One of the problematic developments for the U.S. economy in the last several decades has been increased financialization. In the 1950s, the financial sector made up less than 3 percent of the economy. Today, it is back to its pre-recession heights of more than 8 percent. The financial sector accounts for about 30 percent of total corporate profits, which is actually down from before the financial crisis, when it made closer to 40 percent.

Increased financialization is of dubious societal use; as former Federal Reserve Chairman and big bank critic Paul Volcker has said, “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence.” (Volcker has opined that the last useful bit of financial innovation was the ATM.) At the same time, the industry is one of the highest paid. In a new piece in New York magazine, a former Lehman Bros trader explained that, in his view, “there’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little“:

Many [on Wall Street] acknowledge that the bubble­-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said.

The Great Recession destroyed nearly $20 trillion in wealth, and total family wealth is still down $15.1 trillion (in 2011 dollars) from its last peak. And there’s very little that the financial industry can point to that could possibly be worth that cost. To the contrary, as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, the era of “boring” commercial banking — when strict regulations kept investment banking and commercial banking separate — “was also an era of spectacular economic progress for most Americans.” (HT: Jillian Berman)

There have been no shortage of Ronald Reagan mentions on the campaign trail, with Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum invoking the former president’s name at seemingly every turn. Each argues that only he is truly like Reagan, and that only his massive, budget-busting tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans is in the true spirit of Reagan’s legacy.

Today, on what would have been Reagan’s 101st birthday, his former economist published an editorial — titled “Why the GOP should stop invoking Reaganomics” — in the Washington Post telling the candidates to stop it with the name-dropping. Bruce Bartlett, who served under both Reagan and George H.W. Bush, outlined the differences between today’s economic circumstances and those of the Reagan years, positing that while curbing inflation was the biggest issue in the Reagan era, today’s economic policies must be focused on boosting demand.

The result of those differences, Bartlett wrote, is that Reagan’s policies “can’t — and shouldn’t — be replicated today”:

Judging from the candidates’ tax proposals, they seem to believe that the most Reagan-like candidate is the one with the biggest tax cut. But as the person who drafted the 1981 Reagan tax cut, I think Republicans misunderstand the premises upon which Reagan’s economic policies were based and why those policies can’t — and shouldn’t — be replicated today. [...]

All of the evidence tells us that the economy’s fundamental problem today is not on the supply side but the demand side. According to a recent study by Credit Suisse, two-thirds of the difference in growth at this point in the business cycle, compared with previous cycles, is due to slower consumer spending. And low inflation — as well as widespread unemployment, vast stocks of unsold houses, empty factories and other indicators — tells us that money is tight, not loose, as was the case in the late 1970s.

Bartlett isn’t the only one noting the weakness of the GOP’s plans to bolster the economic recovery. Multiple economics professors told Reuters that the Republican plans wouldn’t pass an Econ 101 class. The candidates’ economic proposals will explode the deficit, expand income inequality through massive tax breaks to the rich, and hurt the poor and middle classes if enacted, but the GOP continues to ignore evidence that today’s situation is different than Reagan’s.

“Economic conditions are entirely different today than they were in Reagan’s era, and different conditions demand different policies,” Bartlett concluded. “Those who say otherwise are simply engaging in cookie-cutter economics — proposing whatever was popular and seemed to work once, without regard to changing circumstances.”

Today is the supposed deadline for a group of attorneys general to sign onto a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks, stemming from the foreclosure fraud scandal that broke back in 2010. The settlement has been in limbo for several months, as a group of AGs believed it gave too much up to the banks in terms of immunity for mortgage misdeeds.

Part of the hesitation on the part of AG’s such as New York Attorney General Eric Schneidermann and California Attorney General Kamala Harris is that the settlement would have shortchanged investigations into the true extent of foreclosure abuses, which have reportedly gone back decades. In fact, according to a report in the New York Times over the weekend, government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae knew about foreclosure fraud as far back as 2003, but did nothing about it:

Even then, [Florida businessman Nye Lavalle] discovered, some loan-servicing companies that worked for Fannie Mae routinely filed false foreclosure documents, not unlike the fraudulent paperwork that has since made “robo-signing” a household term. Even then, he found, the nation’s electronic mortgage registry was playing fast and loose with the law — something that courts have belatedly recognized, too…For two years, he corresponded with Fannie executives and lawyers. Fannie later hired a Washington law firm to investigate his claims. In May 2006, that firm, using some of Mr. Lavalle’s research, issued a confidential, 147-page report corroborating many of his findings.

And there, apparently, is where it ended. There is little evidence that Fannie Mae’s management or board ever took serious action.

Schneidermann has sued Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo for their use of a mortgage database that may have led to improper foreclosures. And evidently a look into what Fannie Mae knew about foreclosure fraud is also warranted.

While Super Bowl XLVI will be remembered for its dramatic ending, the issue of workers’ rights and union representation also surrounded the National Football League’s biggest game. A labor dispute nearly cost the NFL its 2011-12 season, and in the days before the game, Indiana passed an anti-union “right to work” law that led to union and Occupy protests at Indianapolis’ Super Bowl festivities throughout the week.

But despite fears from sports columnists and right-wing blogs that the protesters would “ruin the Super Bowl,” the only visible advocacy for some of the game’s viewers came in the form of a misleading anti-union attack ad from a corporate front group. The Center For Union Facts, an organization that has run newspaper ads comparing unions to Kim Jong-il’s authoritarian North Korean regime and endorsed an editorial comparing unions to Nazis, produced and paid for the 40-second ad, which ran in the Washington DC television market just before halftime ended. Watch it:

The ad’s claim that just 10 percent of current union members voted to form the union may be true, but it is incredibly misleading. Federal law mandates that more than 50 percent of a company’s workforce must vote in favor of the formation of a union. Most current union members, however, join unions that were formed years before and know that the union exists when they take the job.

The ad’s implication that the Employee Rights Act would put money in workers’ pockets is also misleading. According to the Economic Policy Institute, right-to-work laws cost workers up to $1,500 a year and also lead to reduced pensions and health care coverage.

Super Bowl broadcasters have traditionally banned ads that advocate for political causes. Year after year, though, it seems that ban doesn’t extend to misleading anti-union ads paid for by corporate front-groups that don’t disclose their donors.

On Friday, ThinkProgress noted that Fox News appeared to be systematically ignoring the strong jobs report that day, perhaps in an effort to avoid giving President Obama any credit. The network mentioned the jobs numbers half as often as some of their competitors, and buried the big news on their website, but on Fox and Friends today, the network went a step further.

Hosts Eric Bolling, Steve Doocy, and Gretchen Carlson went beyond merely downplaying the numbers to contriving a conspiracy theory to explain them away:

BOLLING: So are they playing around with the numbers? Look, it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s supposed to be non-partisan, but that’s the Department of Labor. Hilda Solis heads the Department of Labor, Hilda Solis works directly to Obama. I’m — you know.

DOOCY: Are you saying they’re cooking the books?

BOLLING: I’m saying there’s room for error. There’s room — when you’re talking about 4 million people, how do you know?

DOOCY: How do you know?

CARLSON: I don’t think anyone should surprised that in an election year — [...] So it’s interpretation, I think is the way in which we’d describe it.

Watch it, via Media Matters:

If it weren’t improper to psychologically analyse strangers, one might think the Fox hosts are displaying a textbook example of cognitive dissonance here, a psychological phenomena in which people who hold a strong belief about something invent (sometimes far fetched) explanations for new evidence that conflicts with their existing views. Obama is bad for the economy, the jobs numbers show the economy is doing better, so there must be something wrong with the jobs numbers. Needless to say, this is hardly the behavior one expects from fair and balanced journalists Fox hosts claim to be.

Meanwhile, some conservatives have developed a more sophisticated excuse for the jobs report, saying the drop in unemployment rate is only due to decreasing participation in the jobs market. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and others have refuted this claim.