"My comments in the Bill Moyers Journal interview about the “Prompt Corrective Action” (PCA) law (adopted in 1991) have sparked considerable comment in the blogsphere. Here is the portion of the interview transcript that discusses the PCA law.

"WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, certainly in the financial sphere, I am. I think, first, the policies are substantively bad. Second, I think they completely lack integrity. Third, they violate the rule of law. This is being done just like Secretary Paulson did it. In violation of the law. We adopted a law after the Savings and Loan crisis, called the Prompt Corrective Action Law. And it requires them to close these institutions. And they're refusing to obey the law.

BILL MOYERS: In other words, they could have closed these banks without nationalizing them?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Well, you do a receivership. No one -- Ronald Reagan did receiverships. Nobody called it nationalization.

BILL MOYERS: And that's a law?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: That's the law.

BILL MOYERS: So, Paulson could have done this? Geithner could do this?

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Not could. Was mandated-

BILL MOYERS: By the law.

WILLIAM K. BLACK: By the law."

"I first published an article about the PCA law over a month ago entitled: “Why is Geithner Continuing Paulson’s Policy of Violating the Law?” (February 23, 2009). 

I was the staff leader for Federal Home Loan Bank Board Chairman Ed Gray’s successful reregulation of the S&L industry. That reregulation provided the tools that allowed the agency to place in receivership many of the worst control frauds. Gray inherited (and for a time supported) a dominant strategy of covering up the scale of the S&L industry’s insolvency. He personally recruited vigorous senior regulators such as Michael Patriarca and Joe Selby to reverse that strategy. The PCA law was adopted largely in response to the enormous cost to the taxpayers of our predecessor’s failed strategy of not closing insolvent S&Ls. 

"Shortly before the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the manager of a Whole Foods grocery store in the San Francisco Bay Area gathered his employees in a conference room for a chat about labor organizing. “This is not a union-bashing thing whatsoever,” the manager began, adding, however, that he’d called the meeting because Whole Foods believed Obama would sign the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation intended to ease unionization that was opposed by the company’s lobbyists. According to a tape of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones, the manager went on to imply that joining a union would lead to reprisals: 'It’s interesting to note that once you become represented by the union,' he said, 'basically everything, every benefit you have, is kind of thrown out the window, and you renegotiate a contract.'

" 'I think it’s probably fair to construe [that comment] as a threat,' concluded Tim Peck, a representative of the National Labor Relations Board (NLR in San Francisco, after Mother Jones read him quotes from the meeting, one of several anti-union trainings held by the company in recent months. Peck pointed out that labor law bars employers from threatening to strip benefits from workers in retaliation for unionizing. 'The ‘flying out the window’ [comment] kind of suggests that the benefits are gone,' he noted. Legally, 'that wouldn’t pass muster..'

"Unlike Costco, where 20 percent of workers are represented by the Teamsters, Whole Foods and Starbucks stores haven’t been organized by traditional unions. And yet their cultures are steeped in the language and norms of the labor movement. Starbucks calls its workers 'partners' and Whole Foods dubs them 'team members.'  A 'Business Conduct Helpline' allows Starbucks baristas to a report workplace issues anonymously, and special committees of Whole Foods workers and managers resolve disputes. Both companies offer employees relatively generous wages and health benefits and routinely make Fortune’s list of 'Best Companies to Work For.'

"The firms’ granola reputations could give Democrats political cover to support a compromise on EFCA, averting a likely Republican filibuster. Yet the stores’ unique, do-gooder mentality paradoxically has left little space for actual unions. In 1997, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote that he wanted workers 'to believe in their hearts that management trusted them and treated them with respect....If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.'  Whole Foods’ avowedly libertarian CEO, John Mackey, has compared the prospect of having unions at his stores to 'having herpes..' An internal Whole Foods document listing 'six strategic goals for Whole Foods Market to achieve by 2013,' obtained byMother Jones, includes a goal to remain '100% union-free.'

"On April 6, two days after the 22-year-old Richard Poplawski allegedly murdered three police officers in Pittsburgh, a radio host named Alex Jones settled in before a microphone in his studio in Austin, Texas, to do some damage control. “The mainstream media has certainly enjoyed tying me into this story,” Jones complained. “They’re attacking me and saying I’m delusional and there’s no New World Order… The Second Amendment, what the country’s founded on—it’s all my fault!”

"In the wake of Poplawski’s alleged murder spree, the killer’s friends and family members painted a portrait of a paranoid young man whose worldview was informed almost totally by the kind of conspiratorial themes entertained by Jones. Poplawski’s best friend, Edward Perkovic, who also spouted white-supremacist rhetoric, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that his friend “grew angry recently over fears Obama would outlaw guns.” Poplawski’s mother remarked to police investigators that her son targeted cops “because he believed that as a result of economic collapse, the police were no longer able to protect society.”