Last month’s jobs report was undeniably dismal, and Republicans were quick to place blame on President Obama and the Democrats (even after they took credit for job gains that were made since January). But House Financial Service Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) decided today that blaming the current crop of Democrats isn’t quite enough.

During his opening statement before a hearing on monetary policy, Bachus explained that, in his opinion, the blame for weak job creation should be placed at the feet of former Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson:

BACHUS: The uncertainty and lack of confidence are at the center of the failure of our economy to achieve a robust recovery with job creation, job creation which would be necessary to support the continued improvement in our citizens’ lives that we’ve come to expect as Americans. The origins of this crisis of confidence is debatable. The Great Recession and its legacy of job losses and home foreclosures is a contributing factor, and those are things we’ll have to work through. And as your testimony said, it will be a long process. But in my opinion seeds of this lack of confidence were first sown in well-intentioned programs of the 1930s and of the Lyndon Johnson Great Society.

Watch it:

According to Bachus, businesses are so freaked out about New Deal and Great Society era programs (presumably Social Security and Medicare) that they aren’t hiring. But according to the June National Federation of Independent Business survey, the reason businesses aren’t hiring is easy: “when sales pick up, owners will have a reason to hire more workers to take care of customers, to produce more output and will have a reason to invest in new equipment and expansion.”

Bachus didn’t deign to explain his theory, but it’s worth pointing out that, while the private sector is slowly adding jobs, the public sector hemorrhaged jobs last month, coinciding with what conservatives say they want. After all, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) essentially shrugged when asked if he cared about public sector job losses, while Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) this week advocated that more government workers be laid off.

As talks surrounding raising the debt ceiling grow all the more heated, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) broke away from Republican orthodoxy yesterday when he told ABC news that the GOP needs to “reevaluate” its approach to the negotiations by agreeing to a mixture of spending cuts and revenue increases (via closing tax loopholes) as a means of reducing the deficit:

GRAHAM: The middle ground for me is to close tax loopholes, like ethanol. We give money away to a few people at the expense of the many, so why don’t we close some of these loopholes and bring the money back into the Treasury?

ABC: Including oil and gas?

GRAHAM: Anything, everything. [...]

ABC: Private jets?

GRAHAM: The whole deal. [...]

ABC: Bottom line, does the debt ceiling get raised by August 2?

Graham: I don’t know, right now I’m very worried. [...] Our guys are saying we’re not going to generate any new revenue. They’re saying we’re not going to do it without new revenue. Well, somebody’s got to blink here. The middle ground for me would be to take the money you generate from closing loopholes and apply it to the deficit.

Watch it:

Graham’s plea for a shared sacrifice to close the deficit comes at time when the GOP leadership is particularly unified against any revenue increases — including closing corporate loopholes. At least 19 different polls show the American public supports revenue increases as part of the strategy to reduce the deficit.

In fact, just one in five Americans want the deficit to be reduced entirely through spending cuts. And it turns out that voters prefer that these revenue increases come from millionaires, who currently pay record-low taxes.

Despite Graham’s willingness to break away from his party’s platform, he is not optimistic about a compromise on the debt ceiling. “Right now, I’m very worried,” Graham said. When asked directly if he thought a compromise would be reached, he said, “If I were a betting man, I’d bet no.”

Check out our special coverage of the Debt Ceiling Showdown.

– Jen Kalaidis

For all his talk of fiscal conservationism on the national stage, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) hasn’t been so parsimonious at home, where his state is racking up debt at a faster rate than the national government and in greater amounts than most other states. Perry regularly attacks President Obama for engaging in “too much spending” and running up too much debt, but as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Mitchell Schnurman writes today, Texas’ refusal to raise taxes has led to its own debt ballooning faster than Washington’s:

From 2001 to 2010, state debt alone grew from $13.4 billion to $37.8 billion, according to the Texas Bond Review Board. That’s an increase of 281 percent. Over the same time, the national debt rose almost 234 percent. [...]

Still, the trend is undeniable. While Texas lawmakers have refused to raise taxes — and often criticize Washington for borrowing and spending — the state has been paying for much of its expansion with borrowed money.

While the state has had to borrow for infrastructure building to keep up with rapid population growth, as Schnurman points out, Texas didn’t have two wars, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts, recession-combating measurs, and other big-ticket national expenditures. And Texas’ “borrowing isn’t slowing.”

The state’s debt belies Perry’s boisterous rhetoric on his economic stewardship. While conservatives boast of Perry’s “Texas miracle,” California, which Perry often bashes as the antithesis of his approach, has seen faster GDP per capita growth than Texas under Perry. Meanwhile, Texas’ obstinate refusal to raise taxes helped create the largest budget shortfall in the state’s history, leading to devastating cuts to government services — one town had to lay off its entire police force — and Perry using budget gimmicks and federal stimulus dollars to balance his budget.

The GOP’s stubborn refusal to close frivolous tax loopholes is receiving flak from an unexpected corner. This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ohio Gov. John Kasich scoffed at the GOP’s unwillingess to “be a leader” in the debt ceiling negotiations.

Aghast that the GOP would push “caps and gimmicks” to address the debt, he demanded to know whether the GOP would “put [its] head in the sand” and “let America default?” “You gotta be kidding me,” he exclaimed, pushing Republicans to get a debt deal “in the middle.” When asked by columnist Mike Barnicle whether he’d consider closing loopholes in order to avoid tax increases, Kasich said “Yeah! There’s enough in that [federal tax] code” to seriously address the deficit:

BARNICLE: Closing loopholes..

KASICH: Great!

BARNICLE: Closing loopholes would provide you with enough revenue, widen the revenue stream, that you wouldn’t have to go to tax increases.

KASICH: Yeah I think there’s enough in that code.

BARNICLE: If you really go after it.

KASICH: If you really do it. And here’s the thing, when you do that, that ought to come a little later. Because I’ll tell you what Congress will do. Republicans blew the big surplus, Joe! They went on a spending binge we couldn’t believe it, after 2000!

Watch it:

In this instance, Kasich is correct. As Center for American Progress’s Seth Hanlon and Michael Ettlinger note, there’s more than $1 trillion of wasteful spending hidden in the federal tax code to go after. These include billions in subsidies to highly profitable oil and gas industry, a tax loophole or hedge fund managers, and tax breaks for horse breeders, for corporate meals and entertainment, for vacation homes and yachts, and for corporate jets. Those tax breaks alone would save taxpayers more than $75 billion over the next ten years.

Incidentally, Kasich’s new found sense of national leadership doesn’t seem to apply to Ohio. Since taking office in January, he has slashed and burned vital public programs in his budget while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. If Kasich preaches a rational approach on the national stage, perhaps he should practice it in his state.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), which was charged with investigating the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, released a report in January noting that the financial crisis “was avoidable.” The commission, however, splintered along partisan lines, with the Democratic members voting in favor of its final report and the Republican members opposing it.

The Republican FCIC members had actually gone rogue during the commission’s investigation, releasing their findings more than a month before the official FCIC report was presented to the public. Their report largely blamed the government for the crisis, and they criticized the majority for its conclusion that regulatory failure was a main cause. “The majority’s almost 550-page report is more an account of bad events than a focused explanation of what happened and why,” the Republican commissioners said.

However, a new report released today by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reveals that the Republican FCIC commissioners had an ulterior motive in mind: boosting the ability of House Republicans to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Rather than presenting an honest assessment of the crisis, e-mails released by the committee show that the Republican commissioner Peter Wallison, of the American Enterprise Institute, attempted to coordinate statements and reports in such a way that the commission wouldn’t “undermine” the GOP’s attempt to repeal or change Dodd-Frank:

For example, on November 3, 2010, the day after the mid-term congressional elections in which Republicans took control of the House, Republican Commissioner Peter Wallison e-mailed Republican Commissioner Douglas Holtz-Eakin: “It’s very important, I think, that what we say in our separate statements not undermine the ability of the new House GOP to modify or repeal Dodd-Frank.”

The next day, he sent a similar e-mail to Vice Chairman Thomas, attaching an article entitled “GOP Pledges Major Changes to Dodd-Frank, Fannie and Freddie, CFPB.” He wrote: “Garrett [Rep. Scott Garrett] has also suggested in the past a complete repeal of Dodd-Frank. This effort should not be undermined. That law will suppress economic growth because it was based on the idea that more regulation was necessary. Boehner also said yesterday that changing this law was a priority.”

The report also found that Wallison leaked privileged information collected by the commission to his AEI colleagues:

Internal Commission documents obtained by the Committee indicate that Commissioner Wallison violated the Commission’s ethics provisions by leaking confidential information.

On August 9, 2010, Commission staff prepared a memo to Commissioners entitled “Analysis of Housing Data and Comparison with Ed Pinto’s Analysis.” This memo compared information provided by Mr. Pinto to the Commission on March 16, 2010, against confidential data provided by the Federal Reserve and not otherwise available to the public or AEI.

The report makes it quite clear that the Republican commissioners, and Wallison in particular, had no interest in actually explaining the causes of the financial crisis that decimated families across the country, but were focused on supporting a partisan political and legislative agenda. FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides (D) was scheduled to testify before the oversight committee today regarding the commission’s findings, but Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) canceled the hearing.

Last week, Zaid Jilani laid out the tale of a man who lost his job and car — and spent three days in jail — after Chase bank cut him a check, but then refused to cash it and had him arrested on suspicion of fraud. This was just the latest in a string of tales about banks behaving badly and mistreating customers (even stealing their pets).

The LA Times’ David Lazarus today profiled a case in which Bank of America not only harmed a customers finances by diverting $30,000 of his Social Security payments into the wrong account, but had taxpayers foot the bill for its error:

Bank of America gave the same 10-digit account number to two customers, resulting in about $30,000 in a Riverside man’s Social Security payments going astray. But even after the man’s relatives pinpointed the problem and brought it to the bank’s attention, the family said BofA did little to fix things until the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office launched its own investigation. Moreover, the Social Security Administration, not the bank, ended up refunding the missing money.

To be sure, the person who was collecting these incorrect payments and spending them — instead of reporting them to the proper authorities — should take her fair share of the blame, and will have to pay back the Social Security administration. Still, the fact that BofA was alerted to the problem but couldn’t be bothered to do something about it until threatened with legal action is extremely problematic. As Lazarus put it, “BofA’s actions, or non-actions, are deeply troubling, to say the least.”

BofA, since the housing bubble burst, has been one of the banks least capable of helping homeowners who are in dire financial straits through no fault of their own. It was at the forefront of the foreclosure fraud scandal, employing robo-signers who were approving foreclosure despite having “no idea” what they were signing. Andrew Jakabovics and I also caught bank flagrantly violating its contract with Treasury while participating in the Home Affordable Modification Program.

Finally, the bank paid nothing in federal taxes last year, instead collecting nearly $1 billion in tax benefits. Sending Social Security benefits to the wrong person, and then not fixing the error, is just one more instance in which the bank is failing to take responsibility for its actions.

More than a decade ago, shoe giant Nike came under fire for its use of sweatshop labor in the production of its products. Most of the criticism focused on its Indonesian workforce, where workers, largely young women, were forced to labor under harsh conditions and abusive supervisors. In 1997, filmmaker Michael Moore made Nike’s abuses a subject of his film “The Big One,” and met with Nike CEO Phil Knight. Knight explained that the reason his company was using low-wage labor in Indonesia is because “Americans don’t want to make shoes.” Watch it:

In 2001, following protests by labor and human rights advocates, Nike pledged a series of reforms following the revelation that some of its developing world workers were children. But a new investigation conducted by the Associated Press appears to find that poor conditions persist in many of Nike’s factories.

At the Taiwanese-operated Pou Chen Group factory in Sukabumi, Indonesia, which makes Converse shoes for Nike, and PT Amara Footwear factory in Jakarta, workers alleged that they are paid ultra-low wages, regularly verbally and physically abused, and even fired for the act of taking sick leave:

The 10,000 mostly female workers at the Taiwanese-operated Pou Chen plant make around 50 cents an hour. That’s enough, for food and bunkhouse-type lodging, but little else. Some workers interviewed by the AP in March and April described being hit or scratched in the arm — one man until he bled. Others said they were fired after filing complaints. [...] Mira Agustina, 30, said she was fired in 2009 for taking sick leave, even though she produced a doctor’s note. [...]
At the PT Amara Footwear factory located just outside Jakarta, where another Taiwanese contractor makes Converse shoes, a supervisor ordered six female workers to stand in the blazing sun after they failed to meet their target of completing 60 dozen pairs of shoes on time.

An internal Nike report released to the AP found that “nearly two-thirds of 168 factories making Converse products worldwide fail to meet Nike’s own standards for contract manufacturers.” Meanwhile, in 2010, Nike CEO Mark Parker’s received an 84 percent hike in his annual compensation, raking in $13.1 million, an amount many of the workers in Sukabumi and Jakarta can only dream of.