The nation’s five biggest banks agreed to a $25 billion foreclosure fraud settlement back in February that required them to provide $17 billion of mortgage relief to troubled homeowners. However, one of the banks, Bank of America, is hardly holding up its end of the bargain. According to a new report, as of June 30, Bank of America had not modified a single mortgage under the settlement to reduce the amount that a borrower owes:

Bank of America Corp is lagging other banks in quickly executing mortgage modifications required by the U.S. government as part of the $25 billion foreclosure settlement finalized in March, according to a report released on Wednesday…Unlike its competitors, Bank of America did not finalize any modifications of first-lien mortgages and also did not complete any refinances by June 30.

Bank of America admitted earlier this month that it was lagging behind on loan modifications, but this report shows just how incompetent the bank has been when it comes to moving homeowners into more sustainable mortgages. Bank of America does lead the settlement banks affected in getting its borrowers through short sales, but as Firedoglake’s David Dayen explained, “the idea of banks granting short sales as a punishment for defrauding consumers and state courts is ridiculous. They’re all too happy to get a higher price for a short sale than they would get in foreclosure, with the added benefit of never having to take the foreclosed home and maintain it.”

Prior to the settlement, one whistleblower alleged that Bank of America intentionally blocked homeowners from receiving federal mortgage aid. But perhaps all these homeowners simply weren’t willing to erase the mean things they said about Bank of America on Twitter.

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

A recent study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that Mitt Romney’s tax plan, which purports to be “revenue neutral,” would require households with incomes under $200,000 to pay higher taxes, on average, in order to finance tax cuts for the rich. In response, Romney economic advisor Martin Feldstein penned an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal claiming that Romney’s plan does not require such a tax increase.

Though Feldstein uses at least three sleights of hand to obscure the point, his analysis actually confirms TPC’s central finding. Here’s why:

1) Feldstein ignores Romney’s $1 trillion corporate tax cut, which is paid for by individual income tax increases.

Feldstein purports to show how reductions in tax breaks for high-income households could pay for a handful of Romney’s tax policies, including cuts in tax rates for individuals. But Feldstein conveniently ignores Romney’s tax cuts for corporations.

Romney’s plan would give corporations an “immediate” tax cut, cutting their rates from 35 percent to 25 percent. This tax cut would cost $96 billion in 2015 according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC) and more than $1 trillion over ten years. The TPC report did not even factor this massive corporate tax cut in their analysis of Romney’s plan under the very generous assumption that it would be fully paid for by eliminating business tax breaks.

But the Romney campaign has since made clear that the $1 trillion in corporate tax cuts aren’t paid for by any reductions in corporate tax breaks. Therefore, as the TPC researchers have noted, Romney’s corporate tax cuts would require “even larger cuts to tax expenditures [i.e. tax breaks], and correspondingly larger increases in taxes on middle- and/or lower-income taxpayers,” than their original study found. Feldstein simply ignores all of this.

2) Feldstein redefines the “middle class.”

In crunching numbers to try to make Romney’s tax plan add up, Feldstein counts only those households with incomes under $100,000 as “middle class.” He purports to demonstrate that Romney’s plan can add up if deductions are eliminated for households over $100,000. But this simply confirms the Tax Policy Center’s conclusion that Romney’s plan does not add up without a tax increase on households with incomes under $200,000. (This table from TPC shows that households in the $100,000-$200,000 range stand to lose much more from the elimination of tax breaks than they would gain from Romney’s tax rate cut.)

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The Romney campaign has been running a series of blatantly false ads claiming that the Obama administration has waived work requirements included in the 1996 welfare reform law. Everyone from independent fact-checkers to major newspapers to President Bill Clinton (who signed the law) have said that the campaign’s attack is untrue.

Last night, however, failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum once again made the false claim, saying “this summer [Obama] showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waving the work requirement for welfare.” But evidently not every member of the Republican party received the memo about how to characterize what the administration did. When asked Wednesday morning whether the welfare claim is a lie, Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) replied, “as far as I have seen”:

JANSING: But you agree that these claims that the work requirement has been abolished are false?

BROWNBACK: As far as I have seen, but I don’t know all of the basis to it. I do know the basis to this dependency on the government and how big the government is and how big the entitlement state is and how much of a debt we’re leaving to our kids.

Watch it:

All the administration’s welfare waivers would do is empower states to innovate with new work strategies. The directive from the administration reads, “The Secretary [of Health and Human Services] is only interested in approving waivers if the state can explain in a compelling fashion why the proposed approach may be a more efficient or effective means to promote employment entry.”

Yesterday, the Romney campaign’s political director laughed off a question about the false welfare ads, saying, “I think reasonable people can have a disagreement over this.”

The first real night of the 2012 Republican National Convention will close tonight with a keynote address by Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ). Christie has become a conservative darling for his blunt speaking style and his open willingness to berate public servants.

“I’ll be talking about the New Jersey experience and what that means for the country,” Christie said while previewing the speech. “If [listeners] say I like the vision he’s laid out for the country and for his party for the next four years, then I will have done the job for my party and my country.”

However, the “New Jersey experience” under Christie has been anything but rosy. Here are some key economics stats to know before Christie hits the stage tonight:

– New Jersey ranked 47th in the nation in GDP growth in 2011. [Bureau of Economic Analysis]

– The Garden state’s unemployment rate of 9.8 percent is fourth highest in the nation, trailing only Nevada, California, and Rhode Island. [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

– New Jersey lost 12,000 jobs last month, the most in the country. [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

– The state ranked 44th in personal income growth in 2011. [Bureau of Economic Analysis]

Christie has focused on cutting taxes for millionaires (while blocking a millionaires’ surtax), slashing social spending, and opposing plans to help New Jersey’s workers. He’s cheered the firing of public sector workers and scuttled important infrastructure projects on false pretenses.

Finally, he’s handed out a record number of corporate handouts, while getting little for it in terms of job growth. And for this, he’s been rewarded with a huge speaking slot at the Republican convention, from which he will likely proclaim Republican economic ideology a stunning success.

Thomas Peterffy, who pioneered the computer-based high-frequency trading that generates millions of dollars in profits for big banks, said in an interview with NPR’s Planet Money that speed trading has gotten so fast that it now “has absolutely no social value”:

Peterffy says automation has done some very good things for the world. It’s made buying and selling stocks much much cheaper for everyone.

But Peterffy thinks the race for speed is doing more harm than good now. “We are competing at milliseconds,” he says. “And whether you can shave three milliseconds of an order, has absolutely no social value.”

When Peterffy first began using computers to trade, high-speed trading was rare. Now, as the Huffington Post noted, it makes up more than half of the stock market’s volume. This interactive chart from Nanex, a markets research firm, shows how high-speed trading has exploded:

Tho address this problem, Peterffy told NPR that a regulatory structure that slows down trading is necessary. Though he didn’t mention it specifically, one way to achieve that goal would be a financial transactions tax, a small levy on trades that would slow down markets while barely affecting normal traders. The European Union has considered a transactions tax in the wake of the financial crisis, and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) have proposed one here in the U.S.

That tax could raise $35 billion annually, according to DeFazio, but more importantly it would remove volatility from the markets and make the entire financial system safer. Cries from industry insiders that a transactions tax would hurt economic growth, DeFazio told ThinkProgress earlier this year, are simply false. “For 50 years we had a tax that was about seven times larger than this when the country was seeing the greatest growth in its history, post-World War II,” he said. “So we’ve proven this will not have a detrimental impact on growth. In fact, it perhaps is beneficial to growth. It’s not necessarily beneficial to salaries of hedge fund managers on Wall Street.”

The Romney campaign has aggressively campaigned against President Obama’s recent changes to the welfare program, alleging that he “gutted” welfare, eliminating the work requirement so that “they just send you your check.” In fact, the administration’s welfare waiver initiative would strengthen work requirements by simply empowering states to innovate on new strategies.

And it turns out that at least one Republican governor, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, supports Obama’s policy change. On MSNBC Tuesday afternoon, Tom Brokaw pressed Snyder on how he felt about the increased flexibility Obama gave the states. Snyder’s response was surprisingly positive as he sat in the GOP convention hall waiting to choose Mitt Romney as his party’s nominee:

BROKAW: [Governors] want more flexibility in how they administer these welfare programs. He’s really responding to what they asked for. So my question to you is, has what President Obama done for welfare in the state of Michigan, has that given you more flexibility and are you happy with this policy in that regard?

SNYDER: It’s still relatively new, this change in policy, so we are still fully analyzing it. The concept of more flexibility to governors is a good thing, but I think there should be performance metrics. We should be held accountable for performance but flexibility on how to do it.

Watch it:

Before it became a policy of the Obama administration, Republicans pushed for more state authority over the welfare program. Additionally, Romney himself is advocating for more state flexibility on other policies, like food stamps, where he would like to block grant money to the states.

TAMPA, Florida — Though many Republicans are fretting about the optics of holding their party’s convention as Hurricane Isaac slams into New Orleans, a leading Tea Party congressman is vowing to use the opportunity to extract budget cuts if Congress wants to dole out disaster funding to help victims.

Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) told ThinkProgress at a Hispanic Leadership Network luncheon that Republicans should take a similar approach with disaster funding for Hurricane Isaac as they did after natural disasters last year. In 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) led the Republican charge to deny disaster funding following major hurricanes and tornadoes unless the federal budget was cut in other areas.

Labrador said that Congress must “readjust everything we do” in order to find cuts to pay for Hurricane Isaac disaster relief. “If there’s emergencies, we don’t always need to keep borrowing money,” said the freshman Republican.

KEYES: Last year, for instance, after the Missouri tornado, Leader Cantor was a real “hold-the-line” to call for budget cuts to pay for disaster relief. Do you think that’s still the right strategy going forward if there’s damage from Hurricane Isaac?

LABRADOR: I think government should do what every family does. If you have an emergency, then you rethink your priorities and you still invest and you still do the things that you need to do to take care of your family. That’s what government should do is always reconsider. If there’s emergencies, we don’t always need to keep borrowing money, but we can actually take care of people that are in damaged communities by reconfiguring what we’re doing in Washington D.C.

KEYES: So find cuts to pay for those disaster funds?

LABRADOR: Find different ways to do it, absolutely. We have to readjust everything we do.

Watch it:

Disaster funding has traditionally been a non-controversial issue, with both parties typically agreeing to offer immediate help to victims and worry about congressional budget matters later. Tea Party Republicans broke that long-standing consensus last year, demanding dollar-for-dollar cuts to pay for any relief for victims of Hurricane Irene or the massive tornado in Joplin, Missouri.

Isaac, which is expected to make landfall overnight, will hit on the 7-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The Chicago Tribune estimates that as much as $36 billion in property could be at risk.

Our guest blogger is Erik Stegman, Manager of the Half in Ten Campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

An executive member of the Republican National Committee said that his home state of New Mexico is “going to hell” because an annual meeting between the governor and the state’s 22 American Indian tribes dishonored the memory of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, who is widely known for his bloody campaigns against Plains Indians in the late 1800’s. Mandated by New Mexican law, the governor meets on a yearly basis with cabinet officials and tribal government leaders to address issues of mutual concern.

American Indians represent 10.1 percent of New Mexicans. What was on this year’s agenda? Sessions about improving education, healthcare, economic development, and infrastructure.

After Governor Susana Martinez (R) announced the upcoming Tribal Leaders Summit, Pat Rogers, a partner with the Modrall law firm, lobbyist, and member of the RNC executive committee, decided to share a piece of his mind with the governor’s staff over email, which was originally publicized by Progress Now New Mexico:

Quislings, French surrender monkeys, secret supporters (all along) of JAJ [Janice Arnold Jones]

The state is going to hell. Col. Weh would not have dishonored Col Custer in this manner.

I hope who ever recommended this is required to read the entire redist [redistricting law suit] transcript and sit through the entire meeting with the Gov.

“Quislings” is another term for traitor, referring to politicians who favor the interest of other nations over their own. And who are JAJ and Weh? Rogers blasted this email off two days after the state primary when Republicans confirmed former State Rep. Janice Arnold Jones as their nominee for a congressional seat. Retired Marine Corps Col. Allen Weh ran against Martinez in the 2010 Republican primary election

“I call upon the Republican National Committee to remove Mr. Rogers from his official capacity within the committee,” All Indian Pueblo Council Chairman Chandler Sanchez said in a statement Sunday. “His statement that Custer is some kind of hero demanding deference is offensive.” The All Indian Pueblo Council represents New Mexico’s 20 sovereign pueblo governments. A spokesman for Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly said, “It’s definitely something that is just insensitive and careless to even remotely joke about that in this day and age.”

Rogers told the Albuquerque Journal that his email was a “poor attempt at humor and apologized, but made no direct apologies to any tribes in the state.”

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has run multiple false advertisements accusing the Obama administration of “gutting” the 1996 welfare reform law through a waiver program that will give states more latitude in applying the law’s work requirements. The ads, debunked by many news outlets, are blatantly false — the waivers do not “gut” the law, and work requirements remain in place. Romney himself supported an even more expansive waiver program while he was governor of Massachusetts.

The Romney campaign, undeterred by the obvious falsehoods, has both continued running the ads and released new ones. On Tuesday, when asked by an NPR reporter why the campaign continues to run the ads, Romney political director Rich Beeson laughed off their brazen lack of truth, stating that “reasonable people can have a disagreement” about whether the oft-debunked ads are false:

STEVE INSKEEP (NPR): “Doesn’t the change mean that the governors can choose or can apply to change the work requirement as opposed to being forced to remove it?”

BEESON: “Again, that still is a change.”

INSKEEP: “But it’s not, quote, ‘they just send you your check,’ which is what the ad says.”

BEESON: (laughs) “I think reasonable people can have a disagreement over this but he [Obama] has significantly changed what President Clinton put in in 1996.”

The Romney campaign’s apparent disagreement with the notion that facts are true (and still matter) was reinforced later in the day, when campaign pollster Neil Newhouse told BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Neither, judging by Romney’s repeated struggles with the truth, are they going to let their campaign be dictated by actual facts.

Virginia Rep. Scott Rigell became the latest Republican to break with party orthodoxy on taxes this week, telling a local editorial board that he would back a compromise to raise taxes and cut spending. In an interview with the Charlottesville Daily Press, Rigell said he would back a plan to bring revenues to roughly 20 percent of gross domestic product in order to fix the unsustainable revenue levels caused by the Bush tax cuts and the GOP’s adherence to a no-new-taxes pledge:

“The American people are ready for the truth — they can handle the truth,” Rigell told the Daily Press editorial board. “They can handle solutions. They want solutions and they want leadership.”

And the truth, Rigell says, is that the “Bush tax cuts” coupled with Grover Norquist’s “no new tax pledge” signed by the vast majority of Republicans in Congress have locked federal revenue in at a rate that is unsustainable.

“We have a structural deficit that should scare every American across this country,” Rigell said. “I think our house is on fire.”

As Rigell noted in his interview with the Daily Press, federal revenues are at historically low rates thanks to the massive package of tax cuts signed by George W. Bush and the slumping economy. Republicans, though, have largely maintained that the U.S. doesn’t have a “revenue problem” and have blocked any efforts to raise taxes. Their stance nearly caused a debt default in 2011 — and did cause the first credit downgrade in American history — and could lead Congress over the so-called “fiscal cliff” this year.

A growing number of Republicans have begun to recognize this problem, criticizing Norquist and party leaders for refusing to consider revenue increases as part of any budget deal. Since last year, constituents at townhalls have criticized Republican members of Congress for signing Norquist’s pledge and remaining intransigent on taxes. Rigell disavowed the Norquist pledge earlier this year.

Rigell also criticized the House Republican budget for being “indefensible mathematically” if it did not include “revenue enhancements.” But Rigell’s moderate stance on taxes is new-found: he voted for the House budget, which gives $3 trillion in tax cuts to the rich and corporations, and has twice voted for the full extension of the Bush tax cuts. And instead of allowing the Bush rates to expire, Rigell told the Daily Press he would prefer to raise revenues by closing tax loopholes, a proposition that while not impossible is politically impractical.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney haven’t always seen eye to eye on the rescue of the auto industry that saved hundreds of thousands of American jobs. Romney has held several positions on the topic: he wrote an editorial calling on the government to “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” before the rescue occurred, then attempted to claim credit for the rescue after it succeeded. He then re-upped his opposition in a Let Detroit Go Bankrupt 2.0 editorial ahead of Michigan’s Republican primary this year.

Throughout it all, Snyder’s opposing view has been clear. Like other Michigan Republicans, Snyder supported the rescue and has applauded its success. Today, though, Snyder dismissed Romney’s opposition, telling Fox News host Neil Cavuto the rescue is “history”:

SNYDER: The auto bailout issue, it’s overblown in my view. It was a very important thing, it got done, it could have been done otherwise. The main point with that is, it got done, it’s history –

CAVUTO: But Mitt Romney was against it. Maybe for all the right reasons, but in a state like yours, could it hurt him?

SNYDER: He talked about different ways to do it, and the point is, it could have been done different ways. But that’s all history. It’s behind us.

Snyder has ignored his differences with Romney on the issue before. When he endorsed Romney before the state’s primary, he didn’t mention Romney’s opposition to the rescue or the jobs it would have cost Michigan and the country.

Romney contends that the private sector should have stepped in and saved General Motors and Chrysler, pushing them toward the managed bankruptcy they eventually went through. But that position ignores the simple fact that government stepped in precisely because the private sector refused to do so. Other Republicans, auto industry insiders, and reporters who covered the auto industry have all dismissed Romney’s view as “reckless,” “dishonest,” and “pure fantasy.”