In a break from past practice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will begin seeking more admissions of wrongdoing when it settles enforcement cases with banks, Chairman Mary Jo White announced. Agency staff was alerted to the decision in a letter sent on June 17.

The change won’t apply to all cases, but will depend on “how much harm has been done to investors, how egregious is the fraud,” White said at a Wall Street Journal event on Tuesday, Bloomberg reports. The enforcement division will begin reviewing its pipeline of cases but won’t apply the new policy to those already in settlement talks.

White sent a letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) earlier this month saying that she was “actively reviewing” the commission’s policy of settling with banks while letting them avoid admitting to wrongdoing. The letter was in response to Warren’s inquiry into the practice, as well as the willingness to pursue settlements instead of prosecutions.

News about the SEC’s shift in enforcement policy comes as the U.K. gets even tougher on misconduct at banks. A parliamentary commission called for the creation of criminal sanctions for “reckless mismanagement” in the financial sector on Wednesday. The report also called for stricter rules on pay, greater competition, and more transparency on what activities are the responsibility of executives. While not binding, the report will likely influence future regulations.

Despite the fact that the economic crash was in large part thanks to risky bets and even fraudulent behavior at many large banks, there have yet to be prosecutions. Instead, regulators have mostly sought settlements that allowed banks to avoid admitting to wrongdoing. On the whole, prosecutions for financial fraud hit a 20-year low in 2011.

The largest settlements in the wake of the crisis, for mortgage and foreclosure fraud, have been rife with problems and allowed banks to game the requirements while offering little assistance to homeowners.

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX)

On Friday, the Senate advanced a farm bill that would take $4 billion out of SNAP and the House is considering cutting the program by 2.5 percent and leaving some two million families without food assistance. In response, more than 26 members of Congress are taking the “SNAP Challenge,” living off a food stamp budget for a week to draw attention to the inadequacy of the average benefit of $4.50 per day. Forty-seven million Americans are currently enrolled in the program.

But an aide in Stockman’s office claims to have “debunked” their effort and is accusing Democrats of “intentionally buying overpriced food and shopping at high-priced chains to make it appear the cuts go too far”:

Donny Ferguson, who serves as Stockman’s communications director and agriculture policy advisor, was able to buy enough food to eat well for a week on just $27.58, almost four dollars less than the $31.50 “SNAP Challenge” figure.

“I wanted to personally experience the effects of the proposed cuts to food stamps. I didn’t plan ahead or buy strategically, I just saw the publicity stunt and made a snap decision to drive down the street and try it myself. I put my money where my mouth is, and the proposed food stamp cuts are still quite filling,” said Ferguson.

“We can cut the proposed benefits by an additional 12.4 percent and still be able to eat for a week,” said Ferguson. “Not only am I feeding myself for less than the SNAP Challenge, I will probably have food left over.” [...]

“I didn’t use coupons, I didn’t compare prices and was buying for one, instead of a family. I could have bought even more food per person if I were splitting $126 four ways, instead of budgeting $31.50 to eat for one” said Ferguson. “I could have bought cheaper vegetables instead of prepared red beans and rice, but I like red beans and rice. Folks aren’t buying fast food instead of vegetables because of benefit limits, they’re buying fast food because fast food tastes great and vegetables taste like vegetables.”

Stockman’s office appears to misunderstand the challenge. Rather than impulsively buying food, participants plan for nutritious meals, akin to actual families enrolled in the program. And with the average cost of food at home far exceeding the SNAP Challenge allotment, families often struggle to afford meals.

A study published earlier this year by the Institute of Medicine found that “low-income and minority populations are more likely than other groups to experience limited access to supermarkets and other large retail outlets” These families also lack the transportation to access quality food and don’t have “sufficient time to produce healthy meals from scratch.” Since food prices vary across the nation, “SNAP participants who live in locales with higher food prices find it difficult to meet their needs with the current benefit,” the IOM concluded.

Indeed, as Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) — one of the members participating in the challenge — pointed out, “When I was a young, single mother, I was on public assistance. It was a bridge over troubled water, and without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” “I spent hours debating what to buy and what to skip, all the while keeping my sons in my mind,” she wrote.

The latest poverty data show that SNAP lifted 4.7 million households out of poverty in 2011.

The House plans to vote this week on a farm bill that cuts nearly $21 billion from food stamps, and several members who support the cuts have benefited significantly from the various forms of farm subsidies provided by the same legislation.

The ten Republicans in question have collected about $6.7 million in federal farm money dating back to the 1990s, according to analysis by the Environmental Working Group. Over the years, they’ve also justified cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) with a variety of smears against recipients and misrepresentations of the program’s nature and performance. Rep. Stephen Fincher’s (R-TN) erroneous biblical argument for cuts that would knock two million Americans off of food aid drew attention last month given that he’s gotten nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies over the years. But some of his colleagues deserve similar scrutiny for their apparent hypocrisy with regard to the House farm bill.

Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD), who’s gotten over $500,000 in subsidy payments since 1995, is a particularly interesting case. While Noem is diplomatic in most public statements on food stamps, she endorses a common smear of the program when away from cameras. In a constituent letter obtained by ThinkProgress, Noem wrote that “loopholes and fraud in the current program have lead to federal spending on SNAP to increase [sic] by 270 percent over the past ten years.” Rep. Vicki Hartzler (R-MO) offers to same rationale for the cuts, and has taken $500,000 in farm subsidies as well.

In fact, the jump in food stamp enrollment is due almost entirely to the catastrophic economic collapse and ensuing Great Recession. Even amid that heightened strain on the program’s staff, “SNAP achieved its lowest error rates on record in fiscal year 2011,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Outright fraud is down to just one percent.

Waste, fraud, and abuse are more common in the farm subsidies programs that have sent over a million taxpayer dollars to the Hartzler and Noem households over the years than in food stamps. Crop insurance alone has a 4.7 percent error rate, compared to 3.8 percent for SNAP.

Other common rationales from this group of would-be SNAP cutters fare no better under scrutiny. Many conservatives believe charities and individuals can better serve the hungry. But as ThinkProgress has noted, food charities say they are already beyond their capacity and cannot step into the breach the House bill would leave. Conservative objections to policies that expand SNAP eligibility to families just above the program’s cutoff level of 130 percent of the poverty line look less righteous when you consider that 8 in 10 hungry American children live in households with income up to 185 percent of the poverty line.

And while Rep. Marlin Stutzman’s (R-IN) suggestion that America’s poor amount to budget fat in need of trimming is a philosophical question, the question of dependency he raised in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing food stamps has no basis in fact.

ThinkProgress intern Kumar Ramanathan contributed research to this post.

(Credit: AP)

Have conservatives learned their lesson from the 47 percent debacle? A new paper from arguably the most influential conservative economist in the country, titled “In Defense Of The One Percent,” suggests no. Even worse, the paper shows how dividing America into Randian producers and naturally subordinate moochers is the only way to resolve a central contradiction in modern conservative economic thinking — meaning that the GOP will be stuck making a losing argument until it conducts a total rethink of its economic philosophy.

Harvard Economics Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, the author of “In Defense,” was the chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and counseled Mitt Romney on economic issues in 2006 and 2012. Despite his occasional heresies (Mankiw famously supports a carbon tax to fight global warming), Mankiw is one of the most-respected and most-representative conservative economist active in public life today.

Mankiw’s defense of the one percent proceeds from a fairly conventional script. He argues that structural transformations in the economy, principally caused by the advent of new technology like computers, “have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago.” The recent spike in inequality, for Mankiw, is then largely caused by the smart and talented being able to express their talents freely. Much of Mankiw’s paper is devoted to arguing that punishing these talented individuals through more progressive taxation would be unfair because they earned it fair and square.*

This argument doesn’t work if you think, like many Americans, the economic game is rigged in favor of the already-rich. As Mankiw concedes, the evidence that inequality persists over generations — that is, people with rich parents tend to end up rich too — is overwhelming. If this reflected structural disadvantage like unequal access to health care and education, then it would be hard to argue that the best and brightest, rather than richest and whitest, were being rewarded by rising inequality.

Instead of trying to argue away the facts on inequality, Mankiw attempts to reexplain them. He proceeds in part by personal anecdote: “I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age,” he writes, despite growing up wealthier than their middle-class father. Recognizing this impression to not be enough, Mankiw turns to the somewhat more surprising crutch of genetics. “Parents and children share genes,” which in Mankiw’s telling explains “intergenerational persistence in income even in a world of equal opportunities.” Though he disavows “genetic determinism,” Mankiw nevertheless thinks genetic transmission of things like IQ (a common conservative trope) make it “implausible to interpret generational persistence in income as simply a failure of society to provide equal opportunities.”

Even setting aside the obvious strawmanning here (nobody thinks persistent inequality is only caused by lack of opportunity), Mankiw’s analysis is unpersuasive. It can’t explain, for instance, why the United States has one of the lowest rates of intergenerational mobility in the developed world. Presumably, if genetics overwhelmed the effects of family inequality, more egalitarian distributions of wealth wouldn’t correlate with higher rates of mobility, but evidence from the developed world suggest they do.

But more fundamentally, follow Mankiw’s logic to its conclusion. He believes both that 1) the fact that the rich tend to stay rich, and the middle class tend not to become rich, are consequences of the natural distribution of talents and that 2) the most talented, morally speaking, deserve to keep what they earn.

In essence, Mankiw is arguing that a partly genetically determined upper class deserves most of society’s wealth and deserves to pass it on to their kids. It’s an argument that we’re living in a natural American hierarchy.
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Much mockery was made of Miss Utah on Monday after she gave a halting answer to a complicated question about the gender wage gap. On Tuesday, Miss Utah, otherwise known as Melissa Powell, was given a chance to answer the question without being put on the spot in an appearance on the Today Show:

Her answer was completely coherent and accurate:

So this is not okay. It needs to be equal pay for equal work. And it’s hard enough already to earn a living and it shouldn’t be harder just because you’re a woman.

Powell is absolutely right to point out that women don’t earn equal pay for equal work. On average they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes and among the 600 occupations tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they make less than men in all but seven. Factors such as what industry or job women choose, whether they take time off or go part-time to have children, their race, and their marital status still can’t explain the gap. Even after stripping those factors away, they make 80 percent of men’s income.

It is in fact tough to make a living, as wages for the average worker have been on a downward trajectory. Wages as a percent of overall economic output fell to an all-time low in December and have continued falling since. Yet at the same time, corporate profits have soared, growing by about 20 percent a year since the end of 2008 and reaching record highs. This means the growing share of families that rely on women’s income face a double whammy.

The question remains as to why a women who earns her money as a singer and actress is also expected to be an expert on economic policy, but when given the time to adequately prepare she was able to discuss the issue as well as anyone else.

Photo Credit: AP

The proposal asserts that the funding gap for Detroit’s pension obligations is five times wider than previously thought, at $3.5 billion rather than the $644 million estimated in 2011. Reuters reporter Cate Long dug into the numbers and came up skeptical: “Orr is going to have to show math that demonstrates the pension funds are so massively underfunded,” Long wrote, calling the pensions “reasonably well-funded according to national standards.”

But regardless of the validity of Orr’s numbers, the proposal appears designed to facilitate a bankruptcy filing. Once in bankruptcy court, Orr would no longer need public workers’ unions to sign off on a plan to renege on pension promises. Michael VanOverbeke, a lawyer for the pension fund, explained the basic unfairness of prioritizing investors over retirees: Where bond investments carry “a certain amount of risk,” he told the New York Times, “[p]lanning for retirement and working for employers was not an investment in the market. These are people who are on a fixed income…they can’t go back to work and start all over again.”

Elsewhere, Orr’s report summarizes the barely-functioning state of the Motor City: 40 percent of its street lights are dark, two-thirds of its ambulances are out of service, and 78,000 buildings stand empty. How did Detroit get here? The fundamentals of the city’s economy declined along with the U.S. auto industry, but ill-considered debt schemes and manipulation by big international banks exacerbated the problem. Convicted former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick oversaw huge loans that went bad, including billions of dollars in the interest rate gambles known as “swaps.” But banks were rigging the rates that determine who wins and who loses on interest rate swaps like Detroit’s, as last year’s LIBOR scandal revealed. The city paid nearly half a billion dollars in fees to Wall Street firms for engineering the swaps and other financing schemes that only deepened Detroit’s debt hole.

The combination of local corruption and bank manipulation, which leaves the public holding the bag, is something of a common feature for troubled American cities these days. But the far-reaching powers Orr has to resolve things in Detroit set it apart.

In 2011, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R) signed a law expanding the powers of emergency managers like Orr, who can tear up collective bargaining agreements and sell public holdings. But because the state’s constitution protects public employee pensions, Orr will need either union consent or the help of a federal bankruptcy judge to impose the cuts on Detroit’s 30,000 current and former employees.

Credit: New York Magazine

A California district court gave preliminary approval to the national class action settlement in the case, Cogdell v. Wet Seal, which alleged that Wet Seal “had a policy of denying equal pay and promotion opportunities and firing African-American store management employees” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The plaintiffs were represented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and two other law firms. The court will decide in November, after a review of the claims process, whether to grant final approval.

If the settlement, which the two parties reached May 8, is approved, at least $5.58 million of the $7.5 million in monetary relief will be paid in damages to current and former managers of Wet Seal outlets who are black or African-American. The company will also take several non-monetary steps, including expanding its human resources department and tracking job applications to ensure diversity in hiring and applications.

A three-year investigation by the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into the store wrapped up last year. The EEOC concluded that the store had knowingly discriminated in its hiring decisions, the Los Angeles Times reported:

In a three-year investigation, the commission found evidence that Wet Seal corporate managers openly stated that to be profitable the retailer had to retain workers with “the Armani look” — meaning thin, blond and blue-eyed.

One high-level executive sent an email to underlings in 2009 pointing out that the dominance of African American workers was a “huge issue.”

“Managers were instructed to make employment decisions based on race,” the agency said in documents made public Monday.

The case is the latest reminder of the difficulties African-Americans face in the job market. The black unemployment rate is still more than double that for white people, and last week the EEOC filed two suits against separate companies alleging they unfairly used background checks to discriminate in hiring decisions.

Joseph Diebold is an intern at ThinkProgress.

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The explosion occurred in a section of the plant that had been shut down for maintenance when workers are thought to have pumped too much nitrogen into a vessel, causing it to rupture. The company has said that there was no fire or chemical release and there is no threat or hazard posed to the community near the plant.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is now conducting one of three investigations at the plant to uncover the exact cause, running plant officials through emergency drills. CF Industries Holdings is conducting its own investigation and has also hired a third party to investigate the causes of the accident.

OSHA issued a six-figure fine against the plant in 2000 after an explosion in an ammonia unit killed three workers and injured eight, according to WBRZ. The plant in Geismar hadn’t been inspected by OSHA in at least two decades, according to OSHA’s online database. The Geismar plant experienced another accident in 2009 when 60 pounds of flammable mixture was released, causing a fire that didn’t lead to injuries. Louisiana has experienced at least two other explosions in chemical facilities in the last two years.

Last week’s blasts came months after the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas that killed 15 people and injured more than 160. The West plant hadn’t been inspected by OSHA since 1985.

OSHA inspections are few and far between thanks to a perennial lack of funding and difficulty retaining staff. The average workplace only gets a visit from inspectors every 99 years. Sequestration will make things worse, with cuts to the agency’s budget likely resulting in 1,200 fewer workplace inspections.

Yet thousands of people die in workplace accidents every year. In just 2007, there were 5,600 fatal workplace injuries and 53,000 fatal illnesses, plus 8,559,000 nonfatal injuries and 427,000 nonfatal illnesses. These accidents cost society huge sums thanks to medical and indirect expenses: $250 billion for the injuries and illnesses in 2007 alone.

Meanwhile, thousands of chemical plants across the country pose risks to big populations. Nearly 7,000 facilities report that a worst-case scenario would pose a risk to populations over 1,000 people and 90 plants could impact more than 1 million.

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Mt. Holly bought up all but 70 of the homes in a predominantly black and latino neighborhood called Mount Holly Gardens and began razing parts of the neighborhood to clear it for redevelopment. The plan would have replaced homes the town bought for $30,000-$50,000 with homes valued at $200,000-$250,000.

In February, the Obama administration officially made the theory of “disparate impact” the determining factor for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) role as arbiter of housing discrimination. Disparate impact arguments allow the government to bypass the question of intent. Discriminatory intent is far more difficult to prove than discriminatory impact, which is simply a matter of statistics.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the disparate impact claim from displaced Mount Holly Gardens citizens last June, opening the door for the top court to take the case. As Pro Publica explained in February, scholars believe Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts, are seeking to strike down disparate impact in housing law, and the decision will hinge on Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Housing discrimination has gone underground since laws banning outright discrimination took effect, as a recent HUD-funded study and numerous other examinations of the housing market have shown. In the words of HUD enforcement chief Sara Pratt, “Landlords, housing professionals, zoning and planning boards, have learned to stop talking about it. What they haven’t learned is to stop doing it.” That makes the ability to combat discrimination with quantitative impact findings, rather than telepathic intent findings, especially crucial.

The discrimination lawsuit Wells Fargo settled in early June was premised on such statistical proofs of discriminatory treatment of foreclosed properties depending on the racial makeup of the surrounding neighborhoods. Notorious subprime lender Countrywide paid a $335 million settlement after the government demonstrated in court filings that the firm systematically overcharged 200,000 minority borrowers. The standard is frequently applied in other areas of anti-discrimination law as well, such as in the recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints against Dollar General stores and BMW factories.

The high court attempted to address the use of disparate impact in housing law in its previous term, but then-Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez convinced the city of St. Paul, MN, to withdraw its appeal. Perez’s actions in keeping that case from reaching the bench were the rallying point for opposition to his nomination to head the Department of Labor. As Ian Millhiser previously explained in ThinkProgress, the GOP attempt to paint Perez’s role in preserving a key pillar of housing fairness law as a “quid pro quo” swindle can’t be reconciled with the facts. Now that anti-discrimination pillar is once again headed to the bench.

(Credit: Shutterstock)

Late last week, the city’s Metro Council approved a measure to fund one-way bus tickets for homeless people. Officials originally named it the “Clean Sweep” program; after they realized that comparing homeless people to trash on the street wasn’t a great public relations move, they changed the name to “HOPE,” or Homeless Outreach Prevent Efforts. Just $5,000 was appropriated in the trial program, enough for around 30 one-way bus tickets, but funding could be expanded later if officials consider the move a success.

HOPE is a seemingly benevolent program where homeless people who have family or a job lined up somewhere outside Baton Rouge can use the program to get a free bus ticket to their destination. In theory, the job or family member is supposed to be verified by the city before putting a homeless person on a bus.

The issue is that these programs frequently fall short of their ideal and can even result in homeless people being shipped out of town against their will. A number of other cities around the country already have programs to give their homeless residents one-way tickets, including New York City, San Francisco, and Fort Lauderdale, and they have proven highly problematic.

It can be good “if it’s done for the right reasons and it’s voluntary and people are not being given a choice, ‘go to jail or we can give you a bus ticket,’” Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing at the National Coalition for the Homeless, told ThinkProgress. In addition, though one-way bus ticket programs are typically sold as a way to reunite homeless persons with their families, such programs have historically served a far more nefarious goal: ridding downtown of homeless people.

Problems arise, however, when a city’s police department, instead of a homeless agency, is in charge of administering these programs. There is often little oversight or follow-up to ensure that a homeless person isn’t just being shuttled out of the city and then forgotten. “Police departments should be the last people handling this,” Stoops said.

However, as The Advocate, a local newspaper, notes, “the program is being overseen by the Baton Rouge Police Deaprtment.” Though it claims it will work in conjunction with homeless organizations, local advocacy groups said they had no knowledge of the matter.

As a result, advocates would be excused for worrying that HOPE is a thinly-veiled guise for getting rid of Baton Rouge’s homeless population, especially considering comments made by the sponsoring councilmember. Councilman John Delgado, the driving force behind HOPE, said homeless people are a blight on downtown Baton Rouge. “At the end of the day we did not spend millions of tax payer dollars on refurbishing downtown to make it as nice as it is just to have it flooded with homeless people,” said Delgado, hinting that family reunification may not be his primary goal.

Indeed, one can imagine Delgado’s next priority being a statue to be placed on the road into Baton Rouge that reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, so that I may give them one-way bus tickets out of town and they can be someone else’s problem.”

Credit: FoxNews.com

Sunday evening was the annual Miss USA beauty pageant, where Erin Brady, Miss Connecticut, took the crown. But what everyone seems to be talking about the morning after is not Brady but an answer Miss Utah gave during the pageant. A judge asked Marissa Powell, “A recent report shows that in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?”

Her answer was admittedly rambling:

I think we can relate this back to education and how we are continuing to try to strive to (pause) figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem and I think, especially the men, are um, seen as the leaders of this and so we need to try and figure out how to create education better so we can solve this problem.

But why we expect women competing in a beauty pageant to all be experts in economics too is unclear. And those mocking Miss Utah may be surprised to hear that there were glimmers of truth in her answer: men’s wages and education are much discussed factors in the gender wage gap.

In married couples where women make more, men’s declining wages may be at least in part to blame. Men’s wages have been on a relatively steady decline since the late 1970s except for the strong labor market of the late 1990s. This trend can in fact account for a quarter of the narrowing gender wage gap over that time. “Men are the leaders of this” is almost accurate.

Talking about education in this context is not far-fetched. Some in fact look to education to solve this problem, as Powell haltingly indicated, as men are completing fewer higher degrees than women. But more education isn’t the answer. For men with a high school degree, real wages have fallen by more than 14 percent since the 1970s. Yet wages have remained depressed across the board, even for those with a college degree.

Education did help narrow the gender wage gap from the 1970s to the 2000s. Yet women’s wages have recently started dropping even as they gain even more higher education than men. And the wage gap is stubbornly persistent despite how much education women take on. The gap appears the moment men and women graduate, with young female graduates earning 82 percent of what their male counterparts earn. It follows them at every level of education as men with the same degree earn more.

The question was also poorly framed. The Pew report that the judge referred to actually shows that while 40 percent of families are relying on women’s wages, that demographic is really split into two groups: women who make more than their husbands and single mothers. In fact, single moms account for two-thirds of women who are the main income support for their families. Single mothers don’t just earn less than men. They earn a lot less than married couples: households headed by single mothers earn less than half of those with a married couple. Both the wage gap and the way U.S. policy fails to adequately support single parents are to blame.

In general, though, the model in which a husband makes more than his wife is still going strong: three-quarters of married couples follow this dynamic.

If the U.S. wants to close the gender wage gap, as the Miss USA judge seemed to be trying to discuss, it will have to confront many causes, one of the strongest of which may be the penalty working mothers face, particularly worrisome to breadwinning women. While men and women see similar wage growth through age 30, women’s slows right at the age when they typically begin having children and all but halts by age 39. Mothers earn 5 percent less per hour per child than childless women. Paid family leave could help change this equation, as it helps boost wages for mothers. Helping women to pay for childcare could also go a long way as it helps them stay in jobs and experience higher pay.

Other policy changes could help close the gap. Ending salary secrecy would make it easier for women to root out and address discrimination. Raising the minimum wage would give that female-dominated workforce a big lift.

Should Miss Utah have given a full overview of the causes and potential policy solutions to the gender wage gap? That seems a lot to ask of someone on the spot.

One of the nation’s largest mortgage servicers intentionally, knowingly, and routinely falsifies paperwork and lies to homeowners in order to boot them from their homes, according to bank insiders.

The latest of many civil suits over Bank of America’s handling of foreclosures and mortgage modifications has produced affidavits from six former employees alleging the bank actively and systematically deceived homeowners and sought foreclosures over modifications that would have kept borrowers in their homes. A seventh signed statement from a man who worked for one of the bank’s contractors reinforces the picture of a company-wide culture of putting profits over customers, even in defiance of facts.

The documents, first reported by Kimberly Miller of the Palm Beach Post, are part of a lawsuit over the bank’s handling of trial loan modifications under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) created by the Obama administration. The employees, whose work for the bank ranged from loan origination to collections to reviewing internal loan databases, swear that Bank of America used a variety of internal policies to discourage loan modifications and encourage foreclosures, even when loan documents visible to the employees showed the bank’s rationale for foreclosing was untrue. Those policies include:

• ‘Blitzing’: According to William Wilson, the bank conducted a “blitz” twice a month, instructing case managers to deny any HAMP application more than 60 days old, including “files [in] which the homeowner had provided all required financial documents and fully complied with the terms of a Trial Period Plan.”

• $500 bonuses for filling foreclosure quotas: According to Simone Gordon, an employee “who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus. Bank of America also gave employees gift cards to retail stores like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond as rewards for placing accounts into foreclosure.”

• Lying to clients about documentation: Gordon’s affidavit says it was bank policy to sit on financial documents borrowers submitted for 30 days, then label them “stale” and require the homeowner to re-apply. Bert Sheeks, the contract employee, was instructed “to find any pretext” to justify closing outstanding loan modification applications, “even in cases where we knew the borrower had, in fact, responded with complete documents.” Erika Brown “was instructed to inform every homeowner who called in that their file was ‘under review’” even when she could see no one had looked at the documents in question. Brown says she personally saw more than a hundred instances in which a bank official cancelled a loan modification due to “non payment” when the file showed all payments had been received on time.

The sum of the allegations is that the bank routinely falsified documents and knowingly foreclosed on borrowers who were in full compliance with modification plans. The program, which was the biggest federal initiative intended to alleviate the foreclosure crisis, should have helped 800,000 more homeowners than it did, according to a 2012 report.

Bank of America spokespeople say the allegations are false. The company has already “spent more than $45 billion to settle claims tied to its 2008 takeover of Countrywide Financial Corp,” the Boston Globe notes, and the top-to-bottom malfeasance alleged in this suit echoes allegations from 2011 that the bank paid to settle. Bank of America is far from alone in that regard, as many of the largest banks in the country have paid to settle allegations of abusive practices such as “robosigning.”

Despite such settlements, the government has prosecuted more protesters than it has banks involved in the foreclosure crisis, and abuses have continued.

Bank of America and other large banks that were supposed to harness HAMP funds to help resolve the foreclosure crisis were instead quite effective at using the program to boost their own balance sheets. The manipulation of the program depicted in these affidavits is more evidence that direct principal reduction would be a more effective use of federal housing funds than HAMP’s attempted partnership with banks.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a bill on Friday that blocks local governments from implementing paid sick leave legislation, the Orlando Sentinel reports. He made his decision quickly, only taking four of the 15 days he legally had to review the bill before he signed it.

In signing the bill, Scott sided with big business interests including Disney World, Darden Restaurants (owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster), and the Florida Chamber of Commerce. The bill is part of a national effort to pass so-called “preemption bills” that would block paid sick leave legislation that is backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing group that coordinates conservative laws across states. The state’s House Majority Leader, Steve Precourt (R), who was instrumental in putting forward the preemption bill, is an active ALEC member.

The bill has made moot a 2014 referendum in Orange County that would have decided whether to require paid sick leave. More than 50,000 voters had tried to get the measure on the November 6 ballot but the County Commission voted it off. It made it on the ballot in 2014 thanks to a three-judge panel.

Florida follows a rash of preemption bills in the states, which cropped up in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Mississippi. These bills are part of ALEC’s efforts to weaken wage and labor standards: Since 2011, 67 such ALEC-affiliated bills have been introduced in state legislatures, 11 of which had been signed into law before Scott signed this bill.

Big business stood in opposition to the Orange County effort on paid sick leave because it claimed such a bill would drive up costs. Yet a study of San Francisco, which enacted a paid sick leave policy in 2007, showed that a majority of businesses saw either no impact or a positive one on profitability. Other research has shown such policies to be good for business and job growth.

Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) vetoed a bill on Friday that would have allowed women suffering wage discrimination to take legal action, alleging that the measure “duplicates federal law, which already allows employees…to file a claim with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.” On average, women earn 77 cents of every dollar a man makes, though the disparity is even greater for African American and Hispanic women.

HB 950 builds on the federal Lilly Ledbetter Act, which strengthened women’s ability to challenge pay discrimination. Supporters argued that the state legislation would “provide uniformity between state and federal anti-discrimination laws” and “allow parties to proceed in a nearby state court, while at the same time avoid the increased expense of having to proceed in a federal court which may be far away.” Lilly Ledbetter protections also “do not apply to state cases absent action by the legislature.”

Forty-two states have passed sate-based equal pay laws, recognizing that Lilly Ledbetter was not enough.

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Middle-class men who take on greater caregiving roles at home are more penalized at work than men who offload that work to their wives. Women, on the other hand, are treated worse for not having children or having nontraditional caregiving arrangements.

Mothers’ and fathers’ roles at home have been changing in the past half-century. The Pew Research Center found that fathers have nearly tripled the time they spend with their children since 1965 (although there is still a large gender gap, as mothers spend twice as much).

As men have taken on greater caring roles, they have also experienced greater discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has reported a rise in discrimination claims against caregivers, with a growing share brought by men. The number of family responsibility discrimination cases brought by male plaintiffs rose 300 percent between 2006 and 2010.

Meanwhile, family policies often leave them out. While men are equally entitled to time off to take care of a child under the Family and Medical Leave Act, that leave is unpaid. Fourteen states include new fathers in laws that go beyond the federal floor to offer better policies, the remaining 36 either help new mothers or do nothing at all. Thus while about 85 percent of fathers take time off for the birth of a child, the vast majority take just a week or two. By contrast, offering paid leave in California nearly tripled the amount of time fathers took off, from an average of three weeks to eight.

The U.S. by and large stands alone in not offering paid paternity leave, as at least 66 other countries ensure paid time off for new fathers. Meanwhile it is just one of three countries among 178 that doesn’t offer maternity leave.