In a surprising, if perhaps non-flattering moment, Housers is caught on camera protesting at the Bank of America shareholders meeting.

Housers appears in this photograph, published by the Charlotte Observer.

Perhaps a slightly more flattering image came across from the Philadelphia Business Journal.

This is a better picture, eh? It was a great bit of organizing by SEIU.

SEIU was incredibly well-organized.  They brought out about 30 protesters from the area surrounding Charlotte.  That is virtually impossible in a company town like the Queen City.  Then, they brought along two disgruntled ex-employees from B of A’s credit card division.  Those individuals (Donna and Christopher Feener) testified to the incentives, and the pressures, that they were encumbered with to make customers add to their credit card balances.  They were rewarded with incentives for balance transfers, and encouraged to get the highest interest rate possible on those transfers, they said.  They also brought along a Catholic minister, who spoke of the genuine social justice motives underpinning Wednesday’s protest.

SEIU’s proxy resolution passed with 50.3 percent of the vote.  This is an incredible outcome, and a defining statement of the national feelings about the actions of the finance industry.  Lewis appears to have been a scapegoat.  It may be that a good portion of the “against” votes were motivated by corporate governance concerns.  Many feel that at any corporation, that the positions of CEO and Chairman of the Board should be separate, in order to develop institutional accountability.

Cigarettes are slowly being taxed out of American way of life.  In some places it can cost more than $7 to buy a pack of cigarettes.  In New York, it can cost more than $9.  Federal and state taxes are increasing on cigarettes.  It’s so steep that people have largely abandoned the habit of sharing cigarettes in polite company.

Often, cigarette taxes are collected in the name of some kind of social good.  For example, in North Carolina, new taxes on cigarettes are going to pay medical costs.  A large share of those costs are actually income-targeted, too.  They go to pay state shares of Medicaid.

Lotteries, by the way, often have the same model.

Let’s look at payday lending.  It deserves some of the same treatment as cigarettes, undoubteldy.  Many might call payday lending a cancer on the communities where it is practiced.  Most of the public dialogue on what to do about payday lending focuses on either shutting it down, or on curbing its costs.

The latter aims often try to get the price of payday lending below some notion of usury.  In North Carolina, that price level is 36 percent.

In effect, legislation forces payday lenders to tone down the toxicity of their business model.  It is as if Monsanto agreed to create a roundup that only killed half your weeds.  It would be pretty certain that the weeds would come back, no?

What if — legislation required that payday lenders not be allowed to charge anything below an absolutely stratospheric price by enforcing high taxes on each payday loan transaction?  What if the cost of taking out $50 was attended by the fees for the payday lender, plus another $25 in fees for the state?  Or maybe another $50 in fees?

This might be a bust.  Conceivably, the desperation that attends the use of payday loans might not be extinguished by another round of levies.  If that was true, then the policy would merely transfer resources from the poorest individuals into state coffers.  That would be very unfortunate policy.

That said, it might force a new parsimony upon the industry.

In the last administration, the action of regulators could be summed up like this:

1) We reserve the right to regulate, and we deny states the right to regulate within their state.

2) We choose not to regulate.

It was a nice one-two punch.  In North Carolina, some good anti-predatory lending laws were enacted that should have shielded our residents from many problems.  When in place, the state rules worked.  State-regulated institutions (including BB&T, the largest) followed those rules.

Still, national banks argued that they didn’t need to heed states.  It was too hard to follow rules in 50 places.  Better to follow one rule.  Even better, if the one rule was essentially saying that “there should be no rules.”

In Wachovia v. Watters, the Court emphatically ratified this regulatory principle into law.

Fast forward to today’s hearing, though.  In Cuomo vs. The Clearinghouse Association, the Justices will hear arguments related to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigation into mortgage pricing.  Spitzer was denied the ability to issue subpoenas after he used publicly available data to find discrepancies in lending prices to minorities.

Spitzer had to move on to pursue other opportunities.  Andrew Cuomo has gladly filled in for him, though, and he is the author of the filing heard today.

Bankers have traditionally argued that the publicly available data, from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, paints a false picture because it does not contain all of the relevant data that goes into underwriting decisions.  That is true.  Credit scores are omitted, as are loan-to-value ratios.  That said, the banks will not assent to having that data in the HMDA reports, and they declined to make it available to Cuomo.

Cuomo’s petition is here.  The attorneys represent the Clearinghouse Association have presented this brief.

Today, we will get a hint if this case is going to find traction.

Lehigh Acres, Florida is one of the epicenters of America’s foreclosure crisis.  Forbes just listed the community on the outskirts of Fort Myers as the fourth worst in the country.  President Obama, upon announcing a policy to combat foreclosures, visited Lehigh.

CRA-NC has just produced a new photographic slide show, narrated with thoughts about the situation.

You can see it by linking to it here.

You may have heard claims by Bank of America’s about its stature in small business lending:

“With our scale and depth of resources, Bank of America offers small business owners unparalleled access to solutions to help run their businesses smoother, more profitably and with greater access to a wider business network.” — Mark Hogan, BAC Small Business Banking

True enough, BAC is the largest Small Business Administration Lender, measured by aggregate statistics for the entire country.  In fiscal year 2007, Bank of America made more than 10,000 SBA (7) a loans for a sum of more than $300 million.

Yet another look reveals that this position is really a product of the size of their business.  This is an mile-wide, inch-deep kind of commitment.

Take a look at the area where, of any in the country, Bank of America’s “leadership” in small business banking should translate into market dominance:  Charlotte, North Carolina.  This is BAC’s headquarters.  Charlotte is home to some other large banks, of course, but none that claim to be the leader in small business banking.

That’s too bad, because many of them outpace Bank of America.  Let’s look at the list of leading small business lenders in the area, in terms of loans by loan amounts.  We get data from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), the leading publicly available provider of data on small business loans.  The FFIEC cuts has several ways of defining small business lending – this one applies to firms with less than $1 million in annual revenue.

1. Wachovia (now part of Wells Fargo), $120,000 million
2. BB & T, $89.9 million
3. First Citizen’s Bank & Trust, $56.1 million
4. First Charter (now part of Fifth Third), $38.2 million
5. FIA Card Services, $38 million
6. Suntrust, $30.2 million
7. Citizen’s South, $25.8 million
8. RBC Centura, $22.8 million
9. Bank of America, $19.1 million

So, in Charlotte, Bank of America actually lags 8 institutions.  Some significantly smaller institutions, most glaringly Citizen’s South, provide more funding to the region’s small businesses.

Now, it is possible that some could claim that $1 million is the wrong place to draw a line in the sand.  Sure, that’s reasonable.  Then again, its as reasonable as most other demarcations.  It means that businesses up to the size of a small deli or a local pest service are counted, but perhaps a local franchise is excluded.  The former are likely to have a particularly hard time getting loans.  They are also likely to be job generators, as they include many nascent firms with the potential to expand quickly.

Still, this is getting ahead of things.  What about in terms of loan volume?  Well, here, the list ahead of Bank of America is probably too long to write in a blog.  Suffice to say that Bank of America comes in 17th in Charlotte.

There is a caveat, applying to both lists.  FIA Card Services, which ranks fifth by amount and second by volume in Charlotte, is the former MBNA brand acquired in 2006 by Bank of America.  Taken together, BAC’s sums would increase a few places in each category.

Nonetheless, the impression remains off the mark.  If the pr surrounding BAC’s small business lending indicated that it mostly consisted of credit card loans (presumably with high interest rates, terms subject to constant revision, and few consumer protections) wouldn’t that seem different?

In fact, to make it more transparent – here is one disclosure statement of standard terms for a B of A card through FIA:  variable interest rates range from 12 percent to as high as 19.99 percent. Cash advances are almost 25 percent.  A default APR of 27.24 percent! Hardly the kind of lender that a small business would want to work with while it finds its way.  More like a lender of last resort.

Ouch!  Doesn’t sound like higher standards.