Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio (FL) has been having a little trouble laying out exactly how he plans to balance the budget (as his proposed constitutional balanced budget amendment would require), while simultaneously cutting taxes for the rich and corporations. And when pressed for specifics regarding what, exactly, he would endorse eliminating from the federal budget, Rubio has simply refused to answer.

Today, Rubio’s penchant for budget fuzziness was on full display during an interview with Fox News. Asked what he would cut from the budget, Rubio seized onto the same John Boehner-inspired return to 2008 non-defense discretionary spending levels that was included in the House Republicans’ Pledge to America. But when asked what that translates into practically, Rubio managed to name precisely zero items in the discretionary budget that he would cut:

Q: What would be the first thing you would cut?

RUBIO: First thing that we need to do is actually roll back discretionary spending and freeze it at the 2008 level. [...]

Q: Is there an item on the discretionary spending that you think would be where to focus?

RUBIO: Oh, goodness. Yeah, how ’bout the unspent stimulus money? How ’bout the unspent TARP money? I mean, those two alone are significant billions of dollars that can be used to pay down the debt. That’s just a start. I think when you add $3 trillion to the national debt, the way this administration has done over the last 18 months, you’re not going to struggle to find places to cut back federal discretionary spending.

Watch it:

Both the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 were one-time emergency spending measures, not discretionary spending programs. They aren’t going to be re-authorized. In fact, TARP has already expired! Some discretionary programs did receive stimulus funding, but the Recovery Act, as a piece of legislation, is not discretionary spending and has no effect on the federal budget beyond 2012.

But what is in the discretionary budget? For starters, all federal education funding, some veteran’s benefits, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, federal highway funding, the National Park Service, the Coast Guard, and Congress itself. And even if you cut every last penny of the non-defense discretionary budget, you still wouldn’t eliminate the deficit.

Rubio, like many Republicans, seems to think that there a whole host of programs in the federal budget that affect no one and that no one will miss. But it’s simply not true, and in the meantime, Rubio is utterly incapable of identifying anything he would do to get the long-term deficit under control. Instead, he simply names programs that are explicitly designed to disappear no matter what he or anyone else thinks of them.

Today, the New York Times builds on research published by ThinkProgress by noting that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is mostly funded by a small group of large corporations. The Chamber has tried to lie about its identity for years, absurdly telling the media that it represents 3 million businesses. Then after being caught with no proof of such membership, it modified that number to 300,000 — but then claimed small businesses were the true driver of the Chamber’s member rolls. But the Times correctly points out that in 2008, the Chamber received the bulk of its donations from only 45 companies, including firms like Goldman Sachs, Edward Jones, Alpha Technologies, Chevron Texaco and Aegon.

Many corporations pay regular dues to the Chamber, but pitch in more during election cycles or particular lobbying campaigns. For instance, on top of its regular $100,000 commitment of yearly dues, health insurance giant Aetna joined other health insurers to funnel $20 million to the Chamber to kill health reform. Similarly, Fox News parent company News Corporation gave an additional $1 million to the Chamber for its attack campaign this midterm election. While ThinkProgress forced the Chamber to acknowledge that it receives foreign funds to its 501(c)(6) account used for attack ads, the Chamber refuses to disclose any of its other donors or how exactly it funds its nasty attack ads. Using public corporate records, ThinkProgress has found more dues-paying members of the Chamber. The numbers below reflect a bare minimum, and in many cases these corporations have paid ten times the amount of their regular dues to the Chamber in the past two years:

– Microsoft’s corporate disclosures state that the company paid the Chamber up to $999,999 in 2009 and up to $999,999 in 2010 in its minimum dues.

– Procter and Gamble paid the Chamber $3.2 million in 2009.

– Outsourcing giant CSC, which specializes in IT outsourcing, paid the Chamber at least $100,000 in 2009 and $100,000 in 2010.

– eBay paid the Chamber at least $100,000 in yearly dues ($100,000 in 2010, and what appears to be $100,000 in 2009).

– Drug company Merck paid the Chamber $234,000 in 2008, and still counts itself as a dues-paying member of the Chamber.

– Utility company Dominion Resources gave the Chamber $100,000 in 2009.

– On the Chamber’s Egypt Business Council website, Apache Corporation, British American Tobacco, The Blackstone Group, The Boeing Company, Cargill USA, CitiGroup, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, Google, Microsoft Corporation, PepsiCo, Intel Corporation, Monsanto Company, Pfizer Inc, Philip Morris International combined committed an additional $375,000 to the Chamber for 2009-2010.

Earlier this year, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue admitted to ThinkProgress that CitiGroup, a bailed out financial conglomerate that still has not paid back taxpayer TARP funds, is a dues-paying member of the Chamber. Many bailed out banks are in fact dues-paying members of the Chamber. A Huffington Post crowd-sourced study of the Chamber found that there are dozens of other large corporations that have indicated membership in the Chamber, but have refused to confess their level of involvement. The Chamber has shilled for BP, and Donohue said after BP’s spill that taxpayers should pay for the clean up. Indeed, BP admitted membership, but has not disclosed how much they pay to the Chamber.

As a ThinkProgress investigation found, at least 80 foreign businesses have been paying the Chamber at least $885,000 in yearly dues for the last two years. The money went directly to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6), the same account the Chamber is now using to run a $75 million attack campaign against Democrats. As we have shown, many of the foreign corporations have a direct stake in American public policy; for instance the Chamber has been the most vigorous lobbying operation in DC to promote outsourcing of American jobs. Of course, many other corporation join the Chamber to benefit from its right-wing corporate lobbying campaign, like keeping corporate tax loopholes open (Chamber members CitiGroup, ExxonMobil and Bank of America already paid no corporate income taxes last year) and maintaining the status quo on energy policy so the fossil fuel industry can emit carbon pollution free of charge.

Yesterday, Bloomberg News released an extensive report showing how Google used tax havens in Ireland and the Caribbean to dodge $3.1 billion in taxes in both the United States and abroad. Employing strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich,” Google managed to lower its effective corporate tax rate all the way down to 2.4 percent, far below the U.S. statutory rate of 35 percent.

Last night, CNBC ran a segment on Google’s tax dodging, which even CNBC’s supply-side guru Larry Kudlow seemed to think was out of bounds, saying, “I think, with a $1.3 trillion budget deficit, we do want corporations to pay their share.” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), though, used the revelation regarding Google’s handiwork to call for cutting the corporate tax rate. Hensarling freely admitted that he didn’t actually have any clue what it was that Google did, but he is certain that Google’s taxes should be cut anyway:

I don’t know the individual facts of the Google situation. What I do know is that, second only to Japan, we have the highest corporate income tax rate of any industrialized nation of the world. I also know that for companies that want to repatriate their capital to the American shores, they’re looking at a 35 percent income tax rate, where on many other OECD nations, several of the EU nations, will tax it at zero to two percent. So, again, I don’t know the individual situation with Google, but I do know that zero times zero is zero and we ought to be look at how do we get this capital back into the United States of America.

Watch it:

So that Hensarling can get up to speed on the situation, here’s a handy interactive graphic laying out how Google’s tax scheme works. But Hensarling is hardly alone in finding corporate tax dodging a justification for lowering the corporate tax rate. Over the summer, Rep. David Camp (R-MI) said that the U.S. corporate tax rate “puts pressure” on companies to shift income, and therefore needs to be reduced.

But Hensarling’s position makes little sense. He called for bringing the corporate tax rate down to 25 percent, but why would that prevent companies from using tax havens? After all, Google’s 2.4 percent rate is still far below Hensarling’s proposed rate. And when given past opportunities to repatriate money at a lower tax rate, as Hensarling also suggested, corporations have used that money to enrich shareholders and executives, not to create jobs or make investments.

From his seat on the Financial Services Committee, Hensarling has consistently carried water for big corporations, no matter their behavior. Saying that they should be rewarded for tax dodging is simply another part of his pattern.

Our guest blogger is Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at American Progress.

Many Republican officials greatly admire the father of cap and trade: President Ronald Reagan. Yet opposition to “cap-and-trade” legislation to reduce global warming pollution is a common refrain among many Republican and a few Democratic officials this fall. The program is derided as a “cap and tax” that would drain voters’ wallets while bankrupting the nation. After the demise of comprehensive global warming legislation in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gloated that “cap-and-trade, which is also known as the national energy tax, is dead in the United States Senate.”

Ironically enough, the three most recent Republican presidents promoted cap and trade, including Ronald Reagan. They employed such a system to phase out lead in gasoline, cut chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting chemicals, and reduce sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain — all without undue cost.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) praised Reagan last year:

When you realize the magnitude of President Reagan’s achievements, there is absolutely no reason why anyone would ignore his ‘demonstrably good’ example.

Nonetheless, she and many of today’s public officials oppose a global warming plan that would employ the innovative cap-and-trade system first created by President Reagan, repudiating his legacy for cheap political gain and to curry favor with polluting industries.

The Reagan White House conceived the first cap-and-trade program to reduce pollution, used in the 1980s to phase out lead in gasoline at a lower cost. It was developed as a more flexible, market-based system to reduce environmental pollution compared to the so-called “command and control” model employed by environmental laws in the 1970s. The old system required each polluting facility to make a fixed reduction in air or water contamination, which ignored that some facilities could cut pollution more cheaply than others. An EPA analysis shows:

… estimated savings from the lead trading program of approximately 20 percent over alternative programs that did not provide for lead banking, a cost savings of about $250 million per year.

President Reagan also signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to slash the production and use of chemicals that deplete the upper ozone layer essential to screen out cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. His administration established a cap-and-trade system to implement the chemical reductions the protocol required. A 2006 scientific assessment concluded that “the Montreal Protocol is working” to reduce chemicals and protect the ozone layer.

President George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, was the first president to propose the employment of a cap-and-trade system in an environmental law. The Clean Air Act of 1990 includes his proposed cap-and-trade system to reduce the sulfur pollution from power plants responsible for acid rain.

The Clean Air Act passed the Senate by a vote of 89-10 and the House by 401-25. Many staunch conservatives voted for it including Sens. Kit Bond (R-Mo), Trent Lott (R-MS), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Strom Thurmond (R-SC). Conservative House supporters included Reps. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Joe Barton (R-TX), Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and Fred Upton (R-MI).

When President Bush signed the Clean Air Act into law he highlighted its innovative cap-and-trade mechanism:

The acid rain allowance trading program will be the first large-scale regulatory use of market incentives and is already being seen as a model for regulatory reform efforts here and abroad.

“To reject this legacy and embrace the failed 1970s policies of one-size-fits-all regulatory mandates would signify unilateral surrender of principled support for markets,” write economists Richard Schmalensee, who worked in the Reagan White House, and Robert Stavins. “If some conservatives oppose energy or climate policies because of disagreement about the threat of climate change or the costs of those policies, so be it. But in the process of debating risks and costs, there should be no tarnishing of market-based policy instruments. Such a scorched-earth approach will come back to haunt when future environmental policies will not be able to use the power of the marketplace to reduce business costs.”

Schmalensee and Stavins’s warning should be heeded: This current crop of Republican and a few Democratic officials—in their zeal to curry favor with their special interest funders and Tea Party activists—could doom future efforts to follow the path paved by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush to reduce pollution in the most cost-effective way possible.

Read the extended version of this post at American Progress.

A slew of Republican Senate candidates have recently tried to dress up their support for Social Security privatization as something else entirely, denying that they support privatization while continuing to advocate for the creation of private Social Security accounts that could be invested in the markets. Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey, Ohio Republican Rob Portman, Arkansas Republican John Boozman, and Colorado Republican Ken Buck have all said they oppose privatization, while simultaneously advocating for private accounts.

Oregon’s Republican Senate nominee, law professor Jim Huffman, became the latest to join this club during a debate last night with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Huffman asserted that he hasn’t argued for privatizing Social Security, literally one sentence after calling for the creation of private accounts. He then reiterated his idea later in the debate:

I have argued for allowing newcomers to the Social Security system to have the option of private accounts. I have not argued for privatizing the Social Security system. There’s nothing in the record that would uphold that argument.

Watch it:

This is all part and parcel of the concerted conservative campaign to change the terms — but not the policy prescriptions — of Social Security privatization. Privatization polls badly, so conservatives want to change the word, but not the idea.

And the fact remains that creating private Social Security accounts would impose new risks on seniors, create new administrative costs and benefit reductions, and wouldn’t even set the Social Security system on a path to solvency. In fact, such a move would force the federal government into trillions of dollars of new borrowing, as money that should have gone into the general Social Security system gets diverted into the creation of personal accounts.

An analysis of private accounts done by Robert Shiller found that, “given an all-stock portfolio and typical stock market returns across the world’s 15 largest economies, a worker’s account would have negative returns 33 percent of the time.” And diversifying an account with other investments such as bonds actually increased the likelihood of a negative return. This is an unnecessary risk for seniors — more than 13 million of whom are kept out of poverty only because of Social Security — no matter what those on the right want to call it.

On the campaign trail, California’s Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina has repeatedly defended the decision to outsource thousands of jobs that tech giant Hewlett-Packard made while she was its CEO. “During my time at Hewlett Packard, yes, I had to make some tough choices like families and businesses all across California are making tough choices. China is fighting for our jobs,” she said.

But at the same time that she was shipping positions overseas — and HP was raking in billions in profits — Fiorina also claimed California tax credits meant to encourage start-up companies to invest in manufacturing equipment (and presumably create jobs here in the U.S.):

While Fiorina was chief executive of the computer giant, the state was hospitable enough to grant the company a controversial $13-million tax refund even though, state officials said, it had already used credits to offset some income tax bills…HP was awarded $13 million in 2005, when the company posted net earnings of $2.5 billion. That year, California faced a $6-billion budget gap and slashed funding for public health programs, education and law enforcement. In asking for the rebates, the companies cited provisions of a law that state officials said were designed to encourage small start-ups to invest in manufacturing equipment.

Considering that it was founded in 1939, HP calling itself a start-up is obviously a bit of a stretch. According to the Los Angeles Times, “in years before the vote, Hewlett-Packard made $20,000 in political donations to the four members of the five-member Board of Equalization who approved the tax relief,” which may have greased the skids a bit.

This credit is California’s version of a problem plaguing the tax code at the federal level: the proliferation of credits and handouts to mature, profitable companies. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with trying to incentivize actual start-up industries, but there’s no reason to be giving companies that can clearly stand on their own two feet taxpayer money, particularly when states and the federal government are facing their own severe fiscal constraints.

Nowadays, Fiorina spends a healthy portion of her time bashing her state’s economic policies, telling CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, “the facts are we’re destroying jobs in this state through bad government policy.” But during her tenure as CEO, Fiorina clearly had no qualms about accepting tax credits meant to create and preserve jobs and then shipping positions overseas anyway. I guess we should expect nothing less from someone who refers to outsourcing as “right-shoring.”

Earlier this month, former Bush administration budget director Rob Portman, who is running on the Republican ticket for Ohio’s open Senate seat, denied that he favored privatizing Social Security, despite his long record of statements in support of doing just that. “I mean, this is what Einstein talked about, the magic, the greatest force in the universe, the power of compounding interest. That’s what we’re talking about here,” Portman said of private Social Security accounts.

But now Portman has added a new quirk to his privatization plan, in a pretty clear attempt to calm the nerves of those who rightfully worry about their Social Security being subject to the whims of the markets:

During the debate and in the “spin room” with reporters afterward, Portman insisted he has pledged not to cut benefits for retirees. Instead, he said he supports allowing young people to take a small portion of their Social Security taxes to set up personal accounts to invest as they see fit. But he insisted if they lost money, the government would step in to make them whole again.

This idea is simply absurd. In addition to the substantial costs associated with a traditional privatization scheme — which would force the government into trillions of new borrowing — Portman would add the cost of bailing out the accounts of those investors who lost money.

Obviously, this sets up a huge moral hazard problem. If investors know full well that the government is going to “make them whole again,” no matter what they do, then the incentive is to make risky investments and hope for a big payoff. After all, why not take the risk if the government has guaranteed that you can’t lose money? “If the government guaranteed to bail you out in case of losses, then investors would make riskier investments and the number of people who need bailing out would rise,” wrote Matthew Yglesias in reaction to Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) promoting a similar idea.

Of course, there’s a simple way to avoid creating this sort of cockamamie scheme and the assorted problems that come along with it: don’t privatize Social Security. But Portman has been in thrall to this idea for so long, he seems willing to say and do whatever it takes to make it look like a responsible plan.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that some multinational corporations — including General Electric and Pfizer — lowered their effective tax rate by more than 20 points thanks to the use of offshore tax havens and the loophole ridden corporate tax code.

But those companies don’t have anything on Google. According to a Bloomberg News report, Google, thanks to a setup in which it moves its profits to Ireland and countries in the Caribbean, has paid a 2.4 percent tax rate over the last three years, avoiding $3.1 billion in taxes:

Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries…The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country’s 12.5 percent income tax.

“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent.”

The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent. But Google not only avoided U.S. taxes with its scheme, it also dodged taxes in the United Kingdom (where the statutory corporate tax rate is 20 percent). Facebook is reportedly cooking up a similar tax plan right now.

Despite having a relatively high statutory corporate tax rate, the U.S. collects little corporate tax revenue due to the prolific use of tax havens and the needless subsidies the U.S. taxpayer provides to mature, profitable industries. In fact, “the U.S. Office of Management and Budget estimates corporate tax receipts will account for just 7.2% of federal revenues in 2010, with large corporations contributing less than one-sixth as much as small business and individual taxpayers to the Federal Treasury.” Eighty-three of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. corporations and 63 of the 100 largest federal contractors have at least one subsidiary in a tax haven.

Since the Obama administration came into office, it has been trying, along with some congressional Democrats, to close some of the more egregious tax loopholes that allow corporations to sling profits all over the world and never pay taxes on them. But they have been stymied at every turn by Republicans, working with the Chamber of Commerce and other Big Business groups, who are content with allowing corporations to do all they can to get around paying the tax rate on the books.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal noted that more than 250 current congressional candidates have signed a pledge to support elimination of the estate tax (which is levied on inheritance). 253 Republicans and 2 Democrats joined the repeal pledge, which is being circulated by the American Family Business Institute, an organization that also funds right-wing attacks on the estate tax.

Due to a Bush-era budgeting gimmick, there is no estate tax this year, but President Obama has proposed permanently setting it at the 2009 level of 45 percent with a $3.5 million exemption (which means the first $3.5 million is passed on entirely tax free). Conservatives, when not pushing for outright repeal, have coalesced around a plan put forth by Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) that would cut the rate to 35 percent and raise the exemption to $5 million.

The common right-wing refrain when it comes to the estate tax is that it decimates scores of small businesses and family farms, preventing them from being passed on to the next generation. But as a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice points out, at the 2008 level (which is lower than the level Obama has proposed), just 0.6 percent of deaths resulted in any estate tax liability at all:

New data from the IRS show that only 0.6 percent of deaths in the U.S. in 2008 resulted in estate tax liability in 2009. (Estate taxes are usually filed during the year after the year in which a person dies.) The estate tax that would exist under President Obama’s tax plan would affect even fewer estates, which demonstrates why Congress should consider enacting a more robust estate tax than what President Obama proposes.

As CTJ put it, “one of the strangest things about politics in our nation’s capital is that the taxes that get attacked the most by lawmakers are those taxes which affect the fewest, and the richest, people.” Indeed, the data confirms that there is certainly no case for making the estate tax any lower than it was in 2009, and plenty of reasons to increase rates on some estates.

If it were permanently set at the the 2009 level, 62.5 percent of estate tax revenue would come from estates worth more than $20 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Another 35 percent of the revenue would come from estates worth between $5 million and $20 million. Repealing the tax, meanwhile, would cost $784 billion over the next ten years.

CTJ endorsed the estate tax plan put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which would create a more progressive estate tax, with higher marginal rates at $10 million and $50 million and a “billionaires surtax.” This kind of move makes sense, as income inequality in the country is the worst its been since 1928 and the richest households have been taking in a bigger and bigger share of the country’s total income.

Our guest blogger is Nick Bunker, Special Assistant with the Economic Policy team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last week, Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul (R) further revealed his anti-worker worldview when he stated his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act because some businesses might have to accept unions they don’t want. Paul’s statement is not surprising given his past comments on workplace issues. Unfortunately, ballot initiatives in four states are trying to implement Paul’s vision for a businesses veto over unions.

The initiatives, on the ballot in Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, and Utah, claim to protect workers’ rights by amending the state constitution to guarantee the “right to a secret ballot” in elections for employee representation. Here is the language from the Arizona’s Prop. 113:

SECTION 36. THE RIGHT TO VOTE BY SECRET BALLOT FOR EMPLOYEE REPRESENTATION IS FUNDAMENTAL AND SHALL BE GUARANTEED WHERE LOCAL, STATE OR FEDERAL LAW PERMITS OR REQUIRES ELECTIONS, DESIGNATIONS OR AUTHORIZATIONS FOR EMPLOYEE REPRESENTATION.

In reality, these initiatives are not about protecting workers — if they were they would prevent management from intimidating workers from making a free choice whether to join a union. Instead, they are an attempt at preempting the strengthening of unions through the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that passed in the House in previous Congresses, but has failed to secure 60 votes in the Senate.

EFCA would allow workers to form a union if more than 50 percent of workers signed a card stating their support for the union. Card check unionization has been used in the past – by more than half a million workers since 2003, in fact – and unions have been formed at companies such as Cingular Wireless, Dow Jones, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Kaiser Permanente under the process.

Supporters of these initiatives claim they are only standing up for the rights of workers who would be intimidated by into voting for unionization under a card check voting system. Unfortunately for them, the record shows that management is much more likely to use coercion and intimidation, so much so that the process for joining a union is totally biased against workers. And contrary to the claims of business, majority sign up does not lead to union intimidation. A study of majority sign-up efforts at the University of Illinois found “not a single incident of union misconduct.”

Furthermore, the ability of these initiatives to preempt federal laws is even doubted by the legislative director of the National Right to Work Committee, an anti-union organization.

Behind these state ballot initiatives is the Save Our Secret Ballot campaign, a national 501(c)(4) organization that has funded efforts to put these initiatives on state ballots. The campaign has not and does not intend to disclose its donors. But if the campaign’s board is any indication, the group is funded by the usual corporate suspects. Save Our Secret Ballot’s Advisory Board includes past and present Republican elected officials and representatives of right wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Goldwater Institute. Read more

Among the many lies told by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently, chief Chamber lobbyist Bruce Josten said that his organization’s foreign affiliates, called AmChams, are only “comprised of American companies doing business abroad in those countries.” In fact, the Chinese AmCham is comprised of Chinese firms like Northern Light Venture Capital; the AmCham in Russia is comprised of Russian state-run companies like VTB Bank; and, the AmCham of Abu Dhabi is comprised of UAE state-run oil companies.

The ties between the AmChams and the U.S. Chamber are deep. In addition to sharing staff members, the Chinese AmCham has worked closely with the U.S. Chamber and the Chinese government to sponsor a series of seminars in America to teach American businesses how to outsource jobs to China (called the China Grassroots Program). Below is an invite to an event sponsored by the right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson, inviting local businesses in Florida to come to Jacksonville and learn about outsourcing from Chinese government officials like Li Haiyan, the Counselor for Economic Affairs for the People’s Republic of China, U.S. Chamber lobbyist Joseph Fawkner, and BChinaB, a firm that specializes in helping American firms outsource their manufacturing jobs to China. Click the screenshot below for the invitation:

Similar events like the one above continued into 2009 and beyond.

The Chamber’s CEO, Tom Donohue, frequently defends outsourcing: for example, in 2004, he said “there are legitimate values in outsourcing — not only jobs, but work.” Recently, the Chamber came out against a Senate bill that would have discouraged outsourcing. As Campaign Money Watch report found that more than 1.4 million jobs were outsourced since 1994 in the nine states in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending significant money.

Separately from their relationship with the AmCham affiliates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce receives direct foreign donations to the same 501(c)(6) political account the Chamber is using to run an unprecedented $75 million attack ad campaign against progressives. In an exclusive investigation, ThinkProgress documented over 80 foreign firms donating at least $885,000 to the Chamber’s 501(c)(6) account. As ThinkProgress’ Brad Johnson noted, many of these foreign supporters of the Chamber financing its 501(c)(6) are also some of the world’s largest outsourcing companies.

According to the Financial Times, some multinational corporations have been lobbying the Obama administration to undergo a new round of tax repatriation, a process that allows corporations to bring money they hold overseas back to the U.S. at a very low tax rate. The companies are arguing that such a move will boost investment and job creation here at home:

US multinational companies are clamouring for a tax holiday to repatriate billions of dollars “trapped” overseas but are being rebuffed by Barack Obama’s administration…“We do have overseas cash and we would be very supportive of a repatriation holiday,” said Keith Sherin, chief financial officer of General Electric. “If you think about it, there is a lot of cash trapped overseas. If companies could bring that back at more competitive tax rates, I think it would be good for the US economy.“

When corporations bring foreign earnings back to the U.S., they pay the full statutory corporate tax rate, so of course they would jump at the opportunity to pay a lower rate. And a good way to convince policymakers that this is a winning idea is to promise that the money will be used to invest in job creation.

But left out of the story is the fact that we’ve tried this before: it turned into a windfall for shareholders and corporate executives, while not spurring job creation or investment. In 2004, Congress passed the Homeland Investment Act, allowing companies to bring back offshore profits in 2005 and pay a tax rate of just 5.25 percent, far below the 35 percent corporate tax rate.

As the New York Times Floyd Norris wrote, the bill “was sold to Congress as a way to spur investment in America, building plants, increasing research and development and creating jobs.” However, according to work done by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 92 percent of the nearly $300 billion that companies brought back went to share buybacks and increased dividend payments. Plus, Kristin Forbes, one of the authors of the NBER study, said that restrictions regarding how repatriated money could be spent “seem to have been completely ineffective”:

“Dell was a great example,” she added, referring to Dell Computer. “They lobbied very hard for the tax holiday. They said part of the money would be brought back to build a new plant in Winston-Salem, N.C. They did bring back $4 billion, and spent $100 million on the plant, which they admitted would have been built anyway. About two months after that, they used $2 billion for a share buyback.”

This turned into a tax boondoggle the first time. There’s no reason to give it another chance.

For months after the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) — the Obama administration’s signature foreclosure prevention program — was launched, Bank of America lagged behind the other servicers in the percentage of eligible borrowers that it was successfully navigating into a permanent mortgage modification. Part of the problem was that BofA was utterly incapable, by its own admission, of keeping track of paperwork and working constructively with borrowers.

When the ongoing foreclosure fraud scandal hit, Bank of America was the first institution to implement a foreclosure freeze, and the only bank to extend its freeze to all fifty states. However, BofA announced yesterday that it has reviewed its foreclosure process and “had not found a single example where a foreclosure proceeding was brought in error.” Therefore, the bank is moving ahead with more than 100,000 foreclosures on Monday in the 23 states that require judicial review to complete a foreclosure.

As the New York Times noted, “consumer advocates and lawyers for homeowners expressed skepticism that Bank of America could complete a review of the paperwork so quickly.” Indeed, let’s put this in perspective. Bank of America has been participating in HAMP for roughly 18 months, during which time it offered 410,000 trial modifications, started 316,000, and turned about 80,000 into permanent modifications. That’s about 760 trial modifications per day and 4,400 permanent modifications per month.

In the last ten days, though, Bank of America managed to plow through 102,000 cases to get them ready to go back to court. That’s more than 10,000 reviews per day. Peter Ticktin, a Florida based lawyer, questioned how BofA could suddenly find the wherewithal to validate so much paperwork so quickly. “This wasn’t just a simple little mistake of forgetting to dot the ‘i,’” he said. “There was a whole system put in place to make false affidavits. How are they going to erect a new system to do 102,000 affidavits unless they are going to use the same old law firms to make a second generation of bad affidavits?”

Now, Bank of America’s modification numbers were likely skewed downward because, as Andrew Jakabovics and I first reported, it was attempting to siphon borrowers off into its own private modification program, in violation of its contract with Treasury. But still, the bank jerked borrowers around for months and couldn’t get them through HAMP, but now that its faced with a mess that could blow a hole in its bottom line, it kicks its operation into high gear. David Dayen added these points:

Two things on this. One, it neglects the clear risk to the rule of law that banks like BofA submitted phony documents to a court. Whether they take them back now or not has no bearing on this attempt to commit fraud. Two, it localizes the issue to the signing of the affidavits and not the impropriety of the documents themselves – the forgeries, the backdating, the failure to inform borrowers of foreclosure actions, all of the horror stories we’ve heard over the past month.

Somewhere along the line, there were fraudulent documents and a breakdown of due process. But the banks are still acting like this is simply a paperwork problem.

On Saturday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) held a large “Victory Rally,” which ThinkProgress attended, just outside Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was the highlight of event, while RNC Chairman Michael Steele, several GOP congressmen, and right-wing media tycoon Andrew Breitbart also gave speeches to the excited, mostly-elderly crowd in a hotel ballroom. Notably absent were Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, California’s GOP Senate and governor nominees.

But curiously present was the conservative “grassroots” astroturfing outfit Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which held a “No Jobs Fair” to encourage people to vote yes on Proposition 23, a referendum on the ballot this year that would essentially scrap California’s landmark global warming law. Interestingly, AFP appeared to be the only group aside from the RNC and candidates’ campaigns with any major presence at the event, entirely occupying a large room across the hallway from the rally in the Anaheim Marriott. The only other room being employed, aside from those for the rally itself and AFP, was a small space adjacent where attendees could register to volunteer for GOP campaigns.

Because federal election law would prohibit groups like AFP from coordinating with the RNC, AFP California Communications Director Meridith Turney told ThinkProgress that the two groups did not coordinate. But, she added, AFP had to “ask for their permission to use the room” and paid the RNC for its use. Watch a compliation of AFP’s fair, and ThinkProgress’ interview with Turney and AFP California Chairman David Spady:

Turney couldn’t really explain why, of all the countless ballot initiatives across the country — California alone has 10 — her group had invested so heavily in Prop. 23. But AFP and the Yes on 23 campaign are a natural fit. The campaign pushing Prop. 23 portrays itself as a broad coalition of Californians concerned about jobs, but it is in fact funded almost exclusively by a small handful of out-of-state oil companies concerned about their bottom line if the state’s global warming law is allowed to be fully implemented. Texas-based Valero and Tesoro, along with Kansas-based Koch Industries alone have provided about 80 percent of the financial backing.

Koch, the country’s second largest privately held company, is owned and operated by brothers Charles and David Koch. Coincidentally, David Koch is the chairman of AFP. In corporate documents, Koch Industries has explicitly stated that California’s global warming law would hurt profits and “be very bad news for our industry.” With the AFP fair, and countless other events, the Kochs seem to be using the astroturfing arm they founded and fund to defend the profits of the corporation they own, all the while disguising their effort as an altruistic “jobs initiative” for average Californians.

This is typical of AFP, which has played a central role in incubating the tea party movement to drum up populist support as a smokescreen to push their self-serving interests. The Koch brothers have repeatedly tried to distance themselves from the tea party movement to protect its guise of independence, but even AFP’s own Meridith Turney has touted her organization’s and David Koch’s involvement in the movement. Last year at a national AFP meeting led by Koch, she proudly told him AFP California “helped organize huge tea parties all throughout the state,” including “one of the largest tea parties in the country.” Recently released video even shows David Koch touting his role in supporting AFP and the tea party movement. At the fair Saturday, AFP offered free cocktails to anyone who enlisted in the effort to push the dirty energy referendum that will preserve their profits.

What was unusual about AFP’s fair Saturday was the fact that it occurred during an official RNC event, underscoring the growing nexus between the Republican establishment, the tea party movement, and the secretive corporate backers that bankroll both.

Notably, when asked by ThinkProgress whether their organization would join increasing calls for electoral transparency by disclosing its donors, both Turney and Spady dismissed the idea, even if progressive groups like MoveOn.org were also required to disclose. In defending their secretive donors, Spady trotted out the familiar excuse employed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others that their backers would be subject to “retribution” of some kind if their contributions were made public. He also said he supports unlimited donations to individual candidates.

Last week, mega-bank Wells Fargo refused to implement a foreclosure moratorium like those put in place by Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and GMAC Mortgage, stating that no such step was necessary because its foreclosure process was sound and not plagued by some of the “robo-signer” issues that other banks have found. This, as it turned out, wasn’t true; a desposition uncovered by the Financial Times showed that Wells had, in fact, relied on a robo-signer to process foreclosures.

Mortgage giant Citigroup has also, thus far, been adamantly opposed to putting a foreclosure moratorium in place. This morning, on a conference call, the bank reiterated its opposition to a foreclosure freeze, saying that it’s “fairly confident” that it didn’t engage in fraudulent foreclosure practices:

Citigroup sought to allay investors’ fears over the US mortgage crisis, saying it had not uncovered any irregularities in its foreclosure process and downplaying the potential cost of buying back home loans from government entities…“We have not found evidence of robo-signing as we have gone through our review,” John Gerspach, Citi’s finance chief, said. “We are fairly confident we have not relied on robo-signers.”

“Fairly confident” doesn’t sound all that confident to me. And it’s even less convincing considering that last week, the Palm Beach Post reported that Citigroup was using a law firm — run by “foreclosure king” David Stern — that processed foreclosures using robo-signers:

Attorney Tom Ice of Royal Palm Beach-based Ice Legal said the problem is that law firm employees were doing the work, not Citi employees. “In truth, CitiMortgage not only engaged in the same practice of using a robo-signer for its cases, they used a robo-signer who is actually an employee of the foreclosure mill attorneys representing them,” said Ice, who deposed Stern operations manager Cheryl Samons last year. Samons signed as “attorney-in-fact” for CitiMortgage in some foreclosure documents.

As the Associated Press reported, a former paralegal in Stern’s office told the Florida attorney general about “a boiler-room atmosphere in which employees were pressured to forge signatures, backdate documents, swap Social Security numbers, inflate billings and pass around notary stamps as if they were salt.” Citi was so spooked by the allegations that, as of last week, it is no longer sending business to Stern’s office.

At this point, it’s really hard to tell how widespread fradulent foreclosures are (though there definitely are some), which is why it makes sense for the banks to freeze actions until the extent of the problem is known. In addition to the issues facing people who were improperly foreclosed upon, as David Dayen put it, “you just feed homebuyers into a wood chipper if you let them buy a foreclosed home in a market with such confusion.” Emptywheel has more on Stern’s antics here.

Deficit fraud Dino Rossi, who is running on the Republican ticket for Senate in Washington, spends a lot of time fearmongering about the deficit while advocating for policies that would make that deficit worse. Rossi would also like to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans — at a cost of $830 billion over ten years — and as he made clear during a debate last night, he has no intention of cutting the budget in order to cover that cost.

During a portion of the debate during which the two candidates were given an opportunity to question each other, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) asked Rossi what he would eliminate from the budget in order to offset the cost of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Rossi refused to answer, instead attacking Murray’s record.

Murray asked a second time, to which Rossi replied, “I answer your questions, it’s just not your answers.” But in both instances, Rossi failed to identify one single item he would cut from the budget. Watch it:

According to the Tacoma-Seattle News Tribune, Rossi “said after the debate that there should be measures to offset the extension of the tax cuts, but said that as with any budget cuts, it’s impossible to detail them, since it involves cutting thousands of budget line items.”

Of course, Rossi is far from alone in being unwilling to identify one item in the budget that could be cut to begin reducing the deficit. Yesterday, Carly Fiorina, California’s Republican senate nominee, was asked seven times what she would cut from the budget to offset extending the Bush tax cuts and failed to name anything.

Finding the money to offset the Bush tax cuts (and Democrats want to extend a lot of them without paying for it as well) would require cutting huge swathes of the budget, including popular and vital social safety net programs. So, in order to avoid offending any portion of the population, it seems that Rossi is subscribing to the Linda McMahon version of campaigning: elect me first, and then I’ll tell you what budget cuts I’m for.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post provided some more details about the ongoing foreclosure fraud scandal, noting that “virtually everyone involved – loan servicers, law firms, document processing companies and others – made more money as they evicted more borrowers from their homes, creating a system that was vulnerable to error and difficult for homeowners to challenge.” Many borrowers have been left in limbo as the banks sort out how extensive their problems are.

A bevy of Democratic lawmakers have called for examinations of the banks’ potentially fraudulent activities, while the Attorneys General of all fifty states have pledged a coordinated investigation. Republicans, however, have been largely silent on the issue.

And according to Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA), who is slated to take over the House Committee on Government and Oversight should the Republicans take the House, the GOP is not really interested in the banks’ malpractice. Instead, Issa wants to “launch aggressive inquiries” into whether the government helped poor people buy houses they couldn’t afford:

The conservative Republican from California, who would become chairman of the powerful House oversight and government reform committee, said hearings would focus on whether the federal government should be involved at all in sponsoring home loans for the poor.

Such hearings would evidently “centre on the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” which Republicans have blamed for the financial collapse of 2008, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

In fact, it’s been a favorite conservative tactic to blame the economic meltdown on the Community Reinvestment Act and other government efforts to spur affordable homeownership and undo some of the inequities in housing finance. This is a convenient way to deflect attention from the malfeasance of Wall Street (which is contributing heavily to Republicans in this election cycle) and to try and blame the country’s economic woes on the government, instead of a deregulatory ideology that allowed financial behemoths to run wild.

But the statistics just don’t support the GOP’s story. The CRA was around for decades before 2008′s troubles, and CRA-covered institutions and loans have performed better than their non-CRA counterparts.

While the GOP likes to blame homeowners for our economic troubles, in the last decade, as the Center for American Progress has documented, banks were still systematically charging minorities higher costs for loans and pushing them into expensive subprime mortgages, even when they could afford standard prime loans, making government policies to ensure fair access to credit a necessary step. It says a lot about the Republican mindset that banks evicting homeowners who aren’t in foreclosure doesn’t merit an investigation, but a low-income family receiving a mortgage in a traditionally under-served community does.

At an annual shareholders meeting yesterday, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch said that his political donations to Republican political entities like the Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Governors Association are “in the best interest of the country.” He also claimed that the donations have “nothing to do with the editorial policies or the journalism” that his company provides.

Media Matters, which posted audio and a transcript of the shareholders meeting, reports that — when asked directly about whether he would engage shareholders in the process of selecting recipients of political donations — Murdoch dismissively said, “No”:

STOCKHOLDER: And going forward, then, would you be willing to have greater disclosure to shareholders around political contributions, both the policies and the actual dollar amounts? It’s particularly troubling to shareholders that, in particular, the U.S. Chamber contribution was only learned of by shareholders because of a leak to the press. Would the board consider much broader disclosure around shareholder — around political spending?

MURDOCH: We’ve considered it from time to time. I don’t believe we’ll [inaudible] it again, but we’ll see.

STOCKHOLDER: Would you be willing to engage shareholders in that process?

MURDOCH: No. Sorry, you have the right to vote us off the board if you don’t like that.

As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser wrote recently, “There actually are laws against corporate managers treating a publicly-traded corporation as if it were their own personal bank account.” During yesterday’s call, one of the shareholders asked Sir Roderick Eddington, chairman of News Corp’s audit board, to justify Murdoch’s donations. Eddington’s answer didn’t inspire much confidence, suggesting it defers to Murdoch’s decision-making: “The board takes advice from the management team and considers it on that basis, and also refers it to the company’s general counsel, and on that basis the donations were made. I understand the concerns.” Listen here:

I pointed out yesterday that California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s (R) job creation plan is based on a tax cut that economists don’t believe will create jobs or boost investment. Rather, it would amount to nothing more than a giveaway to California’s wealthy.

But Whitman’s plan to balance the state budget also leaves a lot to be desired. As UC Berkley economic Michael Reich noted, Whitman’s promise to cut $15 billion from the budget “necessarily implies significant reductions in spending on education, health, and social service programs on top of the deep cuts already made in the past two years.” But you won’t hear that from her, if her interview today with the New York Times’ John Harwood is any indication:

HARWOOD: Every single, at the national level, big deficit reduction package…has involved tax increases, revenue, as well as spending cuts. Is the better part of honesty and candor with the voters of California to say that’s what you’re going to have to do as well?

WHITMAN: I don’t believe we are going to have to do that. I am against increasing taxes on Californians.

HARWOOD: You can close a $19 billion budget deficit just by cutting spending?

WHITMAN: And growing the economy.

Watch it:

In the interview, Whitman named four things that she would do to supposedly save $15 billion (which still wouldn’t eliminate California’s $19 billion deficit). Here’s a look at why they amount to little more than hot air: Read more

Kentucky Republican senate nominee Rand Paul has already made it quite clear that he doesn’t care much for worker’s rights, as he has called for drastically rolling back federal workers protections, including those for mine workers, and has a stated desire to “get OSHA out of our small businesses.” (OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.) During a debate yesterday, Paul made this stance even clearer, saying that he opposed the Employee Free Choice Act because, if it became law, businesses that don’t want to see their workers unionize might have to deal with a union anyway:

Let me interpret for ya. [Attorney General Jack Conway] is for the Employee Free Choice Act, which creates and allows unions to be formed and forced on businesses that don’t want to have unions. Jack is for it, I know it’s difficult to get that out of the answer.

Watch it:

So, in Paul’s mind, if management doesn’t want a union, then the business shouldn’t be unionized, regardless of what the workers want. Either that, or he thinks that EFCA will magically unionize workers who have no interest in being in a union. He’s either ignorant regarding how the bill would work, or in the more likely scenario, he would empower management with veto power over workers who want to form a union and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, or safety standards.

Back in reality, EFCA would simply authorize workers to automatically form a union by signing cards signaling their favor for such a move. Workers are already allowed to form unions in this manner, and have been doing so without controversy for years. In fact, since 2003, more than half a million workers have been organized by majority sign-up, including those at Cingular Wireless, Dow Jones, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Kaiser Permanente.

The only catch is that, in order for this process to proceed, the employer has to give its okay. Even if a vast majority of workers indicate that they want to join a union, the employer can demand an election, giving itself ample time to intimidate or even fire pro-union workers and bring in union-busting consulting firms that specialize in winning unionization elections for the management. (75 percent of employers facing union drives hire anti-union consultants.) EFCA would simply remove this management veto over majority sign-up campaigns.

So does Paul favor unionization only if the employer gives its okay? That would fit into his anti-worker worldview, which, if it actually came to pass, would allow businesses to run roughshod over their employees, with no way for workers to come together and demand a better, safer workplace.