Recently, several CEOs have issued missives to their workers saying that, if President Obama wins reelection, their jobs might be in danger. One CEO wrote in an email, “The economy doesn’t currently pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is another 4 years of the same Presidential administration.” Another wrote, “If we fail as a nation to make the right choice on November 6th, and we lose our independence as a company, I don’t want to hear any complaints regarding the fallout that will most likely come…I am asking you to give us one more chance to stay independent by voting in a new President.”

In audio uncovered by In These Times’ Mike Elk, Mitt Romney himself got in on the action, telling a group of business owners, “I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.”

And now House Republicans are joining in. In video released by the Chicago Sun-Times, filmed by the CREDO SuperPac, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) instructed business owners to threaten employees with the loss of their jobs or their health insurance if Obama wins:

Spread the word! If you run, own or manage a company, tell your employees! What was the CEO this week that said, if Obama is reelected, I may have to let all of you go next year? If Obama’s reelected, if the Democrats take Congress, I may not be able to cover your health insurance next year. If there’s ever a year where people who run, manage, or own their companies are going to energize their employees, it better be this year. We’re up against it.

Walsh is perhaps best known for his incendiary and over-the-top rhetoric. He screamed at constituents attempting to ask about the role of bank lobbyists in Washington, claimed that Muslims are “trying to kill Americans every week,” and said that his military veteran opponent is not a true hero. (HT: Mike Elk)

During Tuesday’s second presidential debate, Republican nominee Mitt Romney floated a new idea to pay for his tax plan, which provides nearly $5 trillion in tax cuts. Romney introduced this proposal after analysts showed that Romney can’t mathematically achieve his goals of reducing income tax rates by 20 percent while not increasing middle class taxes or adding to the deficit.

But a Tax Policy Center analysis found Romney’s idea, to cap the amount of deductions each taxpayer can take advantage of at $25,000, also fails to make his plan add up.

And as the Center for American Progress’ Seth Hanlon noted in a column on Thursday, Romney’s plan would still provide a massive tax cut to the wealthiest Americans, even if a deduction cap were in place. After they hit the cap on deductions, members of the top one percent would get tax cuts totaling more than $105,000. And for wealthier taxpayers, the breaks get even bigger, Hanlon found:

The tax cuts from Romney’s plan would come on top of the reductions they received from extending the Bush tax rates, which Romney wants to make permanent. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, the average millionaire would save more than $250,000 a year when the Bush and Romney tax cuts are combined, even if Romney eliminates all of their deductions.

Romney also floated another idea: capping deductions at $50,000 instead of $25,000. That plan would indeed make the tax cut for the rich smaller, but it would also reduce the amount of revenue gained, making the math of Romney’s plan even worse. And it would render the idea of capping deductions almost irrelevant, since the average member of the top one percent claimed just over $43,000 in tax deductions last year.

Back in March, a Goldman Sachs employe, Greg Smith, publicly resigned via a New York Times op-ed, decrying the firm’s “toxic” culture. “To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,” Smith wrote. “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.”

Smith has penned a book about his experience that is due to be released this month. Politico received an advance copy of the book, in which Smith expands on the activities in which Goldman traders engaged, particularly when it came to betting against the very clients they were supposed to be serving:

“The client increasingly came to be regarded as a counterparty, merely the other side of a transaction, rather than an advisee,” he writes. “Where this practice of proprietary trading … turned morally ambiguous was when the firm changed its mind (or masked its intentions) and made a bet in the other direction from the client’s.” [...]

The idea was to advise clients to bet on the opposite outcome of what the firm believed would happen so it could profit by taking the other stance, he wrote.

“We must have changed our view on each of these institutions from positive to negative back to positive 10 times,” Smith writes. “I remember thinking, ‘How can we be doing this with a straight face? No thinking client would believe that conditions on the ground could change that frequently.’”

Another Goldman trader also alleged that the “commercial animals/jerks” who “pushed for the firm to profit over other considerations” have been promoted over more customer-minded employees in recent years. “So much junk was created that should never have been with disastrous consequences and that will be a black mark on the whole industry for a long time, as it should be,” she said. “I know many people who were in ‘that business’ who quit because they could not in good faith sell the crap they were being asked to create and market.”

The behavior that these traders allege is the same that Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) criticized when he excoriated Goldman’s “shitty deal” — Goldman and other banks peddled toxic investment instruments and then bet against their own customers, profiting when those customers lost out.

Goldman has denied the allegations that Smith made in the original op-ed, and is not yet commenting on his book. Instead, the firm, as well as the conservative business press, has painted Smith as nothing more than a disgruntled employee who was upset at not being paid enough. Smith acknowledges in his book that he was upset with his compensation: “By the logic of the outside world, I was being absurdly well-compensated for work whose chief benefit was to maintain the robustness of the world’s capital markets . . . By any measure, I should have felt exceptionally lucky and grateful…But by the warped logic of Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, I was being screwed.”

But Smith being angry about his pay does not change the fact that several former traders and a Senate investigation have all drawn back the curtain on Goldman’s attempts to profit at its own customers expense.

A recently hired economic policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign was a top lobbyist for JP Morgan Chase, Wall Street’s biggest bank, and federal documents show that he lobbied Congress and federal regulators this year on issues ranging from the implementation of new financial regulations to corporate tax reform.

Pierce Scranton, who became Romney’s economic policy director in August, is listed as JP Morgan’s executive director of the bank’s lobbying department on public federal documents filed in 2012. Those documents show that between January and July of this year, Scranton oversaw lobbying activities on a host of economic issues, including legislation dealing with home mortgage modifications and foreclosures, Chinese trade and currency manipulation, the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act and other financial regulations, the Jumpstart Our Small Businesses (JOBS) Act, and corporate tax reform.

Scranton, according to the documents, lobbied Congress and federal regulatory agencies on legislation regarding the “implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act.” Scranton and JP Morgan, at the time, were lobbying for a loophole in a regulation that limited risky trading; months later, the bank lost billions of dollars on risky trades that would be prohibited without such a loophole. Scranton lobbied on four pieces of legislation dealing with Dodd-Frank’s regulation of the derivatives market, according to the documents. He also met with Treasury officials in January of 2011 regarding Dodd-Frank, according to the Sunlight Foundation.

JP Morgan has been an ardent opponent of many of the rules contained in Dodd-Frank, including the regulation of the derivatives market. JP Morgan has spent nearly $10 million lobbying since the beginning of 2011, much of it aimed at Dodd-Frank and regulations it includes.

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As part of the $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement forged between the nation’s five biggest banks and a coalition of federal agencies and state attorneys general, individual states were granted $2.5 billion. That money was meant to provide a variety of services to troubled homeowners, but, as a new report from the housing advocacy organization Community Enterprise Partners shows, less than half of that money is actually headed for its intended use:

Six months after finalizing the landmark $25 billion National Mortgage Settlement, the District of Columbia and the 49 states who were parties to the settlement have been allocating and distributing their respective shares of the $2.5 billion that was designated for them, but less than half of the announced expenditures will be used as intended. Direct payments to the states were intended to help prevent foreclosures, stabilize communities, and prevent or prosecute financial fraud. To date, states have announced plans to spend $966 million for housing and foreclosure-related activities, while $988 million has been diverted to states’ general funds or for non-housing uses. There is $588 million remaining to be allocated, of which Texas and Florida comprise the lion’s share and with the rest spread out among states that have already begun to roll out their plans.

As this map shows, several states are using a minimal amount of their settlement funds to help homeowners, while a few (including California) are using none at all:

Both Democratic and Republican governors are guilty of siphoning off funds meant for homeowners. Meanwhile, the banks continued their abusive practices that led to the settlement in the first place.

In an October 15 debate between North Dakota Senate candidates Republican Rep. Rick Berg and Democratic challenger Heidi Heitkamp, the failure of the House of Representatives to pass a farm bill was a central issue. Heitkamp called the lack of a new farm bill the “biggest failure of this Congress.”

Though the Senate passed a farm bill with a big bipartisan majority, leadership in the Republican-controlled House did not even vote on one before adjourning in September. At the time, Berg told CNN he was “frustrated with the Republican leadership.” In Tuesday’s debate, Rep. Berg reiterated that point, calling House Republican leadership “a problem”:

We have a stonewall problem. I’ll agree. The House Republican leadership is a problem on the farm bill.

Watch it:

Berg claimed Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) promised to bring the bill to the floor before the end of the year. But during an appearance in Iowa yesterday, Boehner “didn’t respond to questions about federal farm provisions that expired this month.”

Since North Dakota is one of the leading agriculture producers in the nation and ranks in the top ten for a variety of agricultural products, it is no surprise the farm bill was a main focus of discussion. The last farm bill expired on September 30, and though it won’t end federal support for farmers in 2012, farm policies will return to standards from 1949 on January 1, 2013 if no new bill is passed. Large swathes of the Department of Agriculture also face defunding.

House Republicans and Democrats from agriculture-heavy districts came together in a rare moment of bipartisanship in late September, trying to get the bill to the floor in spite of House leadership.

– Greg Noth

During an interview on Bloomberg TV yesterday, former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack — who led the bank through the 2008 financial crisis, when it was bailed out by the federal government — said that Wall Street pay has been too high and needs to come down:

Let’s be totally honest. A lot of people who have done really well have not handled that wealth very well. That gets to part of the issue with Wall Street. I think it’s really changing. I think the kind of money that’s made and the way it was flaunted — look it’s wrong. [...] The money was really unbelievably generous, to say the right word…At the end of the day the one area that has to be squeezed [to give a return to shareholders] is the compensation number.

Watch it:

Estimates show that Wall Street pay is going to be near record highs for 2012, and the biggest banks are back to making pre-recession profits, while most of the rest of the country is still struggling with the effects of the Great Recession. Over the last three decades, increasing pay on Wall Street has contributed to America’s skyrocketing income inequality.

Earlier this month, Morgan Stanley’s current CEO agreed that banker pay is “way too high.” Another former trader said, “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little.” (HT: Mark Gongloff)