Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — when he isn’t badly mangling the U.S. Constitution — wants to take a hatchet to the federal budget, proposing a program that “would require slashing every government program that’s not defense or Social Security (Medicare, Medicaid, veterans affairs, education, and so on) by 89.6 percent.” But at the same time, judging by a new proposal he released today, he wants to gift multinational corporations with a permanent tax break worth tens of billions of dollars.

A slew of multinational corporations — even though they already pay exceedingly low taxes — have been pushing for the enactment of a tax repatriation holiday, which would allow them to bring money they have stashed overseas back to the U.S. at a tax rate dramatically lower than the statutory 35 percent. The corporations want a short window in which this low tax rate would apply. But Lee has decided that he would just go ahead and make the holiday permanent:

Today, Senator Mike Lee submitted legislation that would create millions of new jobs and inject $1 trillion into the American economy by significantly reducing the excessive tax on repatriated assets. Sen. Lee’s proposal would permanently lower the tax rate for businesses from 35% to 5% on money earned overseas and brought back to this country…Unlike recent repatriation “holidays,” which last a short period of time, Senator Lee’s bill would make the repatriation rate permanent.

“We should be lowering those barriers and encouraging American companies to invest in this country, increase wages, and create new jobs,” Lee said. Lee joins House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) in calling for this permanent corporate giveaway. Not only do these sorts of moves not create jobs, but, according to the Joint Economic Committee, lowering the tax on repatriation to 5 percent would cost more than $78 billion.

But this wasn’t the only bad repatriation idea to surface today. Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) introduced a bill that would lower the rate on repatriated money to 8.75 percent, and lower it further to 5.25 percent if the company in question can prove it created jobs (thereby admitting that a lower rate doesn’t automatically translate into job growth?).

In a statement, Bob Keener of Business for Shared Prosperity said that the McCain-Hagan bill “would hurt small and medium-sized businesses, by taking money from the Treasury that could be invested in public infrastructure and services that they depend on — and urgently need now.” But no matter how much data is brought to bear showing how poorly repatriation holidays have worked out, lawmakers continue to treat them as a panacea for the struggling economy.

As the 99 Percent Movement takes shape across the country, citizens are demanding that Congress represent the public interest instead of the whims of bankers and big corporations. For instance, after demanding and receiving massive bailouts, Wall Street banks successfully lobbied Congress to crush any serious effort to mitigate the foreclosure crisis. The spectacular bank lobbying coup in Washington prompted Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) to remark that the banks “frankly, own the place.”

And this dynamic is not only at play in Washington: Banks have a disproportionate amount of power in California as well.

As one of the epicenters of the foreclosure crisis, Californians by the tens of thousands have lost their homes. In most cases, banks have repossessed houses without bothering to re-negotiate interest payments to find foreclosure alternatives. And in a growing number of cases, “robo-signers” have allegedly forged documents and illegally foreclosed on borrowers. Since the foreclosure crisis is leading towards a spiraling decrease in home property values across the state, nearly everyone is affected.

A common sense idea to add transparency and accountability to the mortgage market died a quick death earlier this year. State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) proposed SB729, a measure “to require banks to give people a definitive answer on loan modification, identify who owns the loan, and give borrowers legal recourse if banks don’t take these steps.”

The idea, embraced by consumer advocates and many foreclosure experts, did not even make it out of committee. State Sen. Juan Vargas (D-San Diego), the chairman of the banking committee, joined two Republican state senators in snuffing the bill. State Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Los Angeles) abstained from the vote, ensuring a 3-3 split (a tied vote does not allow the bill to proceed). Despite moving testimony from victims of foreclosure fraud and persuasive academic opinion, the bill died. To understand why, simply follow the money:

– Bank of America, a leading mortgage-lender in California, spent $173,703 lobbying this year in Sacramento. Disclosure reports show Bank of America hired lobbying firms like Nielsen Merksamer and Government Relations Counsel to kill SB729. Reports also show that Bank of America treated Vargas to dinner at the Ella Dining Room and Bar about a month after he voted to kill the foreclosure mitigation bill. Bank of America has contributed $5,500 in campaign contributions to Vargas and nearly $2,000 to Padilla.

– The California Mortgage Bankers Association, a lobbying group representing a number of mortgage lenders in the state, spent $55,711 lobbying in Sacramento this year. The bankers hired KP Public Affairs, a firm that doubles as the general counsel for the association, to help kill SB729. The group donated $4,000 to Vargas and $1,000 to Padilla recently.

– Wells Fargo spent $84,027 lobbying in Sacramento, and hired a firmed called Knudsen & Associates to help kill SB729. Wells Fargo has contributed $2,800 to Padilla and $2,000 to Vargas. Disclosure reports show agents for Wells Fargo took a state senator out to lunch shortly after the SB729 vote, but the disclosure forms appear to be incomplete because the name of the senator is not filled in.

JP Morgan Chase, the California Chamber of Commerce, Fidelity National Financial, the Securities Industry And Financial Markets Association (a trade association representing investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital), and other bank-related organizations spent tens of thousands to lobby against SB729.

In an article last month in the San Diego Union Tribune, Vargas pled ignorance while explaining his role in killing the mitigation and transparency measure:

“If a homeowner is doing everything the bank asked him or her to do and the bank forecloses, I think that’s very inappropriate and should be a violation of the law. But I don’t remember hearing any testimony about that kind of thing while we were discussing this bill.”

According to sources contacted by ThinkProgress, Vargas was in the hearing room with witnesses who testified about a host of unfair and rushed bank foreclosures. Perhaps the dinner Bank of America bought Vargas after the vote had some memory-wiping ingredients.

The Senate Banking Committee today — on a party-line 12-10 vote — approved the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sending the nomination to the full Senate. Senate Republicans, of course, doubled down on their refusal to approve a nominee — any nominee — unless the Bureau is substantially changed and watered down.

“My colleagues and I stand by our pledge that no nominee to head the CFPB will be confirmed by the U.S. Senate — regardless of party affiliation — without basic changes to the Bureau’s structure,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS). “I will not support the consideration of any nominee to be the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director until the structure of the bureau is reformed,” added Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID)

But as the Public Action Campaign Fund noted today, the 10 GOP members of the Banking Committee who opposed Cordray’s nomination had about 31 million reasons — having nothing to do with the Bureau’s structure — to ensure that the first federal regulator explicitly charged with only consumer financial protection never gets off of the ground:

All 10 members have received significant campaign cash from Wall Street interests during their time in Congress…Committee Republicans have received at least $31 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate sector (FIRE) during their time in Congress, according to Public Campaign Action Fund analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Banking Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) said that today’s vote — which comes more than 14 months after Dodd-Frank was signed into law — “was premature.” Shelby, remember, received $5000 from Goldman Sachs literally the day after he denounced the CFPB as “dangerous.”

During his press conference today, President Obama explained that Republicans “want to roll back the whole notion of having a consumer watchdog.” “I’m going to be fighting every inch of the way here in Washington to make sure that we have a consumer watchdog,” he added. The GOP though, continues to do Wall Street’s bidding, even as the country struggles to recover from a recession caused, in large part, by Wall Street malfeasance.

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich will manufacture any excuse to attack the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and insist that it be repealed. Last month, at the same time bank profits were soaring, Gingrich told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the Dodd-Frank law was “killing the banking industry.” Now, Gingrich is co-opting the Occupy Wall Street protest to call yet again for the repeal of these much-needed reforms.

On CNN’s The Situation Room yesterday, Gingrich told host Wolf Blitzer that the protests are a wholesale indictment of President Obama’s economic policies. As such, Gingrich said that “the Dodd-Frank bill should repealed this week”:

GINGRICH: The truth is, with this level of failure, Geithner should be fired as Secretary of the Treasury, Bernanke should be fired as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Dodd-Frank bill should be repealed this week. We ought to have decisive action. If you’re somebody out there, and you’ve been walking around and you’re beginning to figure out ‘How come the big boys get all these billions of dollars, the big banks get all these billions of dollars, somehow the Federal Reserve and the Treasury collude together on behalf of people who are already rich and nobody else gets a break?’ I think people need to understand, there’s something profoundly wrong with how Washington intersects with New York.

Watch it:

When asked whether he identifies with the protesters railing against the big banks, Gingrich reiterated that he is “angry about the Dodd-Frank bill” and insisted that protesters have the right to be “very very angry” about it. He said there should be pressure to “say to the Congress, ‘Why can’t you repeal Dodd-Frank now?’”

The great irony here is that the Dodd-Frank reforms are a necessary response to the Wall Street behavior that propelled the U.S. economy into the Great Recession. As the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission pointed out, the “widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision,” along with a “lack of transparency,” ultimately “proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets.” Not only does Dodd-Frank address these failures, it also seeks to curb excessive executive compensation and other abuses of taxpayer funds.

Moreover, if Gingrich is so offended by Washington’s collusion “on behalf of the people who are already rich,” perhaps he should look to his own party. He and his fellow Republicans consistently seek to provide wealthy people and corporations with tax cuts and subsidies, rejecting any attempt to make them pay their fair share in taxes as “class warfare.” The “big boys” he so quickly derides now are the very same “job creators” he continually insists need protection from progressive tax reform.

It’s clear from his record that Gingrich’s goal is to protect the Wall Street “big boys” from the any kind of oversight — no matter what spin he puts on it.

After telling those protesting on Wall Street and around the country yesterday that “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself,” presidential candidate Herman Cain had more choice words last night during a campaign stop in St. Petersburg, Florida. According to the Associated Press, Cain lambasted the protesters as un-American:

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain says the Occupy Wall Street protesters are un-American and against capitalism. Speaking to The Associated Press during a book signing event Wednesday in St. Petersburg, Fla., Cain said the protesters shouldn’t rally against Wall Street bankers or brokers because “they’re the ones who create the jobs.”

For one thing, it’s not anti-capitalist to protest an industry that was saved by trillions of taxpayer dollars and returned the favor by fighting against common-sense regulations. Plus, contrary to Cain’s assertion, Wall Street bankers are in the business of making money, not creating jobs. Many private equity firms make billions by buying out companies, laying off employees, and re-selling the company once it begins generating more profit. Other hedge funds and investment banks simply speculate on a number of different aspects of the economy, such as the price of oil.

Some ultra-profitable Wall Street firms have even turned toward cannibalizing their own, laying off brokers and other employees to pad quarterly profits. And considering the fact that risky Wall Street bets plunged the financial system and caused an unemployment crisis, Cain might be a tad out of touch when he suggests that Americans should be thanking Wall Street.

At the end of the day, protesting a corrupt, multi-national corporation is just as American as tossing tea in the harbor.

Over 1,000 activists gathered in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 17th for the “Occupy Wall Street” protest of a political and financial system that rewards the richest 1 percent at the expense of the other 99 percent. Since then, the protest has grown substantially with hundreads of people camped out every night in Zuccotti Park even in the face of police crackdowns.

Inspired by the activists in New York City, protests have sprung up in cities from Boston to Wichita to Denver, where thousands have gathered to join the 99 Percent Movement. Here’s a look at some of the protests that have happened so far:

Los Angeles: Almost 200 have gathered on the north lawn of the Los Angeles City Hall.

Chicago: Nearing their second week of action, the crowd of over 100 continues to grow. “99 percent of this country is disenfranchised and not being heard,” said protester Evelyn DeHais, “that is irresponsible and awful, but it can be changed and we can change it.”

Louisville: About 200 gathered for the inaugural action.

Wichita: Between 100 and 300 people showed up to the first action on Sunday. “We’re here to stand in solidarity together,” said protester Don Landis, a Vietnam veteran.

Hartford: Close to 100 people attended the first protest on Wednesday in Hartford’s Bushnell Park.

Anchorage: More than 65 people gathered in Anchorage on Wednesday. “Homelessness. Foreclosures, robo-signing of foreclosures,” said protester Brian MacMillan. “Child poverty or child hunger. The unemployment rate, one in 10 in America without a job. Jeez, what isn’t there to protest?”

Charlotte: Local protesters are planning a march on the local offices of Bank of America this Saturday. “I think we’ve got a growing movement,” said a local organizer, Tracey Myhalyk.

Lexington: Since it began on Thursday at least 100 people have gathered every day in Lexington, Kentucky.

Boston: An estimated 3,000 took the streets on Friday to kick off the Boston protest, with a core of 150 staying indefinitely in Boston’s Dewey Square Park. “This is your future at stake,” protester and Iraq War veteran Ryan Cahill said. “It’s not going to fix itself. I think that’s pretty clear.”

Seattle: A crowd of more than 200 protesters gathered in Seattle’s Westlake Park.

Philadelphia: At a standing-room-only planning meeting on Tuseday almost 1,000 activists packed into Arch Street United Methodist Church in Philadelphia. The meeting decided to kick off the protest outside of the Philadelphia City Hall on Tuesday morning.

Denver: More than 50 protesters marched in downtown Denver on Saturday. One protesters’ sign read, “they only call it class war when we fight back.”

Iowa City: About 100 locals met Wednseday night in Iowa City to plan a local protest. The group decided to begin the protest on Friday.

Miami: On Saturday between 100 and 200 protesters met at Bayfront Park in Miami.

Portland: An estimated 100 protesters braved the rain on Saturday to rally in Portland, Maine. “This underscores what’s valuable in a democratic society: At some point, the people need to stand up and say, ‘That’s enough.’” protester Matth Mitchell commented.

Dozens more protests are planned for the coming days. Make sure to check out all of ThinkProgress’s ongoing coverage of the 99 Percent Movement here.

– Karl Singer