House Republicans on the Appropriations Committee yesterday released their 2013 budget for the nation’s financial market regulators. Under the GOP plan, both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would see their budgets finalized at levels far below President Obama’s request, with the CFTC even seeing a real reduction in dollars from its budget last year:

The House Appropriations Committee’s fiscal 2013 spending package would slash the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s annual budget by about $25 million to $180.4 million.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, would see its 2013 budget rise by about $50 million, to $1.37 billion from $1.32 billion, according to the Republicans’ proposal.

Both budgets are well below the targets that President Barack Obama had proposed for the SEC and CFTC, with both agencies finalizing numerous new regulations required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street oversight law.

Republicans have been making a concerted effort to undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reform law by denying regulators the funds needed to implement it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has even said, “the less we fund those agencies, the better America will be.”

But this time, the GOP’s effort comes in the wake of JP Morgan’s multibillion dollar trading debacle, which showed that Wall Street has no hesitation about going back to the sort of risky behavior that contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said that “the result of the House bill is to effectively put the interests of Wall Street ahead of those of the American public.” Rep. Barny Frank (D-MA) added in a statement, “At a time when JPMorgan Chase has reported the loss of $3 billion or more in the derivatives markets, the Republicans are refusing to appropriate a small percentage of that amount to provide the protections we need against a return to financial chaos.”

The regularity of gender discrimination in the workplace has been demonstrated time and again. For example, currently, women get paid 77 cents to a man’s dollar. Inequity in the financial and lobbying industries is particularly prevalent. And in venture capital firms, where women make up a small minority of partner positions, discrimination seems to be compounded.

Several writers at Betabeat conducted a study calculating the FEM (female equality metric) of 71 venture capital firms. They found that “almost 50 percent of venture capital firms don’t have any female partners” and that many have exclusively female receptionists:

Page through the list of venture capital’s heavyweights, and it’s striking to see how few women have made it to the upper ranks. Also striking was the perfect 100 POFR, or percentage of female receptionists, at the 26 VC firms we called…’We have female administrative assistants,’ explained one woman who picked up the phone, when asked whether any of the partners and managing directors were women.

Even one firm with a slightly better ranking, Kleiner Perkins, is being sued by investment partner Ellen Pao for sex discrimination. Among other things, “the suit alleges that Pao, along with other female employees at the firm, were regularly left out of meetings held by the firm’s male partners and that she was unfairly passed over for promotion because of her gender.”

– Nina Liss-Schultz

2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has been campaigning hard against government spending, blasting “crony capitalism” and criticizing the Obama administration for providing economic development subsidies. Romney has blasted the “endless subsidies and credits intended to shape behavior in our economic society,” calling them “intrusion in the workings of the free marketplace itself.”

However, as Bloomberg News reported, the companies run by the private equity firm Bain Capital when Romney was its CEO had little problem accepting subsidies from state and local governments:

During Romney’s years as chief executive of Bain Capital LLC, companies owned by the firm received millions of dollars in benefits from a variety of state and local government economic development programs.

In California, taxpayer money built one Bain company a conveyor bridge between two of its buildings. New York City gave another Bain company tax breaks and lower energy bills to discourage it from moving to New Jersey. And in Indiana, a county government issued bonds to help buy new equipment for a Bain-owned steel plant — a business success featured in a Romney campaign ad touting his private sector prowess.

As ThinkProgress has reported, in his campaign ads, Romney has been citing the Steel Dynamics as an example of where his business acumen help turn around a company and create jobs. Steel Dynamics benefited from $37 million in subsidies from the state of Indiana.