As ThinkProgress previously reported, earlier this month, the Nigerian government moved to “charge former Vice President Dick Cheney in a massive bribery case involving $180 million in kickbacks paid to Nigerian lawmakers, who awarded a $6 billion natural gas pipeline contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR when Cheney was running the company.” As a part of the charge, the Nigerian government is seeking an arrest warrant through Interpol for the former vice president.

Now, GlobalPost is reporting that the company is in talks with the Nigerian government to arrive at a settlement. Sources within the Nigerian government informed GlobalPost that a possible plea bargain could “involve a $500 million settlement“:

Halliburton is planning to make a plea bargain in former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s corruption case, Nigerian officials told GlobalPost. [...]

However, Halliburton is in talks with Nigerian officials to make a plea bargain in the case, said Femi Babafemi, spokesman for Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the agency which has pressed the charges against Cheney.

“The companies are asking for a plea bargain, we are reviewing their request, we are talking with them, but we have not gone far with the talks yet,” Babafemi told GlobalPost. Although Babafemi did not give further details, other sources within the agency said the plea bargain might involve a $500 million settlement.

GlobalPost goes on to note that “Cheney and three other top executives could face sentences of three years in a Nigerian prison if convicted of the charges in the 16-count indictment.” One has to wonder how the employees and stockholders of the company feel about it possibly sacrificing half a billion dollars to keep Cheney and other executives out of jail. (HT: emptywheel)

Yesterday, I highlighted this report from the Tax Policy Center showing that if the tax deal negotiated between President Obama and Congressional Republicans is approved, low-income households will actually see their taxes go up. Due to the deal’s provision swapping Obama’s Making Work Pay (MWP) tax credit for a straight payroll tax cut, those working people who don’t earn enough in wages to see their payroll taxes cut by the value of the MWP credit will ultimately be subjected to a tax increase.

That bit of tax wonkery translates into 25 million low-income Americans seeing their taxes go up next year under the tax deal, even as a millionaire receives a $139,000 tax break (and the heirs of dead multi-millionaires receive another break courtesy of an estate tax cut). This is simply unacceptable, and as CAP’s Michael Linden wrote today, is very simple to fix:

The good news is that fixing this problem is easy and, compared to the cost of the entire package, pretty cheap. The best solution would be to implement a “stop-gap” credit that makes up the difference between their payroll tax cut and the value of the Making Work Pay credit. This would actually be easier and simpler than the current Making Work Pay structure, and it would hold harmless all 25 million people. This fix would cost less than $7 billion — less than one-tenth the cost of extending the bonus Bush tax cuts for the rich, and less than the cost of cutting the estate tax.

Republicans have emphasized for months and months that no American should see a tax increase next year, a point which they hammered so hard that they finally won from Obama a full extension of the Bush tax cut and a totally unjustified cut in the estate tax. To win those concessions while raising taxes on 25 million people at the low-end of the income scale would be an abomination.

At the same time, the tax deal also rips away the benefit of Making Work Pay from public employees, as they pay into pension systems other than Social Security (and thus don’t pay the payroll tax). These are real problems, and as House Democrats look to redefine what is and is not in the tax deal, they are problems that need to be fixed.

The final report of President Obama’s debt commission — which failed to receive the required number of votes to actually move forward — included an unfair and regressive cut in Social Security benefits via raising the retirement age. When the commission was crafting its proposal, many of its members relied on false characterizations about Social Security’s financial stability in order to justify cutting benefits for lower- and middle-class workers.

The commission’s report came after a wave of 2010 Congressional candidates voiced support for privatizing Social Security (while trying to dress their idea up as something it wasn’t). So to once again review: If nothing is done to Social Security, it will pay full benefits until the year 2037. After that, the program is still projected to pay out 75 percent of benefits until 2084, which is close to full benefits once inflation is accounted for.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t progressive changes that can be made to the program to ensure that offer the best insurance benefits to those who need them the most. To that end, CAP has released its own proposal for modernizing Social Security, laid out here in “Building It Up, Not Tearing It Down: A Progressive Approach to Strengthening Social Security.” Our proposed changes include:

– Create a minimum benefit level: This improved benefit level will allow a full- time career worker to receive benefits that will exceed at least the poverty line.

– Raise benefits for the oldest of the old: America’s seniors exhaust their savings and rely heavily on Social Security to meet their consumption needs after the age of 85, which is why their benefits would increase by a fixed dollar amount equal to an average benefit of 5 percent.

– Improve survivorship and divorce benefits and introduce family caregiving benefits.

– Expand spousal benefits to married same-sex couples.

– Gradually phase in progressive changes to the benefit formula: The initial benefit amount for the top one-third of income earners will grow more slowly than is currently the case.

– Eliminate the cap on the employer share of the payroll tax: Eliminating the cap on the employer portion of the payroll cap counters the growing earnings inequality in our country among retirees and future retirees.

– Use a more accurate inflation measure.

The most contentious part of this proposal is the progressive indexing of benefits. But as CAP’s Vice-President for Economic Policy Michael Ettlinger explained, the hope is that this move frees up money that otherwise would have gone to Social Security for pressing and much-needed investments elsewhere:

Those who resist any modification to future Social Security benefit calculations argue that the long-term shortfall isn’t that great and that it can be plugged with reasonable tax increases. That’s absolutely true. But over the coming years the country has many spending and investment needs that will be needed to be funded by taxes. And there’s a limit to how high taxes will go. The more additional revenue that goes to Social Security the less that will be available for other priorities.

As its signature foreclosure prevention program — the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — has sputtered, the Obama administration has been looking for alternate ways to prevent foreclosures. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the administration is pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which own or guarantee about half of the mortgages in the country, to participate in programs aimed at reducing loan principal for underwater homeowners (who owe more on their mortgage than their home is now worth).

One program, run by the Federal Housing Administration, provides incentives to lenders who reduce principal, but so far has been an utter flop, with just three completed loan modifications in three months. The thought behind the administration’s pressure is that principal reductions by Fannie and Freddie — which have both been extremely reluctant to write-down loans — would both help 500,000 to 1.5 million homeowners directly and maybe entice other lenders to join in (though why they would is unclear).

In any case, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) — who yesterday won the endorsement of the Republican Steering Committee to become the next chairman of the House Financial Services Committee — is having none of it:

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R., Ala.), in an interview with Washington Wire, criticized the cost to taxpayers for such write-downs, especially since propping up the two mortgage companies already has cost taxpayers about $134 billion…While the plan could help an estimated half a million people, he said, “These are a half million people who are severely behind on their mortgage, have not been able to pay and really in most cases don’t demonstrate an ability to pay going forward. You’re just going to push the ball down the road at taxpayer expense.”

Bachus, like many Republicans, is content to blame the borrower for events outside of their control. But allowing foreclosures to continue for those who, with a little help, could stay in their homes, provides significant drag on the economy, leaving neighborhoods blighted and dragging down property values for everyone.

“Letting the status quo continue is going to be much more expensive than people think,” said Kenneth Rosen, a professor of economics and real estate at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’ve got a downward spiral in housing here, and they’d better break the back of this with some shock and awe.” As FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair has said, “We see [principal reductions] as one possible way to encourage borrowers to stick with their mortgages. This could help reduce defaults, keep people in their homes, avoid costly foreclosures, and enhance the value of these loans.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that only $12 billion of the $50 billion in TARP money that the administration allocated to foreclosure prevention has been spent, so there is ample room to launch new efforts at helping troubled borrowers without blowing up the government’s bottom line. While the administration’s efforts have largely flopped, Republicans have proposed nothing but leaving borrowers to the mercy of the banks.