A month after the nation’s largest banks reached a mortgage fraud settlement with the federal government and state attorneys general, House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) joined Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY) for a foreclosure hearing in Brooklyn this morning. The field hearing included remarks by both Issa and Towns as well as scheduled testimony from representatives of Wall Street banks that were a part of the settlement, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase.

The hearing was almost immediately interrupted by protesters, however, who called on Issa and the panelists to “stop fighting for Wall Street and fight for the people that elected you!” Others chanted at Issa, “Work for the people!” before they were removed by security.

Watch it, courtesy of Raw Story:

The protesters were promptly removed for interrupting the hearing, but Issa was just getting started. He later blamed homeowners for robo-signing, the fraudulent foreclosure practice that landed banks in hot water in 2010, according to AlterNet reporter Sarah Jaffe:

Blaming homeowners and backlogs for robo-signing is directly contradictory to a report issued by the inspector general of the Department and Urban Development last week. That investigation found that the nation’s biggest banks — several of which had representatives on Issa’s panel — knew about the fraudulent practice, and that managers had authorized robo-signing. Bank managers gave out “vice president” titles to unqualified employees so they could robo-sign documents and squashed investigations into the practices. And when the scandal originally broke in 2010, banks promised to end the practice, only to keep robo-signing documents for at least another year.

Issa’s thoughts on foreclosure fraud, unfortunately, aren’t new. Before the GOP took control of the House in 2011, Issa promised not to investigate the fraudulent acts committed by Wall Street banks, instead vowing to focus his attention on home loans made to poor people.

U.S. Senate candidate Sam Rohrer (R-PA)

Former Pennsylvania State Rep. Sam Rohrer is leading the GOP field for his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate, according to the latest PPP poll. He is seeking the right to challenge Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D) in November.

But between now and the April 24 primary, he might want to brush up on the U.S. Constitution.

In a campaign video posted last week, entitled “A Constitutional America No More,” Rohrer demonstrates a complete ignorance of the congressional appropriations process:

With the help of Senator Casey and the Senate Democrats, the President has managed to give himself the power to spend at will. It’s important to understand that since no budget has been passed during his tenure, the President is free to spend without constraint, making it possible for a crippling 3 trillion dollar increase in spending while Congress can do little more than watch. Without a budget, there is no control over Executive Branch spending. No budget means opening our wallets to an out of control Executive branch that sets its own budget and determines itself the boss.

Watch the video (at the 55 second mark):

Rohrer’s statement is 100 percent false. Article I of the U.S. Constitution explicitly says “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law” — a power expressly given to Congress. While Congress has not opted to make its appropriations through an overarching budget in recent years, it has passed multiple appropriations bills — some funding individual items and some omnibus bills covering multiple parts of government. Each of those appropriations bills has been signed by the president.

Amusingly, in the “frequently asked questions” section of his campaign website, one of the questions is, “Why Pennsylvanians should vote for Sam Rohrer?” The answer, in part: “Sam is a proven, reliable conservative and Constitutional student.” Perhaps he should ask his alma mater, Bob Jones University, for his tuition money back.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) pitched his last budget proposal as a way to rein in the federal budget, cut deficits and debt, and create jobs. While much of the focus on that budget fell on Ryan’s plan to end Medicare as we know it, it also included substantial cuts to vital safety net programs.

One of the programs that would have been cut by Ryan’s budget was the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps). Ryan’s plan turned SNAP into a block grant to states, cutting 18 percent from a program that is credited with keeping 3.9 million Americans — including 1.7 million children — out of poverty in 2010. Had the Ryan budget been approved, that conversion would have had terrible implications for the program’s “ability to respond to rising need, forcing states during economic downturns to cut benefits or create waiting lists for needy families.” And according to a new study from the Center for American Progress, those cuts would have also destroyed more than 174,000 jobs:

In the so-called “Ryan budget plan,” named after the principal author of the bill, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), he proposed a $127 billion cut to the program. A cut of that size would result in the loss of more than 174,000 jobs in the first year.

According to the study, each $1 billion cut from SNAP results in more than 13,700 lost jobs, and a 10 percent cut to the program would kill roughly 96,000 jobs that have depended on the program during the recession. The losses would particularly impact food-related industries, which would lose 11,000 jobs if the program was cut by 10 percent.

It’s unclear whether Ryan’s budget, set to be released tomorrow, will include cuts to SNAP similar to last year’s. If it does, however, it’s important for Ryan to know that such cuts wouldn’t only increase the spread of poverty and hunger, they would kill jobs too.

While it’s well-known by now that women consistently earn less than men even though they often attain better education — 77.4 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts in 2010 — Bloomberg News’ Frank Bass reports a new development: this gap is widest on Wall Street.

Parsing census data, Bass found that the six jobs with the largest gender gap in 2010 were insurance agents, managers, financial clerks, securities sales agents, personal financial advisers, other financial specialists — all in “the Wall Street-heavy financial sector”:

The financial sector pays women in the six major jobs with the biggest salary gap from 55 to 62 cents for every $1 made by men, according to the census. Female bank tellers, with a median salary of $23,695, came closest to narrowing the gap in the industry, pulling down 96 cents for every $1 earned.

One reason female professionals make less money in the financial sector is that they tend to wind up in lower-paying positions such as in public finance rather than on trading desks, said Louise Marie Roth, a University of Arizona sociologist and author of “Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street.”

Women often simply don’t know how much they’re being underpaid because a large percentage of Wall Street salaries are based on bonuses that are kept secret, she said.

The gap is hardly confined to the financial sector — wide disparities exist in many other high-education sectors, such as among doctors and lawyers — but it’s notable that all six of the job categories with the highest discrepancy are in a single sector.

Bass notes that “women who want to earn more on Wall Street than their male colleagues have one reliable option. They can set up a shoe-shine,” where women make $1.02 for every dollar men make.

Massive sales of the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers have made Apple the largest retailer in America, so big, in fact, that it is larger than the rest of the country’s retail market. The company is currently sitting on nearly $100 billion in cash reserves, and it announced this morning that it will use some of that cash to pay dividends to shareholders and buy back some of its own stock.

During the conference call announcing its plans, Apple also announced that it was using only cash it holds in the United States to finance the dividend. It won’t touch the reserves it has overseas, mainly so it can avoid paying American taxes on that cash, CNN Money reports:

It’s significant that Apple is using its domestic cash, rather than the much heftier stockpiles it holds overseas, because foreign cash would be subject to a sizable “repatriation tax” if brought back into the United States. Cook said the company didn’t want to pay that tax.

Apple is among the companies that make up WinAmerica, a coalition of corporations lobbying Congress for a repatriation holiday. The companies have argued that the holiday would boost economic growth and job creation by allowing them to bring money back either without paying taxes or at a lower rate than the current 35%.

There’s little evidence, however, that the holiday would have that effect, even as it has gained favor with Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates. Congress approved a similar holiday in 2004, only to watch companies use it to pay dividends to shareholders before promptly cutting jobs. Kristen Forbes, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers when the 2004 holiday was approved, said it “didn’t accomplish the stated goals of bringing jobs and investment to the US,’’ and afterward, corporations stashed even more money overseas in anticipation of another future holiday.

Further, at a time when the country’s effective corporate tax rate is at a 40-year low (companies that make up WinAmerica are already paying low rates), such a holiday would cost the U.S. $80 billion over the next decade.

Since its beginning, Occupy Wall Street and the protests it spawned across the country have faced critics who say it has no goals and wouldn’t achieve any substantial accomplishments. “In fact, the sum total of what Occupy Wall Street has accomplished is zero,” a New York Post columnist wrote in November. “Inspiring chat around the national watercooler is not an achievement.”

The movement turned six months old last Saturday, and a closer look at its record of achievement reveals that it has done more than spark conversation around Wall Street’s watercoolers. Occupy groups have shifted the national debate on taxes and inequality, helped homeowners stay in their homes, forced major policy issues to the forefront of debate at the state and federal level, and gotten the attention of the institutions they’ve challenged most forcefully. With that in mind, ThinkProgress compiled a brief list of Occupy Wall Street’s accomplishments over its first six months:

Income Inequality: The 99 Percent movement refocused America’s political debate, forcing news outlets and eventually politicians to focus on rising income inequality. While debt and deficits were the primary focus of the media before the movement started, their attention after the movement began shifted to jobs, Wall Street, and unemployment. By the end of October, even Republicans were talking about income inequality, and a week later, Time Magazine devoted its cover to the topic, asking, “Can you still move up in America?”

Occupy Our Homes: The movement has drawn attention to many of the predatory, discriminatory, and fraudulent practices perpetrated by banks during the foreclosure crisis, and across the country, Occupy groups, religious leaders, and community organizations have helped homeowners prevent wrongful foreclosures on their homes. Activists in Detroit are working to save their fifth home, and similar actions have taken place in cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Atlanta. The movement has drawn so much attention that local political leaders and even members of Congress have stepped in to help homeowners facing foreclosure.

Move Your Money: On Bank Transfer Day, activists helped more than 40,000 Americans move their money from large banks to credit unions, and more than 650,000 switched to credit unions last October. Religious groups have taken up the cause as well, moving $55 million before Thanksgiving. This year, a San Francisco interfaith group moved $10 million from Wells Fargo and other groups marked Lent by moving more money from Wall Street. As a result, analysts say the nation’s 10 biggest banks could lose $185 billion in customer deposits this year “due to customer defections.”

Fighting For Positive Policies: Occupy groups have pushed for positive policy outcomes at both the state and federal levels. Occupy The SEC submitted a 325-page comment letter on the Volcker Rule, a regulation to rein in big banks. Pressure from protesters forced New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to reverse his opposition to a millionaire’s tax, and activists fought Indiana Republicans’ union-busting “right-to-work” law, and have pushed big banks to stop financing destructive environmental practices like mountaintop removal mining in coal states.

Though many of the camps across the country have been disbanded, the 99 Percent Movement isn’t going away. Organizers have continued fighting at the state level, pushing back against banks on fraudulent foreclosures and other issues, and have now turned their attention to the 2012 presidential elections. Movement leaders in New York, meanwhile, are developing high-tech ways to organize protests and keep the movement going. Occupy is starting to assert a political influence, pushing multiple candidates and even running for office themselves — in both Maine and Pennsylvania, former Occupy activists are running for public office.

“It’s changed the language,” one protester told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s brought out a lot of issues that people are talking about. … And that’s the start of change.”

Republicans have continually decried the Obama Administration’s “runaway spending” since he took office, blaming him for growing deficits and a mounting national debt. But a quick glance at the facts show that, compared to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, Obama is actually embracing fiscal conservatism more than any other president in recent history, with the exception of fellow Democrat Bill Clinton.

The Atlantic crunches the numbers:

For all the talk you hear about Obama’s historic spree, government spending actually hasn’t increased so dramatically under this president. The stimulus was big, but it’s over. It’s been replaced by, if not austerity (which has struck our states and cities) then a hard correction to the center.

Evidence of the cost-cutting measures employed by Obama can be found in the last several jobs reports. While the overall number of jobs created has steadily increased for the last several months, those advances have all come entirely in the private sector. Public sector jobs have actually been on the decline for much of the last year as government spending on some agencies and programs have been cut.

Economics Professor Mark Thoma provides a helpful chart on his blog that puts President Obama’s per capita spending into context, comparing it with the spending of every president in the last 40 years.

That’s likely a hard pill to swallow for Obama’s critics, who have spent years hammering his administration for record spending and fiscal irresponsibility. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put it best: “Going by federal expenditures…it would seem that if Obama’s a socialist, Ronald Reagan is Karl Marx with an ICBM.”

When Craig Dubow resigned as CEO of the nation’s largest newspaper conglomerate amid health problems last year, he ended a six-year stint that “was, by most accounts, a disaster.” Gannett, the parent company of the USA Today and 80 other American newspapers, had seen its revenue plummet $1.7 billion and its stock price fall 86 percent, from $72 a share to just over $10.

To counter those losses, Gannett shed jobs, and a lot of them. Industry estimates say the company has laid off at least 20,000 workers since 2005, reducing its workforce from 52,000 to roughly 32,000. Despite those losses, Gannett awarded Dubow a severance package worth $32 million, NPR reports:

Dubow’s final compensation package includes $12.8 million in retirement benefits, $6.2 million in disability benefits and a $5.9 million severance payment, according to the filing. Gannett stock options and restricted stock, which Dubow had accrued during his years of employment with the company, were also part of the package. Those stock awards are valued at nearly $7 million.

Separately, Gannett will pay $25,000 to $50,000 annually for a $6.2 million life insurance policy covering Dubow and another $70,000 annually for benefits such as health insurance, home computer and secretarial assistance and financial counseling. He will receive most of these benefits for three years unless he goes to work for a competitor, according to the filing.

The lavish severance package Gannett is giving Dubow stands in stark contrast with how it treated many of the 20,000 employees it let go. After giving severance packages to employees during early rounds of layoffs (a common industry practice), Gannett decided in 2009 that it would no longer offer such packages, instead paying supplemental unemployment benefits that shifted most of the costs to states. At the time, Gannett claimed the decision would help many employees get more than they would from severance. But for those who worked or freelanced at other jobs, that meant they’d get much less — and perhaps nothing at all.

“Craig championed our consumers and their ever-changing needs for news and information,” the chair of Gannett’s board of directors said when his retirement was announced in October. The question, as former reporter Peter Lewis asked at the time, is how exactly Dubow served consumers or his employees. “They laid off journalists. They cut the pay of those who remained, while demanding that they work longer hours. They closed news bureaus. They slashed newsroom budgets,” Lewis wrote on his blog. “As revenue fell, and stock prices tanked, and product quality deteriorated, they rewarded themselves huge pay raises and bonuses.”