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It's awfully tough to be a presidential candidate worth $250 million when income inequality and poverty are at record levels. Of course, it's tougher still when you're Mitt Romney. After all, in words and in deeds, Romney for years has consistently reminded Americans of "the guy who laid you off."

Now, a week after the Republican frontrunner proposed deep spending cuts for lower income Americans to offset his $6.6 trillion tax cut windfall for the richest individuals and corporations, here are just some of the ways you know Mitt Romney is out of touch.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when the $250,000,000 son of an auto magnate jokes with jobless voters, "I'm also unemployed."

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he declares himself part of the "80 to 90 percent us" who are middle class.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he won't release his tax returns during any of his runs for office.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he declares "I love a flat tax" after calling it a "tax cut for fat cats."

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when decides he will not seek donations to repay $45 million in personal loans he made to his failed presidential bid -- "the biggest ever made by a candidate in a primary campaign."

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he responds "I'm not concerned about the voters" after Tim Russert asked him "why not tell the voters of Florida and across the country how much of your own wealth you're spending?"

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when his wife Ann jokes that "Mitt doesn't even know the answer to that" when asked how many dressage horses she owns.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when the estimated 14 percent tax rate he paid the IRS is lower than Warren Buffett's.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when his tax cut proposal supposedly focused on "the people in the middle" could save his own family tens of millions of dollars.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when his tax cut proposal supposedly focused on "the people in the middle" delivers two-thirds of its benefits to millionaires - including Mitt Romney.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he lies about federal employees making more than their private sector counterparts and then complains about "our servants who are making a lot more money than we are."

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he apparently forgets which state he lives in, votes in and pays taxes in - twice.

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he sells two of his four multimillion dollars mansions because he and his wife are, according to an aide, "downsizing and simplifying."

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when his advice to struggling American homeowners is "don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

You know Mitt Romney is out of touch when he says Democrats are "the party of the monarchists."

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Mitt Romney's plan for the housing market looks a lot like what he did with Bain Capital back in the day.

Via Daily Kos:

As to what to do for the housing industry specifically, and are there things that you could do to encourage housing?

One is, don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy up homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up, and let it turn around and come back up.

The Obama administration has slow-walked the foreclosure processes that have long existed and as a result we still have a foreclosure overhang.

At least one of them finally said what I have long believed to be the plan. When the housing market bubble burst, it left lots of bargains for people with money to buy and sit on while waiting for home prices to turn around. But more importantly, what Romney is proposing is to make a market in rentals, driving rents up while the middle class is squeezed even harder and tighter than it already is.

Let's play Monopoly with Mitt. It would go something like this:

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As the New York Times reported Sunday, within the Obama White House a fierce debate is raging about what to do next about jobs and the economy. But on the same day Americans learned advisers David Plouffe and Bill Daley are pushing President Obama to put forward only proposals which can pass Congress as part of his continuing quixotic quest for the political center, the Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg became the latest to document that it no longer exists.

Which is one more reason why President Obama not only must aggressively promote the job creation programs America are so desperate for. He should take a page from the GOP playbook while doing so. After all, the same Republicans who claimed the economy was the party's "number one priority" immediately pushed draconian anti-abortion restrictions, a stillborn repeal of the health care reform law and a disastrous balanced budget amendment they knew would never become law.

It's time for Barack Obama to start making Republicans offers they can't refuse. And if they do, they'll be on record for having said no to the economic recovery measures the American people so badly need.

1. The States' Rights Act. Republicans claim to love states' rights. Among them should be the right to get help from Washington to limit the cataclysmic budget shortfalls and layoffs now gripping cash-strapped state and local governments. The States' Rights Act would do just that.

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(Scene from Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story.)

A new report predicts more than 1 million American households will lose their homes due to foreclosure:

Nearly 528,000 homes were foreclosed in the first six months of 2010. As lenders work through a huge backlog of borrowers behind on their mortgages, even more home repossessions could occur before the end of the year.

According to RealtyTrac, Inc., a foreclosure listing service, the number of households facing foreclosure in the first half of the year climbed 8 percent when compared to the same time frame last year. In June, 1 in every 411 households received a foreclosure filing.

The fastest growing group of foreclosures involved homeowners with good credit who took out conventional fixed-rate loans. Many of these borrowers have fallen behind in their mortgages due to unemployment or reduced income.

It takes about 15 months for a home loan to go from being 30 days late to the property being seized and sold. Between January and June of this year, about 1.7 million homeowners received a foreclosure-related warning. At the time of this writing, more than 7.3 million home loans are in some stage of delinquency. The states experiencing the highest foreclosure rates are California, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, Arizona and Nevada.

As Atrios points out, the HAMP program has been worse than a failure, because it prolonged the agony for homeowners and most of them lost their homes, anyway. "All carrot and no stick," as this blogger calls it. (Which seems to sum up the adminstration's attitude toward bankers in general.)

I was in the neighborhood pizza restaurant last night, and several of the diners were talking about unemployment extensions. Like most people, they're confused about the difference between next week's vote on unemployment extension, and Tier 5 benefits -- which Congress won't touch. They're hoping "someone will do something," because the alternative is too unthinkable.

The staff is worried, too. The pizza cook is an accountant with three kids who can't find anything above minimum wage. "When I've gotten an interview, I'm going up against people with ten years' experience and MBAs -- for jobs that pay $10 an hour," he told me. "I just don't know what I'm going to do."

And the delivery guy, a former IT programmer, is worried sick about his wife, who has COPD and internal bleeding they can't locate. They've been going to the local federally-funded public health center. "The doctors there are good, but they get a little antsy when you need a specialist," he said. "My unemployment runs out in September, and she's the only steady paycheck coming into the house."

He told me he has this idea for an invention, that when he was working, he invested $1000 in getting designs made. But now? "I need another ten thousand to move forward, and there's no way in hell I can ever afford that without a job," he said.

He paused. "Let alone a house. I just don't know what we're gonna do."

And in stark contrast to the burdens carried by these decent, hard-working people, Americans who got the education and prepared themselves to be self-sufficient, stand the just plain mean denizens of Beck Nation. A friend of mine was looking in a store yesterday and told the owner she wouldn't be buying anything just yet because she was unemployed. The woman snapped, started wagging a finger in her face and told her she "shouldn't be here, you should be out looking for a job!"

"Practically snarling at me," my friend told me. "Can you imagine?" Yes, I can.

How are we ever going to bridge this divide? You just can't leave this many people without help, but the politicans are mostly spineless. What is going to happen to us?

As you may already know, in 2005, the credit card companies lobbied mightily and won provisions that made it much more difficult to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy. That successful effort put in place the current law, which has made it impossible to simply discharge consumer debt in order to keep paying the mortgage. Thanks, Congressional corporatists!

"Who could have seen this wave of foreclosures coming?" Don't make me laugh:

Cash-strapped families are seeking bankruptcy protection at nearly the same rate and in the same manner as they did before the much-debated 2005 bankruptcy law reform, a trend critics say proves the reform was a failure.

Congress wrangled for eight years before passing a reform act aimed at curbing abuse and ending an alarming rise in bankruptcy filings. With the economy in tatters and personal fortunes often in even worse shape these days, the bankruptcy law is beginning to undergo scrutiny again.

I suppose it never occurred to them that the bankruptcy filings were a symptom of economic stress - and not the problem itself?

For now, Congress is focused on efforts to stem home foreclosures by altering the law so that bankruptcy court judges will be allowed to modify certain mortgages to help people keep their homes. But once that's settled, attention will turn to the 2005 bankruptcy reform.

"There is continuing concern about the bankruptcy-reform bill and what its effects have been," says Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who leads the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that oversees bankruptcy law. "We are looking at a number of things that we can do to address the problems."

On Tuesday, Whitehouse will hold a hearing that will discuss legislation he has introduced that would allow families burdened by exorbitant credit card rates and fees to more simply discharge their debt under bankruptcy. He is considering several other proposals.

Critics of the 2005 reform say filing is more tedious, more difficult and costlier for ordinary debtors. They also believe the reform benefited banks over consumers. An independent study says the reform has helped contribute to the surge in home foreclosures. Supporters, however, say the reform has helped reduce fraud and has not trampled on debtors who really need to file for bankruptcy.

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C&L readers will remember the case of Jerry Kane, the traveling "sovereign citizen" who, with his 16-year-old son in tow, toured the country giving seminars on how to take advantage of the current foreclosure crisis by the usual fantasy-based schemes of Patriot-movement pseudo-legal "constitutionalism".

All that, of course, before he and the boy opened fire on two police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas, after which they were mowed down themselves in a blizzard of police bullets in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

If you watch the video, and the others Kane left behind, you'll see that the scheme he was selling entailed creating "strawman" companies that would enable a "sovereign citizen" to then claim ownership, by virtue of their sovereignty (often defined in divine terms), of whatever properties they set their sights upon. As one account noted:

Seminars of this type usually teach that each person has a real self and a “corporate self” that is a fabrication of the government, and that banks cannot legitimately lend money that belongs to their depositors.

“It’s mumbo jumbo; it’s magic words; it’s abracadabra,” Ms. MacNab said.

You'll note also that Kane had been promoting this scheme in the Seattle area:

Jim Jenkins, a former mortgage broker in Seattle who attended one of Mr. Kane’s seminars in April, said that Mr. Kane had been largely congenial, but that his anger had flared when he recalled a traffic stop earlier that month in New Mexico. Mr. Kane was arrested and jailed on charges of driving while his license was suspended or revoked and concealing his identity.

Well, surprise, surprise: Someone operating under a scheme awfully similar to the one Kane was promoting recently popped up in the news in Seattle. My old friend Danny Westneat at the Seattle Times has the story, involving a woman who appears to have taken up residence in a vacant $5 million mansion in Kirkland, across the lake from Seattle:

That's odd, neighbors thought. The West of Market neighborhood in Kirkland is friendly, easygoing. So one of them called the real-estate agent to ask what was up.

What he said floored them. The house is still for sale for $3.3 million. Whoever is living there had broken in. They're squatters.

"It's blown everybody away around here," said another neighbor, who asked me not to print her name.

"It takes some real guts to just waltz into a house like that, I'll give them that."

We were standing across the street from the six-bedroom, six-and-a-half bath house, dubbed in the ads as "Mediterranean Natural." With its rock exterior and terraces, it looks like a miniature hotel.

"Elevator to the theater, wine cellar & tasting room, game room, recreation room, nanny's quarters, den/library, culinary artist's kitchen, bonus room and the lavish master suite & bath," reads a listing from 2008, when the house was for sale for $5.8 million.

Of particular note was the means by which the squatter has been able to forestall being carted out as a trespasser:

A form posted on the door of the house by its new "tenants" says "all rights, interest and title in said property" has been transferred to something called the "Priority Rose Children's Outreach" in Bothell.

That's a charity that was incorporated only two weeks ago, according to the state Secretary of State's Office. Its purpose is listed as "spiritual training for adults and children in a religious safe environment for the development of all mankind."

That sounds nice. But the phone number for the charity is also the number for a Bothell company called NW Note Elimination that specializes in "eliminating mortgages." It does this by finding flaws with loans or titles and exploiting them to stake outright claims to property.

One of its strategies, according to a primer it posted on Craigslist, is to create a land trust and claim title to a piece of property, then try to challenge the existing mortgages as flawed in hopes the banks eventually will just go away.

"The idea is that with this economy, people are looking for any kind of real-estate loophole they can find," said Sgt. Robert Saloum of the Kirkland Police.

But squatting? In somebody else's home?

I called the charity to ask how moving into a house you don't own promotes the religious and spiritual development of all mankind. Nobody called me back.

Saloum said when Kirkland police went to the house, the woman who answered the door showed a form claiming she owned the house.

"It's up to a court to sort that out," he said.

This is hardly the first time this has cropped up. There have been scattered reports of similar schemes taking place in southern California, where the vacant foreclosures are as common as sagebrush. Here in the Northwest, the scheme has also cropped up in Montana -- unsurprisingly, since we're talking about the Home of the Freemen here.

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One of the most tragic consequences of the subprime mortgage crisis has been the toll minorities have paid. Republicans point to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and ACORN as the mortgage Satans of the 21st century, but the truth is something else entirely.

Here's one example:

For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.

A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.

Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.

“I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”

Like so many, Mr. Banks was lured by the promises made by the big banks like Wells Fargo and others: Refinance your home, take out some money for yourself, and hey, the interest rate will be low...for awhile, anyway.

The squeeze came for him when the interest rates on that variable rate mortgage rose and his income dropped. While it's not limited to minority borrowers, the impact on minority communities has been deeper than on white communities, largely because the unemployment rate is much higher.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

It appears that the higher foreclosure rate is no accident. In fact, it seems that Wells Fargo targeted minorities to market higher-risk loans. At least, that's the accusation causing federal authorities to take a closer look at their lending practices there.

Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.

As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.

What follows next is a story told across the country, but when the scam is played on a community just beginning to get a toehold on forward economic progress, the setback is one that may take more than a generation to overcome.

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

Ask a conservative and they'll tell you those people shouldn't have believed they'd get something for nothing. Well, I beg to differ. In the subprime heyday, phone calls rolled in here at record pace, promising us we could refinance our home and pull out enough cash to retire. When our middle son graduated from high school we were inundated with offers to refinance to send him to college. We had already been stung during the S&L crisis, so we knew it was a scam. But to the uninitiated, it seemed like a step up.

But then, look what happens:

Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.

“I thought, ‘This is great! ’ ” Mr. Banks says. “When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings.”

What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.

We've heard all of these stories before, but in Memphis the result is deep, dire and depressing.

“We’re wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

Elizabeth Warren is so sensible and credible. Why don't more people in the Obama administration listen to her?

Banks and homeowners alike need to take a more realistic view about how to stem the tide of foreclosures overtaking the housing market and the economy, the head of a government watchdog panel told CNBC.

The more than $700 billion the government allocated toward dealing with foreclosures has only made a minor dent in the problem, said Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

That's because those on both sides of the equation are not taking a proactive enough approach, she said.

"We have to sober up on this and say, 'Look, it's time to get realistic,'" Warren said. "It's time for the banks to get realistic about the value of the second mortgages, it's time to be realistic about doing some principal writedowns."

But the onus is not entirely on banks. Homeowners with distressed mortgages also may need a reality check.

"Some of you should stay in your homes...and some of you don't belong in those homes and you've got to be moved out," Warren said. "And frankly, those houses need to get back onto the market and get into the hands of people who can afford them."

"In other words, acknowledge the problem, deal with it, write off the losses and start rebuilding an economy on solid ground."

It's a complicated problem that comes down to which lien takes precedence, and the previous administration attempt to help people who are in over their head due to second mortgages was a failure. The program was also stymied by the unwillingness of banks to take losses on the loans:

Programs to help distressed borrowers so far have focused on lowering the payments on their primary mortgage. But during the go-go years of the housing market, millions of homeowners took out a second or even third loan backed by their home. Many were piggyback mortgages, which enabled home buyers to put little or no money down, while others took advantage of rising home prices to secure home-equity lines of credits.

Now, these secondary loans are aggravating the foreclosure crisis, adding an extra burden that can be the difference between borrowers digging out of debt and losing their home. The extra mortgages also make it far more unwieldy for lenders to untie the knot of excessive debt and provide relief to borrowers. And even when borrowers do get help with their primary mortgages, the second loans can continue to bedevil homeowners, raising the risk they will default later.

The Obama administration is about to ramp up its efforts to tackle second mortgages as part of an aggressive program announced by the White House on Friday to address foreclosures. Other steps include a requirement that lenders offer temporary mortgage relief to unemployed borrowers and increased incentives for lenders to cut loan balances for borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth.

A federal judge has reaffirmed her earlier ruling blocking the congressional effort to defund the anti-poverty group ACORN. On Wednesday, Judge Nina Gershon cemented a decision from last year that such action amounted to an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” Judge Gershon told all federal agencies to allow ACORN funding without delay:

JOHN ATLAS: I’m going to talk about that in a minute, but the first thing I want to say, that needs to be said over and over again, is that the act of defunding ACORN by Congress is a national disgrace. We should all be outraged about that. Basically what happened is Congress bowed to Fox News, Glenn Beck, the rest of the right-wing echo chamber—we’re talking about the United States Congress—and then scapegoated the most effective anti-poverty organization in the country. That’s a scandal of enormous proportions.

ACORN has a record of helping poor people in these hard times. They help them get homes. They help them stop foreclosures. They help them fight predatory lending. They help them register voters. I’m talking about minority voters, people who ordinarily don’t vote. Very hard to get that kind of voter registration work done. And in short, all other studies, including mine, have documented how effective ACORN has been and how important it’s been to low-income people, especially the working poor.

OK, now, with the significance of the decision, first people have to understand the context. This was a case in which the Congress defunded ACORN, and they claimed they had to defund ACORN to protect the taxpayers. ACORN brought a lawsuit. They brought it against the United States government, the Office of Management and Budget, the Secretary of HUD, and the Secretary of Treasury. They had to bring a lawsuit against them because these were the people who issued orders, pursuant to the vote by Congress, to not allow ACORN to get any funding that it was entitled to, but didn’t get, and they could not, in the future, apply for federal funding.

AMY GOODMAN: And remind us why they were defunded. I mean, what was the incident that precipitated this?

JOHN ATLAS: Well, as your opening said, which we can emphasize again, the immediate trigger—I’m talking about the immediate trigger—was the release of videos that appeared to show that ACORN staffers were giving advice to right-wing activists who looked like a pimp and a prostitute. And they were giving advice to them which was outrageous, which we should go into, after we talk about this case, because it turned out that that was completely misleading, that in fact he never—the guy who was posing as a pimp never showed up in this outlandish pimp outfit that we all associate with those videotapes. You know, the guy in the top hat, the cape around his shoulders, with his cane, the dark glasses, you know, he looked like a 1970s African American—you know, stereotype African American pimp. He went on TV. He said, “This is what I looked like when I was in the office.” Turned out, not true. And we should go into that, because—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain. How, then?

JOHN ATLAS: Well, it’s not true, because he edited—they took those pictures of him dressed that way, and they edited him into the tapes.

Now, before we get back into the decision, let me say this, that this reporting was done by not just the right-wing press, but every one of the mainstream press, and I’m talking about the Washington Post, the New York Times. Before I came here, I actually put together a list—I can—of times that the New York Times reported that fact, that this man was dressed like that when he was sitting in the office. And the New York Times has refused to retract this. And there’s a whole movement out there now trying to get the public editor to go on record saying the Times botched the story.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Despite the judge—

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