ThinkProgress filed this report from the Values Voters Summit in Washington DC

Republicans, many of whom adopted the Tea Party mantra when that movement began in 2008, have dismissed the ongoing protests on Wall Street as an anti-capitalist, anti-American movement, even as it spreads from its origins in New York to cities across the country. At the Values Voters Summit today, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) called the protesters “mobs” and accused those supporting it of “condoning the pitting of Americans against Americans,” ignoring the legitimate complaints the protesters have made about the richest Wall Street bankers, many of whom have seen their incomes skyrocket while the average worker’s have stagnated.

In an interview this morning on CNBC, Santorum seemed to join his fellow Republicans, calling the protesters “a fringe group” of the “radical left” that has been protesting since Vietnam:

SANTORUM: Well, you’re talking about a rather fringe group of people out here sitting outside your building. I mean, these are the same old folks that have been protesting since the Vietnam War. … They don’t curry too much favor in my book and I don’t think they do with the American people. This is the radical left.

Watch it:

But at the Values Voters Summit today, Santorum seemed to change his tune. After first dismissing the protests by saying, “This is what the left does,” Santorum told ThinkProgress that while he may disagree with what the protesters wanted to accomplish, there is “legitimate concern about corruption on Wall Street” and that “I understand the motivation behind the protests”:

SANTORUM: I understand the motivation behind the protests. I don’t think what they’re trying to accomplish is what I’d like to see. But clearly, Wall Street should have paid, and in my opinion, still should pay for the consequences of what they’ve done.

Watch it:

Aside from Santorum’s obvious flip-flop, it’s unclear how he wants to hold Wall Street bankers accountable now, considering he opposes the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act that was meant to rein in big banks and ensure that the type of financial crisis that sparked the recession can’t repeat itself. In a recent interview, Santorum explained that the financial collapse was somehow caused by government regulation, not the massive banking deregulation efforts that preceded the collapse.

GOP Senate candidate Adam Hasner

To wide dismay, Bank of America recently announced a new $5 monthly fee on customers who use its debit card for purchases. The bank’s decision is just one of the many issues feeding the fury behind the burgeoning 99 percent movement. It is also the new attack weapon in Florida’s GOP Senate candidate Adam Hasner’s campaign.

The former state House Majority Leader is taking on former Sen. George LeMieux (R) for the chance to run against incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL). To take down his rival, Hasner is pointing to the bank’s fee increase as reason enough to dismiss LeMieux. “If Floridians are wondering why they will soon be paying more to use their debit cards, the need to look no further than Senator George LeMieux,” he said.

Why? Because LeMieux supported a reform in the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law that limited how much banks can charge retailers each time a customer swipes their debit card. By Hasner’s logic, this so-called “Durbin Tax” actually “forced” the beleaguered Bank of America to create new fees to stay afloat in the sea of regulations:

In the email, Hasner says that banks were “forced to charge customers new fees due to the negative and costly requirements associated with the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law, in particular the ‘Durbin Tax.’” Dodd-Frank legislation was a response to the country’s financial crisis that many economists say was partially caused by lax regulations on financial institutions. [...]

Hasner’s email says, “At a time when Florida families can afford it the least, they will now be charged an extra $5 a month just to use their debit cards. That’s 60 hard earned dollars a year. And guess who voted for the ‘Durbin Tax’ …that’s right, Senator George LeMieux.”

Hasner’s outrage over the bank’s practice would be more persuasive if he went after the right offender. Durbin’s reform is intended to help small retailers that are forced to pay excessive fees every time a consumer shops at their store. Bank of America could easily choose not to overburden their customers with an unnecessary fee. But, as Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said himself, the main reason behind the fee is to simply make money. “I have an inherent duty as a CEO of a publicly owned company to get a return for my shareholders,” he said in defense. “Understand we have a right to make a profit.”

And profit they do. As TP Economy editor Pat Garofalo notes, banks are making nearly one-third of the total corporate profits. Bank of America is still making money, but is “under pressure to show how it will weather problems remaining with its home mortgage assets.” And evidently slamming consumers for using a debit card is its answer.

The Occupy Wall Street protest that began in New York City more than three weeks ago has sparked an entire movement, based on the principle that the economy should work for everyone, not simply the richest one percent. At a time when income inequality and corporate profits are running sky high, right alongside joblessness and foreclosures, a movement like this captures the very real pain felt by “the 99 percent.”

However, the financial prognosticators on CNBC — including Larry Kudlow, Jim Cramer, and Joe Kernan — have found nothing but scorn for the protestors, deriding them as “bizarre,” “freaks,” and “law-breaking” “anti-American” “anarchists” who are “more aligned with Lenin.” Watch a compilation:

It’s no real surprise that the same pundits who derided subprime lending victims as “suckers,” vigorously defended the righteousness of bailed-out banks paying million dollar bonuses, believe tax havens prevent tyranny, and cited Glenn Beck as a new economic indicator would find the Wall Street protests off-putting. But their comments merely highlight how out-of-touch they are with the common American, as they cater all day, every day to the Wall Street crowd.

Hopes were not high today for this month’s jobs report after the economy appeared to net exactly zero jobs in August. While the numbers beat expectations, the story behind them reveals a pervasive trend in public sector job loss that Republicans seem committed to ignoring.

In August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the private sector added 17,000 jobs, but the public sector lost the exact same number (those numbers have since been revised). This month, the private sector created 137,000 jobs, but the public sector continued to hemorrhage jobs, losing 34,000. As Matt Yglesias notes, “month after month we see a labor market that’s basically treading water primarily because government employment is shrinking rather than keeping pace with population growth.”

Political Correction charted the plummeting public sector growth next to the steady rise in private sector jobs over the past two years. While the private sector marked a net gain of 1.4 million jobs, budget cuts have eliminated 572,000 government jobs. If governments maintained the same employment rate since 2009, “the economy would have grown by about 2 million jobs”:

This trend of public job depletion puts the Republican jobs agenda in stark contrast with the administration’s approach. President Obama’s American Jobs Act would not only add 1.9 million jobs next year, but makes targeted investments to arrest the trend in layoffs. The plan includes $35 billion in direct state aid infusion that will “prevent up to 280,000 layoffs of teachers, who are — along with cops and firefighters — particularly vulnerable to local government budget shortfalls.”

However, Republicans continue to block Obama’s much-needed plan because, in part, they see public job loss as a positive. As Yglesias points out, “this shrinkage is exactly what conservatives claim to believe will spark growth once they bring the era of Kenyan Anticolonialism to an end.” Buying into the conservative campaign against government workers, Republicans governors like Chris Christie (NJ) and Rick Scott (FL) openly tout laying off thousands of workers as a badge of honor. Scott actually bragged about getting rid of 15,000 jobs in his state. In talking up his draconian budget cuts, Scott admitted that his “biggest cut” is “always people.”

However loud Republicans sing about the shrinking public sector, plummeting public job numbers have failed to deliver on the promise of “private sector magic” — and the economy will continue to suffer for it.

The Occupy Wall Street protests that began in New York City more than three weeks ago have now spread across the country. The choice of Wall Street as the focal point for the protests — as even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said — makes sense due to the big bank malfeasance that led to the Great Recession.

While the Dodd-Frank financial reform law did a lot to ensure that a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis won’t occur — through regulation of derivatives, a new consumer protection agency, and new powers for the government to dismantle failing banks — the biggest banks still have a firm grip on the financial system, even more so than before the 2008 financial crisis. Here are eleven facts that you need to know about the nation’s biggest banks:

– Bank profits are highest since before the recession…: According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., bank profits in the first quarter of this year were “the best for the industry since the $36.8 billion earned in the second quarter of 2007.” JP Morgan Chase is currently pulling in record profits.

– …even as the banks plan thousands of layoffs: Banks, including Bank of America, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Credit Suisse, are planning to lay off tens of thousands of workers.

– Banks make nearly one-third of total corporate profits: The financial sector accounts for about 30 percent of total corporate profits, which is actually down from before the financial crisis, when they made closer to 40 percent.

– Since 2008, the biggest banks have gotten bigger: Due to the failure of small competitors and mergers facilitated during the 2008 crisis, the nation’s biggest banks — including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo — are now bigger than they were pre-recession. Pre-crisis, the four biggest banks held 32 percent of total deposits; now they hold nearly 40 percent.

– The four biggest banks issue 50 percent of mortgages and 66 percent of credit cards: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup issue one out of every two mortgages and nearly two out of every three credit cards in America.

– The 10 biggest banks hold 60 percent of bank assets: In the 1980s, the 10 biggest banks controlled 22 percent of total bank assets. Today, they control 60 percent.

– The six biggest banks hold assets equal to 63 percent of the country’s GDP: In 1995, the six biggest banks in the country held assets equal to about 17 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. Now their assets equal 63 percent of GDP.

– The five biggest banks hold 95 percent of derivatives: Nearly the entire market in derivatives — the credit instruments that helped blow up some of the nation’s biggest banks as well as mega-insurer AIG — is dominated by just five firms: JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank, and Wells Fargo.

– Banks cost households nearly $20 trillion in wealth: Almost $20 trillion in wealth was destroyed by the Great Recession, and total family wealth is still down “$12.8 trillion (in 2011 dollars) from June 2007 — its last peak.”

– Big banks don’t lend to small businesses: The New Rules Project notes that the country’s 20 biggest banks “devote only 18 percent of their commercial loan portfolios to small business.”

– Big banks paid 5,000 bonuses of at least $1 million in 2008: According to the New York Attorney General’s office, “nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008.”

In the last few decades, regulations on the biggest banks have been systematically eliminated, while those banks engineered more and more ways to both rip off customers and turn ever-more complex trading instruments into ever-higher profits. It makes perfect sense, then, that a movement calling for an economy that works for everyone would center its efforts on an industry that exemplifies the opposite.

Eighteen people have now died from cantaloupes contaminated with listeria, in the deadliest food outbreak in a decade. But legislation President Obama signed into law earlier this year might have prevented their deaths if it were fully implemented, as it would give regulators the power to head off outbreaks before they even occur, as the Wall Street Journal reported:

Inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration are searching fields in Colorado’s Rocky Ford region for clues as to how cantaloupes grown there this summer caused at least 100 illnesses and 18 deaths. But if a new law had been in place, they might have been there before the outbreak. [...]

Under the current FDA food-inspection system, facilities are inspected fitfully—if at all. In fiscal 2010, the FDA inspected about 15% of U.S. food production facilities, about 0.1% of foreign import facilities and essentially no farms. Farms such as Jensen Farms, which grew the cantaloupes linked to the deadly outbreak of listeria, don’t get inspected unless contamination is suspected.

Now, the FDA is writing a set of rules that will require farms and food facilities to identify hazards over the next two years, with the goal of preventing disease outbreaks in the first place. The rules will be based on scientific research and the outcomes of investigations, the FDA says. For example, now that the agency has learned that listeria can appear in fruit, it is expected to craft a rule requiring farms to minimize the risk of that occurring.

The law was the biggest upgrade of the nation’s food safety regime in decades, but Republicans fought its passage, calling it a “government takeover” of food. And even after Obama signed it, House Republicans threatened to defund the law through the appropriations process. They say the law is just another burdensome government regulation and that the food industry does a good enough job policing itself. The tainted melon outbreak, alongside other outbreaks of contaminated food, shows that’s clearly not true.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan

Speaking at the Atlantic Idea Fest earlier this week, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan sat down for a televised interview with CNBC’s Larry Kudlow. Defending the bank’s new $5 per month debit card fee, Moynihan invented something he called the “right to make a profit.”

But another segment of the interview sheds a great deal of light on how Bank of America sees its role in the economy. A year ago, Bank of America was among the many banks caught in a sweeping “robo-signing” scandal, in which documents were allegedly fabricated in places all over the country in order to foreclose on more homes. Although Bank of America has continued using robo-signing tactics today, Moynihan and Kudlow dismissed the potentially massive fraud, and bantered about how faster foreclosures could be great for the country:

KUDLOW: Isn’t it fair to say the faster the foreclosure, the better off we’re going to be? And I know there’s pain. But of course, some people lose, other people win. Young families come in, they’re going going to get very low prices. But the point is, the faster we clear our the unsold inventory, the sooner this country might start creating jobs in a real economic growth situation. Is that fair?

MOYNIHAN: You can look at the markets and see where the markets have had the inventory cleared, you’re seeing prices stabilize.

KUDLOW: So these attorneys general around the country that were blocking you because there were a few bad robo-type-letters or whatever they were, robo-signing letters. They’re keeping the economy on its back because they won’t let the housing market adjust and they’re all over Bank of America, you’re like their favorite guy.

Watch:

Praising the speed of foreclosures in California, Moynihan said the state has “faired reasonably well” considering the housing market. His remarks might have been aimed at California Attorney General Kamala Harris. Harris recently withdrew from the multi-state settlement deal with the banks, in part because of her concern with the big banks’ attempt to gain legal immunity for the robo-signing fraud.