Last month, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), a frequent critic of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e. the stimulus), announced that he was going to take advantage of a stimulus program to get suspended infrastructure projects in his state back on line. That program — the Build America Bonds program — has the federal government pick up 35 percent of the interest on bonds that states issue to fund transportation, infrastructure, and school construction projects.

And Christie is evidently not the only stimulus-critic who feels no guilt about building up his state courtesy of the Recovery Act. Today, the Treasury Department released a full list of Build America Bond projects, as issuances under the program surpassed $150 billion, and look who’s on the list:

– Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX): Perry said that, when it came to the stimulus, “this was pretty simple for us…We can take care of ourselves.” But he used $2 billion in Build America Bonds for highway improvements and another $182 million for “public improvements.”

– Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS): “A lot of this is just crazy,” Barbour said of the stimulus. “I’m better off not to get it.” But that didn’t stop him from using $98 million in Build America Bonds for recreational facility improvements.

– Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN): “It hasn’t worked,” Daniels said of the stimulus. “You have to be a blind zealot to say that this thing has done any good.” The Indiana Financial Authority issued $192 million in Build America Bonds, while the Indiana Bond Bank issued another $54 million.

– Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA): Jindal has called the Recovery Act “a nearly trillion-dollar stimulus that has not stimulated.” Louisiana has issued $181 million in Build America Bonds for highway improvements.

These totals leave out the slew of local school districts and local governments in these states that also took advantage of the Build America Bonds program to make critical investments in state infrastructure. As The American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz explained, Build America Bonds “is one of the most successful programs of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, spurring productive investment, job creation, and creating a more progressive and democratic method of local finance.”

Of course, stimulus hypocrisy is nothing new for the GOP: ThinkProgress has identified 114 Republicans who voted against the Recovery Act, while touting its benefits back home.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as ThinkProgress has repeatedly noted, does not disclose the donors to its aggressive political activities. Insiders have revealed certain contributions — like the lobbyists who revealed that health insurance companies pumped money into ads to defeat health care reform — and reporters can sometimes use tax filings and other public records to deduce some contributions, but the Chamber by and large remains a black box — unnamed corporate money comes in, and political attack ads come out.

The Chamber’s finances are so opaque, in fact, that shareholders in companies that are known to contribute to the Chamber don’t actually know if their money is being used to attack political candidates. But following an election season where the Chamber contributed $32.1 million to defeating mostly Democratic candidates — with a high degree of success — some shareholders are demanding disclosure. Walden Asset Management in Boston and Domini Social Investments in New York said this week they filed resolutions calling for independent directors to review political spending at Pfizer and Pepsi, along with IBM and Accenture.

If accepted, the resolutions will be voted on by shareholders next spring, though they would still be non-binding. Pepsi said it will review the resolution, but a spokesman praised the Chamber as “an effective advocate of business.” A Pfizer spokesman said it will consider the resolution and that it “takes seriously all shareholder concerns.” Accenture says it believes their money doesn’t go towards political activities, and IBM would not comment.

Experts say that in the post-Citizens United environment, and with bills to force disclosure dying in Congress, more and more shareholders may begin demanding to know where their money is going:

Shareholders are likely to introduce more such measures as similar legislation stalls in Washington, said Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard University law school professor who studies corporate governance.

In a forthcoming paper, Bebchuk himself and co-writer Robert Jackson of Columbia University argue that shareholders should be given the chance to vote directly on political contributions and that companies ought to be required to disclose their spending to intermediaries.

Currently, when it comes to such support, “the interests of (company) directors and executives may significantly diverge from those of shareholders,” they write.

Shareholders are increasingly demanding corporate responsibility and disclosure from business entities beyond the Chamber, when the government isn’t able to force it. In October, some shareholders in News Corporation rebelled over donations to the Republican Governor’s Association. Shareholders in Valero Energy, Tesoro and Occidental Petroleum — which contributed $8 million on behalf of Proposition 23, a California ballot initiative that would have repealed the state’s global warming rule –also demanded to know if their money was being used in that effort.

Last month, a few of the nation’s biggest banks froze (and then restarted) foreclosure filings, following revelations that they had relied on “robo-signers” — employees who were okaying documents without verifying basic information — to approve foreclosures. All 50 state Attorneys General subsequently launched a coordinated investigation into the banks’ practices.

But as CNN Money reported today, half of [the investigation's] 12-member executive committee now find themselves in their last months of service” as they were booted from office on election day:

Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, New York and Ohio will all have new attorneys general come January. Most prominent in that group is Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, who had filed suit against Ally Financial, alleging that the bank and its employees had signed and filed false affidavits in foreclosure cases, a practice commonly known as robo-signing. Cordray lost his reelection bid to Republican Mike DeWine, who has not yet declared whether he intends to pursue the issue.

Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who is leading the effort, added that “it is unclear how much the group can accomplish in the next two months with membership in flux and the new AGs trying to get briefed on all aspects of their new jobs.”

The experts that CNN interviewed said that, substantively, the investigation will pick up essentially where it left off. “AGs come and go all the time,” said James Tierney, director of the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia University. “That’s just the nature of the beast.”

However, waiting for two months as the new AG’s get up to speed gives the banks two opportunities. First, it allows them to resubmit all of the troublesome paperwork that caused them to halt foreclosures in the first place. Bank of America claimed to have reviewed more than 100,000 foreclosure cases in 10 days in order to resubmit them, so two months is ample time to get plenty of foreclosure cases back in the pipeline.

Second, it gives the banks still more opportunity to continue framing the robo-signing scandal as one that only involved “mistakes,” rather than as a systemic abuse of due process and property rights. The banks committed fraud by circumventing the legal process in place for initiating and completing a foreclosure, even if they improperly foreclosed on no one (which we know they did). Unless the AG’s keep the heat on, the banks will have even more time to draw attention away from the system they employed to rush foreclosures through as quickly as they could, regardless of the legal process on the books.

Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 151,000 jobs last month — and that private sector payrolls grew by 159,000 — but that the unemployment rate held steady at 9.6 percent. Nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed, and 41.8 percent of them have been unemployed for six months or more.

With job growth still sluggish and such a high percentage of unemployed persons in the ranks of the long-term unemployed, extending unemployment benefits is a necessary step. President Obama yesterday reiterated his support for such a move, saying “I think it makes sense for us to extend unemployment insurance because there are still a lot of folks out there hurting.”

This will have to be a job for the lame duck Congress, as benefits are set to expire at the end of the month. If no extension is approved, two million workers will lose their benefits in December (just in time for the holidays!), according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “The current expiration date will cause a cascade of unemployed workers to fall off the unemployment rolls, prematurely cutting benefits for some and making any form of an extension completely unavailable for others,” NELP noted.

Plus, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, there are still far more unemployed workers than there are job openings:

Finding a job remains extremely difficult: about 15 million people are competing for about 3 million job openings. That means that even if every job opening were instantly filled with an unemployed worker, four out of five unemployed workers would still be looking for a job. This situation is far worse than in the recovery from the 2001 recession.

And let’s get one thing clear: an extension doesn’t mean that those who have completely exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of benefits will get any more. It merely assures that those already in the UI program don’t get cut off midstream.

Last time around, Republicans in Congress made a huge stink over extending benefits, and approving the extension took 51 days. But in a lame duck session, that kind of time is simply unavailable. So will Republicans concede that an extension is the right thing to do, or will two million workers see their benefits disappear at the end of the month?