Wildfire damage in Texas

This disastrous year is also the year that many Republican lawmakers have also decided to break precedent and demand that much-needed disaster relief be offset with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed to quickly usher $6 billion in emergency disaster relief for states through the Senate. However, even as wildfires obliterate more than 1,000 homes in his state, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) insisted that those funds be offset because “we can’t keep spending money we don’t have.” Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), whose state has suffered “millions and millions of dollars” in wind and flood damage from Hurricane Irene, simply demanded that “we’ve got to offset everything“:

“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, where deadly wildfires have charred tens of thousands of acres and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. [...]

“I think we’ve got to offset everything; anything that’s not allocated has got to be offset these days. It shouldn’t delay it,” Burr told POLITICO. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse that could be accessed like that.”

This purist principle did not stop both Cornyn and Burr for voting to fund rebuilding efforts in Iraq without a single offset. Indeed, Cornyn voted against delaying $20.3 billion in Iraq infrastructure funds even though the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) noted that such a payment would increase the budget deficit. Overall, the U.S. has spent $44.6 billion in taxpayer funds on rebuilding Iraq through emergency supplemental bills — and not a penny was cut from elsewhere in the budget.

Cornyn and Burr’s position — first espoused by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) — is so callously out of touch that even fellow Republicans are slamming the idea. After enduring serious bipartisan backlash, Cantor is now gun-shy. Calling Reid’s emergency funds bill “unprecedented,” he is not clearly taking a stand against it.

Our guest blogger is Peter Swire, the C. William O’Neill professor of law at the Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Here’s another reason for the rest of us to get mad at Wall Street. Even where the government can prove massive fraud in the mortgage market, the finance folks are saying the suits should be dropped.

The suits were announced last Friday by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. FHFA sued 17 major banks and a number of individuals for fraud in the issuance and sale of mortgage backed securities during the buildup of the housing bubble.

In response, a columnist for the Motley Fool has called the suits a “misguided search for vengeance” and “an unnecessary distraction.” An investment banker told Bloomberg that the government should “stop punishing banks.” The mortgage fraudsters should get away, they say, because we don’t want to shake confidence in the big banks that FHFA says committed massive mortgage fraud.

But there are so many reasons why the people who perpetrate fraud should pay for it. To pick two often voiced by conservatives, take “personal responsibility” and “property rights.”

The personal responsibility part is that individuals and companies that signed fraudulent securities filings are responsible for the fraud. That punishes fraud, and deters the next generation of Wall Street financiers when they get tempted to do it again.

The property rights part is that fraud is theft — the fraudster took money from the other party. The banks are trying to argue that Fannie and Freddie were “sophisticated purchasers” who should have known better. But even sophisticated companies can be the victims of fraud — the suits allege that the defendants had detailed facts about the bad mortgages that were simply unknown to the purchasers.

Nor should we accept the idea that the government should stop the suits and forgive all the fraudsters because the markets might otherwise lose confidence in the big banks. Fortunately, this is not the fall of 2008 when financial markets froze and even the best borrowers could not get capital. The economy is not what we want it to be, but U.S. banks have raised many tens of billions of dollars of capital and financial markets are functioning.

Where evidence exists for fraud, the suits should go forward. Charles Keating went to jail after the S&L mess. Where the facts warrant it, this generation of wrongdoers should pay as well.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) set aside his front-running strategy at last night’s Republican presidential debate, attacking the race’s new front-runner, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, on a variety of issues, including Perry’s repeated assertions that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” that won’t exist for younger Americans. In his 2009 book, Perry also questioned the constitutionality of Social Security, another issue with which Romney’s campaign took exception.

After the debate, Romney campaign adviser Stuart Stevens told reporters that Perry’s desire to “abolish Social Security” was a “disqualifying position.” But in 2007, when Romney was also campaigning for the Republican nomination for president, he supported his own radical change, repeatedly advocating for the privatization of Social Security, a plan pushed by Republicans and former President George W. Bush that failed in 2005.

At one debate, Romney was asked where he stood on privatization. Regarding Bush’s plan, Romney said, “That works“:

ROMNEY: Currently, we’re taking more money into Social Security that we actually send out. So our current seniors, their benefits are not going to change. For people 20 and 30 and 40 years old, we have four major options, for instance, for Social Security. One is the one Democrats want: raise taxes. It’s the wrong way to go.

Number two, the president said let’s have private accounts and take that surplus money that’s being gathered now in Social Security and put that into private accounts. That works.

But Romney’s support of private accounts was hardly a one-time utterance at a single debate. Throughout that campaign, he touted the plan:

June 2007: When a college student asked Romney how he, as president, planned to solidify Social Security’s future, he endorsed private accounts: “One thing that the president proposed [on Social Security] that is a good idea is to take some of that money, or all of that surplus money and allow people to have a personal account. So they can invest in things that have a higher rate of return than just government debt. They can invest in things like our stock market or the world’s stock market…so that they can get a better return, and maybe that would make up for some of the shortfall. That’s a good idea.”

October 2007: At a town hall, Romney said there were “two major paths” lawmakers could take to shore up Social Security. The first, he said, was “to raise taxes on people, which I don’t want to do. And the other is to allow some portion of people’s money that they’re now having taken out of their salaries to be invested in Social Security.” When an attendee told him his plan was “privatization,” Romney replied, “You call it privatization. I call it a private account.”

Romney did not abandon his support for privatization when his first presidential campaign ended. On page 160 of his book, No Apology, published in 2010, Romney again hinted at support for privatization:

“Individual retirement accounts offer a fourth option, one that would allow today’s wage earners to direct a portion of their Social Security tax to a private account rather than go entirely to pay the benefits of current retirees, as is the case today. [...] Owners of these individual accounts would invest in a combination of stocks and bonds and – presuming these investments paid a higher rate of return than new treasuries – the return on these investments would boost the payments to seniors. I also like the fact the individual retirement accounts would encourage more Americans to invest in the private sector that powers our economy.”

What is shocking about Romney’s embrace of private accounts in his book is that it was published after a financial crisis that would have devastated retirement accounts for millions of Americans had the push for privatization succeeded. According to a Center for American Progress analysis, an October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in a private Social Security account, and that report was done before the market bottomed out in 2009. Millions of Americans who already save in some sort of private account — a 401(k), for instance — lost nearly everything in the crisis, and Social Security is the only source of retirement income they have left. Yet Romney still offered privatization as a potential “fix” for the program, acknowledging but ignoring the easiest way to make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years.

Perry’s position that Social Security is unconstitutional is without a doubt, as veteran GOP strategist Karl Rove put it, “toxic.” But the argument Romney’s campaign has pushed is that by taking a position Americans don’t support, Perry is unelectable and incapable of beating President Obama in a general election. That stance, however, ignores Romney’s own support for a radical position that has been repeatedly proposed by Republicans and subsequently rejected by the American people.

Deborah Crabtree, of Honolulu, Hawaii tragically lost her husband to cancer on Aug. 3. The bank to which he owed money, Bank of America, didn’t even wait for a day after his death to begin calling Crabtree to remind her that her husband had missed a $3,000 mortgage payment on their home.

Crabtree told Bank of America that she had $5,000 on hand, and that she needed this money to buy food and bury her husband. Convinced that Crabtree should be using this money to pay them, Bank of America repeatedly “robo-called” Crabtree during her husband’s wake, sometimes with only 15 minutes between each call.

Now, Crabtree is suing the bank, alleging that it called her up to 48 times a day, even repeatedly demanding evidence that her husband was dead, and once receiving it, losing it. Crabtree’s complaint cites the emotional distress and mental anguish caused by Bank of America’s behavior.

The local NBC news affiliate covered Crabtree’s case. After reaching out to Bank of America, the station says that it did eventually cease the calls after learning of Mr. Crabtree’s death. Watch it:

Earlier this month, CNNMoney published a piece on banks and other financial entities seeking debts of the deceased from mourners. It notes that under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, there are prohibitions against “third-party debt collectors…collecting debts at ‘inconvenient times’ and harassing customers.” However, this law only applies to “third-party debt collectors, not the banks — which are regulated by individual states.”

A new report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows that household hunger remained steady from 2009 to 2010, even though almost 49 million people — a near record number — were affected by food insecurity. Some states even saw their hunger rates decline.

But one glaring exception was the state of Texas, which has been hailed by Gov. Rick Perry (R) as a model for the rest of the nation during these tough economic times:

Built on a measure called “food insecurity,” the study was based on a survey of 45,000 households during the 2010 census, and found 14.5 percent of households had difficulty meeting their food needs — a statistic that was “essentially unchanged” from 2009, according to the agency. Last year saw a decline in the proportion of households with “severe” food insecurity across the country, too.

In Texas, however, the three-year average food insecurity rate did increase, from 17.4 percent in 2007-2009 to the current rate of 18.8 percent in 2008-2010, according to the Austin-based Center for Public Policy Priorities.

Mississippi is the only state with a worse food insecurity rate than Texas. The number of people on food stamps in Texas rose 2.8 percent between 2009 and 2010, and is now a staggering 15.6 percent of the state’s population. The increase was one of the highest in the nation.

Federal officials credit an increase in government food aid for keeping national hunger rates steady. Programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) have grown to meet increased demand during the recession. However, U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Kevin Concannon notes that Texas hasn’t done as well as other large states like Florida that were hit much harder by the downturn, in part because Texas’ food stamp eligibility determination program has been a mess, “with a backlog of nearly 60,000 unprocessed applications after ‘a very inefficient and ineffective privatization scheme.’”

Ironically, Perry has recently been highly critical of the very food stamp program that would have helped his state’s poorest residents get enough to eat. At a campaign stop last month, Perry called the size of the food stamp program a “testament to widespread misery” — instead of an essential aid that’s keeping Texan families alive.

Austin Food Bank’s John Turner says it’s no coincidence that Texas and Mississippi also lead the country in low-wage jobs. For many hard-working Texans, minimum wage jobs just don’t pay enough to stave off hunger. “The vast majority of the 48,000 central Texans this food bank serves every week are employed, hard-working men and women who are just not earning a living wage,” he writes.