S. regulation for decades, including last year’s Dodd-Frank overhaul of Wall Street regulation.
The legislation gave the FDIC, which liquidates failing banks, expanded powers to dismantle large financial institutions in danger of failing. The agency can borrow from the Treasury Department to finance the biggest lenders’ operations to stem bank runs. It’s required to recoup taxpayer money used during the resolution process through fees on the largest firms.
Bank of America benefited from two injections of U.S. bailout funds during the financial crisis. The first, in 2008, included $15 billion for the bank and $10 billion for Merrill, which the bank had agreed to buy. The second round of $20 billion came in January 2009 after Merrill’s losses in its final quarter as an independent firm surpassed $15 billion, raising doubts about the bank’s stability if the takeover proceeded. The U.S. also offered to guarantee $118 billion of assets held by the combined company, mostly at Merrill. The company repaid federal bailout funds in 2009 with interest.
‘The Normal Course’
Bank of America’s holding company -- the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit -- held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according todata compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.
That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
The moves by Bank of America are part of “the normal course of dealings that we’ve had with counterparties since Merrill Lynch and BofA came together,” Thompson said today.
‘Created a Firewall’
Moving derivatives contracts between units of a bank holding company is limited under Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, which is designed to prevent a lender’s affiliates from benefiting from its federal subsidy and to protect the bank from excessive risk originating at the non-bank affiliate, saidSaule T. Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.
“Congress doesn’t want a bank’s FDIC insurance and access to the Fed discount window to somehow benefit an affiliate, so they created a firewall,” Omarova said. The discount window has been open to banks as the lender of last resort since 1914.
As a general rule, as long as transactions involve high-quality assets and don’t exceed certain quantitative limitations, they should be allowed under the Federal ReserveAct, Omarova said.
In 2009, the Fed granted Section 23A exemptions to the banking arms of Ally Financial Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, Fifth Third Bancorp, ING Groep NV, General Electric Co., Northern Trust Corp., CIT Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., among others, according to letters posted on the Fed’s website.
The central bank terminated exemptions last year for retail-banking units of JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and Deutsche Bank AG. The Fed also ended an exemption for Bank of America in March 2010 and in September of that year approved a new one.
Section 23A “is among the most important tools that U.S. bank regulators have to protect the safety and soundness of U.S. banks,” Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, told Congress in March 2008.
To contact the reporters on this story: Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.net; Hugh Son in New York at hson1@bloomberg.net; Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gary Putka at gputka@bloomberg.net;David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.

Labels: bad politics, crooked business, crooked government, crooked politicians, finances, your money

Yes, We Can Enforce
BY RICH LOWRY
What the Supreme Court’s E-Verify decision symbolizes.
After it passed a robust immigration-enforcement measure last year, Arizona was practically expelled from the union.
The great and good denounced the state for its Gestapo tactics. The Obama administration sued it. The professionally outraged announced boycotts. Arizona stood condemned before the world, a byword for hatred and defiance of federal law.
And yet the Supreme Court last week implicitly ratified Arizona’s leadership role on immigration enforcement. It’s everyone else who is out of line, not Arizona.
The Supreme Court upheld the state’s requirement that businesses use the federal E-Verify system — a database accessible through the Internet — to confirm the legal status of employees. This is different from last year’s law saying that police should, when practicable, check the immigration status of suspected illegal immigrants, but the echoes are clear enough. The same critics (the business community and civil-rights groups) used the same tactics (loud condemnations and lawsuits) over the same essential issue (whether the state had gone beyond federal law).
Arizona passed the E-Verify law in 2007, and the Chamber of Commerce fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. The organization’s courtroom tenacity shows just how dangerous it is to get between the Chamber and its illegal employees. The dirty little secret of the Chamber is not, as the Democrats shamelessly alleged in the 2010 elections, Chinese money; it’s Mexican workers.
The Chamber maintained that Arizona had gone too far in requiring E-Verify because Congress had only made the program voluntary. But Congress didn’t forbid states from mandating the program. The Arizona law is careful to stay within the bounds set out by Congress. The punishment in Arizona for knowingly hiring illegal workers is the loss of a business license. Federal law says that states may “through licensing and similar laws” sanction businesses employing illegal immigrants.
Congress has been adept through the years at passing laws and programs notionally targeting illegal immigration, but with no intention of acting on them. It’s enforcement by pretense. Arizona’s offense is to take the federal law at face value and act on it. So if Congress creates a widely ignored voluntary system to verify the status of employees, Arizona will actually use it as a tool of enforcement.
According to an Institute for the Study of Labor report, Arizona accounts for one-third of all employers nationwide enrolled in E-Verify. Roughly 700,000 of Arizona’s new hires between October 2008 and September 2009 were checked with E-Verify, about half of all the state’s new hires.
This increased attention to the legal status of employees has had the effect any reasonable person would expect — it has made it harder for illegal immigrants to get jobs and therefore made Arizona less hospitable terrain. The Institute for the Study of Labor finds a statistically significant reduction in the state’s population of Hispanic noncitizens, a category overlapping heavily with illegal immigrants. The result holds even when accounting for the recession. The study looked at Arizona’s population of Hispanic naturalized citizens — who are obviously not targeted by the law — and found no such decline.
The Supreme Court decision will encourage other states to follow Arizona’s lead. Already, South Carolina, Utah, and Mississippi have passed similar laws. As more and more states make E-Verify mandatory, it will make more sense for Congress to require the system nationwide.
There are shopworn objections to any kind of immigration enforcement. We are told that the simple expedient of building a fence on our southern border is a gross un-American symbol of exclusion. Is it also un-American to ask that employers do a few clicks of due diligence to ensure that they are abiding by the nation’s laws? We are told we can’t deport 11 million people. Is it impossible, too, to make it a little harder to come here and find a job?
Slowly, we are beginning to move from a culture of permissiveness to a culture of enforcement on illegal immigration. For that, we can all say, “Thank you, Arizona.”
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail at comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2011 by King Features Syndicate

Labels: crooked politicians, crooked politics, government, national debt

Labels: crooked politicians, crooked politics, governmet, president

Labels: crooked politicians, government, gun control, guns