A Republican Congressman is urging the GOP to support legislation extending President Bush’s tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans that will expire if Congress does not act before the end of the year, Politico reports. Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) told colleagues on Tuesday that by agreeing to President Obama’s approach and providing tax relief for the majority of Americans, the party could honor Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge and still push for extending the tax breaks for the richest 2 percent of income earners:

At a meeting of the House GOP whip team earlier in the day, he made the case that Republicans would strengthen their position by joining hands with President Barack Obama now to give most taxpayers what he calls “an early Christmas present” of ensuring their taxes don’t go up on Jan. 1.

Cole’s position is striking because he’s hardly a “squish” — Norquist’s term for a weak-kneed lawmaker — when it comes to Republican orthodoxy. Cole served as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and in other official posts within the party. [...]

“I think we ought to take the 98 percent deal right now,” he said of freezing income tax rates for all but the top 2 percent of earners. “It doesn’t mean I agree with raising the top 2. I don’t. Instead, he told POLITICO, Republicans should fight the president over tax rates for the top earners after everyone else is taken care of.

The Senate passed legislation maintaining Bush’s tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent of income earners in July and Obama has urged the GOP-controlled House to support the bill.

Several CEOs — under the guise of a campaign known as “Fix the Debt” — have recently called for cuts to Social Security and other entitlements. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, for instance, said that “there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised.” “The solutions [to the fiscal cliff] are – it’s the retirement age; means testing Social Security and Medicare,” said Aetna CEO Mark Berolino. “We just need to get leadership.”

Of course, these CEOs have little cause for concern if government retirement assistance is cut, as they have millions of dollars squirreled away in their personal retirement accounts:

– The 71 Fix the Debt CEOs of public companies have average retirement assets of $9.1 million. Of these 71 CEOs, 54 participate in their company‘s retirement programs and have collective pension assets of $649 million, or more than $12 million per CEO — enough to generate a $65,873 pension check each month for life. In contrast, the average monthly Social Security check for retired workers is $1,237.

– A dozen of the Fix the Debt executives have more than $20 million in their individual company retirement accounts. If each of these CEOs converted their assets to an annuity when they turned 65, they would receive a monthly check for at least $110,000 for life.

Blankfein has nearly $12 million in retirement assets, while Bertolini has $1.5 million. Adding insult to injury, many of the CEOs calling for cuts to the social safety net are underfunding their workers’ retirement accounts:

Of the 71 publicly held Fix the Debt member companies, 41 provide employee pension funds for their workers. Of these, only two have sufficient assets in their pension funds to meet their expected obligations. The rest have underfunded their worker pension funds by $103 billion, or about $2.5 billion on average.

Since 1985, 84,000 pension plans have been eliminated. And now these CEOs are coming after the government programs upon which the elderly, and many others, depend.

That Republicans have begun to split from radical anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and his pledge to never raise taxes takes “political courage,” a top Democratic senator told ThinkProgress Tuesday.

In the last week, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (SC), Saxby Chambliss (GA), and Bob Corker (TN) have all distanced themselves from Norquist’s pledge. Though that is an “encouraging” sign for debt negotiations, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said the two sides still had “a long way to go” to reach a deal before automatic spending cuts and tax increases take effect at the end of the year:

[Norquist is] a real bully boy when it comes to Republican primaries. When my Senate Republican colleagues step up and say our first obligation is to this country and not to Mr. Norquist or a piece of paper, it takes a lot of political courage. We still have a long way to go, but the fact that they’re willing to split from him, to run the risk of his opposition in the future, speaks very well of their commitment to our country.

Watch it:

Republicans who have thus far split with Norquist haven’t come far on taxes, and they still oppose raising marginal tax rates on the wealthiest Americans. Instead, they’ve endorsed raising revenue through the closure of tax loopholes and the elimination of tax breaks, and many, like Graham, have demanded reforms to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security in exchange, even as Democrats have already offered such reforms in recent years. The Republican “compromise,” at this point, looks more like the proposals failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered during the 2012 election.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Schapiro will, as expected, be stepping down in January. President Obama already announced that SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter will take her place.

Schapiro’s departure means that the five-member SEC Commission is down to four members: two Democrats and two Republicans. And as Fortune’s Cyrus Sanati noted, that’s bad news for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:

With the Commission now balanced, it will be virtually impossible for Walter to push through the administration’s agenda, most notably, the implementation of all the rules still left to be sorted out that are part of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory bill. Turning the massive bill into rules has been a tough slog for the Commission as they have faced strong opposition from Wall Street. The most controversial aspects of the overhaul, like the Volcker Rule, which would limit a bank’s ability to trade and invest its own capital, to the so-called title seven reforms, which overhaul the multi-trillion dollar derivatives market, remain locked in regulatory limbo.

That’s great news for Wall Street as it delays implementation of some of the more profit-killing parts of Dodd-Frank — a delay that many on the Street wish will become the new status quo. The large broker dealers that stand to lose billions of dollars once derivative reform takes place will undoubtedly try to ensure that the two conservatives on the Commission block any attempts to push through title seven. The same goes with the Volcker Rule.

These rules are key to ensuring that the financial system is more stable and secure, as big banks will not be able to take risks that threaten the entire economy. (And there will be a mechanism in place to take those banks apart should they blow themselves up.) Wall Street has been lobbying to slow down those rules — in an effort to kill them off entirely — and having a gridlocked SEC will only help the banks achieve their goal.

Grover Norquist has launched a wide-ranging media campaign to combat the perception that Republicans are abandoning his pledge to never raise taxes as they work on a plan to avert the fiscal cliff.

The anti-tax zealot uses his ubiquitous presence on cable TV, radio, and in print to publicly pressure Republicans from compromising on a balanced measure that includes increased revenue and spending cuts, using various scare tactics to keep the GOP in line. But his claims — which he dutifully reiterates in every media appearance — are often divorced from reality. Here are Norquist’s top 4 whoppers:

1) “[F]or four years President Obama has not reined in spending. Done nothing useful on entitlement reform.” Federal spending is actually lower now than it was when President Obama took office. In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP. By 2017, spending will come down to 22 percent of the GDP. In actual dollars, government spending dropped from 2009 to 2010. In fact, Obama has the lowest spending record of any recent president. He has also significantly reformed Medicare — and extended its solvency — through the Affordable Care Act.

2) “That’s where we were with Reagan tax rates and that’s where we were with lower marginal tax rates and with — with reasonable economic growth. We’ve got revenues of 18.5 percent of GDP…. If we had grown at Reagan rates of growth instead of Obama rates of growth, 11 million Americans would be at work today.” Reagan’s tax cuts did little for economic growth. As Reagan administration economist Bruce Bartlett has noted: “Real gross domestic product growth was about the same after the 1986 act took effect in 1987 as it was before…By the mid-1990s, it was the consensus view of economists that the Tax Reform Act of 1986 had little, if any, impact on growth.” Other studies came to the same conclusion.

3) “When [Bush] cut marginal tax rates on capital gains and dividends from 2002, there was four years of strong economic growth from ’03 to ’07.” Numerous studies have found that cutting tax rates for the wealthiest Americans did not spur economic growth or job creation. In fact, since Republicans began instituting supply-side policies under President Reagan, growth has lagged and income inequality has surged, as the wealthiest Americans make more money while paying less in taxes. Under Bush, the nation experienced the worst economic growth of the post-war period.

4) “George Herbert Walker Bush managed the collapse of the Soviet Union, kicked Iraq out of Kuwait, had a 90% approval rating, however he agreed to a tax-increase deal [consisting of] two dollars of spending cuts for every one dollar of taxes. And he lost the presidency.” As the Washington Post points out, Bush lost re-election because of voter discontent about the economy. His flip flop on taxes ranked low on the list of voter concerns.

A growing number of Republican senators are at least rhetorically backing away from Norquist’s pledge, a sign of his weakened influence in the aftermath of the 2012 elections. Some 16 incumbent Republicans and one incumbent Senator who signed the document lost on election night. In total, 56 Republican House incumbents or candidates who endorsed the pledge and 24 Republican Senators or hopefuls lost.

America’s domestic home help workers, most of them female minorities, earn low wages and often receive no retirement or health benefits because they lack basic labor protections, according to a first-of-its-kind survey of more than 2,000 domestic workers in 14 American cities. The report from the National Domestic Workers Alliance and affiliated groups found that nearly a quarter of nannies, caregivers, and home health workers make less than the minimum wage in the states in which they work, and nearly half — 48 percent — are paid less than needed to adequately support a family.

Ninety-five percent of domestic workers are female, according to the survey, and the wage gaps that persist throughout the American economy are especially prevalent in the industry. More than half of domestic workers are minority, with 54 percent identifying as Latina, African-American, or Asian. The median hourly wage of white domestic workers is $2.13 an hour higher than it is for Latinas and Asians and $1.14 an hour higher than it is for blacks. But across the industry, wages are incredibly low:

Live-in workers have especially low wages. The median wage for that group is just $6.15 an hour, and 67 percent are paid below their state’s minimum wage. Overall, 70 percent of domestic workers are paid less than $13 an hour, and less than 9 percent make more than $18 an hour. Just 4 percent of live-in workers make more than $18 an hour.

For undocumented workers, who make up a significant portion of the domestic workforce, the wage situation is even worse:

It isn’t just wages, though. Less than 2 percent of all domestic workers receive retirement or pension benefits, and only 9 percent work for employers who pay into Social Security, according to the report. Nearly two-thirds live without health insurance, and only 4 percent receive employer-provided health care. Just 8 percent work for employers who provide a contractual agreement, while two-thirds work under verbal agreements that offer few protections.

The reason the situation is so dire for domestic workers is because they are excluded from standard labor protections. The National Labor Relations Act does not cover domestic workers, meaning they have no guaranteed right to organize or form unions to bargain for wages and benefits. Federal workplace discrimination laws also largely exclude domestic workers because they apply to businesses with multiple employees. As a result, domestic workers are often subject to wage theft and rarely paid for overtime.

States and localities have undertaken efforts in recent years to expand such rights to domestic workers, but many have failed. In 2010, New York passed a law granting basic rights to domestic workers, and Montgomery County, Maryland enacted a similar law in 2008. The most recent high-profile attempt to enshrine domestic worker rights failed in October, when California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) vetoed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights because he said it left “a number of unanswered questions.” The California law would have covered more than 200,000 of the state’s domestic workers and was opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce and other business groups.

According to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Social Security should not be on the table during negotiations over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the set of spending cuts and tax increases scheduled for the end of the year. Carney rightly noted that Social Security has nothing to do with today’s deficits:

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday that Social Security is one entitlement program that should be addressed on a “separate track.”

“We should address the drivers of the deficit and Social Security currently is not a driver of the deficit,” Carney told reporters today.

Lawmakers are trying to craft a deal to prevent the “fiscal cliff” from occurring, and have pulled Social Security and health care programs into the negotiations. But Social Security is statutorily barred from adding to the deficit, and is fully funded for more than two decades, unlike scores of other federal programs. As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has explained, “Social Security has not added a single penny, not a dime, a nickel, a dollar to the budget problems we have. Never has. And for the next 30 years, it won’t do that.”

One simple change, raising the cap on the payroll tax so that it is applied to more income for wealthier Americans, would ensure Social Security’s funding for decades to come. But Senate Republicans — aided by wealthy CEOs — are trying to use the manufactured crisis of the “fiscal cliff” to justify cutting benefits upon which seniors and many others depend. Last year, Social Security alone kept more than 20 million people out of poverty.

Our guest blogger is Jack Jenkins, a Writer and Researcher with the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

When workers at Walmart stores across the country went on strike last Friday to protest the retailer’s allegedly low wages and poor working conditions, media outlets were quick to label the controversy as a disagreement primarily between the retail giant and labor groups.

But the Walmart strikers also appear to have another, less-discussed ally: faith groups.

Mixed in with the labor organizers and striking Walmart employees, religious leaders and faith-based groups showed up in force outside of Walmarts across the country on Friday in support of the workers, helping to lead protest actions in Wichita, Kansas, Davenport, Iowa, and Alexandria, Virginia, among others.

“We want to see them treating their workers fairly and paying fair wages and benefits for people who are making it possible for them to be in business,” said Rev. David Hansen, a minister who protested with workers in Wichita on Friday.

Faith groups have reportedly been an integral part of the strike since its inception. OUR Walmart, the main organizational force behind of the nation-wide protests, encouraged activists to hold ‘‘Black Friday Prayer Vigils” as a way of expressing support. Similarly, the Interfaith Worker Justice, a faith-based organizing initiative that “fight[s] for economic and worker justice,” pushed its organizers and activists to attend local Walmart strikes and even produced a liturgy for activists to use during the protest.

“We pray for justice at the work place for Walmart workers, and all workers who don’t get to share in the success and profit of the companies at which they work,” read one of prayers from the liturgy.

Strikers garnered support from religious sources outside of the picket line as well. The United Church of Christ, a Christian denomination that boasts more than a million members, offered its own website as an organizing hub for activists. In addition, faith writers authors such as Susan Thistlethwaite, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Noah H. Evans, an Episcopal priest in Massachusetts, publicly voiced their support for the strikers in various publications.

“Wal-Mart employees are trying to use tried-and-true labor actions to change [their situation],” Thistlethwaite wrote. “As a Christian minister, and one who cares about those driven to work harder while being kept at the poverty level, I support them.”

Like the strikers, many faith leaders and groups are making it clear that their support for the strikers is not a one-time event. Activists insist that if Walmart doesn’t begin listening to concerns about low wages and poor working conditions, workers and faith groups alike will keep protesting – and praying – until they do.