As part of their foreclosure fraud settlement with the federal government and state attorneys general, five of Wall Street’s biggest banks were required to provide billions of dollars in relief to homeowners. After months of lagging, the banks have finally started: according to a report from the settlement watchdog, the banks have provided $26 billion in relief, including $6.3 billion in mortgage writedowns that directly reduce the amount borrowers owe on their loans.

But much of the money devoted toward relief thus far has not been put toward writedowns. Instead, it has been used to finance short sales that likely would have occurred even without the settlement, because such sales are more beneficial to banks than writedowns and less expensive than foreclosures, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

So far, short sales account for the vast majority of relief tabbed under the settlement, with banks forgiving around $13.1 billion on more than 113,000 properties. Many of those short sales might have happened without the settlement because banks generally lose less money on those than they do on foreclosures.

Counting short sales as relief isn’t prohibited, since under the settlement banks are required to spend $10 billion on principal reduction and $10 billion on other forms of relief. That they are counting short sales they likely would have conducted anyway instead of direct relief efforts, though, is yet another troubling sign for the mortgage settlement, which was hamstrung early by state governments that used mortgage relief funds to close gaping budget holes instead of to help distressed homeowners. As of October, less than half of the funds sent to states had been spent on relief.

Further, short sales, while less expensive for the banks, aren’t the best way to provide relief. According to recent studies, principal reduction, which provides direct relief to homeowners who are underwater thanks to plunging prices from the housing crisis, is the most effective means of preventing future foreclosures.

By 2020, more than one-quarter of U.S. workers will be working low-wage jobs, not making enough money to keep a family of four out of poverty. The corporations that employ the most low-wage workers, meanwhile, “have largely recovered from the recession and most are in strong financial positions.” 92 percent of them were profitable last year, while three-quarters are making more in revenues than they were before the recession.

The retail industry is one of those that employs the most low-wage workers. (About 36 percent of low-wage workers work in retail.) And according to a new report from Demos, big retailers could afford to boost their workers’ income to $25,000 per year without eating into their bottom line:

The cost of increasing the living standards of more than 5 million Americans, adding $11.8 to $15.2 billion to GDP, and creating no less than 100,000 jobs amounts to just a small portion of total earnings among the biggest firms. The retail sector takes in more than $4 trillion annually and firms with 1000 or more employees account for more than half of that. At the same time labor compensation in the sector contributes only 12 percent of the total value of production, making payroll just a fraction of total costs. Large retailers could pay full-time, year-round workers $25,000 per year and still make a profit – satisfying shareholders while rewarding their workers for the value they bring to the firm. A raise at large retailers adds $20.8 billion to payroll for the year, or less than 1 percent of total sales in the sector. At the same time it is very likely the firm will experience benefits that offset the cost of the wage increase — in the form of productivity gains and higher sales per employee — making the net cost of the new wage even lower.

Meanwhile, “if retailers pass half of the costs of a wage raise on to their customers, the average household will see just 15 cents added to the cost of its shopping basket on any trip to a large retailer. That amounts to an annual cost of $17.73.”

For a brief moment last week, a House Republican group that serves as an idea shop for the party was on record proposing a remarkably far-reaching reform of American copyright law. The memo (PDF), written by a young staffer named Derek Khanna, was released Friday afternoon by the Republican Study Committee and noticed by The American Conservative’s Jordan Bloom.

Khanna’s memo begins by laying out the original constitutional purpose of copyright protection and how the current legal landscape has strayed from it. It then proceeds to challenge several widely-held beliefs about copyright law, including the claims that it promotes the greatest possible levels of productivity and innovation and that it represents free market ideals at work:

[A]ccording to the Constitution, the overriding purpose of the copyright system is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” In today’s terminology we may say that the purpose is to lead to maximum productivity and innovation.

This is a major distinction, because most legislative discussions on this topic, particularly during the extension of the copyright term, are not premised upon what is in the public good or what will promote the most productivity and innovation, but rather what the content creators “deserve” or are “entitled to” by virtue of their creation. This lexicon is appropriate in the realm of taxation and sometimes in the realm of trade protection, but it is inappropriate in the realm of patents and copyrights. […]

Today’s legal regime of copyright law is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer. It is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value. We frankly may have no idea how it actually hurts innovation, because we don’t know what isn’t able to be produced as a result of our current system.

But by Saturday afternoon the RSC had pulled the memo, citing an inadequate review process and apologizing for the “oversight.” By then the memo had been saved by other sites and widely praised by the tech and libertarian-leaning quadrants of the blogosphere, many of whom saw the proposal as an opportunity for the GOP to energize young and internet-savvy voters while going after one of the Democrats’ biggest allies and fundraisers. Republicans, for example, were much quicker to abandon SOPA last year when protests against the law kicked into full gear.

The memo lists several specific examples of the damage done by copyright law: Stifling the DJ and remix markets in the United States, making the creation of public libraries — and in particular Project Gutenberg — more difficult, and penalizing legitimate investigative journalism. It concludes with suggestions for reform such as significantly shortening the length of copyright claims, expanding “fair use” doctrine, and reforming statutory damages. (Those damages can currently rise as high $150,000 per infringement.)

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