Banks will be put under further pressure this week when the government releases the formal definition of the term ''gouging'' that it will use to guide prosecutions.

Since July it has been illegal for a bank to charge a mortgage exit fee any higher than needed to cover its costs.

But until now no bank has been taken to court because the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has been preparing what it calls ''regulatory guidance'' detailing what it will regard as unfair.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said yesterday the guidelines would help crack down on the fees ''that keep people bound into their banks even though they want to change''.

US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, sat in front of a tame audience on the ABC tonight & held-forth on the wonders of the awesome awstraylen-american relationship.

Earlier in the day, 'Our Kevin' almost wet himself with ecstacy when the well briefed yankee diplomat referred to him as the Prime Minister.

Be afraid - very afraid.

A tsunami of Yemeni mail-bombs is about to bury us: this week, "inspectors from the U.S. ... [headed] to Yemen to monitor security practices and to try to find the holes in their system that allowed two explosive packages to leave the country. ... a team of six inspectors from the Transportation Security Administration [TSA] will make recommendations and give Yemeni officials training to improve their cargo security."

That oughta have the mail-bombs absolutely flooding the ol' Homeland.

One has to congratulate Alan Jones.

One of his favourite words is "rubbish"...

For the last 25 years, Jones has held the number one spot, week after week after week on Sydney radio. Twenty-five years is a long time, a heck of a time to be top rating basically non-stop - even beating all the fancy music FM stations. Alan Jones is an intelligent and flawed man...

Oh ye of little faith - a little pricing power causes wholesale abandonment of confidence in markets to sort out supposed hubris. So much for a robust free market economy.

The bank mania sweeping Canberra, whipped along by the usual populist commentaries, is starting to take on bizarre proportions as the two major parties compete to sound the most interventionist and to display the least confidence in the market mechanisms. The outbreak of posturing by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission isn't a good look either.

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number.

Shake your chains to earth like dew.

Which in sleep has fallen on you.

Ye are many - they are few.

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don't think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.

from Crikey .....

Reclaiming reform: why Labor needs to explain itself better

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Note: the list is in no way complete but comes from a reputable source... and of course does not include all the armaments supplied by the US, and other sundries...

say cheese