This week, Citigroup announced that it had settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission over charges that the mega-bank misled investors in a derivatives deal and then bet against them. Under the terms of the settlement, Citi agreed to pay $285 million.

Citi is not the first bank to settle these sorts of charges with the SEC. Previously, Goldman Sachs had agreed to a $550 million settlement, while JP Morgan Chase paid $154 million. (Goldman’s settlement was over the now infamous “shi*ty deal.”)

Having to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars may seem like a lot, but it’s chump change to these banks. Citigroup, for instance, just announced profits of $3.8 billion for the last quarter alone, while JP Morgan made $4.2 billion. Goldman Sachs this week announced just the second losing quarter since the bank went public in 1999, but it paid its SEC settlement in 2010, a year in which the bank made $39.2 billion overall.

And as ProPublica pointed out, Citi’s settlement will not only cost it a pittance, but ends the SEC’s inquiries into the vast multitude of junk the bank peddled onto its unwitting customers:

The bank says it has settled all of its potential liability to a key regulator – the Securities and Exchange Commission — with a $285 million payment that covers a single transaction, Class V Funding III. ProPublica first raised questions about the deal [1] in August 2010. In announcing a case, the SEC said it had identified one low-level employee, Brian Stoker, as responsible for the bank’s misconduct.

It made no mention of the dozens of similar collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, Citi sold to investors before the crash.

A bank spokesman said the SEC would not be examining any of those deals. “This means that the SEC has completed its CDO investigation(s) of Citi,’’ the spokesman asserted in an e mail.

“This represents extreme caution, at best — and a failure to grapple with the magnitude and harmfulness of the misconduct, at worst,” said Stephen Ascher, a securities litigator.

It’s already looking like the banks are going to largely get off the hook for widespread foreclosure fraud, trading protection for charges for some small amount of help for homeowners. When it comes to charges that they intentionally misled investors and then bet against them, while simultaneously setting the entire economy up for a fall, that’s basically what’s happened already.

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.

An unlikely scene emerged at a Republican conference Thursday afternoon: a tea party congressman deplored corporate tax-dodging, and the conservative audience responded with cheers.

Freshman Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) spoke to the GOP crowd yesterday at the Western Republican Leadership Conference. Though the majority of his speech echoed standard Tea Party rhetoric, Labrador deviated from a discussion of Republican tax philosophy to condemn corporate tax cheats. Labrador said, “I believe that it is fundamentally unfair that companies like GE are making huge profits and not paying taxes.” The Republican audience applauded Labrador’s criticism:

LABRADOR: When people scream about Republicans being unwilling to raise taxes on the rich, they’re actually partly right. We don’t want to raise taxes on anyone. Not just the poor, not just the middle class, not just the rich. We don’t want to raise taxes on anyone. But we do believe that everyone should pay the taxes that are assessed to them and not find ways to avoid them through accounting tricks. I believe that it is fundamentally unfair that companies like GE are making huge profits and not paying taxes. (Applause)

Watch it:

Thursday’s scene displayed just how fed up Americans of all ideologies are with corporate tax cheats. With polls showing more than three in five Americans supporting increasing taxes on corporations and millionaires (including two-thirds of Republicans), perhaps outcries like these — even among conservative audiences — will become more commonplace.

Labrador aside, most Republican politicians have dismissed or even encouraged corporate tax dodging. In the presidential race, Newt Gingrich told ThinkProgress we should “celebrate” corporate tax dodgers and let them pay whatever rate they please, while Herman Cain said he “would like to see no taxes on corporations.” In the Senate, Ron Johnson’s (R-WI) reaction to corporate tax dodging was to call for a corporate tax cut, John Barrasso (R-WY) dismissed the issue because, in his view, “we don’t need more revenue,” and Pat Toomey (R-PA) said corporate taxes are already too high.

Finally, in the House of Representatives, Rob Woodall’s (R-GA) response to corporate tax dodging was to push for “the lowest corporate tax rate we can get,” Jeff Duncan (R-SC) argued that companies like GE are actually paying their fair share, and Louie Gohmert (R-TX) called for completely eliminating the corporate income tax.

Amongst developed nations, America has the weakest labor protections. In fact, the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee its workers some form of paid sick leave, even though sick employees attending work and infecting other costs the U.S. economy $180 billion in lost productivity annually.

To remedy this, some cities have taken matters into their own hands, with Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Seattle passing their own paid sick days requirements. Milwaukee passed its own law as well, only to have it overridden by the Republican state legislature, while Philadelphia is inching closer to crafting a law.

There is even one state that decided to implement a statewide requirement that workers be provided with paid time off to deal with illness: Connecticut. Yesterday, ThinkProgress spoke with Gov. Dan Malloy (D-CT), who signed Connecticut’s requirement into law. He explained that it “makes no sense at all” for sick employees to attend work, particularly when they’re in professions that involve interaction with vulnerable populations:

There’s no doubt that the very nature of biological interaction forces that to happen. That’s why having sick people come to work in hospitals and nursing homes makes no sense at all, and certainly why having those same folks go to work in a daycare facility where you have a particularly vulnerable population makes no sense at all. So I think in some sense, that reality allows us to have more and more people understand what we’re talking about on a public health benefit.

Watch it:

We also spoke with Seattle councilmember Nick Licata, who spearheaded his city’s effort to enact a paid sick days requirement. “I think what’s really important about paid sick leave is that it’s a victory where we’re moving something forward as opposed to a victory where we were stopping something bad from happening,” he said. “We have to start thinking about how to make this country a better nation,” instead of “thinking about how to save the last scrap of food on the table.” Watch it:

A paid sick days initiative will appear on the ballot in Denver in November.