President Obama outlined three proposals to address America’s struggling housing market today in Nevada, the state with the nation’s second highest foreclosure rate. Ahead of the speech, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney circulated a release hitting Obama’s housing record, including a graphic criticizing the president for roughly the 3 million foreclosures and a high unemployment rate that have occurred since he took office in 2009:

Romney’s criticism is odd, considering the candidate’s only elucidated housing proposal was telling homeowners, “Don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit bottom.” That Romney said it in Nevada, a state that has been among the tops for foreclosures since the crisis, made his policy prescription even more remarkable — and it earned him strong rebukes from Nevada’s Republican governor and several of the state’s Republican lawmakers. And even though Romney’s economic plan had 59 points — none was related to housing.

The foreclosure crisis Romney blames on Obama, meanwhile, started well before he took office, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis that started the Great Recession. High unemployment — which Romney again blames on Obama — was largely a result of that crisis, and though Romney has continually slammed Obama for making the economy worse, he and his campaign have yet to substantiate those claims.

Earlier this week, the CEOs of 18 corporations wrote an open letter to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner opining that it would be a mistake to increase the tax rate on dividends and capital gains as called for in the Obama administration’s budget. The budget treats investment income the same as ordinary wage income for households making more than $250,000.

As Citizens for Tax Justice noted, the arguments used by these CEOs to protect their own low tax rates are bunk. In addition, the CEOs oversee companies that also have exceedingly low tax rates. For instance, signing the letter were:

– Gale E. Klappa, Wisconsin Energy Corp. — Average Negative 13.2% tax rate 2008-11

– David M. McClanahan, CenterPoint Energy — Average Negative 11.3 tax rate 2008-11

– Lowell McAdam, Verizon Communications Inc. — Average Negative 3.8% tax rate 2008-11

– James E. Rogers, Duke Energy Corp. — Average Negative 3.5% tax rate 2008-11

– Benjamin G.S. Fowke III, Xcel Energy — Average 1.0% tax rate 2008-10

– Gerard M. Anderson, DTE Energy Co. — Average 0.2% tax rate 2008-11

– Gregory L. Ebel, Spectra Energy Corp. — Average 13.6% tax rate 2008-10

– Thomas A. Fanning, Southern Co. — Average 17.4% tax rate 2008-10

It’s bad enough that these corporations are contributing so much to the fact that corporate taxes are at a forty year low. But to then turn around and advocate for preserving the low rate on capitals gains — which is a leading contributor to income inequality — really adds insult to injury. Remember, it was conservative icon Ronald Reagan who completely equalized the treatment of wage income and capital gains income, rejecting the conservative argument that a lower rate on investment income is necessary.

Over the last few decades, the gap between the richest Americans and everybody else has grown substantially. According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, one of the driving factors has been the growth in pay going to executives and employees of financial firms:

The significant income growth at the very top of the income distribution over the last few decades was largely driven by households headed by someone who was either an executive or was employed in the financial sector. Executives, and workers in finance, accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1 percent and 67 percent of the increase in income for the top 0.1 percent from 1979 to 2005. These estimates understate the role of executive compensation and the financial sector in fueling income growth at the top because the increasing presence of working spouses who are executives or in finance is not included.

Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay. The average Fortune 500 CEO is now pay 380 times as much as the average worker; in 1980, those CEOs received 42 times the average worker’s pay.

And of course, it’s no secret that Wall Street employees are pulling in humongous paychecks, even after they crashed the global economy. As one former Wall Street trader put it, “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little.” And while they’ve been collecting bigger and bigger bonuses, the rest of the American workforce has dealt with stagnating wages and the Great Recession.

The same week that JP Morgan Chase announced it lost $2 billion on a risky trade, Democrats in both the House and Senate have introduced measures that would force the nation’s four biggest banks — JP Morgan among them — to shrink. The bill, proposed by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Reps. Brad Miller (D-NC) and Keith Ellison (D-MN), would cap the percentage of the nation’s deposits that any one bank can hold:

Under the proposals, a single bank could not hold more than 10 percent of the nation’s banking deposits, nor take on more than 10 percent of the banking system’s liabilities. Banks could take on no more than $1.3 trillion, or 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, in non-deposit liabilities. Non-banks could not take on more than three percent of GDP in liabilities, and could not grow larger than $436 billion.

Four existing banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo — are currently above the size cap, and would need to be shrunk down if the bill became law, according to Miller’s office.

“The gigantic size of megabanks, and the perception in the marketplace that they are too big for the government ever to permit to fail, gives them an unfair competitive advantage over smaller financial institutions that distorts the market and discourages competition.” said Miller. “As our nation’s economy begins to recover, we must ensure that megabanks cannot take the same kind of risks that hurt so many of our nation’s families and small businesses,” Brown added. “That’s why we need to place sensible size limits on our nation’s large financial institutions and ensure that if banks gamble, they have the resources to cover their losses.”

At the moment, the nation’s four biggest banks hold about 40 percent of total deposits. They also issue one out of every two mortgages and nearly two out of every three credit cards in America.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) didn’t campaign on union busting, and claimed that his now-infamous bill stripping collective bargaining rights from public sector unions was about fixing the state’s finances, not attacking organized labor. Indeed, it was called the Budget Repair Bill and Walker and his allies said it was a purely fiscal issue.

“You see,” Walker said in a February 11, 2011 speech. “Despite a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard over the past 11 days, the bill I put forward isn’t aimed at state workers, and it certainly isn’t a battle with unions.”

Labor activists and Democrats, of course, claimed that the legislation’s true purpose was to break unions in the state, in order to help ensure more Republicans would get elected in the future. Now, a video released today by a Wisconsin documentary filmmaker should put any doubt to rest and show that Walker was lying through his teeth the entire time that he claimed his bill had nothing to do with undermining unions.

In the video, shot on January 18, 2011 — just before Walker introduced the Budget Repair Bill and a month before his speech — Walker tells a billionaire campaign contributor that the forthcoming budget bill is the first step in an elaborate strategy to “divide and conquer” unions in the state.

Speaking with Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks, who has since become Walker’s single-largest campaign contributor and the biggest donor in Wisconsin history, Walker says the bill will help make Wisconsin a right-to-work and “completely red” state. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which first reported the exchange, transcribed the conversation:

“Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions -” [Hendricks asked]

“Oh, yeah,” Walker broke in.

“- and become a right-to-work?” Hendricks continued. “What can we do to help you?”

“Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill,” Walker said. “The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

Watch the exchange, which is part of a documentary to be released soon:

While it’s by now almost universally understood that Walker’s intentions all along were to deliver a body blow to labor, the video confirms definitively that Walker pushed the legislation under false pretenses and in bad faith. This is, unfortunately, hardly shocking, as even Walker tacitly acknowledges it now, but shows that Walker intentionally deceived the legislature and the public.

Walker also claimed publicly all along that he’s not interested in making Wisconsin a “right-to-work” state, telling the Journal-Sentinel just last month, “Private sector unions are my partner in economic development.”

Thanks to this bill, Walker is now facing a recall election against former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D), who said of the video, “This is another colossal bait and switch that goes directly to his honesty.” “What he claims he is not in favor of publicly, to the person who has made the largest contribution in state history, he says exactly the opposite. You can’t trust him,” Barrett added.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon announced on a conference call yesterday that the bank suffered $2 billion in losses from a risky trade that turned sour. The trade dents Dimon’s case that Wall Street can responsibly manage itself and yet again proves the need for a strong Volcker Rule, which could largely ban such risky trades at federally-insured institutions.

“There were many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment,” Dimon said as the company’s stock fell in extended trading. “These were egregious mistakes, they were self-inflicted.” Those errors, however, could have been prevented were it not for extensive lobbying efforts from banks like JPMorgan, which has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying since the beginning of 2011 (including nearly $2 million already this year). Dimon, in fact, was in Washington just last week to personally lobby the Federal Reserve to weaken the Volcker Rule.

Those lobbying efforts have worked. Dimon insists that the trade-gone-wrong was a hedge, not a proprietary bet, and as such would not be banned under Volcker. The only reason that’s true, however, is because Dimon is referring to the trade as a “hedge” to exploit a loophole Wall Street banks and their Republican allies helped insert into the watered-down version of the Volcker Rule that was included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. That’s a loophole Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) have been trying — unsuccessfully — to close, as Bloomberg notes:

Levin and Merkley, in their February comment letter, pushed regulators to tighten the exemption for hedging, calling some of what may be allowed a “major weakness” in the rule.

Dimon acknowledged that the losses would lead to scrutiny and calls for a tougher Volcker Rule yesterday, saying the blunder “plays right into the hands of a bunch of pundits out there.” What Dimon ignores, though, is that yesterday’s massive loss — big even by JPMorgan’s lofty standards — does in fact exemplify the need for such a rule. For years, banks have made billions in profits from risky bets like this one, but when too many of the deals went bad in 2008, they turned to taxpayers for a bailout.

Thursday’s events prove that Wall Street hasn’t learned its lesson from the last crisis, and that America’s “too big to fail” institutions are too irresponsible to avoid failure. The Volcker Rule, watered down as it may be, is aimed at preventing that. Unfortunately, Dimon and his Wall Street colleagues remain committed to making sure it won’t.

According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, 230,000 Americans will see their unemployment benefits vanish this weekend, even as the jobless rate remains stubbornly high. Nearly half of those losing their benefits live in California, where the unemployment rate is 11 percent:

Long-term unemployed workers in a growing list of states are being abruptly cut from federal unemployment insurance, a new analysis from the National Employment Law Project shows. Due to reductions Congress enacted earlier this year, more than 400,000 workers in 27 states will have lost between 13 to 20 weeks of federal unemployment insurance under the Extended Benefits program by Saturday, May 12th. The cuts come even though long-term unemployment remains near record highs. [...]

The latest round of cuts that take effect in eight states this Saturday will affect more than 200,000 long-term unemployed workers and account for the biggest number of workers to be hit so far, as states like California, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas are all being phased out at the same time. In California, nearly 100,000 workers are being cut from the extended benefits this week.

These cuts are occurring because the formula under which states receive federal funds for extended unemployment benefits stipulates that those funds disappear if the state’s unemployment rate stops increasing. So because California and other states have seen some improvement in their labor situations, their funds vanish. “The Extended Benefits program is being phased out because state unemployment rates have stopped climbing, but unemployment is still exceedingly high in many places,” said NELP Executive Director Christine Owens.

There are still more than three job seekers for every available opening, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and more than 30 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. Considering those numbers, it makes no sense to cut people off from unemployment benefits, which have ensured that millions of Americans don’t slip below the poverty line. According to the Government Accountability Office, 20 percent of those cut off from unemployment benefits by early 2010 fell into poverty.