A beleaguered Target employee mobbed by crowds on Black Friday.

It’s no secret that to boost profits during a down economy, many retailers have put the squeeze on their employees to work longer and harder for less and less. That pressure only increases during the holiday season, when stores try to woo consumers with marathon sales and midnight openings. Workers are often forced to choose between being with their families or working long hours on holidays to keep their jobs.

Now, thousands of employees are standing up to the retail giant Target to protest the long hours they’re being required to work on Thanksigiving:

Anthony Hardwick says he resents working at Target Corp. (TGT) on Thanksgiving and has garnered more than 37,000 signatures on an online protest petition.

Target, Macy’s Inc. (M), Gap Inc. (GPS), Kohl’s Corp. (KSS), Toys “R” Us Inc. and Best Buy Co. all plan to open at midnight or earlier on Thanksgiving in an attempt to goose sales that the National Retail Federation says may rise just 2.8 percent this holiday season, or about half as much as last year.

Hardwick, 29…began the petition two weeks ago on the website Change.org after learning that he and his coworkers would be required to start at 11 p.m. Nov. 24 for a 10-hour shift. [...] “Everyone at work was resigned because the economy is bad and so our employer has us over a barrel.”

Black Friday, or the day after Thanksgiving, is typically retailers’ most lucrative day of the year, and some stores have begun to extend their hours to Thanksgiving day itself to give themselves an edge. Hardwick says he fears losing his job for starting the protest and speaking to the media. Target has yet to respond to the petition. But as Hardwick pointed out, because of the tough job market companies know that their workers have little choice but to comply with their demands or be fired.

Target in particular has a bad track record when it comes to respecting workers’ rights. It has repeatedly tried to discourage employees from unionizing, and the National Labor Relations Board has opened a case alleging that Target illegally intimidated workers before a union vote.

This meal is chock full of vegetables, according to the House GOP.

Earlier this year, the USDA made an attempt to bolster the nutrition guidelines for the federal school lunch program. Under the new guidelines, for instance, school lunches would be limited to one cup of starchy vegetables a week and the ability of schools to count tomato sauce on pizza towards their fruit and vegetables requirement would be scaled back. But House Republicans, in a new spending plan unveiled yesterday, have done away with those changes:

The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department’s proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers. Some conservatives in Congress have called the push for healthier foods an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat.

According to a bill summary released by Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, these provisions are meant to “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations.” What they will actually do is ensure that a steady flow of dollars continues toward certain favored food manufacturers, at the expense of children’s health.

“We are outraged that Congress is seriously considering language that would effectively categorize pizza as a vegetable in the school lunch program,” said Amy Dawson Taggart, the director of Mission: Readiness, a group advocating for healthier school lunches. “It doesn’t take an advanced degree in nutrition to call this a national disgrace.”

This is hardly the first time that the GOP has attacked attempts to boost the nutritional content of school lunches. Back in May, House Republicans derided the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which was signed into law late last year, as a “massive and costly” federal intrusion. They did this despite the fact that escalating obesity rates cost the nation $147 billion per year in direct medical costs.

As education policy analyst Theodora Chang has written, “student nutrition programs ensure that students are ready to learn and are not stymied by hunger. Schools are ideal locations for social services like healthy meals because they have unparalleled access to low-income students and their families.” Instead, the GOP has decided to roll back what little progress has been made in terms of school lunch nutrition.

In an attempt to burnish his Wall Street reformer credentials ahead of his race against Harvard Law Professor and consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) today plans to introduce the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2011, which would apply laws against insider trading to members of Congress, who are currently thought to be exempt from such measures. Brown’s move comes after a 60 Minutes report showed that House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) traded on information he received in private briefings at the height of the financial crisis, earning nearly $30,000.

In a statement, Brown said he was introducing the bill because “we serve the public, not our bank accounts”:

Members of Congress should live under the same laws as everyone else. If they trade on inside knowledge to line their own pockets, they should be punished. Serving the public is a privilege and an honor, not an opportunity for personal gain. I hope every Senator will join me in this effort to lend greater credibility to our work and restore trust in this institution. We serve the public, not our bank accounts, and no one should be allowed to enrich themselves based on inside government information that is not available to the general public.

Brown is not the only one pounding away on the insider trading issue today, as Newt Gingrich said earlier that Congress should “absolutely” have to follow laws against insider trading. A version of the STOCK Act was introduced in the House earlier this year, but gained only five co-sponsors.

This is the second thing Brown has done today to bolster his financial reform credibility, following his earlier endorsement of President Obama’s nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But these positions don’t change the fact that Brown worked to water down key provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law before granting the law his support, actions which earned him the appreciative donations of the financial services industry.

On Sunday, a report by CBS’ 60 Minutes revealed that House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) received private briefings during the height of the economic crisis in 2008 (when he was that committee’s ranking member) and proceeded to make stock trades the next day betting that the markets would fall. In fact, Bachus made about 200 trades as the financial crisis peaked, netting about $28,000.

Bachus was able to get away with this behavior because, in large measure, Congress is believed to be immune to insider trading laws (though whether the law actually says that is the subject of some debate). During a campaign event today, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich — who has climbed near the top of some recent polls — was asked whether insider trading laws should apply to Congress and said that they “absolutely” should:

I think the laws that have passed Congress should explicitly apply to Congress and in the Contract with America in 1994 we did that. And I think that things like insider trading should also apply to members of Congress. Absolutely.

Watch it:

Between this position and his newfound belief that deregulating Wall Street in the 1990s was “probably a mistake,” one could almost be fooled into believing that Gingrich has some interest in regulating financial markets.

But as it turns out, Gingrich may have his own insider trading problem. TPM2012′s Evan McMorris-Santoro highlighted a 1995 Mother Jones investigation finding that, “in January 1992, Gingrich bought between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of Boeing stock. Three weeks later, when the House introduced the NASA Authorization Act, Gingrich helped kill amendments to cut funding for the space station program. Later, Boeing became the prime contractor for the station.” A study released this year by Donna Nagley of Indiana University found that at least “72 [congressional] aides on both sides of the aisle traded shares of companies that their bosses help oversee.”

New Jersey’s blunt-talking Gov. Chris Christie (R) is not shy about shredding his state’s budget. Since taking office in 2010, Christie has slashed $3 billion in funding, leaving low-income citizens with a severe lack of legal help, the mentally ill without a home, thousands of New Jersey women without health clinics to visit, 15,000 low-income students without an after-school program, and 4,000 police officers without jobs. This jobs-focused governor even celebrated firing thousands of public employees.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger editorial board noted that, if Christie truly cares about creating jobs, he could be putting “thousands of New Jersey’s construction workers, as well as architects, engineers and building suppliers, back to work right now” by approving 53 major school construction projects that were approved and awaiting his go-ahead upon taking office. Those projects include replacing structurally unsound roofs or water and sewer leaks. Instead, Christie stopped work on all of these projects upon arrival in 2010 (later approving only 10 projects). His order remains in effect today and is costing thousands of jobs and stifling economic growth:

A 2008 study by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers shows that $1 billion spent on school construction would have a significant impact on New Jersey’s economy, generating:

– 8,700 job years (or 2,900 new full-time jobs, each lasting three years)

– $469,072,000 in individual income

– $13,421,000 in state taxes

– $16,044,000 in local taxes

– $610,929,000 in gross state product

As the Star-Ledger notes, the Schools Development Authority had already spent more than $200 million in taxpayer dollars to prepare the projects for construction, the state unemployment rate for construction workers is more than 12 percent, and “thousands of children attend schools in desperate need of repair and replacement.” But Christie remains tethered to an austerity motto that keeps New Jerseyans out of work and children in unsafe schools.

But who Christie chooses to disregard is made all the more maddening by who he is electing to protect instead: millionaires. The state passed a tax on millionaires that would help provide revenue for these programs and projects. Christie vetoed it — twice – once in under two minutes flat.

“Our children go to school to learn, but these days, the main lesson we seem to be teaching them is that their health and safety and their future are not as important as adding even more to the wealth of those at the top,” said New Jersey Work Environment Council’s Eileen Senn. “Elected officials, including Chris Christie, surely can do better.”

The current round of funding for the federal government runs out on Friday, but House and Senate negotiators have reportedly agreed to a new funding package under the guidelines of the deal that raised the debt ceiling over the summer. One of the casualties of the budget cuts imposed by this agreement will be the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a key financial market watchdog charged with implementing large swathes of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:

Congressional lawmakers have agreed to give the Commodity Futures Trading Commission far less money than it requested for fiscal 2012, potentially limiting the agency’s ability to implement the expanded powers it received under the Dodd-Frank financial law.

Congressional aides on Monday said that the CFTC would receive $205 million for the year, $100 million less than the amount sought by the Obama administration, as part of a compromise dropping a number of proposed policy restrictions that could have delayed the implementation of Dodd-Frank rules even further. [...]

Senate Democratic lawmakers had pushed for a budget of $240 million for the agency, while the Republican-controlled House wanted to keep its fiscal 2012 budget broadly flat at $170 million, from the $169 million the agency had in fiscal 2011. The administration had sought $308 million for the CFTC for fiscal 2012.

According to a study by the Government Accountability Office, the CFTC needs $77 million above last year’s funding level to adequately fulfill its new duties under Dodd-Frank. Instead, the agency is receiving about half of that amount.

The CFTC is responsible for policing the nation’s commodities markets — including the oil market, where speculation has exploded in recent years — and is also tasked under Dodd-Frank with regulating derivatives, the complex financial instruments that were at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis. Refusing to give the agency enough funding to complete these tasks is just one more way that the GOP is hoping to slow down the implementation of new financial regulations.

“[Republicans are] trying to sabotage the situation by not giving money,” said House Financial Services Committee ranking member Barney Frank (D-MA). “These are complicated subjects that involve very smart people, and we need technology and resources for these agencies.” As the New Republic’s Timothy Noah suggested, perhaps its time for the Occupy protesters to visit House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) and “ask why he’s starving the financial watchdogs.”

The European economy grew just 0.2 percent in the third quarter as it remained plagued by the continent’s spreading fiscal crisis, according to official data released by the European Union today. The crisis has only deepened as countries have enacted massive austerity plans, forcing through widespread budget cuts that have stunted economic growth. In Spain, austerity has driven the unemployment rate to 21.5 percent.

As Europe continues its slide, the effects are sure to be felt in the United States, where the threat of a recession in 2012 is now greater than 50 percent. “It is not something that we would be insulated from,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week. “I don’t think we would be able to escape the consequences of a blow-up in Europe.”

But even with evidence that austerity is wreaking havoc on European economies, American policymakers remain intent on following that lead. But chasing Europe down the austerity hole is only ensuring that the U.S. will experience another “great recession,” according to economists surveyed by Politico:

“To engage in austerity right now would be a great mistake,” insisted Desmond Lachman, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “It would push the economy into a great recession.” [...]

“We need to learn from the European recessions,” said David Walker, former comptroller general of the United States, “and structure our own program” accordingly. He, too, said he considers large, near-term budget cuts potentially disastrous. Walker and other experts said significant budget cuts are certainly necessary — eventually. But not now. [...]

“Austerity brings a cyclical contraction,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a German who is senior director for strategy at the German Marshall Fund in Washington. “You can’t just slash. You also have to invest and reform.” In his view, U.S. politicians don’t seem to appreciate this because they hold “a dangerous philosophy of American exceptionalism, as if they were exempt from the rules of finance.”

Despite these warnings, congressional leaders — particularly on the right — continue to push for massive spending cuts to a variety of programs, while opposing economic stimulus that could spark growth and recovery. The House will vote this week on a radical Balanced Budget Amendment that would force bigger spending cuts than even the fiscal super committee could ever dream of, drive up the unemployment rate, and ensure that future recessions will be even more painful.

The GOP, along with some moderate Democrats, has opposed the American Jobs Act, which would inject money into the economy in the form of infrastructure investment, aid to states to hire teachers and public safety officials, and other measures designed for job creation. Instead, they have focused on anti-regulatory, anti-spending policies that have little (if any) effect on job creation.

As these economists noted, clear evidence exists across the pond that widespread austerity measures will only stunt economic growth and push the U.S. closer to the brink of another recession. Unfortunately, Congressional leadership continues to ignore them.

44 Senate Republicans have pledged to block any nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. President Obama has nominated former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be the agency’s first director, but he has yet to receive a vote due to the GOP’s intransigence.

Senate Republicans are blocking Cordray’s nomination because they oppose the very idea of a regulator focused solely on protecting consumers from Wall Street excess. But one Republican is breaking ranks with his party and supporting Cordray’s nomination — Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA):

Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts yesterday became the first Republican to back the nomination of Richard Cordray to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — whose chief architect, Elizabeth Warren, is challenging Brown in his reelection bid next fall.

The decision is a break from Republican leaders, GOP candidates for president, and rank-and-file members, who have denounced both the structure of the bureau and the overarching Dodd-Frank regime of government regulations on Wall Street…“The senator supports the Cordray nomination and believes it deserves an up or down vote on the Senate floor,’’ spokesman John Donnelly said yesterday.

Of course, Brown’s sudden support for Cordray likely has to do with the fact that he’s facing a strong challenge from Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, who not only came up with the idea for the Consumer Protection Bureau, but led it from its creation to its official opening.

Brown has tried to walk the fine line between favoring necessary Wall Street reforms and not earning the wrath of the financial sector. He voted for the Dodd-Frank law, but not before forcing its authors to significantly weaken a key regulation aimed at cutting back on the biggest banks’ risky trading.

As he was weakening Dodd-Frank, Brown was showered with financial sector cash. He then tried to claim the mantle of a Wall Street reformer, saying, “I worked very hard to make sure that banks didn’t act like casinos with our money.” Now, facing a challenge from a true Wall Street reformer, Brown is trying to distance himself even further from the GOP’s cozy embrace of the banks.