Tomorrow, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to hold a reception for the Bahrain Banks Association, a trade group for banks operating in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The Bahrain Minister of Finance, Central Bank, and Bahrain Ambassador will be attending, and the event listing invites “banks and investment firms” to attend.

The Bahrain Banks Association includes many foreign investment firms that, as ThinkProgress reported this week, have been sending funds to the Chamber. The funds are deposited in the same 501(c)(6) account that the Chamber is using to run an unprecedented $75 million dollar attack campaign, mostly against Democrats like Jack Conway in Kentucky and Robin Carnahan in Missouri. ThinkProgress has documented at least $300,000 in foreign money to the Chamber from two countries alone. Below are a list of Bahrain Bank Association members which the Chamber has indicated are dues-paying members:

– Bahrain Financial Harbour Holding Company (based in Bahrain)
– ICICI Bank (based in India)
– TAIB Bank (based in Bahrain)
– State Bank of India (state-owned and based in India)

The event occurs as the Chamber continues to refuse to answer simple questions about the legality of its fundraising operation for its political attack campaign. Foreign businesses and foreign agents are prohibited by law from contributing to any American political campaign expenditure. So far, the Chamber denies any inappropriate conduct, but has failed to produce any documentation that it is segregating its foreign dues from its American money. According to Graham Gillette, a participant at an Iowa event attended by Chamber CEO Tom Donohue today, Donohue replied to the controversy by simply attacking ThinkProgress as a “blog supported by George Soros.”

As ThinkProgress reported, the Chamber has internal fundraising departments called “Business Councils” — like the U.S.-Bahrain Business Council and the U.S.-India Business Council — which are run by Chamber development officers. Promotions to join the Chamber have included promises that foreign firms obtain “access to the US Chamber of Commerce and everything that it does,” noting that the Chamber is “enormous within the US.” ThinkProgress has reported that the application to join the Business Councils welcome foreign-owned entities, and the application encourages businesses to wire or send their dues to the same general 501(c)(6) the Chamber is currently using for its political campaign advertisements all over the country. See below for a link and screen shot to one such application:

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with the Chamber hosting an event with Bahrain banks, or any foreign-owned banks. The problem arises if the Chamber is using foreign funding to help launch partisan advertising here in the United States.

A few weeks ago, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) — one of the self-styled GOP “Young Guns” and the lead architect of the House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” — was pressed on MSNBC to name one single program he’d cut from the federal budget to reduce spending. After dodging the questions for a minute, McCarthy finally embarrassingly responded “the line item would be across-the-board.”

Of course, McCarthy is hardly alone in this regard: a plethora of Republicans have been unable to name any programs they would cut to reduce the deficit. In fact, my colleague Alex Seitz-Wald has a video featuring a number of them.

It seems that McCarthy though, has finally wizened up, as last night he came on PBS’ Newshour prepared with some answers. When the host asserted that “it’s hard to imagine a path to [budget] balance” with the policies Republicans have identified, McCarthy said “not really, not really” and named four cuts he would make. Watch it:

McCarthy gets points for trying, I suppose, but here’s what he identified and each program’s budgetary impact:

– Cutting subsidies for Amtrak sleeper cars: $120 million (0.003 percent of the budget)

– Cutting “taxpayer subsidized union activities”: $120 million (0.003 percent)

– Economic aid to foreign nations: $7.9 billion (0.22 percent). Half of this goes to Afghanistan, which presumably Republicans wouldn’t actually cut.

– Child nutrition programs: $8.28 billion (0.23 percent). More than 90 percent of the nutrition funding in the budget is mandatory, which McCarthy has said he won’t cut, and of the $8 billion in discretionary nutrition spending, the vast majority is to fund the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Children and Infants (WIC). This program provides food, education, and health care referrals to more than 9 million low-income women and children.

So there you have it. One minuscule subsidy, something that sounds devious but isn’t at all specific, a highly unlikely cut in foreign aid, and slashing nutrition assistance for needy women, all to reduce the budget by less than one-half of one percent (0.45 percent, to be exact). And to be clear, McCarthy laid out exemptions to the latter two cuts, but I’ve been extremely charitable and scored him as cutting the entire portion of the budget he named. So his savings wouldn’t even be as high as I’ve calculated.

With the Pledge to America, House Republicans are suggesting $11 trillion in deficits over the next decade, and it’s abundantly clear that they have no plan for paying for it. The best they can come up with is some small-ball programs that have no impact on the structural deficit (which is driven by health care spending, defense spending, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy). Not that ineffective programs shouldn’t be cut, but if McCarthy thinks reductions of the magnitude he’s laid out will ever lead to a balanced budget then he simply has no clue what the federal budget looks like.

An offhand comment by right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch could land him in hot water with his company’s shareholders. Last June, News Corporation, which Murdoch leads, gave a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association. Yet in a recent interview, Murdoch claimed that News Corp. made this donation solely because of Murdoch’s personal friendship with a GOP gubernatorial candidate:

Murdoch, who was in Washington to receive an award from The Media Institute, brushed aside concerns that the gift, which was unusually large and one-sided for a media company, might hurt Fox’s credibility as a news organization that reports on politics.

“It doesn’t reflect on Fox News,” he said. “It had nothing to do with Fox News. The RGA [gift] was actually [a result of] my friendship with John Kasich.”

Unfortunately for Murdoch, there actually are laws against corporate managers treating a publicly-traded corporation as if it were their own personal bank account.  Although News Corp. was founded in Australia, it was recently reincorporated in Delaware and thus must comply with key Delaware court decisions. Significantly, the Delaware Supreme Court determined over 70 years ago that “[c]orporate officers and directors are not permitted to use their position of trust and confidence to further their private interests.”

There are some bright lights for Murdoch. Although the law permits a News Corp. shareholder to challenge Murdoch’s actions in court, these kinds of lawsuits are notoriously difficult to win, so the Delaware courts could ultimately side with Murdoch. Then again, it’s also not every day that a corporate CEO openly admits that he distributed a million dollars from his company’s treasury solely because of a personal friendship.

Just as significantly, even if such a shareholder lawsuit were to succeed, Murdoch would likely only be required to reimburse News Corp. for the $1 million donation — a pittance for a multi-billionaire like Rupert Murdoch.

California’s Republican Senate nominee, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, has been promoting herself as the candidate most likely to boost job creation, particularly in California where unemployment is currently at 12.4 percent. “We have two and half million people out of work here in California, many hundreds of thousands for more than six months and many hundreds of thousands more have quit looking for work altogether. The facts are, we’re destroying jobs in this state through bad government policy,” Fiorina has said.

One of the key planks in Fiorina’s job creation plan is allowing corporations that are holding cash overseas to repatriate it (bring it back to the U.S.) at a lower tax rate. At the moment, multi-national corporations are allowed to defer taxation on profits held overseas, then pay the full statutory tax rate when they bring that money back. In an AOL News op-ed yesterday, Fiorina once again called for letting corporations repatriate money at a lower tax rate, writing, “I have also proposed lowering the tax rate on repatriated corporate profits for businesses that reinvest those profits in capital equipment and job creation here in the United States.”

But Fiorina is leaving out a key fact: we already tried this scheme under the Bush administration, with less-than-impressive results. In 2004, Congress passed the Homeland Investment Act, allowing companies to bring back offshore profits in 2005 and pay a tax rate of just 5.25 percent, far below the 35 percent corporate tax rate. As the New York Times Floyd Norris wrote, the bill “was sold to Congress as a way to spur investment in America, building plants, increasing research and development and creating jobs.”

However, according to work done by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 92 percent of the nearly $300 billion that companies brought back went to share buybacks and increased dividend payments, not investments or job creation.

Now, in her plan, Fiorina says that she would limit the repatriation to businesses “that re-invest those profits in capital equipment and job creation here in the United States.” But Kristin Forbes, one of the authors of the NBER study, said that restrictions in the Homeland Investment Act regarding how repatriated money could be spent “seem to have been completely ineffective”:

“Dell was a great example,” she added, referring to Dell Computer. “They lobbied very hard for the tax holiday. They said part of the money would be brought back to build a new plant in Winston-Salem, N.C. They did bring back $4 billion, and spent $100 million on the plant, which they admitted would have been built anyway. About two months after that, they used $2 billion for a share buyback.”

Fiorina’s repatriation scheme, if history is any indication, will be nothing but a boondoggle, losing billions in federal revenue to line the pockets of corporate executives. It’s not a serious job creation proposal.

Yesterday, the Justice Department announced that it will investigate the foreclosure practices of several financial firms, after widespread reports of foreclosures being approved by bank “robo-signers” (employees who weren’t verifying the necessary documentation to legally okay a foreclosure). One Bank of America official admitted that he approved 7,000 to 8,000 foreclosure filings a month without reading them, while a Wells Fargo executive said that he would only check the date on up to 150 foreclosures he approved daily.

One of the problems with the foreclosure documents has to do with notarizations. Notaries are supposed to be impartial third-parties that verify documents and legal proceedings, but the banks have been using dubious notatizations to justify foreclosures. For instance, “in some cases, the notarizations predated the preparation of the legal documents, suggesting that signatures were not reviewed by a notary. Other notarizations took place in offices far away from where the documents were signed, indicating that the notaries might not have witnessed the signings as the law required.”

And right before it recessed last week, the Senate passed a bill — the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2010 — that could make this problem worse:

The bill, passed without public debate in a way that even surprised its main sponsor, Republican Representative Robert Aderholt, requires courts to accept as valid document notarizations made out of state, making it harder to challenge the authenticity of foreclosure and other legal documents.

Forcing any state to immediately accept notarized documents from out of state not only makes it harder for homeowners to challenge the banks, but could also lead to a race to the bottom, as banks will originate all their documents in states that have the most lax standards. It would only take one state significantly lowering its standards (in the face of bank lobbying or the promise of banks moving jobs into the state) and suddenly homeowners would have to accept bank documents with no idea whether the information on them was verified properly by an impartial observer.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said that the law “would weaken protection of homeowners by requiring many states to accept lower standards for notarizations,” adding that it was “‘suspicious’ that the law unexpectedly passed just as the mortgage industry is facing possible big costs from having filed false or improperly notarized documents.” “It is troubling to me and curious that it passed so quietly,” added Thomas Cox, a Maine lawyer representing homeowners contesting foreclosures.

The bill, passed by unanimous consent, was shepherded through the Senate at the last minute at the behest of Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Leahy’s staffers cited unnamed “constituents” who had pushed for passage, but wouldn’t say “who these constituents were or if anyone representing the mortgage industry or other interests had pressed for the bill to go through.”

The House has already passed a companion bill to the Senate’s legislation, so it is currently sitting on President Obama’s desk. Obama should veto this legislation, and not make it easier for banks to fraudulently throw homeowners out of their homes.