This week, Occupy Our Homes, an outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, successfully helped a 78 year-old former civil rights activist in Atlanta stay in her home, after she was threatened with foreclosure by JP Morgan Chase (while the bank was simultaneously touting its commitment to the values of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.). Meanwhile, in Detroit, Occupy Our Homes has successfully prevented four foreclosures and is locked in on a fifth, as Michigan Radio reports:

The “Occupy our Homes” movement has taken up the cause of Fred Shrum, another homeowner facing foreclosure in Metro Detroit.

The group is a coalition of anti-foreclosure groups, organized labor, and other activists with the Detroit “Occupy” movement.

So far, their protests on behalf of people facing foreclosure have helped keep four Metro Detroit families in their homes—including one case where protesters blocked a dumpster that came to clear out the house.

Those families were able to re-negotiate terms with their lenders.

Now, the group wants to help Shrum. The Dearborn Heights homeowner sought a mortgage modification when he had to take a pay cut and undergo surgery. But after what he calls a long and confusing back-and-forth with mortgage servicer Wells Fargo, Shrum didn’t get the modification–and now faces eviction.

In cities as far apart as Atlanta, Rochester, and Cleveland, Occupy protesters have prevented foreclosures, which are starting to pick back up again across he country. Foreclosures increased by 8 percent last month, with extremely steep jumps in some states. The New York Federal Reserve has estimated that 3.6 million foreclosures will take place over the next two years.

The Economic Policy Institute released an analysis today of the programs in President Obama’s newly proposed budget plan which are aimed at boosting job growth. All told, it would yield approximately 1.5 million new jobs in fiscal year 2012, and around 1.3 million in 2013. This would result in a drop in the unemployment rate of 0.5 percent in 2012 and 0.4 percent in 2013, EPI estimated.

This is consistent with the overall macroeconomic strategy of Obama’s budget: boosting demand immediately, while holding off on significant budget cuts until later in the 10 year window. This approach drives up job growth and would leave the economy at a much more robust level of output when the budget cuts finally do hit — and thus much less likely to falter again in response to those cuts.

Also worth noting: This collection of programs in the new budget is a slight reworking of the American Jobs Act that the President proposed last fall, and which the GOP filibustered into extinction.

Mitt Romney has twisted himself into knots over the rescue of Detroit’s auto industry (which he initially opposed, then tried to take credit for, and now opposes again) as the GOP presidential primary in Michigan approaches. “This was crony capitalism on a grand scale,” Romney wrote of the auto rescue in the Detroit Free Press this week. “The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

However, Romney’s opposition to the bailout didn’t stop him from fundraising yesterday at the office of the law firm that made hundreds of millions of dollars representing General Motors during its rescue, as Politico’s Ben White pointed out:

Mitt Romney was in NYC yesterday and held a fundraising event in which he and others dialed for dollars from the offices of mega law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, one of the biggest players in corporate bankruptcies. Weil Gotshal, in fact, represented General Motors in the bankruptcy and federal bailout that Romney has spent so much time criticizing. Weil earned hundreds of millions in fees off the GM bankruptcy.

Romney favored a “managed bankruptcy” for Detroit’s auto companies, without the bridge loans provided by the federal government. But as Yahoo! Autos reporter noted, Romney’s plan wouldn’t have worked because “before Obama was even sworn in, no one on Wall Street or anywhere else was willing to lend GM and Chrysler a penny — let alone the $81 billion they and their financial arms eventually needed.” And in the end, Romney is clearly fine with dialing for dollars from the offices of the lawyers that oversaw and profited from the whole episode.

This morning brought two new signs that the economy is improving: a four-year low in weekly unemployment claims and record profits at GM, which was nearly left for dead just a few years ago until intervention by the Obama administration saved it. But where most see good news, some conservative see danger — and a secret media plot.

Appearing on Fox News this morning, Sarah Palin said she doesn’t believe the good job numbers:

PALIN: The media is reeling these numbers, that I do not believe are accurate, when it comes to jobs. I still think it is a jobless recovery that is affecting America right now. … So that 8.3 percent unemployment number is an indicator to President Obama and to his allies in the media to make it look like things are getting better.

Meanwhile, displaying characteristic cognitive dissonance, the cast of Fox and Friends — which previously wondered if the Labor Department was “cooking the books” on jobs data — tried their hardest to find the dark lining in the silver cloud. Co-host Steve Doocy discredited GM’s success because it helped unions, while co-host Eric Bolling questioned the means of saving GM: “We usurped the constitution, we usurped free-market capitalism” to do so. As for claims that the bailout saved jobs by saving GM, Bolling offered a ridiculous counter-factual to explain why Obama deserves no credit:

BOLLING: I don’t buy the argument that we saved jobs cause those jobs weren’t going to go overseas anyway. There was just going to be another company, maybe not called GM, it may have been called Ford, who did not take a dollar in bailout money.

Watch both:

As The Economist, which was initially opposed to the bailout, points out today, even Ford worried the entire auto industry would implode if GM were allowed to fail, so it’s unclear why Bolling is so convinced that every person employed at GM today would still have a job without the bailout.

But Doocy really gave away the game a moment later when he said, “We just have done two business stories that are good for the president of the United States…Now here’s some bad news for president of the Untied States,” turning to high gas prices, just as Palin did.

The suggestion that falling unemployment and that the revival of a major American auto-maker is good for Obama, and not, say, the country as a whole, and that rising gas prices are bad for Obama, and not, say, every driver in America, illuminates the Fox News world view which politicizes everything from jobs to Christmas in a nihilist effort to tear down the president.

Good news is bad news for the conservative echo chamber, as it undermines the narrative they’ve doggedly constructed of the past three years that president Obama is bad for the economy.

Perhaps it’s just that, as Comedy Central host Steven Colbert noted, facts have a “liberal bias.”

Much of the spring and summer of 2011 was dominated by the showdown between President Obama and Congressional Republicans over whether and how the nation’s debt ceiling would be raised, with some Republicans vowing to oppose any increase in the nation’s borrowing limit and others even extolling the virtues of a national default on our obligations.

While the current statutory debt limit should be high enough to avoid another dramatic conflict until after the presidential election, the issue of the debt ceiling has now come up in the most unlikely of places: the GOP presidential primary.

With his own candidacy on the ropes, Mitt Romney is now attempting to use Rick Santorum’s past votes in favor of raising the debt ceiling in the hopes of slowing down Santorum’s surging campaign.  On no fewer than eight occasions since February 6, the Romney campaign blasted out press releases attacking Santorum for his debt ceiling votes.  The attack was leveled directly by Romney himself, his spokeswoman Andrea Saul, and two top surrogates, former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).

Romney’s Super PAC, Restore Our Future, has also started carpet-bombing Michigan, Arizona, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Mississippi with ads leveling the same attack:

It’s worth noting that last June, Romney signed a pledge sponsored by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) that actually said the U.S. should not raise the debt ceiling and default on its obligations unless both houses of Congress passed a destructive balanced budget amendment and sent it to the states.  In the end, slightly less radical elements of the Republican party prevailed and the debt ceiling was raised upon pain of deep spending cuts (and with neither chamber having approved a constitutional balanced budget amendment).

Ironically, Romney’s own fiscal plan would necessitate large increases in the debt ceiling, in addition to those that will be necessary anyway in order to avoid defaulting on our current obligations. Despite its deep spending cuts (including to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security), his plan’s $6.6 trillion in tax cuts weighted toward the wealthy and corporations ensures that we’ll continue to run large deficits in perpetuity.

Until Republicans perfected the art of hostage-taking during the present Congress, raising the debt ceiling was a routine matter.  In fact, 130 Republicans currently in Congress voted to raise it at least one of the five times it was increased during the presidency of George W. Bush, including some who have endorsed Romney. Even the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol has questioned Romney’s “juvenile” debt ceiling attack on Santorum:

Santorum voted to raise the debt limit! (Along with every virtually other Republican when the GOP controlled the Senate-and does Romney think they shouldn’t have raised the debt limit?)

One is left to assume that Romney is either playing a cynical political game with this attack, or, based on his attacks on Santorum and the pledge he signed last year, take him at his word and conclude that he actually does oppose further increases in the debt ceiling barring the highly unlikely passage of a sure-to-be disastrous constitutional balanced budget amendment.

Last November, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) told Republican presidential candidates to stop second-guessing the rescue of the automobile industry that saved thousands of jobs in his state. “I would have had some differences on how they did it, but I’m not going to second-guess it,” Snyder told the New York Times. “The more important thing is the results. And the auto industry is doing very well today.”

Today, Snyder endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), a candidate who opposed the auto bailout at the time, second-guessed it as it was happening, attempted to take credit for it when it was working, and finally second-guessed it again this week. But in his Detroit News editorial endorsing Romney, Snyder never mentioned the auto rescue or his and Romney’s conflicting stances on it, even though Romney had published an editorial on the topic in the same paper just three days ago. Instead, Snyder suggested voters focus on Romney’s business acumen and his ties to the state:

A little more than a year ago, Michigan voters put their trust in a businessman to serve as their governor. They were looking for someone who understands the private sector and has a plan for reversing the economic decline that had befallen our great state. [...]

He has deep ties to our state. Mitt understands the challenges confronting Michigan as few Americans do.

With the Michigan primary approaching, Romney has played up his ties to the state and its auto industry. But his editorials about the auto rescue — the first, from 2009, was titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt“; the second published Tuesday — raise questions about whether he understood the circumstances surrounding the rescue or how many jobs the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler would have cost the American economy.

Romney called for the two automakers to go into managed bankruptcy handled by the private sector. As Yahoo! Autos reporter Justin Hyde points out, though, the private sector wasn’t willing to make the loans necessary to keep the companies in business through a managed bankruptcy. Had they followed the Romney path, the companies likely would have liquidated, healthier automakers like Ford and Toyota (and their suppliers) would have been threatened, and an estimated 1.3 million Americans would have been out of work.

Instead, the auto industry is healthy, hiring, and posting record profits. The difference in those two paths is significant. To Snyder and Romney, however, it apparently isn’t worth mentioning.

In a floor speech last night, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) attempted to expound on the Republican party’s record of defending personal freedom over the past 150 years. However, as often happens when West speaks, the rhetoric quickly turned nasty.

West turned the subject away from the GOP’s record to the Democratic Party’s supposed dislike of equality, saying that the Democrats’ support for a robust social safety net amounts to “the most insidious form of slavery remaining in the world today”:

“Our party firmly believes in the safety net,” West said in a late Wednesday floor speech. “We reject the idea of the safety net becoming a hammock.

“For this reason, the Republican value of minimizing government dependence is particularly beneficial to the poorest among us,” he continued. “Conversely, the Democratic appetite for ever-increasing redistributionary handouts is in fact the most insidious form of slavery remaining in the world today, and it does not promote economic freedom.”

West is either unaware or callously dismissive of the fact that there are an estimated 12.3 million actual forced laborers around the globe, according to the International Labour Organization. Among them are many sweatshop workers held illegally and paid very little, girls and women forced into prostitution, and many others.

The issue of slavery, while legally settled in the United States, has not been solved globally. In fact, according to the United Nations’ Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking, “estimated global annual profits made from the exploitation of all trafficked forced labour are US $31.6 billion.”

Of course, it is possible that West believes that support for the social safety net is a greater evil than actual slavery. But if that’s the case, there are millions of people worldwide who disagree with him.

– Zachary Bernstein