The business press this morning is riddled with scandal and upset! The Wall Street Journal banners with Ken Lewis testifying under oath that Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Department Chief Henry Paulson pressured the Bank of America CEO "to not discuss [BofA's] increasingly troubled plan to buy Merrill Lynch—a deal that later triggered a government bailout" of the bank. Although shareholders must under normal circumstances be alerted of material "financial hits," Bernanke and Paulson supposedly said that the news would be too much for Merrill Lynch (MER) to pull through and that the results would devastate the entire system. Paulson told investigators working with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that Lewis may have "misinterpreted some remarks about the Treasury's disclosure obligations," according to the paper, which spoke with insiders working on the investigation.

Second up, there's a coup in the works at MySpace, and it involves ex-Facebook Chief Operating Officer Owen Van Natta. According to the WSJ, News Corp. (NWS) newbie Jonathan Miller, who joined only this month as chief digital officer, is in talks with Van Natta to replace MySpace co-founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anders, who will be stepping down soon. Van Natta "played a key role" in negotiations with Microsoft (MSFT) and Facebook that ended in a lucrative ad deal and a $240 million investment in Facebook, according to a separate article by Kara Swisher from All Things D, posted Feb. 19, when Van Natta stepped down.

Dealbook, the New York Times' blog is reporting "a bidding war has erupted" over the remaining vestiges of Bernard L. Madoff's trading operations. Irving Picard, the trustee charged with liquidating Madoff's assets, said he has gotten three offers this month for the operation, and last month he struck a tentative deal with Castor Pullux Securities to sell the business for $15 million. Before Madoff was arrested in December, he valued the operations at $700 million. Whatever is received for the business will go to investors who lost money in the Madoff Ponzi scheme.

The NYT leads its Business Day coverage with a look at how Japan is dealing with a glut of foreign workers in its own struggling economy. That is, paying them to leave. The newspaper reports that the government has unveiled a program that offers hundreds of thousands of laborers from Latin America $3,000 for airfare and $2,000 for each dependent to return to their native countries. The money is handed over, no strings attached, on the condition that they never return to Japan again for work. However, that stipulation is under pressure. So far, about 100 workers have taken the government up on the offer.

"The program is limited to the country's Latin American guest workers, whose Japanese parents and grandparents emigrated to Brazil and neighboring countries a century ago to work on coffee plantations," the NYT explains. In 1990, to combat labor shortages, Japan enticed thousands of Latin American descendants of these emigrants special visas. Now an estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians live in Japan.

Reuters and CNNMoney say that Obama will host 13 to 14 executives from top credit card issuers at the White House today to discuss pending legislation that would boost credit card holders' rights. Guests will include executives from all the likely suspects: BofA (BAC), American Express (AXP), Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFC), etc. The meeting comes a day after a bill to curb credit card fees and limit penalties cleared a key panel in the House, Reuters says. The bill "would stop credit card issuers from imposing arbitrary interest rate increases and penalties, while halting certain billing practices." Banks came out largely against the legislation.

CNNMoney reports that House Republicans say the laws would be unnecessary since the House bill "mirrors tougher rules that the Federal Reserve passed last December but that don't go into effect until July 2010." Those rules will put an end to higher interest rates being imposed when consumers are late paying unrelated bills and would stop companies from averaging finance charges from two previous cycles, "a practice that dings consumers who carry a balance and pay it off."

And, finally, in a bit of tragic news that quickly made the rounds yesterday afternoon: Freddie Mac's acting CFO, David Kellerman, was found dead yesterday in the basement of his home in Vienna, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C. Kellerman's wife called in the death as a suicide, but it is still being investigated. No evidence of foul play was found, according to Bloomberg.

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Clinton