Heavy storms over the weekend knocked out electricity for millions of Americans across the mid-Atlantic, including hundreds of thousands of residents of the District of Columbia. Pepco, the utility corporation that has a monopoly over electric services in the D.C., is estimating that it won’t have power restored to 90 percent of households until Friday.

“How many times have we been through this before?” asked D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray. “Friday is just not good enough.” Indeed, Pepco is a popular target for discontent in D.C., and for good reason. In the last few years, the company has cut service and maintenance, even while it made millions in profits and paid its executives fat bonuses:

As the good-government website OurDC notes,”From 2008 to 2010, Pepco CEO Joe Rigby earned $8.8 million and Pepco top officers earned more than $22 million. During that same period, Pepco reported $882 million in profits, paid no federal and state income taxes and received $817 million in tax refunds.” Yet as the money rolled in, the Maryland Public Service Commission allowed Pepco to cut back on maintenance, in order to divert funds to dividends and management bonuses…Pepco faces a simple reliability equation: The more it spends on improving service, the less is available for dividends and executive bonuses. CEO Rigby is a major shareholder, so in effect awards himself a commission when he keeps infrastructure spending low and dividends high.

Adding insult to injury, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, Pepco has not paid any net federal corporate income tax for the last decade (despite those millions in profits):

Pepco Holdings: The company recorded small restructuring charges in 2010. The study reallocated these charges to the years they were actually spent. This slightly increased U.S. pretax profits in 2010 and slightly reduced them in 2011. Tax deferrals, primarily from accelerated depreciation, reduced the company’s taxes substantially, as did other factors. The company does not appear to have paid any net federal income tax for at least a decade.

In the last four years, Pepco has actually paid a negative 39.5 percent corporate tax rate, meaning it received millions in tax subsidies from the government. And for that, D.C. residents received a company that can’t get the power back on for a week after a storm.

Economic inequality has shot upwards since 1979, as the top one percent of income earners went from earning ten times as much as the bottom 90 percent to earning 20 times as much. And the top 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent have pulled away to far more dramatic heights. In his new book Twilight of the Elites, MSNBC host Chris Hayes argues this change in the country’s economic landscape is one of the key causes of the breakdown of American meritocracy:

CHRIS HAYES: The argument that I make in the book is that inequality is bad because of what it does to the people at the top of the social pyramid. That it actually makes the people at the top of the social pyramid worse… It just is impossible, in practical terms, to separate equality of opportunity from equality of outcome. The latter subverts the former almost as what I call in the book a kind of iron law.

Hayes recently sat down with ThinkProgress to discuss the book and its implications. Watch it:

The narrative core of his thesis carries personal significance for Hayes: When he was eleven, Hayes entered Hunter College, an extremely selective high school in Manhattan. The school prides itself on determining admission with a single test, irrespective of an applicant’s parents, income, essays, or connections. “An almost nobly austere vision of meritocracy,” as Hayes puts it.

Yet students applying to Hunter arrive at the test with vastly different advantages in terms of their parenting, their family’s economic resources, their community’s resources, and the quality of their previous education. Even more telling is the test prep industry that has grown up to ready prospective students for admission — assuming they can afford the cost of the prep courses. “The majority of students getting in now are products of the test prep industry,” according to Hayes’ interviews. The lesson is that economic inequality inevitably destroys the American vision of an equal and meritocratic starting line.

The scandal plagued corporation Chesapeake Energy has been dealing with the fallout of news that its CEO used company backed assets to secure more than $1 billion in personal loans. The company has also been charged with conspiring to hold down land prices in Michigan, opening it up to an anti-trust investigation.

Meanwhile, the company has paid just a 1 percent tax rate over the last two decades, despite making billions of dollars in profits, as Bloomberg News noted:

Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK) made $5.5 billion in pretax profits since its founding more than two decades ago. So far, the second-largest U.S. natural-gas producer has paid income taxes on almost none of it.

Chesapeake paid $53 million over its 23-year history, or about 1 percent of the cumulative pretax profits during that period, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That’s less than half of Chief Executive Officer Aubrey McClendon’s compensation, for example, in 2008 alone.

And Chesapeake isn’t alone amongst domestic oil and gas producers: “Range Resources Corp. paid income taxes of about 0.4 percent of pretax income over the past decade, the data show. Southwestern Energy Co. (SWN) paid 2.1 percent and EQT Corp. (EQT) paid 5.3 percent.”

These companies are able to get away with paying such low rates because of tax preferences handed out to the oil and gas industries. Overall, the U.S. spends $4 billion annually on tax giveaways to these already hugely profitable companies.

The U.S. has already seen effective corporate tax rates plunge to a 40 year low, even as corporate profits hit record highs, thanks to the plethora of giveaways and loopholes in the corporate tax code. In the last four years, 26 major corporations made billions in profits while paying no federal corporate income tax. That Chesapeake can make billions while paying next to nothing is simply indicative of the extent of the problem.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Monday vetoed a tax increase on millionaires passed by Democrats in the state legislature for the third consecutive year, even as the Democrats planned to use the tax increase to pay for other tax cuts that Christie wants.

Christie himself has proposed tax cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthiest of the state’s residents and has justified his veto of the millionaire’s tax by saying it would lead to a mass exodus of high-income individuals from the state, despite evidence showing that would not be the case. But after vetoing the millionaire’s tax and millions in spending, Christie called legislators back to the capital to work on another tax cut, CBS News reports:

He called lawmakers, who would normally be on vacation after passing the budget, back to Trenton for a special session where he unveiled an alternate tax plan. His latest proposal: Use some of the $361 million he cut last week from the state budget with a line-item veto to pay for property tax cuts for any homeowner with a household income under $400,000 and for an expansion in an earned-income tax credit for the working poor.

Democrats slammed Christie’s latest proposal as “political theater,” and one activist group said he was using the state’s poorest residents as “pawns” in a political game. Supporting the boost to the earned income tax credit is, indeed, a change of tune for the governor. The Democratic budget bolstered the credit to 25 percent of the federal level, giving $115 a year to the average family. Christie, who now claims support for such a plan, scaled back that provision in his budget two years ago, did not include it in his own budget, and used his line-item veto to remove it from the Democratic budget.

California lawmakers yesterday passed legislation that will give homeowners some of the most stringent legal protections in the nation against predatory, aggressive bank lending practices. The legislation passed both the Assembly and state Senate despite opposition from Republicans and the financial industry and is expected to be signed soon by Gov. Jerry Brown (D).

The “Homeowners’ Bill of Rights,” pushed by state Attorney General Kamala Harris (D), aims to extend to the state level many of the protections ensured by the mortgage fraud settlement between six big banks and the federal government and state attorneys general. Unlike the settlement, it will apply to all banks and lenders. California was among the states hardest-hit by the housing crisis and has been the location of some of mortgage lenders’ worst practices — a recent audit of San Francisco foreclosures found that nearly every one had legal issues of some sort.

Here is a breakdown of how the legislation will help California homeowners once it becomes law in January 2013:

“Dual-tracking” will be outlawed. The law bans banks from pursuing foreclosure while a borrower is seeking a loan modification, a process known as “dual-tracking” that led to countless foreclosures even as homeowners were attempting to stay in their homes. Modification departments at banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, for instance, often instructed homeowners to stop making payments to help enter the modification process. When borrowers followed those directions, the banks foreclosed on them anyway.

Robo-signing will be prohibited. The law also bans robo-signing, the process through which banks approved often-fraudulent foreclosure documents en masse in order to speed up the process. Under the law, lenders who file unverified documents will face fines and potential recourse from borrowers. Robo-signing, prevalent at big banks, led to fraudulent, wrongful, and mistaken foreclosures and was one of the major subjects of the federal mortgage settlement. Wells Fargo insiders said their robo-signing department was “exactly like an assembly line,” and the bank once put a junior employee it had hired from a pizza restaurant in charge of loan documentation.

Borrowers will have an easier time dealing with their banks. The new law requires the banks to assign borrowers a single point of contact when they discuss their loans. It also requires banks to explicitly approve or deny a modification, verify foreclosure documents, and provide such documentation to homeowners upon request.

Borrowers will be able to sue their banks. California homeowners will now have the right to sue banks for “significant, material” violations of the new laws, a level of recourse that has been valuable for homeowners in other states. A judge in Louisiana, for instance, awarded a homeowner $3.1 million in damages because of “reprehensible actions” from Wells Fargo, which serviced the loan.

After significant pressure, Mitt Romney released two years of his tax returns, which showed, among other things, that he pays a lower tax rate than many middle-class families and has employed a Swiss bank account to hold his investments. Today, Vanity Fair ran an expose on Romney’s investments, providing some new details regarding funds that he keeps in the Cayman Islands, how his retirement fund grew so large, and how he manages to avoid paying his fair share of taxes.

“Romney, like the superhero who whirls and backflips unscathed through a web of laser beams while everyone
else gets zapped, is certainly a remarkable financial acrobat. But careful analysis of his financial and business affairs also reveals a man who, like some other Wall Street titans, seems comfortable striding into some fuzzy gray zones,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Nicholas Shaxson. Here are five ways Romney is engaging in such financial shenanigans:

1. Romney owns a corporation in Bermuda. Filings describe Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd. as a “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” The corporation was established by Romney in 1997, but was transferred into a blind trust under Ann Romney’s name the day before Mitt began his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. Bermuda is a famed tax shelter.

2. Romney uses special, tax-free stocks to inflate his retirement account. Romney’s independent retirement account set up during his time at Bain Capital could contain as much as $102 million — a staggering amount given limits on employee contributions. The Vanity Fair piece parses how Romney inflated his IRA so much: When Bain bought and sold companies, it gave employees select, high-risk, high-revenue shares of the business. These shares went straight into Romney’s IRA, so they were untaxed profits. And since they started off low, the shares were seen as being below contribution limits — despite the fact that they promptly grew into a large fortune.

3. Romney’s blind trusts are not-so-blind. Ann and Mitt Romney keep their investments in a “blind trust,” which means that they avoid making investment decisions that may impact their political work. But the Romney’s blind trust, which is run by their personal lawyer, includes investments in a company owned by their own son.

4. Romney uses a so-called “blocker corporation” to avoid taxes on his IRA. Though Romney says his investments in the Cayman Islands do not help him lower his tax bill, Romney’s IRA appears to have invested in an offshore corporation which then invests in U.S. businesses, to avoid paying the the U.S.’s Unrelated Business Income Tax.

5. Bain Capital helped financial fraudsters dodge taxes. Bain received investments from “the newspaper tycoon, tax evader, and fraudster Robert Maxwell” (who has since died), as well as other financial oligarchs, which helps provide them “with additional ways to skip around tax, disclosure, and regulatory requirements that they might trigger if they invested directly.”

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus disagreed with his party’s presumptive presidential nominee during an appearance on CNN’s Starting Point Tuesday morning and said that the individual mandate at the heart of President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s health care laws is, in fact, a tax. “The Supreme Court has stated that Obamacare is a tax and so since they have ruled that it’s a tax, it is a tax,” Priebus said, contradicting Romney’s top adviser, who on Monday insisted that the governor believes that the mandate is a penalty.

“Our position is the same as Mitt Romney’s position, it’s a tax, that’s the only way the Supreme Court came up with the decision it did, in order to make it constitutional,” the chairman claimed:

BROOKE BALDWIN (HOST): But it sounds like the Romney campaign says it was a penalty. I’m asking you specifically, Republican National Committee Chairman, tax or penalty, which is it?

PRIEBUS: It’s a tax and the reason why it’s a tax is because the Supreme Court number one ruled it was a tax and number two, it’s what Barack Obama’s lawyer argued before the Supreme Court.

Watch it:

Since Romney’s Massachusetts health reform law penalizes individuals who choose to go without insurance, the Romney campaign has said that the governor disagrees with the Supreme Court’s majority decision and agrees with the dissent, which found the mandate unconstitutional under the commerce clause. The mandate provision has successfully expanded coverage in Massachusetts by encouraging healthier and younger people to obtain insurance (who then avoid paying the penalty).

Republicans in Congress, and even some top Romney surrogates, however, are still holding on to the “tax” talking point. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who may be on Romney’s vice presidential short list, told Fox News’ Fox & Friends Tuesday morning that the mandate is both a “penalty” and a “tax,” something Romney himself has previously claimed.