In early March, the Laborers’ International Union of America launched a radio and mail ad campaign aimed at prodding Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) to pass the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, a highway and transportation bill.

Their ads, focused on Kentucky and Ohio, included children singing “America’s bridges falling down, all around the country,” to the tune of the song “London Bridge is Falling Down.” A narrator warned:

The average age of a U.S. bridge is 45 years, dangerously close to the life span of 50 years. More than a quarter of our bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Because of tight budgets, bridge maintenance is in jeopardy. and if Republican leaders in Congress have their way those budgets will get cut even more. Text “Bridge” to 69866 and let Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell know we need a real highway bill to save our bridges and our lives.

This got the attention of McConnell’s staff, who posted a refutation on his campaign website. McConnell professed his support for the highway bill and slammed Laborers for its support of Democratic candidates and the “radical” Occupy movement.

“Contrary to the assertion in the ads,” McConnell’s staff claimed, “Senator McConnell has been working to pass the highway bill in the U.S. Senate, which is currently slated for a vote on final passage next week.” A McConnell spokesman also told a Louisville, Kentucky radio station that the minority leader was working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to pass the highway bill.

Just before the vote, McConnell took to the senate floor and praised the lead sponsors, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK) for their bipartisan effort. “They have worked together in a collegial way to bring us to this point on the highway bill,” he raved.

Moments later, McConnell joined 21 other Republicans — and no Democrats — in voting against the bill. The House is expected to take up a similar version in April, rather than the far inferior House Republican version.

McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment on why he voted against a bill he’d pledged to support and no explanations were apparent on his senate or campaign websites. But it would certainly appear that the Republican leader owes the Laborers an apology.

Deutsche Bank AG sued to seize Lynn Szymoniak’s Palm Beach Gardens, Florida home in July 2008, setting in motion a foreclosure process that still hasn’t ended. But when the bank couldn’t prove it owned her home, claimed it had lost her mortgage note, then admitted that it acquired her mortgage three months after it originally sued, Szymoniak began investigating the bank’s paperwork.

Szymoniak, an insurance fraud investigator, not only found out that the paperwork to her mortgage was fraudulent, she uncovered thousands of other fraudulent bank documents that had been processed using robo-signers. In 2010, she filed multiple whistleblower claims against banks in federal court, and now she’ll pocket $18 million for her work, Bloomberg reports:

Szymoniak, 63, is among six whistle-blowers who will pocket $46.5 million as part of a $25 billion national foreclosure settlement that state and federal officials reached in February with five banks, including Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Fraudulent foreclosures have reached near-pandemic levels since the collapse of the housing market. At banks like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America, fraudulent practices like robo-signing were approved by upper-level management, and employees with no banking experience were given vice-president level titles so they could sign foreclosure documents (one Wells Fargo “Vice President” came to the bank from a pizza restaurant). When the practice was originally uncovered, banks were enveloped in scandal — and kept robo-signing anyway.

Szymoniak’s case still isn’t resolved. Deutsche Bank is proceeding with foreclosure action against her home, and she told Bloomberg that she isn’t sure what she’ll do with the money. But unlike many victims of the foreclosure crisis, Szymoniak was a homeowner who was capable of fighting back. “When they did this to her, they picked the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place,” Richard Harpootlian, Szymoniak’s attorney, told Bloomberg. “They stuck their hand into the beehive.”

Three Missouri Republicans running to take on Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in November were asked during a radio debate on KMOX what the federal minimum wage is and whether they would vote to increase it. None of the three knew what the minimum wage it, but all knew that they would vote against increasing it, regardless.

Host Charlie Brennan asked the three candidates — businessman John Brunner, former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, and Rep. Todd Akin — “What is the federal minimum wage? Would you vote to increase it?” Here are their responses to the first question:

BRENNAN: Okay, do you know what the minimum wage is?

BRUNNER: No sir.

BRENNAN: How about you Sarah Steelman?

STEELMAN: Uh…$7.50 an hour.

BRENNAN: Do you know what the minimum wage is?



AKIN: My guess is its somewhere in the 6 or 7, but I don’t know the exact number right now.



Watch it:

The federal minimum wage (and Missouri’s minimum wage) is $7.25 per hour. Certainly all three should know the wage level at which four million American workers are at or below. Akin, especially, should know, since in 2007 he voted against raising the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25.

The candidates’ explanations for not wanting to raise the minimum wage ranged from nonsensical (Brunner said his business gave “better than the minimum benefits”) to extreme, with Akin calling for scrapping the minimum wage altogether. “I don’t think the government should be setting prices on wages in any way shape or form,” said Akin.

Steelman was opposed to raising the minimum wage because she “think[s] it’s high enough as it is.” A person working a minimum-wage job for 40-hour work weeks with no vacation would earn just $15,080 over the course of the year, before taxes.

Perhaps explaining their ignorance of the current minimum wage is the fact that none of the three candidates personally live anywhere near it. Akin owns two homes and receives an annual congressional salary of $174,000. Steelman has donated upwards of $400,000 to her own Senate campaign. Brunner tops them all, sporting a net worth of approximately $100 million.

As we’ve noted, Republicans are are bogging down an attempt to reauthorize the U.S. Export-Import Bank — which helps companies access capital to sell their products abroad — on the grounds that it’s too much government intrusion in the free market. The agency isn’t even funded by taxpayers (though the agency does provide loan guarantees that are backed by tax dollars), but conservatives are still throwing a fit about Democrats’ desire to reauthorize the agency and increase its loan limit from $100 billion to $140 billion.

One of the loudest corporate voices arguing against the bank’s reauthorization is Delta Airlines, while one of the loudest arguing against it in Congress is House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA). And as Politico noted today, Delta and Cantor have more than this policy agreement in common:

A sleepy Export-Import Bank debate in Congress has blossomed into a corporate political brawl matching the powerful Boeing Co. lobby against Delta Air Lines, represented here by a close friend and supporter of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

The issues are bigger than the personalities, affecting billions of dollars in U.S.-backed loan guarantees supporting the overseas sale of Boeing aircraft. But with pivotal Senate votes now scheduled for Tuesday, Cantor is without a doubt the crucial broker for the House. And Boeing is hammering away at his close ties with Delta lobbyist and confidante Andrea Newman — even as it fields a small army of its own.

If it seems David vs. Goliath, Newman, as Delta’s senior vice president for government affairs, comes with a BlackBerry instead of a slingshot. In an anecdote Cantor’s office denied Friday, he is said to have once emailed her about an aviation bill while still in a members-only meeting with the White House on the subject. And the two enjoy what’s described as a genuine family — University of Michigan — friendship even as she helps him raise campaign funds.

In addition to gumming up the works on the ExIm bank, Delta has been on the wrong side of many a policy fight recently. It’s worst work was pushing Republicans to include a union-busting provision in a bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration, while ultimately led to an FAA shutdown.

As CAP’s Sabina Dewan has explained, the ExIM bank (yes, in addition to providing some help to giant manufacturers like Boeing) is crucial for smaller exporters that have a hard time accessing financing. But it’s evidently more important for Cantor and crew to throw Delta yet another bone, at the expense of the wider economy.

In 2010, as the nation slowly ground its way from Great Recession to recovery, 93 percent of national income gains went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. As Reuters’s David Cay Johnston pointed out today, this makes the 2010 recovery quite different from the recovery that followed the Great Depression, as then, income gains were widely shared by the population, not concentrated at the very top:

The 1934 economic rebound was widely shared, with strong income gains for the vast majority, the bottom 90 percent.

In 2010, we saw the opposite as the vast majority lost ground.

National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10 percent. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top one percent of the top one percent.

Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37 percent of the entire national gain.

During the recovery, corporate profits have also roared back, already hitting their pre-recession heights. Wages, however, have not done the same.

Greg Smith’s New York Times op-ed — in which he resigned from Goldman Sachs due to its “toxic and destructive” culture that’s focused on ripping off clients — has not prompted much in the way of soul-searching on Wall Street. Instead, Goldman and the nation’s other big banks have circled the wagons and smeared Smith, aided by the conservative financial press.

As we argued, Smith’s op-ed makes the case for the Volcker Rule, the regulation included in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that limits the amount of money big banks can use making their own risky bets. The rule is meant to push such risky trading to firms that aren’t too-big-to-fail and backstopped by the federal government. And several Congressional Democrats agree with that assessment, according to Bloomberg News:

Lawmakers including Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the Democrats who authored the Volcker rule’s ban on proprietary trading and conflicts of interest in the Dodd-Frank Act said the piece strengthened the case for restrictions on Wall Street trading.

Congress can’t “legislate the culture but I think the heart of this goes to why we needed the Merkley-Levin amendment,” Merkley, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in an interview. [...]

Representative Barney Frank, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said the column serves as a rebuttal to bank arguments that restrictions in trading activities would result in increased costs for market participants such as pension and mutual funds.

‘‘What he does is to reinforce the notion that much of the benefit from what they do goes to them and not to the broader society,’’ Frank, who helped draft the law that bears his name, said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It doesn’t make it criminal, but it does remove one of the arguments against the new restrictions.’’

The Merkley-Levin amendment referenced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) was an even stronger version of the Volcker Rule that never even received a vote during the Dodd-Frank debate. Not only was the Volcker rule watered down before Dodd-Frank was passed — thanks in large part to Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) — but the financial services industry has been trying to weaken it by hammering the regulators crafting its final version. But Smith’s op-ed shows how vital it is that banks engaging in this sort of activity not receive federal backing, so that they can’t go right back to business if their risky behavior causes them to fail.

Food safety advocacy groups are fighting a proposed rule that would allow private companies to assume some of the food inspection duties currently handled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service currently oversees all poultry for blemishes and defects before the carcasses are fully processed, but under the new rule, poultry plants would assume those responsibilities.

The USDA estimates that the program, known as HIMP, would save the USDA just under $100 million over the next three years while providing a $520 million shot in the arm to poultry companies. At the same time, the USDA claims, it will reduce 5,200 poultry-related illnesses each year. Advocacy groups like Food & Water Watch, however, share a different story. FWW examined more than 5,000 USDA documents and found that companies already operating under trial versions of HIMP are missing defects at absurd rates, Food Safety News reports:

FWW said they found that company employees often miss quality defects like “feathers, lungs, oil glands, trachea and bile still on the carcass.”

Their analysis found that the average error rate for these types of defect in chicken slaughter facilities was 64 percent and 87 percent in turkey slaughter facilities. And for one turkey slaughter facility, nearly 100 percent of samples found this category of defect. FWW also found that the vast majority of non-compliance records filed for the 14 plants under the pilot was for “fecal contamination found on the carcasses.” Out of 229 NRs filed from March to August 2011, 208 (90 percent) were for visible fecal contamination that was missed by company employees.

The USDA says it is trying to “modernize” its outdated and inefficient system, but previous attempts to expand the HIMP program faced similar criticism. In 2002, the Government Accountability Office reported that some plans participating in HIMP had higher results of contamination than before. Five of 11 plants had higher rates of salmonella contamination while only two improved, and tests found higher rates of defects in seven of the plants. At the time, Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) called the program a “recipe for food safety disaster.”

And if the various analyses of HIMP plants is true and it fails to decrease the instance of foodborne illness, the program likely won’t save taxpayers money, as FSIS claims. One out of six Americans suffer from foodborne illnesses each year, with 128,00 resulting in hospitalization and 3,000 resulting in death. According to Georgetown University’s Product Safety Project, those illnesses come at a cost of $152 billion a year.