The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported Tuesday that Sen.-elect Elizabeth Warren, a dogged consumer advocate whose critique of Wall Street excess was a centerpiece of her campaign, will join the Senate Banking Committee. Wall Street spent boatloads of money to prevent Warren’s election, but now, as the Center for Responsive Politics noted, she will have oversight of the rules and regulations under which banks operate:

The securities and investments industry contributed just $245,000 to Warren and spent $3 million supporting her opponent Scott Brown, according to OpenSecrets data from mid-October. The industry was Brown’s top supporter.

The Financial/Insurance/Real Estate sector followed suit and contributed $6 million to Brown and a puny half-a-million to Warren. Businesses also favored Brown heavily, and his top contributors came straight from Wall Street. And though there wasn’t much outside spending in the race because of a pledge made by the two candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose members include business and financial interests, spent $400,000 on the race in support of Brown and against Warren.

Several Senate candidates supported by Wall Street wound up losing. As a member of the Banking Committee, Warren will have the opportunity to stand against both the watering down of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and new misguided efforts to reduce limits on Wall Street.

Without an extension, two million unemployed workers will lose their federal unemployment insurance benefits at year’s end. Congress has never allowed unemployment benefits to expire with the unemployment rate as high as it is today.

President Obama’s plan to avert the so-called “fiscal cliff” included an extension of unemployment benefits. And now Senate Democrats are hopping on board, according to The Hill:

A majority of Senate Democrats are backing a yearlong extension of federal unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of the year.

Sen. Jack Reed (R.I.) and 41 of his 53 colleagues are lining up behind a proposal to extend the federal benefits program through 2013, according to a letter sent to Senate leaders on Monday.

“We are writing to express our deep concern regarding the expiration of federal support for unemployment insurance at the end of the year,” they wrote.

“Unemployment insurance is an essential component of our ongoing economic recovery and provides support to workers and their families who have been laid off through no fault of their own as they search for work.”

Research has shown that unemployment benefits — in addition to boosting demand in the economy and thus creating jobs — actually increase the number of people that become reemployed, “because they motivated people to not exit the labor force and stop looking for work.” The San Francisco Federal Reserve has found that workers who receive unemployment benefits stay do not stay unemployed longer than workers who receive no benefits.

In addition to those millions facing the prospect of losing their benefits, half of Americans who are eligible for unemployment insurance never even apply.

Ohio Senator Rob Portman (R) was one of a handful of Washington, D.C lawmakers and policy experts invited to participate in a panel discussion on the fiscal cliff on Tuesday morning, but his prepared remarks were temporarily derailed by about a dozen protestors who stood up, one at a time, to confront Portman over his support for the Republican plan to cut billions from social programs and entitlements that millions of low-income and middle class Americans rely on.

For five minutes, individuals scattered throughout the audience interrupted Portman to ask him not to cut programs like Medicare and Social Security or spending on teachers and other public employees. Several of them identified themselves as his constituents, to which Portman responded by promising them an audience following his remarks. The confrontations, though coordinated, harkened back to last spring, when Republicans returned home to their districts only to find themselves face to face with angry voters who voiced their displeasure at the Republicans’ budget plan of deep cuts and no increases in revenue.

Portman was invited to speak by a group calling itself “Fix The Debt,” a collection of corporate CEOs who are advocating cuts to entitlement programs while simultaneously pushing for more than $100 billion in tax breaks for themselves and their companies.

Watch the protests:

Things only got more tense once the protestors were escorted from the room. The cameraman captured Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow from the Heritage Foundation, shouting angrily at the crowd, and it appears that another individual tried to grab the camera before the footage cuts off.

Rep. John Boehner’s (R-OH) proposal to avert the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ is far from moderate: He refuses to consider taxing millionaires, he wants to raise the payroll tax, and his plan to raise revenue is similar to the detail-free ideas of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. On top of all that, the namesake of his plan — economics heavyweight Erskine Bowles — rejected the title, saying that the plan wasn’t centrist enough.

But that isn’t stopping some far-right organizations and members of Congress from rejecting the proposal. A few Republicans have come out against the Boehner plan, either as an attempt to try to make the Speaker look moderate when he’s not, or as a way of evincing a personal vendetta. Here are four Republicans calling Boehner’s plan a cave on the fiscal showdown:

Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS): The freshman Congressman from Kansas might be harboring some personal feelings against GOP leadership right now: Huelskamp was just taken off of the budget committee for having opposed leadership too many times. He’s speaking out against leadership Republicans, saying they “only give lip service to conservative principles.”

Americans for Prosperity Preisdent Tim Phillips: The point of an advocacy organization is to push their own agenda, and AFP has been vocal about theirs: To stop Democrats from raising any taxes, and to cut back on social safety net spending. Phillips trashed Boehner’s plan in an interview with National Journal, saying “Sadly, this plan leaves conservatives wanting.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC): As a tea party standard-bearer, DeMint may be trying to push Boehner as far to the right as possible by calling out his plan on Twitter. It’s also possible the Senator was feigning outrage, an easy way to paint Boehner as reasonable. “Speaker Boehner’s offer of an $800 billion tax hike will destroy jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more,” he wrote.

The Heritage Foundation: According to National Journal, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation sent its members an email disparaging Boehner’s plan: “Not only are Republican leaders asking their members to go back on their promise not to raise taxes on the American people,” the email reads, “but they appear unwilling to fight for the bold entitlement reforms that won them the House in 2010.”

In fact, there’s no compromise in Boehner’s plan at all, just a vague promise to find a method of increasing revenue. It cuts deeply from social programs while sparing top earners from any additional taxes. Indeed, every potential olive branch extended by Republicans has been nothing more than a bait and switch, signaling to the public that Republicans are willing to play a fair game, but without any actual proposals to go along with the gesture.

The Center for American Progress has released a budget plan that would raise $1.8 trillion in revenues and cut $4.1 trillion from the deficit while stabilizing the nation’s debt over the next decade, all while averting the so-called “fiscal cliff” that would occur at the end of the year and making important investments into infrastructure and jobs programs.

On revenue, the CAP plan would end the high-income Bush tax cuts, pushing top marginal tax rates back to their Clinton-era level. It also reforms the tax code by closing loopholes, converting deductions to credits, and repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax. As a result, it would raise $1.8 trillion in revenues and bring taxes as a share of the economy into line with the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan:

A substantial amount of the revenue would come from increasing the rate on capital gains, income earned through investments. Falling capital gains rates are the biggest driver of the growth in income inequality, according to one study, but the CAP plan would raise it to 28 percent, where the rate was under Ronald Reagan (it would also treat dividends, another form of investment income, as ordinary income, as it was for 90 years until Bush cut the rate in 2003):

CAP’s plan also cuts $1.8 trillion in spending, including the $385 billion from Medicare proposed in its Senior Protection Plan. It also finds another $100 billion in spending cuts from mandatory programs and cuts the defense budget by $10 billion a year over the next decade. The plan includes $300 billion in investments for infrastructure spending, teacher hiring, and energy efficiency programs, as well as $100 billion for the extension of middle class tax cuts similar to the payroll tax cut that would help the economy. Together with new revenue, the spending cuts would reduce interest payments on the debt by $500 billion, bringing overall deficit reduction to $4.1 trillion over the next 10 years and reducing federal spending to less than 23 percent of the economy:

The CAP plan would reduce budget deficits to 3 percent of gross domestic product in 2015 and to less than 2 percent by 2017, all while dropping the debt to 72 percent of the economy by the end of the decade. That’s a bigger reduction than Obama has proposed:

After failed Twinkies-maker Hostess filed for bankruptcy in November, acting chief executive Gregory Rayburn imposed an 8 percent across-the-board pay cut on the company’s workers. Despite those cuts, Rayburn, who took the company over after its second bankruptcy filing in March, will not be subject to the pay cut because he is not technically a company employee, the Huffington Post’s Bonnie Kavoussi reports:

Though he imposed an 8 percent pay cut for all Hostess workers, Gregory Rayburn’s monthly $125,000 pay — or $1.5 million a year — will remain unchanged, a company spokesman told The Huffington Post on Monday. Rayburn is not on the Hostess payroll and therefore isn’t subject to the imposed pay cut, the spokesman explained.

Earlier this year, Hostess’ former CEO received a pay increase from $750,000 to nearly $2.5 million even as the company was struggling. The pay package was later reduced to $1.5 million, and Rayburn reduced the salaries of four other senior executives who received bonuses to just $1 until the company emerges from bankruptcy, according to a company spokesperson. Four other executives who received raises, the spokesperson said, had their salaries reduced to pre-raise levels.

Still, the company asked a judge to approve $1.75 million in bonuses for 19 executives after it filed for bankruptcy in November. The judge approved the bonuses this week, making Hostess the latest company to dole out big pay packages to executives even as their firms were failing.

Throughout the fiscal cliff negotiations Republicans have insisted on preserving tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans, but have dogmatically opposed maintaing a payroll tax holiday that disproportionately benefits the middle class. Payroll taxes fall harder on those lower down the income ladder and economists believe that allowing 2011′s 2-percent decrease to expire could undermine economic growth, while permitting the top rates to go up would have only minimal impact.

On Tuesday morning, during an appearance on SiriusXM’s POTUS Politics, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) argued that raising marginal rates on the very rich would slow-down job creation but insisted that the nation’s debt problem requires the government to allow the payroll tax holiday to expire. Price said that individuals — presumably those who benefit most from the holiday — must feel “more pain” to help set the country on a sound fiscal footing:

TIM FARLEY (HOST): The payroll tax holiday is likely going away. People will likely get that increase in the deduction from your pay as of January 15, you’ll see your first paycheck, 2 percent will be gone. And I wonder if, even if you come to a solution…people are going to look at their paychecks and say, ‘I thought we solved this and look at all this money being taken out of my paycheck.

PRICE: Well, remember, step back and recognize that we’ve had four straight years of trillion dollar plus deficits, we’re $16 trillion plus dollars in debt. This doesn’t get fixed without some pain for everybody…The remarkable challenge that we have requires more work and more diligence and more pain for more individuals.

Listen:

Recent nonpartisan studies have shown that the Bush tax cuts for the rich — those on income above $250,000 — don’t boost the economy, while providing relief to lower and middle class Americans could significantly speed up the recovery. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), for instance, “Extending both the current 2 percentage-point cut in the payroll tax and emergency unemployment benefits…would boost real GDP by about three-quarters of a percent by the end of 2013.”

But unfortunately, the GOP is more interested in ideologically-driven policies that shrink government — and make “very painful cuts” to benefits — than growing the economy.