Both UK and US authorities are investigating several banks — most prominently Barclays — for rigging the London InterBank Offered Rate, a benchmark that governs interest rates on all sorts of financial products. According to a report today from Reuters, regulators knew as far back as 2007 that banks were manipulating LIBOR, but little was done to address the problem.

Banks were gaming LIBOR in order to profit off of its movements, and to make themselves look healthier during the financial crisis of 2008 than they actually were. “If attempts to manipulate LIBOR were successful — and the regulators think that Barclays did manage it, on occasion — then this would be the biggest securities fraud in history, affecting investors and borrowers around the world,” according to The Economist.

As CNN Money’s Stephen Gandel noted, the fact that banks were looking to profit off LIBOR’s movements shows the emphasis that they have put on trading over more traditional lending — and makes the case for rules that rein such risky trading in:

The real story, and the long-term concern for regulators, is not that lending rates were fixed, but how much of the business of big banks these days is driven by trading, not lending. Clearly, Barclays and other banks believed they could make more money on their trading desk manipulating the rate, then they would lose in their lending operations…All this appears to be more evidence for why we need a strong Volcker rule that separates lending from trading.

The $9 billion trading bust at JP Morgan Chase also shows the wisdom of restricting the ability of the biggest banks to engage in risky trades that are divorced from commercial banking practices. Instead, the Volcker Rule — the part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law meant to address this problem — has been consistently watered down due to intense bank lobbying and compliant members of Congress.

Though every candidate in the past 30 years has released multiple years of tax returns, Mitt Romney is refusing to do so, reducing surrogates to telling the press to simply “get over it.”

But Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) attempt to defuse the controversy surrounding Romney’s taxes may be a new low for the campaign:

Mitt Romney shouldn’t be criticized for using off-shore tax havens because “it’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Tuesday. [...]

Graham argued that Congress is responsible for tax avoidance because it has crafted such convoluted rules and said he was fine with Romney’s taking advantage of the loopholes.

“As long as it was legal, I’m OK with it,” Graham said. “I don’t blame anybody for using the tax code to their advantage. I blame us for having it so complicated and confused. Pick a rate and make people pay it.”

A recent report by the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) found that tax dodging shifts $100 billion onto taxpaying Americans.

Since President Obama called, once again, for the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for income above $250,000, Republicans have revived their favorite talking points about taxes and small businesses. For years, Republicans have falsely portrayed a tax increase on high-income Americans as disproportionately affecting small businesses, though there is little evidence to back up those assertions.

Case in point, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) said during a speech today that half of the people affected by the increase would be small business people:

Now, let’s look at what the President wants to do. By raising taxes on those who make more than $250,000, half of those people who are going to be taxed are small business people, who have pass through entities, just like many of you, and just like I had…Why we would want to tax the very people we expect to create jobs in this country makes no economic sense.

Watch it:

Boehner has used variations of this lie in the past, claiming that half of the people affected by a millionaire’s tax would be small business owners. The statistic wasn’t true then, as Boehner’s own office admitted, and it isn’t true now. Far less than half of the people affected by the expiration of the upper income tax cuts get any of their income at all from a small businesses. And those people could very well be receiving speaking fees or book royalties, which qualify as “small business income” but don’t have a direct impact on job creation.

Boehner himself has conceded that only three percent of small business owners would be affected by the tax increase. Meanwhile, both his Congressional website and his Twitter feed have been claiming that letting the high income tax cuts lapse hurts job creation: but history has proven that simply isn’t the case, as job creation and economic growth have been stronger when the top tax rate was higher.

Even under Obama’s plan, high-income individuals are still receiving a hefty tax break compared to what they were paying under the Clinton administration. Republicans, meanwhile, are using small businesses as a political prop to promote the interests of the richest people in America.

A trio of Pennsylvania unions is asking a federal judge to hold Scranton, Pennsylvania Mayor Chris Doherty in contempt after he defied a court order and reduced the pay of hundreds of city workers — including firefighters and police officers — to the minimum wage. A federal judge issued an injunction preventing the decrease in pay, but Doherty ignored it last Friday and reduced the pay of roughly 400 workers because he said the city was broke and could not meet its payroll obligations.

The International Association of Firefighters Local 60, the Fraternal Order of Police E.B. Jermyn Lodge 2 and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local Lodge 2305 are now asking the judge to hold Doherty in contempt of court and will also file other lawsuits against the city, the Scranton Times-Tribune reports:

–A motion in Lackawanna County Court to hold the mayor in contempt, due to paying 398 city employees minimum wages in their paychecks Friday, even though a judge on Thursday and Friday ordered full wages.

–A lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Scranton under the Fair Labor Standards Act alleging the city has failed to pay wages on time and failed to pay overtime.

–Another federal complaint alleging violations of the Heart and Lung Act, because benefits of disabled police and firefighters also were cut to minimum wages without first having a required hearing.

–A penalty petition with the state workers’ compensation commission over the minimum wages.

“Pick a law. They violated it,” [Union attorney Thomas Jennings] said.

Scranton holds $133,000 in cash as of Monday, the city commissioner told the Times-Tribune, and meeting payroll requires about $1 million. The unions originally asked a judge to hold Doherty in contempt Friday before the minimum wage payments were issued, but the judge declined, saying the action would be premature. That led to the new request Monday.

As ThinkProgress has noted, Democrats in Washington proposed legislation last fall that would extend aid to cities and states to keep public workers — including firefighters, police officers, and teachers — on payroll, but Republicans repeatedly blocked those efforts.

After President Obama announced his plan to extend some of the Bush tax cuts for one year while allowing the cuts on higher incomes to expire yesterday, conservatives quickly revived the “class warfare” talking point they have used faithfully in tax debates before.

These claims, however, rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of America’s progressive tax system and its utilization of marginal tax rates. The Obama plan still maintains a tax cut for every single income earner, regardless of how much he or she makes. Every earner still receives the tax cut on income up to $250,000 — only after it passes that threshold will it be subject to a higher tax rate. Someone who makes $250,001, for instance, will pay the higher rate on exactly $1.

This chart from Citizens for Tax Justice illustrates how eliminating the tax cut for high earners would work under both Obama’s and the GOP’s plans:

The tax system works the same way for the small businesses that conservatives claim will face massive tax hikes under the Obama plan. Only after $250,000 in income will they pay a higher rate, and to truly notice the higher tax rates, a business would have to earn substantially more than $250,000 in a year — meaning it probably isn’t a small business in the first place. All told, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that only 3 percent of businesses would see an increase under the Obama plan, which actually restores competitive advantages to the nation’s entrepreneurs.

Mitt Romney wasted no time in offering an alternative to President Obama’s most recent call to extend the Bush tax cuts on income up to $250,000. In an interview with Radio Iowa yesterday, Romney pushed the myth that the end of the tax cuts at the top end of the income scale will hurt small businesses and job creators, then called for extending all of the cuts, including those at the high end, “indefinitely“:

“The president’s announcement that he plans on extending (the tax cuts), just for certain classes of Americans — what he’s really saying is that those that are job-creators and small businesses are going to see a massive tax increase,” Romney said, “and that will kill jobs.”

“The president’s plan is aimed at small business and job creators. It will kill jobs in this country and hurt the middle class,” Romney said.”The right answer is to extend the tax rates as they current exist indefinitely, until we put in place an entirely new and reformed system.”

The “entirely new and reformed system” Romney envisions is little more than the Bush tax cuts on steroids: a 20 percent, across-the-board tax cut that is a massive giveaway to the richest Americans. Romney’s plan would cost $10.7 trillion — four times the size of the Bush tax cuts — and would be a “mathematical disaster” that would blow an bigger hole in the federal budget than even Bush managed. Romney claims none of this will happen, but his plans to pay for it don’t come close to covering the cost.

The evidence also doesn’t back up Romney’s claim that allowing the expiration of the high end tax cuts will “kill jobs.” Job creation and economic growth were better when the top tax rate was higher, and the years following the Bush tax cuts were filled with anemic job and economic growth.

British and U.S. authorities are both now investigating Barclays and other banks for manipulating the London InterBank Offered Rate, an interest rate that is a benchmark for a host of financial products around the world. Regulators charge that the banks rigged the interest rate’s movements in order to profit and to make themselves look healthier during the financial crisis of 2008 than they actually were.

This comes on the heels of JP Morgan losing billions of dollars chasing profits with trades that were meant to reduce risk, and, of course, is just a few years removed from a crisis caused in large part by Wall Street malfeasance. But according to a survey by the whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow, Wall Street executives believe this is just part of the financial business. In fact, nearly one quarter of survey respondents said that financial services employees need to be unethical or engage in illegal behavior in order to be successful:

In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.

Sixteen percent of respondents said they would commit insider trading if they could get away with it, according to Labaton Sucharow. And 30 percent said their compensation plans created pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law.

Big banks, of course, have continued to fight reforms to the financial regulatory framework, even in the wake of the crash of 2008. But if this survey is any indication, Wall Street needs a mentality change, along with stricter supervision.