The Nation’s George Zornick noted today that House Republicans — aided by some Democrats — are refusing to appropriate funds for the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, which is supposed to investigate foreclosure fraud and other mortgage abuses by the financial sector:

Yesterday, Representative Maxine Waters, a member of the caucus, made the first attempt to get the RMBS group funding—and it didn’t work.

She offered an amendment to a large appropriations bill, created by Republicans, that would fund, in part, the Department of Justice. The bill provided only a fraction of the $55 million the DoJ asked for in its budget request for “investigating and prosecuting financial and mortgage fraud.” Waters proposed re-appropriating some money in the bill from the NASA program to fully fund the $55 million request…Unfortunately, when put up for a voice vote, the Waters amendment failed in the Republican-dominated chamber.

The RMBS working group has been slow in getting off the ground, and lack of funding certainly won’t help. Of course, this is standard operating procedure when it comes to the House GOP and financial regulation: having failed to prevent Dodd-Frank from becoming law, they have sought to undermine it by not funding the regulators charged with implementing it.

Case in point, in March, House Republicans refused to fully fund the Securities and Exchange Commission. JP Morgan Chase spends four times the SEC’s entire budget on information technology alone, yet House Republicans think that the SEC already has enough resources to police the financial markets. House Republicans won’t even fund efforts to collect the economic data necessary to prevent future financial crises.

Considering the stories that have come out regarding the banks’ mortgage malfeasance, funding an investigation into their practices should be a no-brainer. Foreclosure scams have already increased 60 percent in 2012.

Thousands of protesters gathered outside Bank of America’s Charlotte, North Carolina headquarters throughout the day today, protesting the bank’s involvement in the financial crisis, its shady foreclosure practices, and its financing of destructive environmental projects. At least four protesters were arrested for crossing police lines during the protests, which otherwise remained largely peaceful, according to reports.

The protesters also “foreclosed” on Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, the home of the National Football League’s Carolina Panthers and the site of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Protesters who owned Bank of America shares were refused entry into the bank’s annual shareholder’s meeting, much as Wells Fargo protesters were at its annual meeting last week.

Inside the meeting, disgruntled shareholders forced votes on various proposals, most of which were rejected by executives. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan’s compensation package, which sextupled to more than $7.5 million despite the fact that the bank’s stock price was cut in half in 2011, was overwhelmingly approved.

View pictures of the protest, via Reuters, New Bottom Line, and organizer Matt Browner Hamlin:

Mitt Romney yesterday ludicrously said that he deserves “a lot of credit” for the revival of the American auto industry, a proclamation that befuddled even his staunchest supporters. As Talking Points Memo’s Brian Beutler reported, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) responded to Romney’s remarks by asking, “Romney said that he was responsible for the auto bailout?” “I’d have to look at the context of his remarks,” McCain added.

However, McCain evidently got his story straight before appearing on CNN last night. When asked by CNN’s John King about Romney’s remarks, McCain said that Romney really meant to take credit for being against the way in which the government provided bankruptcy financing to the auto companies:

KING: Senator, forgive me, but to hear Mitt Romney taking credit for the resurgence of the auto industry, isn’t that in a bit of a parallel universe? He was against the bailout.

MCCAIN: Well, being against the bailout was being against what was a deal that they cut, basically, with the unions. Mitt Romney and I don’t understand why the auto industry — by the way, not Ford, who’s doing very well — why GM and Chrysler didn’t do the normal bankruptcy proceedings as thousands of small businesses all over America had to do as they faced these rough times. Instead, they got a special deal, they got taxpayers money, billions of which have not been paid back to the taxpayers, and they could have gone through the normal bankruptcy process. As I said, other companies and corporations did and remained viable and could be fine today. And taxpayers wouldn’t be on the hook.

KING: The companies say they would have run out of cash, that there was no private cash available. They would have had to liquidate, meaning shut down, and then maybe go through bankruptcy. Imagine all the turmoil that would have caused.

MCCAIN: Well, I wonder why Ford didn’t have to do that, number one. Number two is, I don’t accept that.

Both McCain and Romney — when he’s not taking credit for the auto rescue — claim that a bankruptcy without government financing would have been possible. But the consensus opinion is that their view is simply detached from reality. “Romney’s take just doesn’t square with the facts as I lived them,” said Yahoo! Autos reporter Justin Hyde, while The Economist wrote that Romney’s position “conveniently ignores” history.

As Romney endorser Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) said, “There was really a choice between bankruptcy and liquidation. There was no one that was willing to come up not only with the cash to keep them afloat but also to serve the warranties of everyone, you and I that drive all these cars. There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government.” Romney — and now McCain — continues to willfully ignore this reality.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney today attempted to dismiss criticism of his complicated stance on the rescue of the American auto industry, telling a Colorado radio station that his position has been the same since he first authored a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Since writing the editorial in 2008, Romney has both attempted to claim credit for the bailout and re-iterated his position that the industry should have been allowed to fail, most recently saying he would “take a lot a credit” for the auto industry’s recent successes. Those positions don’t conflict, though, according to Romney, who said he still has “the same position on the auto bailout” he had in the beginning:

HOST: You’ve certainly been accused of not sticking with one message, the most recent, your comments about the auto bailout.

ROMNEY: Well, actually, I have the same position on the auto bailout I had from the very beginning. I actually wrote about it.

Romney’s attempts to claim credit for the rescue, however, directly conflict with his 2008 editorial, in which he advocated for letting Chrysler and General Motors enter a managed bankruptcy financed by the private sector. “Frankly, that’s finally what the president did,” he said yesterday.

In reality, the auto rescue didn’t follow the plan outlined by Romney. The government stepped in to finance GM and Chrysler’s entries into bankruptcy because the private sector — including Romney’s former private equity firm, Bain Capital — refused to do so. Without the federal government’s bridge loan, Chrysler and GM would have been forced into liquidating, jeopardizing a million jobs and the future of the entire American automotive industry, as auto insiders, experts, and even Romney’s own endorsers have noted.

Faced with that reality, Romney has put on an extraordinary display of contortion, attempting to convince voters that he both opposed the bailout and came up with it at the same time.

North Carolina is in the news for its new ban on marriage equality, but there’s something else happening in the Tarheel state today: The Bank of America shareholders meeting is being occupied.

In the recession’s fallout, Bank of America has been a primary target, and the demonstrations at its shareholder meeting are just another in a long list of efforts to combat abusive banking practices. What are they protesting? Here’s a list of the top five reasons that Bank of America is being occupied:

1) Cruel and unusual foreclosure practices.: Bank of America’s foreclosure practices are something out of a science fiction novel. There’s the case of the woman and her disabled daughter who were foreclosed on, even after they’d received a loan modification; there are the homeowners that BofA offered loan modifications to if they erased mean things they said about the bank on Twitter; there’s the man who almost lost his home over an 80 cent typo, the elderly couple who were wrongly foreclosed on for paying their mortgage too early, and the man who had the destroyed remnants of his hurricane ravaged house foreclosed on.

2) Bank of America places Bank of America over its customers: Serious accusations leveled against Bank of America include the claim that Bank of America intentionally blocked its customers from seeking mortgage help (“The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged”), and that they allow homes to fall apart in areas that are heavily populated by people of color.

3) A ton of fees, for very little reason: Bank of America customers can expect to pay fees for just about anything. Recipients of unemployment insurance can get hit with fees simply for withdrawing their money. Similarly, taxpayers can find themselves paying a fee on withdrawing their tax returns in some states where the returns can be loaded onto pre-paid debit cards.

4) Bank of America is guilty of robo-signing: As recently as last year, Bank of America was still using robo-signing, the practice of approving foreclosures without verifying basic loan information. Instructions came from management to continue robo-signing, despite objections from lower-level staff.

5) While their customers suffer, the CEO at Bank of America is raking it in:
Less than a month ago, we reported that CEO Brian Moynihan got a $7.5 million pay package. Meanwhile, the company’s shareholders saw the stock lose more than half of its value. In fact, Moynihan’s pay quadrupled in 2011.

As if poor people didn’t have enough to worry about, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has given them one more: enslavement.

West, speaking at the Broward County Lincoln Day Dinner this past Saturday, warned the crowd about the danger of food stamps for American society. “In the last 10 years,” West said, the “food stamp program that has gone from about $20.6 billion to over $75 billion.” The Florida congressmen saw this increase not as a society practicing compassion for its most needy, but as a more nefarious plot. “That’s not how you empower the American people,” West declared. “That’s how you enslave the American people.”

WEST: What have we seen happen recently, in the last 10 years? A food stamp program that has gone from about $20.6 billion to over $75 billion in allocation of funds. A 267 percent increase. That’s not how you empower the American people. That’s how you enslave the American people. That’s how you drive toward economic dependence instead of economic freedom.

Watch it:

Of course, there is a very good reason for the rise in demand for food stamps: the Great Recession. The economic downturn threw millions of Americans out of work, and the government has rightfully aided those who are down on their luck. As the economy recovers, the demand for food stamps is projected to decrease.

Far from being a pernicious plot to enslave the American people, food stamps are currently working just as they’re intended to: to ensure that those who live in poverty get enough to eat. As the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, food stamps are a “powerful anti-poverty program” that “lifted about 4 million Americans above the poverty line in 2010, including about 2 million children.”

Still, the situation for these Americans remains perilous, at best. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) is currently trying to slash food stamp funding, a proposal that West voted for.