News, Etc.

Of course companies are going to drop health care coverage for their employees once the "reform"
takes effect.

Let's be cynical and say this was the intent of the legislation in the first place, and that is to simply give corporations a way out of paying health care benefits at all.

Just as companies took advantage of loopholes in ERISA to gut pensions and force employees on worthless defined contribution plans like 401(k)s.
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If this deal about foreclosures isn't proof Barack Obama is a corrupt son of a bitch, I don't know what is:

The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.

This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.

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