The Senate passed its version of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act by an overwhelming 96-3 margin. Included in the bill is a provision inserted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) under which “Washington insiders who collect political intelligence and sell it to corporate America would have to register under the lobbying disclosure law.” “When these people come around to get information from you that they sell to hedge funds, that you’ll know who they are. You don’t know that now,” Grassley said in defense of the provision.

The House Republicans’ version of the bill, however, does not include Grassley’s provision. In fact, the House version, crafted by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), is significantly weaker than the Senate version, leading Grassley to slam his own party for granting “Wall Street’s wishes” on the legislation:

It’s astonishing and extremely disappointing that the House would fulfill Wall Street’s wishes by killing this provision. The Senate clearly voted to try to shed light on an industry that’s behind the scenes. If the Senate language is too broad, as opponents say, why not propose a solution instead of scrapping the provision altogether? I hope to see a vehicle for meaningful transparency through a House-Senate conference or other means. If Congress delays action, the political intelligence industry will stay in the shadows, just the way Wall Street likes it.

The House is planing to vote on its version of the STOCK Act this week. It’s worth remembering that, before he introduced this weak tea version of the legislation, Cantor blocked his own party from moving an insider trading bill at all.

Republicans across the political world have struggled to comprehend the causes of the financial crisis since it began roiling the American economy nearly five years ago. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R), now one of the GOP’s two leading presidential candidates, hasn’t been immune, going all-in on the notion that government policy, government-sponsored housing programs, and government regulation were the main drivers of the crisis, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

On the campaign trail in Colorado this week, however, Santorum offered an even further out there explanation for the crisis. According to the Colorado Independent, Santorum told one crowd that gasoline and oil prices rose so sharply in the build-up to the collapse that they caused Americans to default on their mortgages in droves, thereby triggering the housing crisis that is still acting as a drag on the nation’s economy:

Stressing the importance for the country to provide cheap energy to its citizens, Santorum blamed the recession not on sub-prime mortgages or the derivatives market but on spiking fuel prices.

“We went into a recession in 2008. People forget why. They thought it was a housing bubble. The housing bubble was caused because of a dramatic spike in energy prices that caused the housing bubble to burst,” Santorum told the audience. “People had to pay so much money to air condition and heat their homes or pay for gasoline that they couldn’t pay their mortgage.”

The theory that rising oil prices blew up the housing market exists only in Santorum’s mind. “All The Devils Are Here,” an inside account of the crisis written by Fortune editor and columnist Bethany McLean and New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, doesn’t mention oil or gas prices a single time. New York Times financial reporter Aaron Sorkin’s “Too Big To Fail,” another inside account, never points to oil prices as a factor in the crisis. And the official government report about the crisis, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report, mentions oil prices multiple times as a symptom of the declining economy but never blames rising prices for the collapse of the housing market.

In reality, the primary cause of the financial crisis is quite clear. Mortgage lenders and large banks, driven by an insatiable thirst for profits, divvied up subprime mortgages and junk loans into mortgage backed securities, credit default options, and various forms of derivatives, then sold them around the world, creating a housing bubble that burst the minute the market overheated. Unfortunately, in their quest to prevent Wall Street banks and rogue mortgage lenders from taking responsibility, many Republicans have created an alternate reality in which anything else — even something as disconnected as fuel prices — caused the crisis, even if those claims have no basis in reality.

New Hampshire’s GOP legislature has come up with all manner of absurd bills recently, including a proposal making public school curriculum optional, another to prevent police from protecting domestic abuse victims, and even a measure mandating that new laws be based on the Magna Carta. Some of the Granite State’s GOP lawmakers have even proposed doing away with the law that requires employers to give their workers time off for lunch, under the rationale that all employers will simply grant lunch breaks out of the goodness of their hearts:

“This is an unneeded law,” [Republican state Representative Kyle Jones] said. “If I was to deny one of my employees a break, I would be in a very bad position with the company’s human resources representative. If you consider that this is a very easy law to follow in that everyone already does it, then why do we need it? Our constituents have already proven that they have enough common sense to do this on their own.”

The bill’s sponsor, state representative J.R. Hoell, argued that companies failing to provide lunch breaks would be shamed over social media, thus rendering the law unnecessary. “If they are not letting people have lunch, they could put it out though the news media, though social media. I don’t think that abusive behavior would continue, the way communications are today,” he said.

Of course, not every employer can be counted to to follow even the easiest of requirements to look after workers’ health and rights. Back in 2005, Walmart was forced to pay $172 million for denying workers their lunch breaks. Pyramid Breweries Inc. settled a case in 2008 for $1.5 million. Just a few months ago, California ordered Embassy Suites to pay workers tens of thousands of dollars for forcing them to skip breaks.

“The fact that in 2012, I would be even sitting in front of the Labor Committee talking about eliminating the lunch hour is outrageous,” said Mark MacKenzie, New Hampshire’s state AFL-CIO representative. “People should at least be able to be given the opportunity to eat.” Fortunately, the bill does not seem too appealing to most of the New Hampshire legislature, and the state House’s labor committee adjourned yesterday without voting on it.

Since a 60 Minutes report showed that Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) profited from information he obtained in private economic briefings in 2008, Congress has moved quickly to pass a bill to ban insider trading by its members. The Senate passed its version by a vote of 96-3 on February 2nd. President Obama praised the vote and promised to sign the bill — he had called for insider trading legislation in his State of the Union address in January.

Before any of that can happen, however, the House needs to vote on its version, which could happen as early as this week. The House’s version of the bill, however, is shaping up to be considerably different than the Senate’s.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has made several changes to the legislation which appear intended to at least weaken the final product, if not to kill it outright. The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) laid out some of those changes:

CREW strongly supported the Senate approved version of the STOCK Act (S. 2038) passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 96 to 3. S. 2038 goes well beyond merely prohibiting insider trading by, among other things, requiring registration by political intelligence consultants, stripping pension benefits from corrupt members of Congress and closing serious loopholes in the nation’s anti-corruption laws.

The bill Rep. Cantor is bringing to the floor removes several of these provisions. Although the House Judiciary Committee passed nearly identical legislation late last year, the new bill drops the Leahy-Cornyn amendment, which responds to court decisions that have undermined prosecutors’ efforts to target public corruption. It also excludes the Grassley Amendment, which would require political intelligence consultants to register with Congress.

Cantor had also tried to expand the legislation to ban other transactions, such as land deals. As UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge noted, “Cantor obviously hopes that including a vast array of economic activity within the bill, exposing members of Congress to disclosure obligations and other restrictions, as well as increasing their liability exposure, will make the bill sufficiently unpopular so as to prevent its passage.”

Despite Cantor’s public protestations that “it is unacceptable for anybody in this body to profit personally from non-public information,” his changes to the STOCK Act have unnecessarily made it weaker. As Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), a chief sponsor of the bill, put it, “I think strengthening here is a euphemism for weakening.” It is also worth noting that, when Bachus proposed an insider trading bill to help repair his image, Cantor blocked it from going forward.

If the House passes a different piece of legislation than the Senate, they will need to be reconciled before they can be signed into law. As the statement from CREW notes, the sections which Cantor removed could still be added back to the final bill in conference, which is why they are still calling for members to vote for passage.

– Zachary Bernstein

Yesterday, the Department of Justice and a group of state Attorneys General were scheduled to finally announce the terms of a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks over the banks’ foreclosure fraud abuses. However, the announcement was canceled at the last minute, leaving the status of the settlement where it has been for several months: in limbo.

Part of the hesitation on the part of several of the AGs is that a settlement would limit investigations into the extent of the fraud perpetrated by the banks. In the meantime, between shoddy foreclosure and faulty loans, the biggest U.S. banks have already lost $72 billion — with the most losses coming at Bank of America — and are preparing to lose even more:

Costs from faulty mortgages and shoddy foreclosures have topped $72 billion at the biggest U.S. banks as they near a settlement of a 50-state probe into the industry’s practices.

Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Ally Financial Inc., the five largest home lenders during the real estate boom, tallied at least $6.78 billion in new costs tied to mortgages during the second half of 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bank of America, ranked second among U.S. banks by assets, contributes $41.8 billion of the overall total.

“It’s a colossal failure of basic banking,” said credit analyst David Knutson. “It’s surprised everyone in terms of persistence and longevity and I think it will continue to surprise.”

Foreclosure fraud has been going on at the biggest banks since at least 1998. According to a New York Times report over the weekend, government backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae also knew about the shoddy foreclosure practices as far back as 2003, but did nothing. The more facts that come out regarding the extent of foreclosure fraud, the more it seems that further investigations and potential court action is warranted.

Mitt Romney has built his presidential campaign on his expertise as a job creator, telling crowds at campaign rallies that only he has the experience to create the jobs our economy needs. His critique of President Obama’s performance, meanwhile, pulls no punches, as Romney often claims (falsely) that Obama “made the economy worse.”

Romney prefers to focus on his past as a corporate executive at Bain Capital, where he often invested in companies and laid off workers while reaping huge profits. But a closer look at Romney’s governorship of Massachusetts, from 2003 to 2007, reveals that his “experience” as a job-creator isn’t all that great. In fact, Massachusetts lagged behind the nation in virtually every economic measure, Andrew Sum, an economics professor at Northeastern University, told the Washington Post:

“There was not one measure where the state did well under his term in office. We were below average and often near the bottom,” said Sum, who is also the director of Northeastern’s Center for Labor Market Studies.

Romney’s campaign points out that he took over the state during a downturn, which is true. But Massachusetts was 47th in the nation in job creation during Romney’s time as governor, and by the beginning of the Great Recession, it still had not replaced 100,000 jobs lost to the 2001 recession, making it one of only four states not to have replaced all its lost jobs over that time period. The state’s jobs record during that time more closely resembled those of Rust Belt manufacturing states like Michigan and Ohio than the high-tech economies of New York and North Carolina, two states to which it had once compared itself.

While the unemployment rate under Romney did fall, it was largely due to contraction of the labor force — a criticism Romney has often leveled at Obama. According to Sum, the only state that saw a sharper drop in its labor force during Romney’s tenure was Louisiana, the state that was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Without Romney in command, the state’s economy has rebounded much faster from the next recession it faced, creating jobs at nearly twice the national rate and ranking in the top 10 nationally. Romney is banking his presidential campaign on his experience creating jobs and leading an economy out of a downturn. If these numbers are any indication, that’s an experience the American people may not want.