According to Jane Friedmann of the “Whistleblower”, Terri Steenblock, an assistant commissioner of Minnesota’s Department of Revenue, said there were multiple issues with the software including assigning political contributions to the wrong party, failing to give an education credit for multiple dependents, incorrectly calculating property tax refunds, and a variety of other calculation errors. Some of these issues surfaced just in the past several days.

The Minnesota Department of Revenue found these errors “unacceptable”.

Here is the notice as it appears on the website of Minnesota’s Department of Revenue:

Important Notice for Taxpayers Using Intuit Products (TurboTax, Lacerte, Intuit online, ProSeries)

The Minnesota Department of Revenue advises you not to use Intuit (TurboTax, Lacerte, Intuit online, ProSeries) to file your Minnesota taxes electronically or on paper. Intuit has discovered multiple issues with their products. The issues could jeopardize the accuracy of your return or delay your refund.

What should I do?

IF YOU… ?	THEN?
Have NOT prepared or filed your return ?	File using a different software product. See a list of approve vendors below.
Prepared your return using Intuit but did not file?	Wait to file until Intuit communicates the problems are corrected.?
Have filed your return using Intuit?	Call Intuit at 1-866-888-4609.

The Department of Revenue is not affiliated with Intuit and we find these errors unacceptable. We expect Intuit to correct these problems immediately. If they fail to do so, the department will stop processing returns filed using Intuit.

We will continue to monitor the situation closely.

Concerned taxpayers may contact Intuit at 1-866-888-4609

AMY GOODMAN: We are on the road in Chicago. I’ll be at noon in San Francisco on Saturday, speaking at Green Fest, and Sunday, 1:30, with Noam Chomsky and University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole in Princeton at the Nassau Presbyterian Church.

But right now we’re in Chicago, and as the most expensive presidential election in U.S. history has come to an end, we turn to an issue that impacts more and more people in this country but was rarely mentioned during the campaign: poverty. The price tag for combined spending by federal candidates, along with their parties and outside groups like super PACs, totaled more than $6 billion. This is especially striking at a time when one in six Americans is poor, with over 16 million children living in poverty. Poverty rates for blacks and Latinos are twice as high as the rates for whites. There is greater poverty among women than men, and the rate of women living in extreme poverty has reached record highs.

But a study released by the media watchdog group FAIR—that’s Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting—they reveal that poverty as an issue has been nearly invisible in U.S. media coverage of the 2012 presidential race. It found just 17 of the 10,489 campaign stories studied—that’s 0.2 percent—addressed poverty in any substantive way.

Critics have pointed out that President Obama was viewed as the anti-poverty candidate in 2008, but his re-election bid four years later has barely mentioned the poor, even though their numbers have gone up.

Well, for more, we’re joined by two guests who have worked diligently to get poverty back on the national agenda. Dr. Cornel West is with us, professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary in New York and professor emeritus at Princeton University. He’s a New York Times bestselling author of numerous books and co-host of the radio show Smiley & Tavis — Smiley & West with Tavis Smiley. Together they’ve written the new book, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. Tavis Smiley is a TV, radio broadcaster, philanthropist, New York Times bestselling author. He hosts the PBS show Tavis Smiley and two radio shows, The Tavis Smiley Show on NPR and Smiley & West with Cornel West.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now!

TAVIS SMILEY: Thank you. Good to see you, Amy.

CORNEL WEST: [inaudible] blessing to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to be with you. So we’re right here in the president’s city. In fact, he just flew out on Wednesday after his re-election. Cornel West, the figures—who is ahead? Who isn’t? As your book is titled The Rich and the Rest of Us.

CORNEL WEST: Well, one, I think that it’s morally obscene and spiritually profane to spend $6 billion on an election, $2 billion on a presidential election, and not have any serious discussion—poverty, trade unions being pushed against the wall dealing with stagnating and declining wages when profits are still up and the 1 percent are doing very well, no talk about drones dropping bombs on innocent people. So we end up with such a narrow, truncated political discourse, as the major problems—ecological catastrophe, climate change, global warming. So it’s very sad. I mean, I’m glad there was not a right-wing takeover, but we end up with a Republican, a Rockefeller Republican in blackface, with Barack Obama, so that our struggle with regard to poverty intensifies.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a pretty rough assessment of President Obama.

CORNEL WEST: Oh, that’s what we have. That’s what we have. Richard Nixon is to the left of him on healthcare. Richard Nixon is to the left of him on guaranteed income. And the same policies in terms of imperial foreign policy is at work. And so, I was glad to see that Romney didn’t win. We pushed back a right-wing takeover. We’ve got a right-wing mentality: cut, cut, cut, austerity, austerity, austerity. Where is the serious talk about investment in jobs, fighting the privatizing of education, and the empowerment of trade unions? And so, our battle is just beginning. We have yet to take off the gloves. You know, we’ve been fighting intensely.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama said to Harry Belafonte, according to Harry, “Why don’t you and Cornel West cut me some slack?” And Cornel—and Harry Belafonte responded, “What makes you think we’re not?”

CORNEL WEST: That’s exactly right.

AMY GOODMAN: I want ask you about Bill O’Reilly, Tavis Smiley. I don’t know if you were watching Fox on election night, but this is what Bill O’Reilly had to say about the outcome of the election.

BRET BAIER: So what’s your sense of the evening? I mean, you look at these exit polls. You look at the, you know—

BILL O’REILLY: My sense of the evening is if Mitt Romney loses in Ohio, the president is re-elected.

MEGYN KELLY: How do you think we got to that point? I mean, President Obama’s approval rating was so low. And obviously this is hypothetical: we don’t know who’s—who’s even winning right now, never mind who won. But how do you think it got this tight?

BILL O’REILLY: Because it’s a changing country. The demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore. And there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it—and whereby 20 years ago President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff. You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things. And which candidate between the two is going to give them things?

AMY GOODMAN: That was Bill O’Reilly, Tavis Smiley.

TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah. Well, you asked a moment ago whether I was watching Fox on election night, and the answer is no. This is precisely why I wasn’t watching Fox on election night. It’s also why I don’t watch a lot of MSNBC, either. I don’t like being spun to the right, and I don’t like being spun to the left. What I prefer is to get at some truth, and that’s why I appreciate Democracy Now! and other programs that are trying to get at the hard truths that Americans don’t want to deal with.

I don’t know where to start in terms of deconstructing and dissecting what I just heard. I will tell you this: this is precisely why the Republicans lost. And if they think this is the narrative that’s going to help them win into the future, then they need to put down the crack pipe. They’re stuck on stupid if they think this strategy is a winning strategy. The reality is simply this—and you’ve discussed this on this program, so this is nothing new, obviously: in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that dog just won’t hunt. If they cannot figure out a way to expand their base, the GOP is going down.

Now, I don’t like the two-party system. I surely don’t want to live in a one-party state. So I appreciate competition. I wish there were more parties, obviously. But again, if this is the narrative they think they can sell to the American people into the future and help them win elections, I don’t know what they’re thinking. So, this is a—it’s tragic to listen to. It’s really—it’s an echo chamber to our right, because this really sounds like Mitt Romney on the videotape that came out about the 47 percent.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh recently claimed that President Obama and Vice President Biden want to grow the portion of the 47 percent who are, quote, “wards of the state.” This is from the October 9th edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Whatever number of the 47 percent are wards of the state, they’re happy. Not all that 47 percent wants to be in that group. But the people in the 47 percent who are content to be there, Biden, Obama would love to grow it. The more people dependent on government, the better. The more people angry, resentful of the rich, the better, as far as they’re concerned.

AMY GOODMAN: Tavis Smiley?

TAVIS SMILEY: Well, again, if that’s the kind of rhetoric that they’re going to continue to engage in, go for it. I have no problem with Fox or Bill or Rush continuing to push that kind of agenda, because, again, it is not a winning strategy in this country to attack Hispanics, to attack African Americans, to attack women, to suggest that we’re all a part of a welfare state, that we’re all dependent on government. And in nowhere—at no point in either of those diatribes did you hear the truth, which is that the majority of Americans on welfare are white Americans. They are not black. They are not Hispanic. And so, that truth just gets lost in the matrix.

This was a campaign for the White House of extremes, a campaign of extremes. Too much money, as Dr. West already said—morally profane that we’d spend $6 billion, so too much money.

Too much time. I think, you know, we’ve got to get to a point of rethinking how we do presidential politics in this country, from the Electoral College to the money, to the debates, but too much time is spent on the campaign. It used to be that the campaigning would stop and the governing would start. Now there’s no line between the two.

And thirdly, too many lies told. And these were examples, again, of the lies that we heard in this campaign. The fact checkers had to work overtime in this campaign to try to get the truth to the American people. So a campaign of extremes. It’s time for us to rethink how we do presidential politics. But again, if this is the storyline that they want to run, let them run it, because they’re going to run themselves into oblivion with this.

CORNEL WEST: You know, but the lie at—

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. West.

CORNEL WEST: The lie at the center of both of them—Brother Rush and Brother Bill—the white liberal establishment is not a majority. The elite white liberal establishment is a minority. The white poor is not part of that. The white working class is not part of that.

If you really want to talk about being dependent on government, $16 trillion for Wall Street, not one of them gone to jail involved in the criminal activity linked to predatory lending, market manipulation or insider trading. The government protects them. Jamal gets caught with a crack bag; he going to jail. But Mr. McGillicuddy gets caught on Wall Street; he’s protected by the government. Neither administration—Bush, Obama—have any investigations, no prosecutions at all. So the folk who are really dependent, they get interest-free loans from the Federal Reserve. Wouldn’t it be nice if students could get interest-free loans?

So, Rush and Bill, they got to tell the truth: the white elite is very dependent on government. They get welfare anytime they want it, with no strings attached. So that’s the lie at the center of both of their views. And it’s not majority. White brothers and sisters are catching hell who are not part of the 1 percent.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the issue of the whole discussion that you’re engaged in, pushing President Obama from the left. In September at the Democratic convention, Democracy Now! hosted a debate on Obama’s record, with Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda, and Michael Eric Dyson, the author and MSNBC analyst, Georgetown University professor. This is what Michael Eric Dyson had to say.

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: The reality is, is that the American left will never be able to participate not simply in the pageantry of American politics and the light and airy stuff that conventions engage in. Of course, the fluff and the desiderata may be absolutely true, as Mr. Ford has indicated. But the reality is, is that Obama is as progressive a figure who has the chance of being elected in America. Friedrich Engels is not going to be the secretary of labor, and Marx will not be the secretary of treasury, bottom line. [...]

But if you ain’t in the game—Miami Heat is playing the—talking about sports—is playing the Oklahoma Thunder. It’s not “I’d prefer it be the Los Angeles Lakers.” This is the game we’re talking about. And if the American left can’t be involved in the actual practice of government to offer the critical and salient insights that are available—take—take 2000, when siding with Nader, then Al Gore, who should have been president, who would have prevented some of the stuff that we see now happening, didn’t occur. The left won’t take responsibility for the fact that, with the extraordinary intelligence of a Glen Ford and many other leftists notwithstanding, the reality is that he’s the most progressive president, as Gary Dorrien, an American leftist who teaches at Union Theological Seminary argues, since FDR.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s author, professor, commentator Michael Eric Dyson. Tavis Smiley, your response?

TAVIS SMILEY: I’ve known Michael Eric Dyson for a long time, and I love him with all of my heart. It is so disappointing, though, to hear Michael, Professor Dyson, advance that kind of argument. He comes out of a black prophetic tradition that is rooted in speaking truth to power—and, I might add, to the powerless. But to somehow try to suggest in any way that this president has been progressive or is the best example of progressivism that we could put forth in this country is just inaccurate.

This is precisely why Dr. West and I and others—you know, we don’t have a monopoly on the truth, and we’re not the only ones—but this is why we believe that the president has to be pushed. I’ve said so many times across the nation that great presidents aren’t born, they’re made. They have to be pushed into their greatness. There is no Abraham Lincoln—I just saw the movie coming out this weekend, I think, the Lincoln project. And Lincoln isn’t Lincoln if Frederick Douglass isn’t pushing him. FDR isn’t FDR if A. Philip Randolph and Eleanor Roosevelt aren’t pushing him. LBJ isn’t LBJ if MLK isn’t pushing him.

And so, what I hear in Professor Dyson’s critique is that there is some excuse to be made or that we have to settle for this as the best example of progressivism that we can find. And Doc and I just don’t believe in settling. We don’t believe in making excuses. We believe that if he is not pushed, he’s going to be a transactional president and not a transformational president. And we believe that the time is now for action and no longer accommodation. But that doesn’t happen unless you’re pushed.

So, the excuse making and the settling for the fact that this is the best that we can do—can you imagine what this country would be if women had settled? “This is the best that we can do”? If black folk in slavery and segregation had said, “This is the best that we can do”? That’s not—that’s not even the spirit of America, much less the spirit of those who come out of the black prophetic tradition. So that’s disappointing to hear, even though I love him with all my heart.

CORNEL WEST: And Brother Tavis is being very kind, because he’s right. I love Brother Mike Dyson, too, but we’re living in a society where everybody is up for sale. Everything is up for sale. And he and Brother Sharpton and Sister Melissa and others, they have sold their souls for a mess of Obama pottage. And we invite them back to the black prophetic tradition after Obama leaves. But at the moment, they want insider access, and they want to tell those kind of lies. They want to turn their back to poor and working people.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, he’s—Michael Eric—

CORNEL WEST: And it’s a sad thing to see them as apologists for the Obama administration in that way, given the kind of critical background that all of them have had at some point.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Eric Dyson isn’t saying that Obama is progressive, but he’s the most progressive of the presidents that we’ve had.

CORNEL WEST: When FDR says, “Bring the economic royalists on; they are my foes. I’m fighting on behalf of poor people,” has Obama not just said that, but done that? Did LBJ, who declared a war on poverty, that generated the kind of legislation against American terrorism called Jim and Jane Crow for voting and—come on, Dyson. But it’s not just what he said there; it’s what he’s been saying as a whole. Brother Glen Ford crushed him in that debate. Listen to what the arguments are. You see what I mean? And again, we’re sending out our love for Dyson, because he’s been our partner, and he can be our partner again. But these kind of lies, we can’t live with.

TAVIS SMILEY: And to me, the most progressive—I want to add right quick, to me, the most progressive means that you’re taking some serious risk.

CORNEL WEST: That’s right.

TAVIS SMILEY: And I just don’t see the example of that. Even the healthcare debate, the president compromised against himself. He watered down what he promised on the campaign trail before we got serious. The promising—the promise of an open debate on C-SPAN never really quite materialized. So, I’m not suggesting that I’m unhappy with the fact that we got something done on healthcare, but it’s nowhere near what it was supposed to be.

And again, if you’re going to label somebody “the most progressive,” you’ve got to show me where the risk was taken. Lincoln took risk. FDR took risk. LBJ took risk. We know, famously, LBJ said, “I know that advancing this legislation, voting rights and civil rights, is going to lose my party the South for two decades.” And he turned out to be right, but it was the right thing to do at that time. And so, that’s what we’re saying.

In the president’s forward motion in the second term to establish a legacy—and I don’t think that being president ought to be about a legacy; it ought to be about advancing the best for the American people. But in this conversation about his legacy, I want to see what risk he’s going to take. Is he going to put himself on the line for poor people? Is he going have an honest conversation about drones? As Doc said earlier, you know, is he ever going to say the word prison—the phrase, “prison-industrial complex”? Reagan wouldn’t say “AIDS.” Bush wouldn’t say “climate change.” Will Obama say “prison-industrial complex”? I mean, I want to know where the risk is that equates to being the most progressive president ever. That’s the—I don’t get that.

CORNEL WEST: Is it progressive to sign the National Defense Authorization Act, in which you can actually detain American citizens with no due process, no judicial process, to assassinate American citizens based on executive power? That’s not—that is authoritarian. That’s autocratic. It’s crypto-fascist. We have to call it for what it is. Drones are war crimes. We have to call it for what it is. That’s the tradition that produced us. That’s what Frederick Douglass is about. That’s what Ida B. Wells is about. That’s what Abraham Joshua Heschel at his best was. That’s what Dorothy Day was. That’s our tradition. Now, if one doesn’t want to be part of that tradition and be inside of the White House, then stay in the White House and have a good time and breakdance. But don’t lie. Don’t try to tell us that lies are the truth.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this conversation in a minute. Our guests are Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. You like that music, Dr. Cornel West.

CORNEL WEST: Oh, that’s Curtis Mayfield, “Keep on Pushing.” He’s on the love train. We on the love train.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Cornel West is with us, and Tavis Smiley, and they have a radio show called Smiley & West. That’s every week. It’s a weekly program. You were just having a debate with Jeffrey Toobin on it around the issue of third-party candidates and what we need in this country. Do you think movements are shaping up? And what do you think the movements that brought President Obama into office the first time—what do you think they are doing now after the second time? Tavis?

TAVIS SMILEY: Doc?

CORNEL WEST: Well, one, I draw—

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. West.

CORNEL WEST: —distinction between campaigns and movements. Movements are highly sophisticated forms of bringing power and pressure to bear on the status quo. Campaigns are attempts to mobilize in order to support candidates inside of a system. And they play a role and so forth, but there was not a social movement.

We haven’t had a social movement really since the gay brothers and lesbian sisters tried to break the back of homophobia, going—before that, the feminist movement and then the great black freedom movement called the civil rights movement. Those are very rare. Usually the leaders are repressed and diluted—or diluted, so that right now, the left, we are weak. We are feeble. The Occupy movement was a tremendous expression of voices, but it was not a movement that was crystallizing in any way.

But we are bouncing back. A democratic awakening is taking place, thanks to Democracy Now! and Tavis’s show and so forth. But at the moment, we’re still dispersed and scattered.

AMY GOODMAN: I talked about Smiley & West, your weekly radio show, which was just canceled here on WBEZ in Chicago, though it’s being picked up by other networks. Tavis, can you talk about this and the controversy around this? It’s been written up in the public radio and television—

TAVIS SMILEY: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —newspaper, Current, and other places.

TAVIS SMILEY: I’m now in my 20th year in the broadcast business, and most of that time has been spent in public media spaces—NPR, PBS, PRI—and that’s by choice. I could be in a commercial space if I chose to be, and I’ve done that before, but I—

AMY GOODMAN: You came from BET.

TAVIS SMILEY: I came from BET, came from CNN. I came from ABC. I’ve done the commercial thing. But I love the public radio and public TV space, because it allows us to get a different kind of truth, and I don’t have to respond to all the pressures from corporate media when you’re playing that particular game. And I have respect for my friends who do it; it’s just not for me at this point in my life. So I’ve done this for a long time.

This has been an uphill battle all along for me. It’s tragic to consider that, at my age, I’m the first person of color in the history NPR to have his own daily show. And that started in 2002. 2004, I become the first person of color in the history of PBS to have his own show every night on PBS. That’s how late to the game public TV and public radio have been in terms of giving people of color a space to operate inside of, so that when a station like WBEZ in Chicago—a great station—but when a station like WBEZ in Chicago starts making excuses for why they drop Smiley & West, when we believe and know this was all about the politics—this is the president’s home town, and they didn’t want us on the air in the last six weeks of the campaign talking about holding the president accountable and pushing him on why he’s not talking about poverty and why he’s not talking about the drones. So a decision was made here in his home town, without our knowledge, without our consultation, to just simply pull the plug on the Smiley & West show, again, without any forewarning. When that happened, you know, the citizenry here in Chicago who supports BEZ and listens to our program went crazy. And—

AMY GOODMAN: What was it replaced by?

TAVIS SMILEY: It was replaced with a repeat of Car Talk, which is not—which, as you know, is no longer even in production. Car Talk was a very popular show for years, but it’s not even in production anymore. So they pulled us off and started running repeats of Car Talk. So, that got a lot of conversation going in the city.

To make a long story short, this is not about Smiley & West being canceled. This is about the democratization of public media. It’s about the lack of diversity in public media. Something is wrong when a black man from Chicago has a better chance of being president of the United States than he does of hosting a talk show in prime time on public radio in Chicago. So all these excuses continue to be made. I’ve been fighting this battle for years. And when I talk about diversity, I don’t mean just ethnic diversity. I mean ideological diversity. For all the criticisms that public media takes for being part of the liberal media bias, we ain’t so liberal, when you listen to the ideology, when you see the lack of ethnic diversity.

And so, the good news is, without going, you know, on so long, because I don’t believe in spending too much time on what’s prologue, the reality is that within 24 hours a number of stations in Chicago called and said, “We would love to carry Smiley & West.” And so, part of our being in Chicago alongside you last night was to talk about democratizing public media and to celebrate with our listenership the fact that there are two stations in Chicago now—WCPT, Chicago Progressive Talk, and WVON, the Talk of Chicago—two stations now that are carrying the program. So we lose one station and pick up two. So, if every time I get canceled by somebody, if I can pick up two in the place of one, keep canceling me. I can live with that.

CORNEL WEST: Keep canceling. Keep canceling. You know, but Brother Tavis makes the point with great insight that when public broadcasting was first initiated under Johnson, it was for children and people of color. But it has become a white liberal elitist bastion, as if white liberal elitists own it. And so, the voices of red, our indigenous brothers and sisters, Latino, black, Asian, don’t play a fundamental role. That needs to be radically called into question. And our white liberal elitists, they need to understand that this is part of the critique that they have to come to terms with.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where do you go from here? Tavis, you still have your PBS show. Your show continues here in Chicago and all over the country. Inequality globally and here in this country is growing.

TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. One of the things that—to answer your question expressly, where do we go from here, we continue using these platforms every week and every night to try to speak truth, again, to power and to the powerless. And I’m about to start my 10th year on PBS, so that show is going extremely strong. I’m 13 years now on the public radio. So I’m very blessed to be where I am with these platforms.

And with regard to poverty, specifically, where we go next is January the 17th in Washington. We are having another national symposium, just three days before the president gets inaugurated, talking about poverty. The confirmations are coming in. We’re bringing together this time the leaders in the poverty—the anti-poverty movement. We’re talking Marian Wright Edelman, confirmed. We’re talking Jeffrey Sachs, confirmed. We’re talking Cornel West, confirmed. We’re talking Jonathan Kozol, confirmed. We’re bringing together leaders in this movement, and we’re going to talk about the president calling a White House conference to eradicate poverty.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to do part two of our conversation with Smiley and West in just one moment, and we’ll post a web-ex.

Interviewer:  As soon as Obama was reelected,  it was reported that there was another drone bombing in Yemen that affected innocent civilians.  Is this is a sign of things to come, to continue with the Obama administration, or do you think it is going to get better or worse?  What’s your expectation over the next four years with Obama as president?

Glenn Greenwald:  I think it’s all going to get much worse.  You know, there’s this theory that he can be liberated from these policies now because he has won his second term and no longer needs to move to the center–but I think the center’s actually where he prefers to be–and I think the theory that is more compelling is that he no longer needs the base of the Democratic party or progressives.

I think you are going to see him do a bunch of policies that will anger his base:  he is eager to do that.  And I think accelerating these counter terroism policies of the Bush administration is definitely something that’s on the horizon.

Interviewer:  This is what perplexes me because there’s really isn’t much outcry or criticism of him on the left or the right on these policies specifically.  Why do you think that is? Why isn’t there such an outcry like there was under George W. Bush?

Glenn Greenwald:  I think conservatives are actually being pretty principled and commendable even though their views are repulsive in that they were supportive of these policies whether there was a Republican president, and they didn’t change their minds and start attacking Obama over them. They have stayed supportive.  If you look at what any right wing figure says when asked about drones or assasinations or Guantanamo or indefinite detentions or secrecy or any of that, they sing Obama’s praises, including people like Dick Cheney or Michael Hayden, the former CIA Director in the Bush years.  So they are being totally consistent.

The people who are being inconsistent and unprincipled are progressives, liberals, Democrats, who pretended to be so outraged by these policies during the Bush years.  And I remember a lot of Republicans saying that they were only making these complaints, and voicing these grievances, for partisan opportunism.  And it turns out that they were totally right because these policies under the Obama administration don’t bother the vast bulk of these very same progressives who were shrieking about it when there was a Republican president.  In fact, many of them have become outright supportive.

So when you combine the principled support of conservatives with the grotesque opportunism of Democrats, what you have is a fairly substantial portion of the citizenry who is supportive of these policies.  And therefore the controversies that were in the Bush years no longer exist.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Barack Obama: “We cannot settle for a second Gilded Age in America.”

Narrator: Four years ago Barack Obama was elected on a promise to change the way things work in Washington.

Barack Obama: “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”

Narrator: But you can’t say you want to change the game and still play it.

Rocky Anderson: “This country is being transformed in dramatic ways. Our government is bought and paid for and we need to put it to an end.

We’re not going to put up with them toadying to Wall Street anymore. Goldman Sachs through its own PAC and through its employees gave over a million dollars to Barack Obama four years ago.

There hasn’t been one prosecution by the Obama administration of anybody on Wall Street for committing the kind of fraud that helped lead to the 2008 meltdown.

The Republicans and Democrats alike both feed at the same trough of special interest money and continually betray the public interest.”

Unknown Speaker: We functionally have a government that is not Democrats or Republicans but that is six major industries. The politicians are more happy to work for those who write the checks at the expense of the balance of our country.

Barack Obama: “I have said repeatedly that money is the original sin in politics and I am not sinless.”

Tim Russert: “There seems to be a real inconsistency the amount of money you raise and where it is coming from and your rhetoric.”

Narrator: But there is always more rhetoric.

Barack Obama: “We need to end an era in Washington where accountability has been absent, oversight has been overlooked. You need leadership you can trust to work for you: not for the special interests that have their thumb on the scale.”

Rocky Anderson: “Republicans and Democrats are in collusion. It’s got to come to an end.”

Barack Obama: “Ask yourself if those same candidates are taking millions of dollars in contributions from the PACs and the lobbyists, who are they going to be toasting once the election is over.”

Narrator: Good question.

It’s time to take our country back. It’s time to stand up, break the cycle, end corporate rule, and restore our democracy.

Rocky Anderson: “We have done a dismal job in protecting and nurturing our republic.

The American people want to see change. We need a party, we need candidates, we need people in public office who are pledged to change the system and get the corrupting influence of corporate and other concentrated wealth out of our system of government.

This is not America. This is not who we are or what we believe in.

We won’t let up. We will demonstrate our love for our nation by always speaking up and taking whatever action is required to keep our republic.”

Rocky Anderson, the people’s candidate, standing for us, and with us. There is a better choice in 2012.

Barack Obama: “We can either have an election in which we are taking on the root causes of special interest dominated politics in Washington, or we can ignore the
problem and we can wake up four years from now and still be talking about an energy crisis, and still be talking about a healthcare crisis, and still be talking about a tax bill that’s not fair to you. I don’t want to wake up that way.”

Narrator: Neither did we.

But we are awake. And your time is up.

Rocky Anderson 2012.

Here is President Obama on Univision talking about how you can get change in Washington.

“And the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside. That’s how I got elected. And that’s how the big accomplishments like health care got done was because we mobilized the American people to speak out. That’s how we were able to cut taxes for middle-class families.

So something that I’d really like to concentrate on my second term is being in a much more constant conversation with the American people so that they can put pressure on Congress to help move some of these issues forward.”

But didn’t you, President Obama, promise us “hope and change”, “change we can believe in”, “change the way Washington works”?  Isn’t that why we elected you four years ago?  Now you are telling us, four years later, that you can’t change Washington being President?!  If such is the case, then why do we need you at all?

Sounds like the biggest alibi I have ever heard, Mr. President.

Linda McMahon is running for the US Senate in Connecticut. For twenty (20) years, she ran World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband, Vince McMahon. A few years ago, a documentary film examined the WWE’s celebration of violence against women. Her campaign doesn’t want Connecticut voters to see that film. Watch these excerpts from the film to see why.

The “Huffington Post” recently published an article on Linda McMahon’s candidacy for the US Senate for Connecticut. This article was written by Jackson Katz, educator, filmmaker, and author. In that article, he observes that although McMahon has repositioned herself as “an advocate and role model for working women”, until her run for the US Senate after stepping down as the CEO of the World Wrestling Entertainment company, “she was one-half of one of the most culturally destructive, and blatantly misogynistic, business partnerships in the history of popular entertainment. Under Linda and her husband Vince McMahon’s leadership, over the past twenty years the WWE has featured some of the most brutal, violent and hateful depictions of women in all of media culture.”

Mr. Katz was “a major contributor on and off-screen to an educational documentary about professional wrestling that was released by the Massachusetts-based Media Education Foundation in 2002. Entitled ‘Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying and Battering,’ the film examined in detail the almost-unimaginable sexism, homophobia and racism of the WWE”, including “numerous clips from WWE programs, interspersed with commentary and interviews with wrestlers and fans.”

Katz observes in the article that “WWE lawyers have been hard at work bullying countless web sites, including YouTube, to remove these clips [from WWE programs], because viewers who watch them come away not only horrified by the sexist abuse, but also much more critical of the McMahons and their eagerness to cater to the culture’s lowest common denominator.”

Katz then goes on to state that “instead of showing her as a ‘role model for businesswomen,’ those clips from WWE programs expose the shamelessness of McMahon and her husband Vince’s quest for profit and power, a shamelessness that extends to their willingness to glamorize sexual and domestic violence in the name of ratings and ticket sales.”

Herein is the video entitled, “Only Entertainment”, recently removed from YouTube on the grounds that it violated copyright laws. Was that the real reason for its removal?

Cenk Uygur: According to Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics”, President Obama once called himself a “blue dog Democrat”. In fact, according to Woodward, quote, President Obama said,

“I’m a blue dog. I want fiscal restraint and order.”
-President Barack Obama

There is nothing wrong with the second half of that sentence. Everybody wants fiscal restraint and order. The question is, how do you do it?

But the fact that President Obama has called himself a blue dog is news: blue dog Democrats are conservative Democrats; they are not progressive Democrats.

So that’s what I have been telling you all along. Now apparently that’s what President Obama is telling you. So all this thing about, “oh, no, no, he is a progressive; he just has a different way of getting there.” No, by his own admission, he is a blue dog.

Now, Bob Woodward explains further:

“The book show that he doesn’t control [Senator Nancy] Pelosi [former Speaker of the House] or [Senator Harry] Reid {Senate Majority Leader]. They were resistant to cutting any entitlements.”
-Bob Woodward
Author, “The Price of Politics”
CNBC

Now I give you that quote, and Woodward was interviewed by Sam Seder, I give you that because why would Reid and Pelosi have to fight him if they wanted to protect entitlements? That’s because President Obama wants to cut entitlements. That’s why they have to fight him.

Now here is something else that he apparently already proposed in negotiations to the Republicans. Woodward says,

“[They were doing] several little things {talking about the negotiations}, like increasing the Medicare age from 65, up to, eventually, 66 or 67.”
-Bob Woodward
Author, “The Price of Politics”
CNBC

Now that was not a Republican proposal; that was President Obama’s proposal. So there it is. He has already proposed it, he will propose it again to increase the retirement age for Medicare.

So “I can’t believe the Republicans would go after Medicare”, and I can’t also wait to raise the retirement age. Do you know how much money that takes out of your pocket when they raise the retirement age? Two more years. It’s not like, oh, yeah, yeah, I get the same amount of money but two years later. No, you don’t get the money when you are 65 and 66. That’s money that you would have gotten that you don’t get. That’s a huge robbery.

Again, you pay into social security and Medicare. They can’t wait to take it away from you. In fact, there’s no need in speculating about what President Obama said. After the 2011 negotiations broke down, he said this, and I quote:

“We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.”
-President Barack Obama
Politico

That’s when he was bragging about, “hey, I was willing to negotiate with Republicans. I gave them this great offer where I cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid”. You just saw it. That is exactly what President Obama said.

So you don’t think that he is going to cut it? He is going to cut it. But I keep repeating it not because I am crazy enough, like it is the most obvious thing in the world, and I keep coming out here and saying, the sky is blue, the sky is blue. It’s because the rest of the media and the rest of the Democrats and everybody else goes along and says, the sky is totally purple, purple all the time.

But he says it himself. How can you not believe it.

All right, more. President Obama says,

“I am willing to move on entitlement reform – even if my own party is resisting, and I will bring them along.”
-President Barack Obama
Politico

How much clearer does he have to be? He wants to cut entitlements: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. He is going to cut it. And he says, I’ll drag my party, screaming and fighting, if I have to do it.

Now look, it’s before an election, and some Democrats say, this is not the time to talk about this. No, before the election is the perfect time to talk about what the candidates are going to do. And by the way, part of the reason I bring it up here is because our only hope of stopping this runaway freight train is to get President Obama on the record before the election saying definitely that he will not cut those programs.

After the election you have lost all leverage. That he is going to do what he has been dying to do.

Do you know that he told the Washington Post even before his inauguration in 2009 that “I am going to cut entitlements.” How obvious is it.

Finally, when they asked President Obama’s spokesperson … now this is the campaign trail, they are pretending that they are going to protect social security and medicare as opposed to the Republicans. Would the Republicans do worse? Yes, they probably would, right? But don’t pretend that President Obama is on your side in protecting these things. He has no intention. His main claim to fame is that he won’t butcher them as much as the Republicans would.

So when they asked Ben LaBolt about it, he said,
“President Obma has always been willing to make hard choices to confront big challenges.”
-Ben LaBolt
Obama’s spokesman
Politico

You know what that means. That means, we’re cutting them. Hard choices means hard choices from your ass, not for the rich or the powerful. We’ll pretend that it’s hard.

Do you know when it’s hard? Right before an election to say that I am going to cut your social security and your medicare. That’s hard. After an election it’s easy, especially if you are never going to run for another election again.

So let’s make it hard on him. Every member of the press should ask this incredibly important issue. If you are in a town hall meeting or at a President Obama speech, you should ask him: “Will you say that you will not cut social security and medicare under any circumstances.”

I guarantee he doesn’t say it because he is going to do it. So our only hope is to get him on the record in the middle of a heated election where he cares about his own prospects and political career that he will finally say, okay, okay, okay, I won’t cut it. That’s the only hope we have.

Transcribed by
The Barefoot Accountant

James Henry: It’s kind of like measuring the size of a black hole. We looked at unrecorded outflows from developing countries. We looked at data that the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements has on cross-border deposits. And we also looked at the assessments that the private banking industry does.

This business is dominated by about fifty global banks. Many of them got bailout money in the last five years but they collectively own just among those banks alone more than twelve trillion dollars of funny money that’s evading tax.

BBC Interviewer: Okay, as you say, evading tax. So this money could really turn things around, couldn’t it, for the global economy. Let’s just bring it back to Europe, if we may, and Britain in particular. How much is going offshore from Britain which legitimately could be used perhaps by the tax authorities?

James Henry: You know, oddly enough, it’s easier to tell you how much is going out of countries like Brazil or Mexico than it is Britain. The authorities that have access to the data don’t release it on that level. So I can get data from the IMF and the World Bank on developing countries on that but it’s very hard to tell how much is going out of Britain.

But we do know that collectively the total is at least twenty one trillion dollars which is about maybe thirteen to fourteen trillion pounds. It’s an enormous sum. It is sitting there. The good news is it’s there. Maybe we can figure out a way to tax it or bring it home.

BBC Interviewer: So let’s explore that. How do you do that? I mean is that a question of getting all the banks to agree to sign up to something to prevent this because, of course, it’s perfectly legal, isn’t it, a lot of it in terms of tax avoidance schemes and things.

James Henry: Well, you know, as Dennis Healy once said, the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is a prison wall. You know, the industry pays a lot of money to lobbyists to write tax codes so that you practically need a judge in the room to figure out whether you are obeying the law.

So I think it comes down to this. That ordinary people owe taxes. Small business, that can’t afford these schemes, this kind of chicanery, that don’t have the representation in the Halls of Parliament, are having a hard time paying the bills, and it’s costing the Treasury an enormous amount every year. I think the non-dom issue in London is well known as an example of that. It doesn’t seem to be make sense for a lot of the taxpayers.

But you end up having the tax base for essential services like schools and hospitals and police and fire, just have to be paid, and they end up being paid by people who are unable to avoid tax. They pay it through sales tax.

And we’ve seen that all over the world, this phenomenon of the richest people in the world being able to hide their money offshore and avoid income taxes while everybody else is having to pay the bills.

BBC Interviewer: Okay, so briefly what are you saying? The only recourse is to try and appeal to their better judgment, to appeal to their morality?

James Henry: No, it’s not a matter of morality. I mean, I think the time has passed for that. We need tougher laws that crackdown on what I call pirate banking. That’s the business these people have created of providing these services across all the havens in the world. It is not only banks but also lawyers and accountants who specialize in sheltering funny money.

Secondly we need to have things like automatic information exchange among tax authorities so that they can figure out who is evading.

And I think thirdly we could really think about seriously about getting developed countries together and agree on what we did with, you know, the airline ticket tax. Let’s just have a simple minimum tax on all the assets that are sitting there from all kinds of shady sources, sitting there in banks, maybe a point five percent tax would be enough to raise a hundred billion dollars a year.

And you know, it would require collective action but you know there’s no simple magical bullet that doesn’t require collective action. And right now we are in kind of a dueling situation where different countries are competing to cut taxes. It’s just not working.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant

IN 2008 THE AMERICAN PEOPLE VOTED FOR CHANGE

… WE WERE BETRAYED.
50 million Americans don’t have health insurance.  

“467,000 jobs lost….”  

“The pharmaceutic industry made a killing….”  

“…why no criminal prosecutions?” 

“…the federal government increasingly dysfunctional.”  

NOW A GROWING NUMBER OF DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS 

“34 billion dollars in bonuses to their employees….”  

HAVE REALIZED 

“A tent city has gone up for those who have run out of options.”

“No jobs, no health insurance.” 

THERE ARE NO VIABLE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES 

“The corporations, by law, are not being made….” 

$375 billion and counting for this loss…. 

IN EITHER PARTY 

“Gas prices remain at their record highs….” 

WHO WILL PUT THE INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE 

“Pharmaceutical and insurance companies spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying on healthcare legislation….”

BEFORE THE INTERESTS 

“The largest corporations are paying no taxes….” 

OF CORPORATIONS AND WALL STREET 

“…a breach of American justice….”

“Goldman Sachs’s top executives boasting about the profits they made during the housing crisis….” 

IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON. 

“Indefinite detention of American citizens without due process….”

IT’S TIME FOR REAL CHANGE 

Real Change Takes Courage

Rocky Anderson:  “We will not be silent.  We will continue to raise our voices regardless of political parties.” 

It Means Opening Our Eyes To The Reality That We Have Been Sold To The Highest Bidder

Rocky Anderson:  “Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.”

Rocky Anderson:  “Congress and the White House have been conducting themselves as if they are on retainer with Wall Street.” 

OUR VOICES have been LOCKED OUT

Our message IGNORED 

Rocky Anderson:  “The American people need a choice.  The Democratic and Republican parties:  where they brought this country is absolutely tragic. 

We Can’t WASTE another election voting for MILLION DOLLAR Candidates Who Serve The One Percent

President Obama:  “At the pace things are going right now, you are going to have to ask whether you are better off than you were four weeks ago…And you can decide whether your representative is actually representing you.” 

for how long?  Will we bail out their CEO’s? 

Rocky Anderson:  “We will do everything we can to get the corrupting influence of corporate and other concentrated wealth out of politics.” 

Rocky Anderson:  “This is the kind of skewed justice that we have…It’s bribery, pure and simple.” 

Fund their endless Wars?  and Reward their Negligence 

President Obama:   “We will not take a dime from Washington lobbyists or special interests or special interest PACs.  We are going to change how Washington works.” 

At least 15 Obama Fund-raisers Now Work In the Lobbying Arena Pouring $5 million Into his campaign – NY Times

Help Foreclosure … Forclosures … Eviction Notice … I Want to Work:  Paychecks Pay the Bill … BANK CRIME SHOULDN’T PAY … GREED KILLS … END CORPORATE PERSONHOOD! 

WAR NO MORE … VETERANS AGAINST NUCLEAR ARMS … STOP THE CANADIAN WAR DRIVE … GREED 

CORPORATE OWNED DEBT … OWNED

We’ve Seen THEIR AMERICA

Now It’s Time We Stood Up For Ours

Rocky Anderson

An End to Corruption in Government
No Special Interest Money
Essential Health Care for All
Immediate End to Wars
Strong Leader on Climate Change
Criminal Accountability and Oversight
Fair Taxation
Reversal of Citizen’s United

Rocky Anderson:  “It is up to us.  We can restore the rule of law.  We can reinvigorate our democracy.  We can recommit to Constitutional values and to our vital system of checks and balances, if only we will.” 

Our Voices

Our Time

Our Candidate

Rocky Anderson 2012

Rocky Anderson:   “I’m Rocky Anderson and I approve this message.” 

Paid for and Approved by Rocky Anderson Our President 2012

VOTEROCKY.ORG

Eliot Spitzer: When did the words, made in America, become a partisan issue. Today Senate Republicans blocked the “Bring Jobs Home Act”, a bill that sounds simple because it is. The bill would eliminate tax deductions that exist for the costs a company incurs moving jobs overseas, and instead, give a tax break for companies that return jobs to America. Yet the Republicans super minority would not even allow a vote on the bill. This prompted an incredulous response from the bill’s sponsor, Senator Debbie Stabenow.

Debbie Stabenow: What in the world is going on when we can’t come together on the simple premise that Americans should not be paying for jobs shipped overseas.

And a simple explanation from Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid.

Senator Harry Reid: It is fairly easy to see why Republicans are blocking our bill to stop outsourcing. They are obviously defending their Presidential nominee.

Joining us now to shed some light, if possible, on the Senate Republicans actions today, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent from Vermont. Senator, as always, thank you for joining us. Explain this to me. I just don’t get it. It seems like plain vanilla and apple pie. What are the Republicans objecting to?

Senator Bernie Sanders: Well, Eliot, I am the wrong guy to ask on that. I have no idea. I think what most Americans perceive, Eliot, and it goes far deeper than just this legislation, or this particular tax break, is that we off hemorrhaging decent paying manufacturing jobs in this country.

In fact, people don’t know this, in the last ten years, Eliot, we have lost sixty thousand factories: in the last ten years, millions of decent paying jobs. And anyone who goes shopping knows how difficult it is to buy a product manufactured in the United States of America.

In my view the real culprit here are disastrous trade policies, such as NAFTA, permanent normal trade relations with China, which have asked American workers to compete against people around the world who make pennies an hour.

But be that as it may, what today’s proposal was, was very, very modest. What it says is that right now, you can get a business tax deduction if you shut down a plant and you send your machinery to China or to Mexico or someplace else. That’s an expensive proposition. And you can deduct that from your taxable income.

And so what the bill did today says, you can’t do that. In fact, however, if you want to move from China back into the United States, we will allow you to deduct those expenses. We will encourage you to come home.

So I think it is pretty much of a no-brainer. We got three Republican votes. But once again they filibustered this important piece of legislation.

Eliot Spitzer: In my view the hidden hand of the US Chamber of Commerce behind the Republican opposition—we can get to the politics in a moment—but the Chamber of Commerce opposing this under the pretextual ridiculous absurd argument, we don’t want to make the tax code complicated. Ha, ha, ha.

Bernie Sanders: Look, Eliot, we should be very clear about this. Outsourcing is—you know, I think Harry Reid appropriately said about Mitt Romney—that has been the business model for major corporations for the last many many years. It’s no great secret. What they have understood is that if you shut down in America, you can do business in China, pay people pennies an hour, you bring your products back into the United States.

So my own view is the Democrats have not been as strong as they should be in really changing trade policy. But this particular tax proposal is really a no brainer. You should not give a tax break to somebody who shutting down in this country and aiding and abetting them to move abroad.

Eliot Spitzer: I agree with you and your premise about our trade policy. And this compounds it because we are subsidizing it in our tax code. This was just limiting the tax code. But in their imitable style the Republicans wouldn’t even let it to come to a vote because their master, the Chamber of Commerce, said if you vote against it, we’re going to include this in our annual tally. Am I right?

The Chamber of Commerce spends more money, even in the DNC, in advertising about people’s votes. And so this was a sort of Damocles hanging over the Republican party and they caved as they always do.

Bernie Sanders: Absolutely. The Chamber of Commerce spends a whole lot of money on campaigns, on lobbying. They have enormous influence in the Congress, especially on the Republicans.

Eliot Spitzer: Well, this is one in a series of issues where the Republicans don’t even permit a vote on the floor on the substantive matters, the Disclose Act, a few days ago, now this.

We really are living in a moment of tyranny of the minority in the Senate. We got to end this filibuster crisis.

Bernie Sanders: I think that’s absolutely right. Look, you know the Senate is supposed to be, as opposed to the House, the deliberative body, things are supposed to move a little bit more slowly. I can accept that. We all respect minority rights. You don’t want to shove things through without minority having the opportunity to make their case.

But there is something wrong when the minority can time after time after time stop majority will. On this issue I believe the overwhelming majority of the American people think it is absurd to give a tax break to help a company shut down and move abroad.

We had fifty three people in the Democratic caucus voting yes, a good majority, all the Democrats, and you had three Republicans: fifty six votes. That’s a pretty good majority. Couldn’t get it passed because the Republicans filibustered. We needed sixty votes.

Eliot Spitzer: As you think, it is important that you had the two senators from Maine and also Scott Brown saying, we’re not going to toe the line with the rabid Republican Chamber of Commerce arguments here. And I think that is important and hopefully the public will appreciate that.

Fiscal clift issues: you know, a lot of chatter these days. We are approaching the clift,
no parachute, no compromise, hostages being taken. What is going on in your view and what should we do?

Bernie Sanders: Well this is, Elliot, an enormous issue and I hope, you know, you and I and the American people just have the time we need to really discuss this hugely important issue.

Here’s the point: the United States has a sixteen trillion dollar national debt, a one point two trillion dollar deficit. Serious business, but we have to understand how we got to where we are. We have to understand that when Bush became president, we had over a two hundred billion dollar surplus and were on our way to significantly reducing the national debt.

What happened is our friend in the White House, George W. Bush, and his Republican deficit hawk friends, went into two wars, and the great deficit hawks, Elliot, you know what? They forgot to pay for the wars.

And then they give huge tax breaks to billionaires, and then Wall Street brought about this recession, which significantly lowered the revenue coming into the Treasury. You add all of that up, we have a serious deficit crisis.

And our Republican friends are saying, well be that as it may, the solution is to cut social security, which by the way had nothing to do with the deficit, Medicare, Medicaid, education, infrastructure, etcetera, and that’s how we’re going to balance the budget. But, say the Republicans, we are not going to ask the millionaires and the billionaires who are doing phenomenally well, whose effective tax rate is the lowest in decades, to pay a nickel more in taxes. That, in a condensed way, is the issue that we are debating.

Eliot Spitzer: Senator, you made the accurate persuasive factual arguments; unfortunately none of that matters in Washington anymore or certainly not to the Republican party, not to Mitt Romney. I don’t know what to say. I would die to take that clip. Send it out to every voter and say, listen to Senator Bernie Sanders. He is the one who gets it right time and time again.

Senator Sanders, as always, thank you for your time tonight.

Bernie Sanders: Thank you, Eliot.

Unofficial transcript by:
The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Cenk Uygur: Back in the days, Governor Eliot Spitzer was, of course, the Attorney General of New York, he used to be known as the Sheriff of Wall Street. Why? Because he actually went after people who committed financial fraud.

Apparently CNBC hates this. He was recently on with Maria Bartiromo and they got into a debate about how he went after the former CEO of AIG Hank Greenberg.

I want to show you the clip, and more than this, I want to talk about her general attitude towards her job. So watch the clip first.

Eliot Spitzer: Hank Greenberg’s accounting was fraudulent.

Maria Bartiromo: C’mon, you can’t say fraudulent because there is no indictment: you can’t just throw around the word fraud.

Eliot Spitzer: Here’s the federal judge’s opinion that says he was a conspirator. Here are the headlines: his company throwing him out.

Maria Bartiromo: So then why no charges: why six out of eight charges dropped then?

Eliot Spitzer: You want to know why? The answer is we charged the company, cleaned it up, got new leadership, the Southern District said to me, we are going to bring the charges. We let the Southern District. This has all been documented. We said, you want to do that, that’s fine.

Cenk Uygur: So here is what I find amazing. AIG paid one point six billion dollars because of fraud. Now why would Bartiromo think, oh, you think they are just going to pay $1.6 billion if they didn’t commit the fraud? They have an army of lawyers!

Hank Greenberg himself paid a fifteen million dollar fine for fraud. But Bartiromo’s default position is: protect the financial industry; protect the people who are in power; protected the establishment. And this guy who actually try to do something about fraud you must attack him, you must destroy him in order protect the establishment.

This is exactly what’s wrong with the establishment media and CNBC in particular. All they do is protect the guys who are doing fraud. You are supposed to represent us, your audience, not those guys. Unfortunately they totally misunderstand that.

Unofficial transcript by:
The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

‘The mob learned from Wall Street’: Eliot Spitzer on the ‘cartel-style corruption’ behind Libor scam. July 3, 2012 broadcast on Viewpoint, Eliot Spitzer interviews Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone’s financial reporter, who has written extensively on Wall Street fraud; and Dennis Kelleher, the head of the nonprofit organization, Better Markets, that promotes the public interest in U.S. and global financial markets.

Who is watching the watchdog? July 16, 2012 broadcast on Viewpoint, with Eliot Spitzer, once again, interviewing Matt Taibbi and Dennis Kelleher on the LIBOR scam.

Maria Bartiromo:  I want to ask you about these new explosive allegations surrounding your charges against Hank Greenberg when he ran AIG.  You brought eight charges against Greenberg during your time as attorney general.  Six have been dropped:  six out of the eight.  Two remain.  Six have been dropped.

Eliot Spitzer:  No.  Maria, let’s deal with facts for a minute.  We brought a charge that AIG’s accounting was fundamentally fraudulent. The company admitted that.  The Justice Department, the SEC, joined us in those charges.  The company’s board removed Hank Greenberg.

Because of the silliness that is attached to this claim, people saying that I did this out of personal invective, or somehow personal animus:  can I tell you something pretty simple?  I don’t know if this will make Hank feel better or not, I have no emotions about him one way or the other.  He is merely one in a litany of corporate executives who defrauded the market.  We prosecuted them.

The charge against a prosecutor, that a prosecutor’s motive is flawed, is the last refuge of the guilty.  I had this claim made against me by every person that we prosecuted.   Hank Greenberg was thrown out by his own company’s board.  He was called a conspirator by a federal judge.

Maria Bartiromo:  Under pressure from you.   In fact, some people might say that the collapse of AIG lays at your feet, because if Hank Greenberg had been there, he would not have allowed some of that craziness and risk being taken on.

Eliot Spitzer:  Maria, who still think that the sun revolves around the earth.  You know, let’s deal with reality here.  Hank Greenberg’s accounting was fraudulent.  His company threw him out.

Maria Bartiromo:  You can’t say fraudulent because there is no indictment.  You can’t just throw around the word fraud.

Eliot Spitzer:  Here is the federal judge’s opinion that said that he was a conspirator.  Here are the headlines:  his company throwing him out.

Maria Bartiromo:  Then why six out of the eight charges were dropped then.  What is the answer?

Eliot Spitzer:   You want to know why?  The answer is we charged the company, cleaned it up, got new leadership.  The Southern District said to me, we are going to bring the charges.  We let the Southern District.  This has all been documented.  We said, you want to do it?  That’s fine.  We let them.

Maria Bartiromo:  And Hank Greenberg is still not running, TV star, running, you know, living his life, so all of these charges that you throw away so cavalier, there is no evidence to support that.

Eliot Spitzer:   Maria, look, I hate to say this to you, deal with facts and reality, not what Hank Greenberg’s PR machine wants you to believe.  Hank Greenberg was thrown out by his own board.  His company paid $1.6 billion in a settlement, acknowledged that his accounting was fraudulent.  These are in facts.  Read the federal judicial opinion.  He was the one that instigated the conspiracy.  He is the one that began, this is a federal judge, began and instigated the conspiracy, fraudulent reinsurance contract.  Do you know who brought the case to me?

Maria Bartiromo:  But no charge.  But all those charges have been dropped.   You’re still not answering that.  I want to take you back three days ago because we talked with your predecessor in the New York Attorney General’s Office, Dennis Vacco.  He says he heard you make comments that demonstrate you had a personal vendetta against Greenberg.  Let me play what he said on this program three days ago.  I want to get your reaction.  Listen to this.  Dennis Vacco.

Dennis Vacco:  It wasn’t that he was hammering his fist on the desk or or on the table, citing allegations of wrong doing or corruption.   His tirade was much more personal in nature, and it left me with an uneasy feeling there was some kind of personal animus that was driving him at that point in time, and I was really surprised and taken aback when Mr. Spitzer, after referencing some comments that Hank Greenberg had made recently, my recollection is that Greenberg had said something to the effect that Spitzer was prosecuting him for murder for essentially jaywalking.

But what followed from that comment was rather a startling personal attack that I was really quite surprised by.

Maria Bartiromo:   That’s what I want to ask you about.  Because after the interview, we are told that you placed a call to Hank Greenberg’s lawyers, the firm Boies, Schiller.  Allegedly you told them, because your firm is in bed with someone like Hank, you will have to bear the consequences.  I have a bazooka pointed at you and everyone else at your firm who is involved.  Did you say this on July 10th?

Eliot Spitzer:  No.  Here is where we are.  David Boies is a good friend of mine.  David Boies is representing Hank Greenberg.   In the past they have made representations in their briefs that they immediately had to withdraw; you can call them and ask them about that.  They had made unsubstantiated counter-factual statements in their briefs, so they needed to send a letter to the court saying, no, we were wrong, that is not where that statement was made.   Ask them about the footnote where in the past they tried to challenge my motive for bringing the case as it is wrong.  They are hired guns.  They are paid well to say what they’re saying, and they have been wrong repeatedly.  Maria, let’s come back to facts.

Maria Bartiromo:  So are you saying you did not say it or did you say it?  Did you say, I have a bazooka at your head?

Eliot Spitzer:  No, I had a nice conversation with Nick Gravante, in which I said, can you send me the statement that David has made.   You guys have made statements in the past that have needed to be withdrawn.   Please send me the statement so that I can see what it says.

Maria, let’s come back to facts here for a minute.  Hank Greenberg was removed by his own board.

Maria Bartiromo:  From pressure from you.

Eliot Spitzer:  No, no pressure from me.

Maria Bartiromo:  C’mon! Ha, Ha!

Eliot Spitzer:   The Board of AIG, which had the most august membership, fired and removed Hank Greenberg because I called up the phone and said I want him gone?!

Maria Bartiromo:  You went on Sunday morning television and said he committed fraud And you have no evidence of this so many years later, still.  His people say you destroyed his reputation and caused the collapse of AIG.

Eliot Spitzer:  Unfortunately I have in front of me the transcript of what I said on Sunday morning TV.  You want the transcript?   These were created for the purpose of deceiving the market.  That’s fraud, it was a black box run by a CEO that did not tell the public the truth.

Maria Bartiromo:  You used the word fraud, that’s the point.   That’s the point, and then you color everybody else’s opinion even though to this day we don’t have any charges of that.  The charges are being dropped.

Eliot Spitzer:  Here is the federal court judgment.  Facts matter.  I know this is cable TV, but facts matter.

Maria Bartiromo:  I’m aware of facts matter.

Eliot Spitzer:  You need to understand that AIG was being lead by a CEO whose accountant was fraudulent.

Maria Bartiromo:  Hank, you know – I know he is trying he is trying to get your personal e-mails because he says you also tried to get him — bring him down.  Are you going to release those e-mails?

Eliot Spitzer:  As I said to people, well, ain’t no such thing.   Hank Greenberg at AIG committed fraud.   The record of on –

Maria Bartiromo:  You keep saying it again, fraud, but there’s no charge of fraud.

Eliot Spitzer:  Here is the 29-page federal court opinion.  I don’t know why you keep saying there’s no evidence.

Maria Bartiromo:  I say it because when you’re the judge, jury, and executor, it’s important for our viewers to understand what went on and give people the benefit of the doubt if there is no evidence supporting that.

Eliot Spitzer:  Have you read this opinion?  I’m waiting for an answer.

Maria Bartiromo:  What was the question.

Eliot Spitzer:  Have you read the opinion?

Maria Bartiromo:  Yes i have.

Eliot Spitzer:  Does it say that he’s a conspirator.  Let’s talk facts.  I’m going to be very serious.

Maria Bartiromo:  I’m not under oath for you, and I’m not in your courtroom. you’re on my show, and thank you for joining us Eliot Spitzer.  I’m asking you a question.

Eliot Spitzer:  You said you read the opinion, because its says that Hank Greenberg’s action led to fraud.

Maria Bartiromo:  You said it, you have continued to say it, and you say it all the time, and I just want to get to the facts here.

Eliot Spitzer:  Maria, here is the problem.  The problem is that you want to repeat ad nauseam things that are coming out of the PR machine of Hank Greenberg that defie factual record.   Maria, I will ask you to give deference to a guest.   The reason the Wall Street environment is falling apart, pardon me, is there is an inability on Wall Street’s part to acknowledge what happened.  If they said those were flawed, we should not have done it, we won’t do it again, we’re done.  That’s what we did in most of the cases.

He continues to this day to dispute facts that have been proven beyond any dispute. Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett came to us and said it.   It’s all documented.  This is the history, it is clearly known.   I think if the public were to understand what was going on at AIG, they would agree that if anything, more should have been done.   The Justice Department looked at it, the SEC looked at it, we all forced that change at AIG, there is no doubt about it, no dispute about it, this is what we need in terms of smart prosecution.

Maria Bartiromo:  It’s good to have you on the program, I enjoyed this.  Very good exchange.

Eliot Spitzer:  Here is the deal, next time you come on my show.

Maria Bartiromo:  I’ll see you on current TV.

Eliot Spitzer:  We’ll see you soon, thank you.

Maria Bartiromo:  You can catch Mr. Spitzer on Current TV week nights at 8:00 PM.

[Unofficial transcript!]

I don’t know whether to laugh or to flee the country out of fear. If I knew Mitt Romney would surely be defeated in November, although I am not in love with President Obama, I would be pissing in my pants laughing hysterically at everything that comes out of the mouth of Mitt Romney. Yes, truth is stranger than fiction, but, folks, what Mitt Romney is asking us to swallow is not truth and it’s so far out that it’s not what can be classified—either by Dewey or the Library of Congress—as conventional fiction.

According to Ed Gillespie, Mitt claims that, even though he received an annual salary of at least $100,000 for his services as the chief executive of Bain Capital for a number of years after 1999, and even though he signed and filed reports to the SEC describing his position at Bain Capital as the “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president”, he had, in fact, “retroactively retired” in 1999!!!  As Jon Stewart correctly ponders in his video, did Mitt Romney have a time machine in order to travel back in time from 2002 so that he could then retire in 1999???

This is not fiction as we ordinarily know it:  isn’t it more like science fiction from The Twilight Zone? Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na.

And isn’t it kind of crazy for anyone to utter such nonsense about retroactive retirement and expect everyone to believe it?!  But what is so very scary to me about this kind of talk is that it is presumably coming from a Presidential candidate, someone representing the very best of a nation, to lead its citizens of 300 million people:  someone entrusted by those 300 million poor souls with the power to push a nuclear button and blow up the entire world?!!!!  Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na.

And let us not also forget that this is the same man who supposedly believes that some guy (i.e., Joseph Smith) born in Sharon, Vermont in 1805 was in some sense “divine” in ways to the nth degree:  divine inspiration, divine revelation, divine manifestation, divine calling, divine mission, divine origins….Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na.

And that this divine-ish guy, Joseph Smith, believed that the physical throne of God is located on the planet Kolob (never identified by astronomers yet). And this Mormon follower, Mitt Romney, might become our next President?! Anyone wanna go to Kolob?

Oh, my God….Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na.

Well…perhaps Mitt Romney has had some divine revelations, too, incomprehensible to us mere mortals, to account for his transmigration of his soul from 2002 to 1999 so that he could retire retroactively?  Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na.

Isn’t it kind of ironic that the Christian fundamentalists will vote for a guy who supposedly believes that Joseph Smith was divine-ish and that God, according to the Mormon Book of Abraham, lives on the planet Kolob?!?!

LOL! Pretty scary stuff for Presidential material, isn’t it?

I am Rocky Anderson and I’m the Justice Party’s candidate for President of the United States. I’ve also been nominated by the Independent Party in New Mexico and the Progressive Party in Oregon, and I’m seeking the nomination of the Peace and Freedom Party in California.

And as a third-party candidate for President, I often hear people express the concern that I might be a spoiler in this race. And by that they mean that I might take away votes—as if one takes away votes—from the candidate with whom I have the most in common and help elect the candidate with whom I have the least in common.

And I thought long and hard about this. And, in fact, my concern about the so-called spoiler effect kept me from getting into this race for a period of time until after thinking very intensely about this, I concluded that we cannot be driven by fear of being a spoiler because if we did, in every single race, we’d end up voting for one of the two parties in this sick, corrupt, political duopoly in this country, the Republican and the Democratic Parties, who have brought us to the point where we are.

And we have got to break out of that. Regardless of whether it means we are going to win or lose a particular election, we have to come together and build a long term sustained movement, and the way to get that started is for as many people as we can possibly get behind this race to vote for a very different way.

There are three basic responses to this so-called spoiler argument. First, we are stuck in a very corrupt game in which we simply move around the players, a Democrat here, a Republican there, every election. It doesn’t matter in this context which of the two parties wins. We still end up with a corrupt system in which the public interest is betrayed by elected officials who have sold out to the highest bidders.

The rules have been made by the two dominant parties and they thrive from those rules. If we are ever going to break out of that perverse game and create a new paradigm where concentrated wealth no longer calls the shots in Washington, we need to vote for a real alternative. We may not win this election but each of us can send the message that we will not stand for this disease plutocracy anymore.

Not to make light of any of this, but I saw cartoon recently that makes the point powerfully. That cartoons says, choosing among Republican or Democratic candidates for President is like choosing between a window seat or an aisle seat on a plane crash. Our job is to do all we can to save our nation from that plane crash.

The second argument against the so-called spoiler argument: we need to, each of us, draw our own moral and political lines in the sand and determine where that point is beyond which we will not go. I have drawn my line. I determined that I cannot support someone who will engage in ramped-up wars of aggression; who covers for Wall Street and refuses to hold accountable those responsible for the massive financial fraud leading to the economic disaster faced by millions of people in this country; who ignores the responsibility to provide leadership on the climate crisis; who ignores due process and targets US citizens for assassination; and who gives the orders for drone killings, where we know that hundreds of innocent men, women, and children have been killed in the process in nations where Congress has not authorized acts of war in violation of the War Power clause of the Constitution; and who has signed into law the power of government to round people up and indefinitely detain them without trial, without charges, without right of habeas corpus, and even without the right of legal assistance.

I know someone might be worse than that person. But in every race someone is going to be worse than the other. That doesn’t mean I will support the other. There must be a moral line that each of us can draw that leads us to say “no”, regardless of the other choices.

When I am eighty years old, I want to look back and say I did everything I could to oppose the atrocities, including not supporting even the lesser evil among the two possible candidates.

The third point: President Obama might be the lesser of two evils, but he is indeed the more effective of the two evils. If George Bush or Mitt Romney were doing the things that President Obama has done, half or perhaps more of this country would be standing up in opposition, including Democrats in Congress. Imagine if George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were sitting around in the Oval Office deciding who would be killed by drones, knowing that hundreds of innocent civilians will also be killed in the process, Democrats would be out there demonstrating. In Congress they would be holding hearings and blasting the Republicans for their war crimes and human rights abuses.

However since President Obama has a “D” on his jersey, his teammates, other Democrats, simply remain complacent and fail to voice any opposition, becoming complicit in our nation’s war mongering and march towards totalitarianism. The absence of opposition by both major political parties in the face of the many abuses by the Obama administration is perhaps the most frightening facet of our nation’s present circumstances.

Please join with us in saying, “no more”. Make your vote count along with those of many others to signal your insistence that we eliminate the corrupting influence of money in government and that we restore the rule of law, the system of checks and balances, and fundamental constitutional values.

I am Rocky Anderson and I approve this message. This message was paid for by Rocky Anderson Our President 2012, Inc.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant

Eliot Spitzer: I want to come back to the outsourcing issue. Mitt Romney obviously being, in my view, properly attacked for the outsourcing that Bain did, how do we actually stopped that. To some extent, are not these not laws of economics? Are these choices that we can actually force companies not to make, not to send jobs overseas?

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter: Eliot, let’s talk about trade bills for just a second because I have been against those since I got into Congress including the ones that we passed this term. But I have never seen any kind of trade agreement the United States made with another country that advantaged in any way the American manufacturers. In many cases I think they were pretty much sent overseas.

And manufacturers, you know, we have never been able to deal with a law that allows Congress to pay people to outsource. That is an annoyance beyond belief, as many things in Washington are today.

But I found a trade bill as well that will finally advantage manufacturers in America by saying that we can change the conditions of a trade bill. It wasn’t tariffs that really bothered so much as the unseen barriers: for example, with cars, the steering wheel wasn’t big enough, this light doesn’t look right, I don’t like that bumper.

We sold eight thousand cars in Japan last year. That should tell us a lot. We sell eight thousand cars in every town in America, just about, of Japanese origin. So we have been just pretty stupid about trade policies far as I’m concerned.

Eliot Spitzer: Louise, I could not agree with you more and I think you put your finger on the very issue that we need to talk about, which is that—and I hate to admit it, this is unfortunate—it has been a bipartisan error. President Clinton signed a lot of the trade bills.

Louise Slaughter: All of them. Yes.

Eliot Spitzer: That’s right. There have been two pieces, two pillars, of our economic strategy that have been fundamentally wrong: one was deregulation of Wall Street; the other was trade bills that were simply oblivious, as you point out, to our manufacturing base. Can we get the President to change on this?

Louise Slaughter: I don’t know. I hope so. I have certainly been trying because of this bill that I got. But this goes all the way back. NAFTA, of course, as we know, has done absolutely nothing for us. And what I watched towns like mine and cities around us be boarded up where people used to work. It was a stupid thing for us to do.

We were in the top manufacturing in the world, we were extraordinarily generous, and we need to be because we had a lot of things going for us, but what we did was give away our seed corn. Nobody does that but we did it.

But what we have to do is pay attention to enforce trade agreements, and that can’t be done by the person who negotiates the trade agreement, which is what we do now. It needs to be in a whole new department of the country but what we have done is make it possible for the Congress itself to stop the trade agreement until it is straightened out. And that’s what we need.

Eliot Spitzer: You are from the Rochester Buffalo portion of upstate New York, which is part of what people used to refer to as the rust belt. It used to be the industrial manufacturing core of America. You understand exactly what has happened to hollow out our economy, and I sure hope that you will continue to hammer on this.

Louise Slaughter: I sure will. I am so involved in this that I eat and sleep this Bill so that we can try once to advantage American manufacturers.

The Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur: We’re back with the aggressive progressive. As you know, on June twenty ninth the Republicans held Eric Holder, our Attorney General, in contempt. Here’s how it went down.

Diane Sawyer: The House of Representatives approved a resolution holding Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to disclose documents on that botched undercover program, the “fast and furious” operation. No sitting cabinet member has ever been held in contempt. Dozens of Democrats boycotted the vote. They walked out of the chamber.

Cenk Uygur: Well, that program was the “fast and furious” that they think he should turn over more information on.

But to me the real problem with Eric Holder is not “fast and furious.” In fact we’ve shown on this program that that is nonsense, that the ATF had no program to shuffle guns to intermediaries that then took them to Mexican cartels.

I think the real problem with Eric Holder is what I would call “the slow and the listless”. And that is his treatment of fraud in the banks. We had a gigantic amount of fraud in two thousand and eight (2008). What did he do about it? Nothing.

We have the LIBOR scandal now involving twelve different banks. What has he done so far? Nothing. In fact, did you know his former law firm, Covington and Burling, deviced a shell corporation implicated in some of the biggest mortgage and foreclosure fraud? Could that be part of the reason he has not done anything?

How many prosecutions has Eric Holder done of big bank executives?

None! Zero! “The slow and the listless.”

This is what I hold Eric Holder in contempt for. This is what is unacceptable.

And now sources that are talking to Richard Eskow at the Huffington Post say it is the Justice Department that is holding it up, and that they are frustrated, in fact, extremely frustrated, that the Justice Department will not act on the mortgage task force on fraud, and they’re not doing anything about it.

That’s what I hold him in contempt for.

Transcribed by:
The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

President Obama and Mitt Romney are talking to Americans about taxes. The President wants to raise taxes on those with taxable incomes over $250,000; Mitt Romney does not want to raise taxes on them. Mitt Romney is against raising taxes on those individuals with taxable incomes exceeding $250,000, arguing that it would have a negative impact on job creation. Barack Obama, however, argues that raising taxes on those earning $250,000 will not impact the middle class since taking care of the middle class will grow the economy.

So who is right? Republicans are always saying that taxes are too high and they are killing job creators. President Obama is saying, on the other hand, that, no, it is the middle class that creates demand and stimulates the economy, in turn creating jobs.

The highest marginal tax rate in 1945 was 94%. Now it is at 35%. Similarly, the capital gains tax rate was at 25%; now it is at 15%. So the present tax rates are not at historic highs, as Republicans would lead you to believe, but rather at historic lows.

But do lower taxes create a booming economy? Do lower taxes help businesses grow their businesses and create jobs?

The Republicans have been saying for decades—and this has been unchallenged by the media and even by most Democrats—that if taxes are lowered, it grows the economy and creates jobs.  Examining a graph of the different top marginal tax rates from 1950 to the present time in relation to average real GDP growth, one can see that when those rates were at their lowest, real GDP growth were similarly at their lowest levels.  In fact, at the current top marginal tax rate of 35%, real GDP growth has been at its lowest level in that time period.

However, when the top marginal tax rates were at their highest rates of 75% to 80%, the United States experienced its highest growth rates in terms of real GDP growth.  Although there are other factors involved in the level of GDP growth, the Republican contention that higher taxes would destroy our nation’s economy is not true when examining historical facts.

In fact, even when the tax rates were as high as 90%, the economy still boomed.  It was doing much better than when the rates were capped at 35%.  Now this graph shows the historical relation of tax rates to GDP, but how about their relation to jobs and employment.

Again one sees a similar relationship.  The United States experienced its best years of job creation when the tax rates were at 75% to 80%.  And since the tax rate has been capped at 35%, the United States had the worst job creation rates:  in fact, the country has had a negative job creation rate:  the nation has been losing jobs; and this has been the only time the United States has lost jobs.

The United States has capped the highest marginal tax rate at 35% now for eleven years and it continues to lose jobs.  Tax cuts do not create jobs.  Often times they cost jobs.

When taxes are raised on the rich, history shows that our country does not lose jobs.  Quite the contrary, the nation experienced the highest amount of growth and the greatest increase in employment when the highest marginal tax rates were at their highest levels.

Consequently, the rich are not job creators.  And taxes on the rich does not have a negative impact on economic growth nor on the creation of jobs. 

The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Cenk Uygur: The rest of the media reports the fundraising per month without noting that this is basically legalized bribery. And they make it seem like, hey, you know what? This is a contest. And we are going to see who wins this contest. And this month Mitt Romney won.

President Obama raised seventy one million dollars. That’s really, really good: the best so far of his campaign. Well, not good enough because Mitt Romney raised a hundred and six million dollars in just June, okay.

So the rest of the media declares that Mitt Romney has won. But what has he won in the month of June?

He’s won the contest for who can get bribed more efficiently and more thoroughly. I don’t think that is something to celebrate. I think that shows you how broken our system is.

So now when you look at Mitt Romney, they say, wait, you have got to be fair to us. Ninety four percent of our donors are small donors under two hundred and fifty dollars or less, right? Okay ninety four percent of your donors are that way but the rest, the six percent, are where the real money comes from.

There raised only twenty two million dollars from the small donors; they raised eighty three point eight million dollars from the large donors. So in fact over eighty percent of the money comes from the large donors, the ones who expect something in return. That’s how this works and that’s why we call it bribery.

And speaking of which, Mitt Romney was in the Hamptons over the weekend. He went to three different fundraisers, including one at David Koch’s house, one at Ron Perlman’s house. And they were on average fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) per plate. The Koch one was more expensive: you got suckered if you went to that one and paid seventy five thousand dollars ($75,000). You would have had the same access as the other ones which were cheaper. And he raised is about three million dollars in one day.

Now as all these people were pouring in, in their Ferraris, literally, Range Rovers, golden Mercedes—as was described in one of the articles—at these fundraisers, they also sometimes talk to the press and told us what they think of all the, you know, the money going into the system, they’re in favor of it, etc.

There were also protesters, too. So first let’s show you the protesters.

[Beginning of video] “…Protesters in the process….Romney, his secret service detail, could be seen criss-crossing the Hamptons in their fleet of suburbans, donors lined up to gain access to these closed events. They were met by protesters at several of these events. Many of whom had been bused in from New York City. Some said they were part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.” [End of video]

All right, I love the fake dog on the roof to make fun of them. But honestly they couldn’t get anywhere near the events. A couple of people were arrested trying to get onto the beach where the yachts had docked to go to some of these events. I am not kidding. Okay.

So now here’s one of the anonymous donors talking to the L.A. Times, she said:

“I don’t think the common person is getting it—my college kid, the babysitters, the nails ladies—everybody who’s got the right to vote. They don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income, one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

Look at that disdain dripping from her mouth: “Oh, you lower class people. You obviously don’t know the same things we know. And if you knew it, you would understand why we have to bribe Mitt Rodney for our advantage. Oops, did I say our advantage? I meant your advantage. Come on nails ladies, figure it out already. I know you have a low education but you have to understand us rich people in the Hamptons have to rule this country.”

They should be sickening to all of us. One of the ladies bragged to one of the reporters, “hey do you know how generous we are?” And she said, “look, my husband, who by the way had supported Obama the last time around and he said, “oh, he bit the hand that fed him”; in other words, “How dare you not be as good to the rich as Mitt Romney. We paid for something and we wanted a return on that investment. And so they flip over to Mitt Romney and she goes to tell a reporter, “oh, tell him who’s staying on our yacht.” And I thought, what, are they going to say that they got, you know, big brother big sister program there, helping people on their yacht. No, she was bragging that there was an incredibly rich Hollywood executive from Miramax who couldn’t get a hotel in the Hamptons as they were all trying to bribe Mitt Romney, and they let him stay on the yacht with them.

But that’s not being generous. That’s incredibly rich people staying on a yacht and buying our democracy. Oh, come on, man, this is grotesque, and the band plays on as if there’s nothing wrong in our government. They are buying our government as we watch.

Alright, listen, this is obviously an epic problem.

Transcribed by:

The Barefoot Accountant
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

$44.4 million

“Duke Energy and Progress Energy merged. It was not good for Bill Johnson, who was the former CEO of Progress Energy because he was fired after a day, or decided to step down, as they say.

Well, don’t feel too bad for Bill Johnson because he got $44.4 million for that one day’s work.

$5.5 million

How do you like them apples?

Now CEO pay is outrageous: that’s a whole new level. In fact, when you look at CEO pay, do you know how much it is larger than that of the average worker?

Three hundred and eighty (380) times more.

CEOs make 380 times more than you

And in fact in the last thirty (3) years, did you know that the CEO’s pay has gone up one hundred and twenty-seven (127) times faster than your pay?

So when they say it is trickle down, do not worry, eventually it will get to you, no, not really. It does not get to you at all. It goes one hundred and twenty-seven (127) times more to the CEO.

CEO pay 127 times faster than workers

They have rigged the rules. They get to pick their own boards. The shareholders cannot even vote. They are the owners of the company.

And look at this: do you know how much it takes for a CEO to buy a gallon of milk? 0.01 seconds. For the guy that is making minimum wage, it takes a half of an hour of work.

The 99% needs a raise

It is broken.”

Transcribed by:
The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Cenk Uygur: If I were Obama, 9 out of 10 times the correct answer for me is attack. Now often times the President does not do that. In fact the President is convinced that if he has a second term, that the Republicans will finally be nice to him:

“I believe that if we’re successful in this election, when we are successful in this election, the fever may break.” Really? “Because it is the tradition of the Republican Party of more common sense than that.”

Cenk Uygur: No, there isn’t. What is that tradition? What are you talking about? Remember Bill Clinton, first-term they went after him. Second term? After he won, they impeached him. So what are you talking about?

But it is not just the President. David Axelrod, his top political advisor, went on C-Span and said,

“My belief is that when the President wins in November, we are going to liberate these Republicans of good will, that they are going to blink into the light of a bright new day and they are going to turn to the Grover Norquists of the world, as, frankly, Jeb Bush has recently, and say, you know what? We did it your way and that was a failure, a failure for the country and also a failure for the Republican Party, and now we are going to work together. There may be issues on which we are going to fight and disagree because that’s why we have two parties. But where we can agree, we are going to find that common ground. I think that that is the message that his reelection will send.”

Really? I argue that that is not the message that his reelection will send. That the message that the Republicans will get is fight even harder even and even dirtier. And it turns out I’m right.

Here come the Republicans with impeachment talk. Here is Senator John Kyle from Arizona talking about President Obama’s stance on immigration. Here is what he told the radio host:

“If the President insists on continuing to ignore parts of the law that he doesn’t like and simply not enforce that law, the primary remedy for that is political. And you have it two ways: one, oversight through the Congress to demonstrate what they’re doing wrong. And if it’s bad enough, and if there are shenanigans involved in it, of course, impeachment is always a possibility.”

Of course! Of course they will try to do that. Do you think it is just John Kyle? No. There is a guy named Alan Quist, who is running now in Minnesota against Representative Tim Walz, who is a Democratic in Minnesota. What is he going to say on the immigration issue, on the defense of marriage act? His ideas are also impeachment:

“So is it an impeachable offense? Yes. Whenever the Constitution is violated, it is an impeachable offense. I would not only propose it, I would argue it to the utmost of my ability and I would carry it like a banner to the American public.”

Carry impeachment like a banner. But they are not alone. The 25th district In Texas, there is a Republican primary with a clown named Wes Riddle in it. He says the very first day, if Obama gets reelected and he’s in office, he will go for impeachment. Facts be damned. Who cares what the facts are? In fact, he said, I’m worried that he gave away seven islands of ours near Siberia. Yeah, there is such a treaty. Do you know who signed it? George H. W. Bush. Who cares what the facts are. We are going to impeach, we are going to impeach.

Look, President Obama, you can’t keep reaching out to these people. If I were Obama, what would I do? I would say, look at these guys. They don’t care about the facts. They are going to come after us no matter what. So, you know what? I welcome their hatred. I am going to go after them. Do you want to play? I am the President of the United States of America and I am going to show people how we are going to do this thing, I am going to fight for progressive ideas, that is where the country stands, and I am going to take the flight to you. Don’t go around looking for agreement from these radicals. They are not going to give it to you. They are only going to fight you harder.

Now when the President does do that, for example, on the issue of immigration, it actually works for him. Remember he came out with a new policy that said, if you are a young kid who came here into the country, I am going to let you stay for a two year period, and let you be able to work in this country, because you didn’t make the decision to come here, and guess what’s happened since? Tremendous support in the Latino community.

First of all, we have, as they call her, the Latino Oprah, who came out and did an ad for Obama because she was so impressed by this move: “President Obama wants everyone to have the chances I had. That’s why he is working to put health care and a good education within reach for more Americans, and supporting the Social Security and Medicare millions of seniors count on.”

Now they didn’t do that for 3 1/2 years, this policy, because they were worried what the reaction of the country was going to be: oh my God, what is the right wing going to think, what are the independents going to do. Let me show you the numbers. It turns out that 70% of all Americans approve of the policy; 90% of Latinos approve of the policy. They should have done it on day one. Hey, he did it: God bless.

So this is what happens when you stand your ground, you plant your flag, you get 70% of the country behind you. Not only that, he has got to win the swing states, right?

Look at what is happening in the swing states. Among Latino voters 63% to 27%: kicking Romney’s ass. A new poll out today showing Romney is doing even worse in Florida now. Why? Because of President Obama’s stance on immigration.

You fight them, you don’t agree with them. And then finally all the Democrats came out and said, oh my God the Bain ads against Mitt Romney, President Obama don’t run those ads. Ads like this one:

“I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message. Day one: President Romney stands up to China. But would he? The Washington Post has just revealed that Romney’s companies were pioneers in shipping US jobs overseas and investing in firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China. Romney has never stood up to China. All he has ever done is send them our jobs.”

Now that is absolutely true. So what did I say on this program over and over? Pound them again and again, and guess what? President Obama did do that much to his credit and his team. What were the results? Look at new poll: 50% to 42%, up in the 12 swing states that he needs to win. That is a big margin.

Okay it gets better. The unfavorables for Romney. Take a look at this: he was tied in May, 36% favorable, 36% unfavorable. Now he is down to 30% favorable, and 41% unfavorable.

Don’t listen to the pundits, the guys in the mainstream media: they love private equity, they love Bain Capital, they love rich people. When you ask real Americans, they say pound them. We didn’t like that he outsources our jobs. So go after him.

So far the President has done exactly that. And by the way, I saw another poll today in Ohio where he is now crushing Romney, partly based on this outsourcing. So stay on the offense. That is the winning strategy. So I hope he listens to that in the campaign, which he is, and more importantly, if he wins, I really hope he listens to that in his second term.

The Barefoot Accountant
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Cenk Uygur: Now we are in a segment called Cenk’s Hit List, where we are going to talk about some of the most interesting stories of the day as it relates to politics. The first one is about Progressives being dissatisfied with Democrats overall and President Obama.

Jonathan Martin of Politico wrote a story about this and they actually did a little video of the story as well. Let’s show you that.

[Video] “’The President is facing a backlash from the left this morning.

‘Democrats particularly on the left side of the party really pushed back hard….’

We saw Progressives shocked and angered when the President backed away from the public health care option in 2009:

‘I will not work for him again if he abandons the public option’.

And when he extended the Bush era tax cuts in 2010:

‘I am trying to figure out if I have already been triangulated or if there is a way to untriangulate this situation’.

[Video end]

Okay, now I am going to bring in Sam Seder, who is the host of the show, Majority Report, to help me with these stories. Sam, I think Politico might be onto something about Progressives being a little disgruntled. It is funny that they have just now figured it out. But what’s your take on this. Is it going to affect the election? And how disgruntled are they? Is it normal? Hey, look, no President gives you exactly what you want. Or is it something a little extraordinary?

Sam Seder: Talking specifically about progressives who are concerned about populist issues I think there’s a real concern at least among activitists that the President and the Democratic Party are too eager to sell away things that are important to the middle class. And frankly there’s a real concern—I think it’s a legitimate one—that corporate money has infected the Democratic Party far more than it is tolerable.

We got things like the Grand Bargain, the idea that maybe we are going to be cutting social security come the lame-duck session; things just like the transpacific partnership, where at least we are seeing about 130 House members now who are saying, hey we want to see this NAFTA plus essentially trade pact that the administration is negotiating in secret; issues like the bankruptcy cram down; the way that they handled the mortgage crisis; the fact that there’s been no accountability for banksters; and I’m not even getting to the civil libertarian aspects that progressives are upset about.

We are talking about a wide range of issues where the President had a unique opportunity, and the Democratic Party had a unique opportunity, to go populist in 2008. And its clear they do not want to.

You were talking about this in terms of the attacks on Bain with Romney, right? There’s actually no way that a smart politician like Bill Clinton can say, this isn’t going to help. We saw the Newt Gingrich hurt of Romney on this in South Carolina. The reason why they came out and said you should not attack Bain is because to a large extent this is their people: Bill Clinton and the financiers are pretty tight, and there is a lot of the Democratic establishment that is in tight with these people.

Cenk Uygur: So, Sam, you got to the heart of the issue there because the Politico article talks about how populism might work. This might actually be a great time for populism. It is kind of weird that the Democrats are not doing it. But I think Sam is right.

I thought it was a pretty good article overall, but I actually want to give you one funny line from it. It says, “Conspiracy theorists who believe campaign contributions drive the agenda aren’t altogether wrong.” Really?! Ha, Ha, Ha. It’s hard not to laugh at that.

Sam Seder: Well, the other half of that is, Sheldon Whitehouse I interviewed him on my show, he said to me, the other part of that is when a Corporation shows up in your Office, they may not contribute money to you to get to you to vote their way. They just show up and say, you know, we got 5 million bucks that we can dump into your district or into your state. And we will attack you if you don’t vote our way. So it cuts both way. And, yeah, of course.

Cenk Uygur: No question, and I love these people who think these giant amounts of legalized bribery might actually affect the political votes are conspiracy theorists. Ha, ha, ha.

Sam Seder: Who knew. Who knew. Ha, ha.

Cenk Uygur: What? Of course. Of course it affects their votes.

Transcribed by
The Barefoot Accountant
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Cenk Uygur: If you think I am outraged about that, wait till you get me talking about campaign finance reform. The real problem in politics is all the money that is pouring in. In fact, there is a new report out about the Super PACs. As of May 71% of the money coming in is from donors above $500,000. That is not their income; that is not their wealth. That is the amount of money that they have given.

Okay, do you know how rich you have to be to give $500,000 or more to a politician? And 71% of the money is coming from them. Do you know that it is less than 100 people that are giving two thirds of the money? Basically less than 100 people are buying the election! The rest of us are fairly irrelevant.

“Voters? That’s a good one. Let’s just buy more ads.”

Do you think that they give $500,000 out of the goodness of their heart? No, they give that money so they could buy them, so that if you are Sheldon Adelson, giving $71 million, and you might be brought up on charges on the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act, and you give a little bit of money, my guess is those charges are not coming if his guy wins. Our system has become legalized and obvious bribery.

Now the most important judicial case of this week was actually not the healthcare law, the one that everybody went nuts over. Understandably it was really, really important. But actually the most important one was about Montana.

In Montana they said, wait, this is corruption. We cannot have corporations buying our local politicians. And all those conservative justices talking about state’s rights—oh my God, Arizona has got state’s rights that target Latinos and immigrants, etc.—turn around to Montana, you have got no state’s rights. Forget state’s rights. We did not mean state’s rights. We meant corporations rule us all.

And they said in a five to four decision, where Chief Justice John Roberts was with the conservatives, with the corporations, said even on the state level, corporations can buy any damn politician they like. And they said, there is not even an appearance of corruption.

Are you kidding me? 100 guys have bought the election, and there is no appearance of corruption? On which planet. As you can tell, I am a little bit worked up about it, as I have said.

Unfortunately, in a lot of ways, we have lost our democracy. Those guys are the ones that get to determine who is going to win and who is not going to win, and it is sickening.

Transcribed and presented by:
The Barefoot Accountant
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There was a very important case in front of the Supreme Court today, and Arizona’s immigration law was struck down partially, of course. Now the part about how it’s a crime for illegal immigrants to seek work and not carry immigration papers was struck down because it has a conflict with federal legislation. But the part where they talk about papers, where they basically pullover Latinos and ask them if they are citizens or not is actually still in the bill.

Now it is an important case but what I think is a much more important case is the Montana case that involves Citizens United. But before I go there, I want to actually give you a couple of quotes from Anthony Scalia’s opinion on the Arizona immigration case. And we will tie it in altogether in a second with the Montana case. He said, “Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty.” Now this is very important because when it comes to the immigration issue, conservative Anthony Scalia is saying sovereignty, state’s rights.

He continues to say, “If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign state.” My God, this man cares about state’s rights.

Well, so when it came to the Montana issue, whether corporations can buy our politicians, Montana is very clear. It has had a law on the books for literally 100 years. In 1912 they passed this law that said, “Corporations may not make an expenditure in connection with a candidate or a political party that supports or opposes a candidate or political party.” How clear can they be? And the Montana Supreme Court said, that is the law of our land; it’s passed by the voters; we think it leads to corruption if corporations give money; so states’s rights: let’s make sure that corporations cannot buy politicians at least within the state of Montana.

Did Scalia say state’s rights? He doesn’t give a damn about state’s rights. He doesn’t give a damn about Montana and its sovereignty. He wants corporations to rule us all.

So Scalia was part of a 5 to 4 decision to say, no, Montana Supreme Court: you don’t get to set the laws in your own state. You will bow your heads and do exactly as the corporations tell you to do.

Now remember, the decision that they are basing this on is Citizens United, which Justice Kennedy explained in his 2010 decision: “Independent expenditures including those made by corporations do not give rise to corruption or their appearance of corruption.”

I love that because it is so comical. Really? So when a corporation gives $100,000 or $1 million or $10 million to a politician, and says, I like to have this law passed, that does not lead to maybe the appearance of corruption, nothing at all?! And here are the five corporatists on the Supreme Court, saying ah huh, yep, uh huh, I don’t see any corruption. Do you see any corruption, Scalia? I don’t see it. Do you see any state’s rights? I don’t need any state’s rights. Screw state’s rights. Exxon Mobil, Haliburton, what would you like? I’m just going to give it to you.

And Kennedy went on to say also in that Citizens United decision: “No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.”

Now he is saying that there could not possibly be an appearance of corruption so there is no government interest at all to making sure our politicians are not bought. Sheldon Adelson is giving $71 million to buy his politicians to do whatever he damn well pleases. If Sheldon Adelson says, you do this, do you think Mitt Romney is going to say to Sheldon Adelson, oh, I’m sorry, perhaps we should not look into the foreign corrupt practices act, or anything else that you want. No, he is going to do whatever Sheldon tells him to do.

In the Montana case, the majority said they didn’t even want to hear the case. Who cares. I don’t want to hear arguments about it. I just want to rule in favor of corporations.

Well, the dissent, four of them, including the dissenting opinion of Stephen Breyer, wrote this about the Montana case regarding corporate political spending: “Montana’s experience, like considerable experience elsewhere since the Court’s decision in Citizens United, casts grave doubts on the Court’s supposition that independent expenditures do not corrupt or appear to do so.”

Well, do you know who agrees with Justice Breyer? Well, only 86% of the country. CNN Opinion Research Corporation poll says that 86% believe that campaign contributors affect how politicians vote. To which I say, of course, of course they do. And only 12% say, no, I am sure that the politicians vote in the best interest of the country. Gee, I wonder if there is an appearance of corruption when 86% of the country think that our politicians are corrupt.

Well, it turns out so is our Supreme Court. This decision they made in the Montana case where they didn’t even hear really the arguments in the case will be definitely the most momentous decision made in this term, let alone today. I know there is a lot of talk about healthcare and about immigration, but this affects everything else. They buy our politicians with this corporate money and we lose on everything.

They don’t give a damn what we think. It’s not even a democracy any more. So my opinions on this are clear.

And what we have with this Court right now is the most right wing and most pro-corporatist Supreme Court really in the history of the United States. And I think even we went back to the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the Supreme Court even at that time was not as absolutely consistent in its support of corporatist and money interests in the United States as this Court is. And I think that is a truly frightening thing to consider in regard to the effect of money on politics in this country.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome. This past week, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, was back on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, as he had earlier done before the Senate Banking Committee. He was being questioned on how his bank had lost two billion dollars — or more — on risky trading. His reception in the House was less fawning than what he got from the senators. Although many of them also are beneficiaries of JP Morgan largesse, House members were more combative.

BARNEY FRANK: You said you have a fortress balance sheet. That assumes there’s something special about the way you are that made us have to worry less. But we can’t assume that’s going to be the case for every financial institution.

JAMIE DIMON: But I also said that we’d be solidly profitable this quarter. So relative to earnings–

BARNEY FRANK: That’s not the question. Mr. Dimon, please don’t filibuster.

SEAN DUFFY: You didn’t know about these trades. You didn’t know about these losses. How do you come forward today and say the regulators should have known that — what one of the best CEOs in the industry didn’t know and couldn’t have known?

MICHAEL CAPUANO: With the regulatory regime that we have today — we both agree that it’s not what we want, but it’s what we have. Do you really think it’s a smart idea to be cutting the legs out of one of those major regulators? Do you think that’s good for America?

JAMIE DIMON: I have enough problems. I’m going to leave that to you.

MICHAEL CAPUANO: Well, Mr. Dimon, the only reason I ask is because you have had no hesitancy whatsoever in expressing opinions on other matters. I thought you might want to take an opportunity to express one today.

BILL MOYERS: Coincidentally, just before Dimon’s House testimony, Bloomberg News published data indicating that JP Morgan Chase receives a government subsidy worth about 14 billion dollars a year in taxpayer money.

Money, said Bloomberg editors, that “helps the bank pay big salaries and bonuses, and more important, distorts markets, fueling crises such as the recent subprime-lending disaster and the sovereign-debt debacle that is now threatening to destroy the euro and sink the global economy.”

With me are two guests who can guide us through the thicket of testimony and beyond. Matt Taibbi, contributing editor at “Rolling Stone” magazine, has investigated the folly and corruption of banks and government with scathing, often profane wit and perception. His book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, described the events leading up to the financial meltdown in 2008. His newest piece for Rolling Stone is a chilling expose called “The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia.”

Yves Smith created and runs Naked Capitalism, the popular blog on finance and economics. She once worked for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, and Sumitomo Bank, and now heads a management consulting firm. You’ll want to read her book, ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.

Welcome to both of you.

YVES SMITH: Thanks so much.

MATT TAIBBI: Thank you.

BILL MOYERS: So in this particular case, what is JPMorgan’s sin? That’s the question Representative David Schweikert raised on the day of the hearing. He asked, “What sin has JPMorgan committed other than being big enough to lose billions of their own money in a quarter and still turn a $4 billion profit?” Want to take a stab at answering?

MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, sure. Their sin wasn’t the loss. The sin was in being a too-big-to-fail company where we can’t afford to have them go under. Why are we there in the first place? If this was a company that, if it went out of business, it wouldn’t affect our lives personally and wouldn’t have major ramification for the economy, we wouldn’t be holding hearings in the Senate and the Congress.

We would say, fine, they lost so much, a bunch of money. Too bad for them. But that’s not the case. As we saw in 2008, when these companies go down, we all end up paying for it. You know, we ended up financing of, what, five, six, seven trillion dollar bailout in 2008. And if a company like JPMorgan Chase goes under, there will certainly be some sort of federal action, which is why we have to know about it. We have to know what goes on when they have unexpected two, three billion dollar losses that affects all of us.

YVES SMITH: They were guilty of gaming the system. And the way that they’ve done it is this unit was using depositor money and yet taking very large bets.

And in this unit, all the other banks similarly have similar units in their treasury department, and the purpose of these portfolios is supposed to be to have liquid assets in case there’s a run on the bank.

And Bloomberg News had a story where they actually reported that all the other banks take less risk in these portfolios. And that’s before we get to the credit default– that’s before we get to the blow-up part, just in the, even the simpler part of the portfolios. They have, they keep more in treasuries. And they have less in corporate bonds. So Dimon is already taking more risk in this unit than he should have.

And this is something which is frustrating about the testimony. There’s a sort of, you know, one of the, again, stories that Dimon was promoting was, oh, well, we didn’t find out about it. And then when we found out about it, we jumped on it and now it’s all fine. And, therefore, the regulators shouldn’t have been able, you know, how could the regulators have found about it?

And, therefore, since the regulators couldn’t found out, you know, more regulation is futile. And, in fact, you could have found this information from the outside. You could have seen that prices were moving in this instrument in a really weird way.

BILL MOYERS: Was everybody looking the other way? Have we forgotten so quickly?

MATT TAIBBI: Well, the entire derivatives market is essentially a gigantic black box. It’s not like the regulators have access to all this information.

YVES SMITH: I think they’re not used to looking for the information.

MATT TAIBBI: Right.

YVES SMITH: I think it’s been acculturated that they’re used to having tea and cookies with the banks and reviewing their internal reports and not doing any type of external validation and this kind of basic external checking they could do that they’re not habituated to doing.

BILL MOYERS: A very curious thing happened when the House hearings opened. Some members of that committee felt that Dimon should be sworn in. But the chairman of the committee, a Republican from Alabama, Spencer Bachus, said, no, that wasn’t necessary. Am I making too much out of that?

MATT TAIBBI: I thought that was an incredible moment for a couple of reasons. Obviously, the reason there was a hullabaloo over that was because of what happened when Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, came and testified before the Senate a couple of years ago. There later was a controversy over whether or not he had perjured himself in those hearings.

So the question was if, you know, Jamie Dimon is going to be sworn in, whether he would have to tell the truth, would be obligated, or whether it would just be a friendly conversation. But what was amazing about that, was that it Spencer Bachus who came to Jamie Dimon’s defense. Spencer Bachus is the congressman for the Birmingham, Alabama, region which has been decimated by the Jefferson County swap disaster, which was caused by Chase, which was fined $700 million by the SEC.

So here’s a guy who represents the county that has been most affected by Chase’s bad behavior, and he comes to Chase’s defense in the hearing, which I thought was– it set the tone for the whole thing.

YVES SMITH: Matt mentioned the toxic swaps. Jefferson County isn’t the only example.

There have been a whole series of, you know, since Jefferson County and other municipalities blew up by deals they did before the crisis, there have been a series of swaps done after the crisis with transit authorities, where they are losing a tremendous amount of money. You can look at the way JPMorgan has serviced mortgage loans.

You know, they had to get up and admit that they had been basically breaking the law, and there were criminal penalties associated with this law, by foreclosing on servicemen in Iraq and not giving them rate breaks that they were entitled to. And there are some egregious cases.

MATT TAIBBI: There’s $228 million fine that they paid last year for municipal bond bid rigging. There was another $153 million fine that they paid for failure to, for fraud in CDO trades. I mean, there are case after case after case that involve these criminal charges. And what I thought was amazing about these hearings is that nobody brought any of those things up.

BILL MOYERS: Both of you have mentioned the Jefferson County story. Give me a quick summary of what JPMorgan did in Jefferson County, Alabama.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, Jefferson County had to build a new sewer system. And they had to borrow a bunch of money to do that. And it was originally a $300 million project. But they got into a series of swap deals with JPMorgan Chase to basically push their financing into the future. But the deals were heavily mispriced in Chase’s favor. And Chase actually bribed another bank to stay away from Chase because they wanted that business. They wanted to give the–

BILL MOYERS: Bribed them?

MATT TAIBBI: They bribed them.

BILL MOYERS: That’s against the law, isn’t it?

MATT TAIBBI: Yes, yes.

YVES SMITH: Yeah.

MATT TAIBBI: And they were caught for it. A couple of their executives were caught for it, and they were heavily fined by the SEC for doing it. And this resulted in this disaster where Jefferson County’s going to be bankrupt for a generation. It ended up costing them $3 billion out of what was originally, what, $300 million?

YVES SMITH: Million dollar, yeah, yeah, yeah. What got to be $2.9 billion deal in the end. And on top of that, my mother happens to live in Jefferson County.

BILL MOYERS: Oh, I didn’t know that.

YVES SMITH: You have the average person in– basically you cannot have access to the sewage system and not pay more than– and not pay less than 50 bucks a month. So there are people in the poor areas who are deciding what they’re going to have: electricity, water, or sewer. I mean, you can’t– they can’t afford all three.

BILL MOYERS: Why is that JPMorgan’s fault that they have to make that choice?

MATT TAIBBI: They basically got them into these onerous toxic swap deals that were poorly understood by the local politicians. And they bribed the local politicians to accept the swap deals. They did it through middleman companies that bribed the–

YVES SMITH: The consultant on the deal is in jail. The former mayor was involved in other improprieties, too. But the former mayor’s in prison. You know, this is–

MATT TAIBBI: For signing off on these deals.

BILL MOYERS: Is there a question you would have asked Dimon if you had been on either of those committees that was not asked?

MATT TAIBBI: The question I wanted to ask is, was, really more about the criminality. I mean, none of the members in either the House or the Senate really got into the issue of all the different offenses that these banks have committed in the last few years. You know, or, an ordinary person, if he commits welfare fraud, never gets a food stamp again in his life.

So given that these banks have systematically and repeatedly committed fraud, repeatedly been caught, you know, in situations like Jefferson County, municipal bid rigging, why should we still give them billions and billions of dollars in emergency lending from the Fed, bailouts, all of this aid from the government? How come there’s no consequences for them and there are consequences for ordinary people?

YVES SMITH: I would have asked questions more having to do with what’s the justification for complex banking at all? That why do we need, why shouldn’t banks be run on the utility basis? Why should we have people like Dimon and his, the members of the CIO unit, most of which he’s fired, what the justification for literally that hundreds of millions of bonuses were paid collectively to those people.

And now he says they didn’t know what they were doing. There’s no justification for this, the sort of level of compensation that we generally have on Wall Street. And I would like to see that myth starting to be punctured in more public places.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean when you say banks should be more like a utility?

YVES SMITH: Banks, more than any other business, more than military contractors, live off the government. They depend on government backstopping. They exist only by way of government issued licenses, which if you had open entry you’d see much lower fees. And they get some confidence from the public from the fact that they are regulated. Oh, and the most important thing is they have access to–

MATT TAIBBI: The Federal Reserve.

YVES SMITH: –the Federal Reserve.

MATT TAIBBI: They’re getting huge amounts of free money.

YVES SMITH: Well, not just the free money. The Federal Reserve basically guarantees the payment system. You know, that’s the really critical architecture that banks control is that, you know, we write checks to each other. We have credit cards. They clear through banks.

But the fact that banks can exchange money with each other confidently is because the Fed stands behind that. So there’s a much– there’s another layer of Fed backstopping beyond what we think of the way they step in in a crisis or the way they’re now intervening to help the banks. So the fact that these institution really depend in a very fundamental way on government support means they don’t have any right to the upside.

I mean, they should really be paid like public servants. I mean, I’m not kidding. I mean, and if they had been, if the pay had been ratcheted down after the crisis, I would have had a lot more sympathy for them, even if they just behaved for a couple of years. You know, they were bailed out. And then in 2009 the industry went and paid itself record bonuses, higher than 2007 instead of rebuilding their balance sheets. I mean, this was just a slap in the face for the public.

BILL MOYERS: And there’s no shame.

YVES SMITH: No.

BILL MOYERS: You’re describing a corrupt financial and political system. And both of you in recent writings, your current article in “Rolling Stone,” which is devastating on the scam that the “Wall Street learned from the Mafia,” and a recent column you wrote about the mafia state, you’re both using that metaphor to apply to our financial and political system. When I read your pieces, you’re not playing with words there. You mean it.

YVES SMITH: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: Why do you mean it?

YVES SMITH: Well, the mafia, when it gets to be big enough, first thing it has services that people feel they need if they’re in a difficult situation. So, for example, loan sharking. If you really need money, they do have the money. And people enter into these loan shark deals even though they know it’s going to be very difficult to pay 20 percent or more interest and they’ll have their legs broken if they don’t pay back.

And the banks actually behave very much in that manner when they find people who really need money. So you see this with credit cards, you know, that, or, and with mortgages. That if you hit– it’s not this if you hit any tripwire, that, you know, become in arrears, the banks basically act in this very extortionate manner and don’t cut any breaks.

MATT TAIBBI: And I think that there’s also this, they are the mafia because of their vast criminality in Wall Street now is that it’s bribery, theft, fraud, bid rigging, price fixing, gambling, loan sharking. All of these things, it’s all organized.

I mean, the story I just wrote about, which was about the systematic rigging of municipal bond auctions, which affected every community in every state in the country and all of the major banks were involved, including Chase.

They were rigging the auctions that were designed to create a fair rate of return on the investments that towns were getting on their– the money they borrowed for municipal bonds. And this is not like something that the mafia does. This is what the mafia does. The mafia has historically, it’s one of their staple businesses, is bid rigging for construction or garbage or, you know, street cleaning services, whatever it is.

They’re doing exactly the same thing. The only thing that’s different is there’s no violence involved. But what their method of control is that they’re ubiquitous. They have this incredible political power that the mafia never had.

YVES SMITH: And they also have what amounts to an oligopoly. I mean, for many of these services, you have a great deal of difficulty going beyond the five biggest banks, you know? This is– it’s the consequence of too big to fail is that when, you know, some of the smaller players, again, you know, like– JPMorgan buying Bear Stearns.

In the crisis, when the smaller players got sick, they were merged into the bigger players. So now if you want– for a lot of these services, there aren’t that many players for you to go to. You really have no choice in– other than to deal with the big banks.

BILL MOYERS: Congress is paid to be informed and to hold these guys accountable. Why don’t they ask the kind of questions you’re dealing with here?

MATT TAIBBI: People refuse to look at these banks and think of them as organized crime organizations.

They in their eyes, organized crime is always either the Italian mafia or the Irish mafia. This isn’t what it looks like. But that is who they are. And I think that they’re treated with a kind of deference and respect, because traditionally that’s not who they were. They were these icons of finance who helped build this country.

But that’s not who they are anymore. And I think, it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around that and treat them the way they should be treated.

YVES SMITH: Well, I think people don’t want to think that there’s something wrong with leaders. And CEOs are leaders of the business community. If you really believe that CEOs of businesses that are really fundamental to the economy are corrupt, you have to think of a very serious restructuring of the business and financial system.

And even if people kind of intellectually might be willing to contemplate that, they don’t really want to go to what the implications are. So it’s much easier for them to block out that thought.

BILL MOYERS: Both of you have been writing a great deal lately about the crisis in Europe. So explain to us simply what hand Wall Street has in what’s going on in Italy, Greece, and Spain today and why we should care.

YVES SMITH: Well, I almost want to go one step of abstraction higher because people tend to focus on the immediate ways Wall Street was involved like Goldman Sachs helped Greece cover up how serious its deficits were.

MATT TAIBBI: Which in the situation, it was very similar to Jefferson County, by the way.

YVES SMITH: Right. But the more important story is much higher, which is that the reason the big reason that all, you have basically a sovereign debt crisis, that the governments in Europe, many of them had to borrow a tremendous amount of money in the wake of the crisis. And the euro zone is not well set up to adapt to that. I could go into technical reasons why, but it’s not unlike a state.

You know, when a state has a budget problem that suddenly they have to think about, you know, cutting costs and doing all kinds of draconian measures. And while maybe a state or a city can do that, you can’t have the biggest economy in the world. I mean, Europe is the biggest economy in the world doing that and not have it basically turn into a down spiral, that you cut spending and then that leads to less income.

And your deficits get worse rather than better. So, but the reason they had that problem is, in fact, very directly the result of the financial crisis. That you had countries that weren’t running deficits, government deficits like Ireland and Spain, that were held up as poster children before the crisis of doing things right.

And that when the crisis hit, you both had a big drop in tax revenues. You had bank bailouts. And these countries had decent social safety nets so that, you know, things like, you know, unemployment insurance went up. And so the budget crisis they’re having is the direct result of the financial crisis. And yet it’s somehow being treated as if they’re separate events. Like somehow these governments were profligate and that borrowers were irresponsible –

MATT TAIBBI: Social safety net.

YVES SMITH: Safety net.

MATT TAIBBI: Exactly. Right. That’s clearly going to be the place that is going to take the brunt of the damage. I mean, I think the most direct example here in America was a lot of unions and state pension funds were primary victims of the sort of broad fraud scheme to sell fraudulent mortgage backed securities.

So they, a lot of these institutional investors were buying these bad mortgages, huge pools of mortgages from all these, the usual suspects, the big banks. And then when they decreased in value and suddenly there they don’t have, it’s harder for them to meet their obligation and suddenly the finger is pointed at them and everyone saying, “Oh, look at those pens, the state pensioners or look at those union employees, they’re they cost too much money. We have to cut their services. We have to cut pensions. We have to do all these things.”

Whereas, in fact, they were buying a fraudulent product from Wall Street and that’s why they’re in such bad shape now. And I think, but politically, the direction is always going to be let’s blame-

BILL MOYERS: The poor.

MATT TAIBBI: That person. The poor.

BILL MOYERS: The guy on the pension. The woman on the pension –

MATT TAIBBI: Right. And we’ll never point the finger in the other direction.

YVES SMITH: Well, in fact, the implications, that’s true. But the implications are actually quite grim, and they’re not being discussed honestly. We’re talking about old people dying faster. We’re talking about children being homeless and not getting education, and we’re talking about grim outcomes like that.

And they’re not even part of the discourse. I mean, you look, Greece is the extreme example. But in Greece, the hospitals are breaking down. Garbage is not being picked up. And if you look at the results of the last election, what you saw is even with the efforts to scare people into staying in the euro, you see this polarization where the Nazi Party got seven percent of the vote even after there was an incident in a TV station where there was literally an on-air fight where a Nazi Party member beat up on somebody basically I think it was on camera, you know?

So you’ve got a real social polarization with radicalization going on. And I’ve seen a number of reports out of Greece saying that it’s basically on knife edge of breakdown.

BILL MOYERS: Could it happen here?

YVES SMITH: If things, if we have another crisis and things aren’t addressed, I could see this definitely happening maybe not nationally but in significant regional pockets. I mean, you know, this is a country full of guns. And people don’t like to think about what happens when people are pushed, you know, I mean, the kind of random violence, the sort of, you know, going postal phenomena?

MATT TAIBBI: When I was in a foreclosure court last year. I spent a week in a foreclosure court in Jacksonville.

BILL MOYERS: Reporting on it.

MATT TAIBBI: Reporting on it. And the amount of raw anger that you see in these proceedings from people who have lost their homes, they have no illusions about who’s to blame for the situation. They know exactly, you know, where the problem is. And I–

BILL MOYERS: And it’s where?

MATT TAIBBI: It’s with these banks that sold them these mortgages. And I think there’s a growing awareness out there in the public, more and more people have had a personal problem on some front with Wall Street, whether it’s credit card debt or a mortgage debt or they’ve lost their jobs. And I think there’s anger and it’s starting to become more organized.

BILL MOYERS: Both of you trace this back to what you call fraudulent debt. Is that right?

MATT TAIBBI: In the case of the mortgage markets, absolutely. I think what a lot of these, this was a fraud scheme. It’s the same scam that you see here in the streets of New York when somebody’s selling a phony Prada bag or a phony Rolex watch in the street. These banks were selling phony mortgages that were, they were selling them as triple A rated instruments when, in fact, they were essentially worthless.

They were highly risky, toxic instruments. And they knew it. They were buying, they were in cahoots with companies like Countrywide and Long Beach, these sort of fly-by-night mortgage operations who went out and they gave mortgages to everybody and everybody who had a pulse. They took these mortgages. They bundled them. They waved a whole bunch of phony hocus-pocus math over them and reconfigured them into triple A rated investments.

Then they went out into the world and they sold them to every customer all over the world, pensions, unions, foreign trade unions, foreign governments. And they–

YVES SMITH: Trade councils in Australia. I mean, real know nothings.

MATT TAIBBI: Everybody. Everybody bought this stuff. It all blew up like, everybody who was in on it knew it eventually would because they were betting against the stuff as they were selling it. And, and the, and that’s why we have this, this situation that we’re in now.

YVES SMITH: Yeah, but even the most even if I’m giving Wall Street more credit than it deserves. But even if you take out the bad creation and selling of the product, you also have the fact that Wall Street basically demands an asymmetrical deal with contracts, that if you have a credit card deal or if you have a mortgage, if you make the tiniest, little violation, you know, we get to take our pound of flesh.

And yet if you’re a union member, it’s perfectly fine to break your contract. You know, our contracts count, but we can break all the other contracts in society to get our obligations honored. I mean, this is just crazy.

MATT TAIBBI: But they genuinely think that they earn their money. And I think that was one of the illuminating things not only about the Dimon hearings but also the Lloyd Blankfein, slash, Goldman Sachs hearings a couple of years ago. These guys really think that they’re, they have a unique and special genius that entitles them to earn the vast sums of money that they pay themselves, that somehow that they’re creating all this wealth for themselves.

And they really genuinely don’t think that they’re getting their money– from all of us. And to them it’s irrelevant that they’re getting all their money for free from the Fed and that they’re lending it all out to us at five percent, 10 percent, 20 percent, you know, 25 percent. They think they deserve the money. And I think that’s the scariest part.

BILL MOYERS: There’s a definition of a sociopath as being radically deprived of empathy. Do you see characteristics of sociopathic behavior on Wall Street?

MATT TAIBBI: Absolutely.

YVES SMITH: Yes.

MATT TAIBBI: I’m sorry, just what Yves was talking about with, you know, the old people who were dying earlier now, people who don’t have kids, who aren’t going to school, garbage that’s being left in the streets. That’s all because some guy was sitting up in a skyscraper in Wall Street and knowingly selling some communities, some municipality a fraudulent, toxic mortgage backed security.

I mean, he knows that that instrument is going to blow up in, you know, six months, a year. But he’s selling it to them anyway. But he doesn’t care, you know, because he can’t see it, you know? I think in the eyes of a lot of these guys if they can’t see the effect, it doesn’t really exist. And to me, that’s classic sociopathic behavior when you’re blind, you’re willingly blind to the consequences.

YVES SMITH: I mean, it’s really the growth of the trading culture. You know, in the old days, I worked on Wall Street when Wall Street really was only criminal around the margins. I mean, you really, Goldman Sachs in those days had the expression long-term greedy which meant you didn’t kill the–

BILL MOYERS: Long-term what?

YVES SMITH: Long-term greedy. That they were long-term greedy. And that meant you didn’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. You know, you wouldn’t put your customer into egregiously bad deal. If you took a little extra, you only took it when the customer was making money, too, so if they ever figured it out they wouldn’t be really upset.

That attitude has changed completely. And I attribute it significantly to the growth of derivatives. Over-the-counter derivatives where you can’t see the price on an exchange. You can’t see the history.

And they’re much more complicated. And those started growing really in the early ’90s and became, and it becomes very interwoven in the practice of finance. Because the derivatives are so complicated, you can’t price compare. The risks are often bundled in within formulas that the buyers can’t understand. And so they can load all kinds of basically what’s equivalent to hidden fees in these things by the way they structure the risks in the terms.

So they’re the perfect vehicle for stealing because you’re selling, no, you’re selling somebody something they can’t evaluate.

BILL MOYERS: When you come back, I want you to take the whole hour and explain to me what a derivative is and how it works. Okay? Is that a promise?

MATT TAIBBI: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: Alright, Yves and Matt, thank you very much for joining us.

MATT TAIBBI: Thank you.

YVES SMITH: Thank you.

BILL MOYERS: During those hearings before the House and Senate, I kept my ears open, hoping someone might ask Jamie Dimon how he feels about his bank riding out the deep recession with $25 billion worth of taxpayer money while at the same time reaping profits from the poor and hungry.

That’s right: JPMorgan Chase processes food stamp benefits for the government in 24 states and makes a neat bundle doing so. As the number of people using food stamps goes up, so do the bank’s profits. Furthermore, to make even more money off the poor, JPMorgan Chase has been known to outsource food stamp debit card calls to India, whose workers can make three and a half bucks an hour answering questions from poor people in this country.

It’s all legal, it’s how the system works. But it says something, don’t you think, about the contradictions of modern state capitalism?

Cenk Uygur: The Power Panel tonight is Megan Carpentier. She is the reporter for Raw Story. She is in New York City. And Alyona Minkovski is the host of the Alyona Show on RT, Russia Today. Alright, great to have you guys here.

First question is do the American people believe that President Obama is the lesser of two evils. Now why does that come up? An interesting new Bloomberg poll show he’s up by 13 points. I hope that’s true; I’m a little worried that it’s an outlier. But look at the trend, right? So two important graphics here.

One is, is the US headed in the right direction? The answer is overwhelmingly, no. Actually 62% say that we are on the wrong track.

But who has the better vision for the economy? Interestingly enough President Obama wins that handily: 49 to 33.

So, Alyona, let me start with you there. It seems that the country is saying we are on the wrong track but Romney would put us on an even worse. So what are we going to do? So we got to vote for Obama. Is that a fair assessment of the poll?

Alyona Minkovski: Yeah, I would say that it’s a pretty fair assessment of the poll, and I think that it is a pretty fair way to say that Obama is the lesser of two evils. And that’s really unfortunate these days, right, when you start to think about what’s actually less evil? Less evil these days is a president that chooses to execute U.S. citizens without ever giving them a day in court. Less evil is somebody who wages a very aggressive war on whistle-blowers while at the same time his administration is leaking a lot of information. It’s a scary place.

But, yes, I think that Americans actually see that President Obama wants to invest in the future: that he actually cares about investing in infrastructure, in education, and a lot of social programs, and that’s not where Mitt Romney wants to take us. But it’s still very, very highly disappointing that here’s a guy that at the same time can’t get his Justice Department to scrounge up enough evidence to try to go after the biggest white-collar criminals in history. And that’s kind of what we have to deal with.

I don’t want to have to choose between the lesser of two evils. I actually want a good leader.

Cenk Uygur: Now, Megan, is that a fair assessment or can some democrats say, no, that’s not right. President Obama actually has done a lot. We will take it. It’s not a lesser of two evils. It’s actually quite good.

Megan Carpentier: I think there is certainly a number of democrats that believe that Obama’s presidency has been really good. But I think that there are a lot of disaffected democrats, there are a lot of disaffected independent voters, who, I think, expected certain things to happen in the course of this administration and to happen fairly quickly given what was at the time a majority in both Houses of Congress.

So the ‘lesser of two evils’ is almost a way of saying that a lot of the people that were really excited after ‘Yes, we can’ and ‘hope and change’ didn’t get everything that they were looking for.

Cenk Uygur: Right, and more than civil liberties, and especially with this poll, I think, that has to do with the economy, and the problem is that President Obama has gone a little in the right-wing direction, if you ask me, and people are saying, go the other way. Don’t go towards Romney; go the other way. Right?

The Barefoot Accountant

Roberto Unger is a former professor of President Obama. He was a professor of his at Harvard Law School. And he has come out with a video now where he says, “Don’t vote for Obama”.

It’s not because Professor Unger is conservative or republican. Quite to the contrary, he is a progressive and thinks that President Obama is doing great damage to the progressive cause.

First he starts by explaining what’s wrong with both parties but specifically the republicans:

“Neither of the two major political parties offer the country what it needs. The Republican party imagines that if only government became less costly and restrictive with lower taxes and fewer regulations, economic growth would make up for inequality. If this party had its way, inequality would become even greater than it is now and threaten freedom and prosperity even more than it now does.”

So he is definitely not on the republican side. He is not trying to help them. He says they would make income inequality and everything else in the country and prosperity much worse.

Now what does he think about the democratic party? Here is where it gets interesting:

“The Democratic Party proposes no new direction. Its idea is to put a human face on the program of its adversary, to implement their program with a humanizing discount. Give the bond markets what they want. They allow the reckless so long as they are also rich. Use fiscal and monetary stimulus to make up for the absence of any consequential broadening of economic and educational opportunity. Sweeten the pill of disempowerment with a touch of tax fairness even though the effect of any such tax reform is sure to be modest. This is less a project then it is an abdication.”

See, basically he is saying they are a Trojan horse. They are going to give you a human face to it—oh, look at us helping you out—and a touch of tax fairness, but in reality they do what the rich want, and he is right about the bond markets because whenever a President comes in, and Bill Clinton has talked about this, they say, “oh, the bond markets! My God, they will drive up our deficits even more because they will increase our interest rate. We won’t be able to pay, and so you got to do whatever they want.”

And what do they want? Shining it up, it turns out they want tax cuts for the rich, the same people who a lot of times have money in the bond markets, and they decide that you should do it by gutting the middle class.

So he says it is horrible for the democrats to go along and play that same game but just try to play it 10% better.

So now, onto President Obama; here’s the Unger’s tape:

“President Obama must be defeated in the coming election. He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States. He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices. He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to healthcare in the mistaken belief that he would be spared the fight. He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice. He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money. He has reduced justice to charity. His policy is financial confidence and food stamps. He has evoked a politics of handholding; but no one changes the world without a struggle. Unless he is defeated, there cannot be a contest for the reorientation of the Democratic Party as the vehicle of a progressive alternative in the country.”

Now he says he has disguised his surrender with talks of compromise, etc. I think those are powerful words. I think that they are largely right. He says that he has basically surrendered our democracy to the rule of money. He’s almost definitely right about that. President Obama has not really gone for any systematic change along those lines, and whoever has more money wins almost every instance.

And he says, look, you cannot do this with hand-holding. If you want real change, which is what you promised, it takes a struggle to do it and you are not struggling. You give up every time there is any kind of fight. He is certainly right about that.

Now the last part of it is the interesting part. He says that we should do a real reorientation of the democratic party. If you don’t do that, if you elect President Obama again, they are not going to do some massive change to the democratic party. They are not going to become progressive. They are going to go along with the same system. Well, he is almost certainly right about that, too.

But does that mean you should vote against President Obama because, of course, the consequences and the alternative are horrible. Well, that’s what he addresses finally here:

“There will be a cost for his defeat in judicial and administrative appointments. The risk of military adventurism, however, under the rule of his opponents will be no greater than it would be under him.

Only a political reversal can allow the voice of Democratic prophecy to speak once again in American life. Its speech is always dangerous. Its silence is always fatal.”

Alright, and here is where I get into disagreement with him because, I think, the Supreme Court, of course, is massively important, he agrees to that. And how far we do down this rabbit hole of the rule of money is partly dependent upon the Supreme Court.

He says military adventurism under Obama has been horrible. Well, that’s largely true except it would be significantly worse under the republicans because it appears that every top foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney can’t wait to go to war with Iran. And that is another level of disaster for the country.

And then finally he talks about a democratic prophecy. But that is where I think he is actually most wrong because the democrats are never going to ride to the rescue. Even if President Obama loses, and Romney takes us to another economic collapse and he takes us to another middle eastern war and all the things are horrible, the lesson that the democratic party will learn is, well, then we should be more like them. That is the lesson that they always learn because that is the lesson they get paid to learn. Okay? So there is no democratic answer.

The only answer comes from the people. And is does not have to do with this election, whether Obama wins or not. It has to do with a revolution against the system, a political revolution, not one of force, against this system that has the democrats and the republicans taking money from the same people, from the richest people in the country.

So I understand 90% of where Professor Unger is coming from but in the end, this election is actually fairly irrelevant because that system marches on either way. We have to attack the heart of it.

If you think President Obama is going to come to the rescue, you are a million percent wrong. If you think the democratic party is going to come to the rescue if President Obama loses, you are still a million percent wrong.

No, we have to start it. You know, obviously we think that we can do it through a Constitutional amendment. We talk all about that at Wolf Pac. You can find out more at wolf-pac.com. But no matter how you do it, no matter through which Constitutional movement it is, it got to be through that, it is not going to be through the useless democratic party.

There are two other reasons why you should not root for President Obama to lose even though as I tell you the election overall is not the answer. Number one is that you don’t win by losing. It is a bad strategy to say, hey, you know what? If we lose and we fall off a cliff, and then maybe we will get to the right results. No, you win by winning.

Number two, if there is a people’s movement, and we get some headway, the Constitutional amendment, etc., Mitt Romney will use the Office of the Presidency to try to fight you and destroy you every step of the way. Whereas President Obama is such a politician, that if he feels like you have got enough momentum and you are about to win, instead of fighting you tooth and nail, will switch sides and go, “I was with you all along; that is what I meant by change.” You see what I am saying? So that is the small shred of hope that you have with President Obama: that he is greasy enough as a politician that at the last moment he will help you a little bit rather than trying to hurt you and pretend that he was on your side.

And you know what? That is a much better hope than you have with Mitt Romney, who is just as greasy but is so corrupt that he would never ever turn on the moneyed interests and the powerful people in this country.

The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
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Neither of the two major political parties offer the country what it needs. The Republican party imagines that if only government became less costly and restrictive with lower taxes and fewer regulations, economic growth would make up for inequality. If this party had its way, inequality would become even greater than it is now and threaten freedom and prosperity even more than it now does.

The Democratic Party proposes no new direction. Its idea is to put a human face on the program of its adversaries, to implement their program with a humanizing discount. Give the bond markets what they want. Bail out the reckless so long as they are also rich. Use fiscal and monetary stimulus to make up for the absence of any consequential broadening of economic and educational opportunity. Sweeten the pill of disempowerment with a touch of tax fairness even though the effect of any such tax reform is sure to be modest. This is less a project then it is an abdication.

America seethes with vitality. Nowhere in the world is there more energy and ingenuity defused through the whole population. Much of this talent goes wasted. The deepest cause of the financial and economic crisis that the United States has recently undergone is that the country stopped producing at competitive prices enough goods and services that the rest of the world wants. It then tries to escape the consequences of this failure by living as if the failure had not occurred. It put a fake credit democracy in place of the property owning democracy that it turned into an ever more distant ideal. The government bribed, placated, and finally abandoned the people instead of equipping them.

What then should the program be, and this finance in the service of the real economy rather than allowing it to serve itself?

Broaden the gateways of access to the vanguards of innovative knowledge base production and disseminate advanced experimental productive practices among the small and medium-sized businesses that form the heart of the American economy.

Make available to all Americans a type of education that accords priority to capability both conceptual and practical of analysis, synthesis, and recombination of ideas and of things.

And to this end reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality.

Engage society in the competitive provision of public services as the best way of enhancing their quality while using the powers of government to ensure a universal minimum of provision.

Insist on the high level of taxation required for the financing of such alternatives. What matters in the short term is the overall level of the tax take and how it is spent. Later on it can be made more progressive through a steeply progressive tax on individual consumption.

And above all, take politics out of the shadow of money.

This program fails to fit within the limits of the two major progressive traditions in American history. One tradition defends small-scale property and small business. Another tradition seeks to regulate big business so that it not damage the public interest. It is no longer enough to protect small business or to regulate big business or to attenuate economic inequalities through compensatory redistribution by taxation and transfer payments.

We need to democratize the market, to renew its institutional arrangements, so that more people can have more access to more markets in more ways so that they can stand on their own feet and make something of themselves. We cannot democratize the market economy unless we also deepen democracy.

President Obama must be defeated in the coming election. He has failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States. He has spent trillions of dollars to rescue the moneyed interests and left workers and homeowners to their own devices. He has subordinated the broadening of economic and educational opportunity to the important but secondary issue of access to healthcare in the mistaken belief that he would be spared the fight. He has disguised his surrender with an empty appeal to tax justice. He has delivered the politics of democracy to the rule of money. He has reduced justice to charity. His policy is financial confidence and food stamps. He has evoked a politics of handholding; but no one changes the world without a struggle. Unless he is defeated, there cannot be a contest for the reorientation of the Democratic Party as the vehicle of a progressive alternative in the country.

There will be a cost for his defeat in judicial and administrative appointments. The risk of military adventurism, however, under the rule of his opponents will be no greater than it would be under him.

Only a political reversal can allow the voice of Democratic prophecy to speak once again in American life. Its speech is always dangerous. Its silence is always fatal.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur: Hi, we’re back on the Young Turks and we are going to talk about income inequality here. It is interesting that there is a huge misconception that people have about inequality. In fact, they did a poll on this, and they asked, what do you think should be the right amount of percentage of wealth for the country to have for the top 20%? And the American people said that 30% of wealth should be in the top 20%.

Now that makes sense, right, and it’s logical: they are in the top 20% so they should get more than 20%, right? And I actually think that number should be higher.  I guess the country is more liberal than I am, significantly more liberal than I am.

But when you ask them, hey, what do you think is the percentage of wealth for the top 20%, then they answer 60%. But when you find out the reality, [the real percentage of our country's wealth that the top 20% of our population have], it is actually 85%!  It’s a much more unequal society than they realized, let alone what they think it should be.

A guy who has written a little bit about this and might know a thing or two about inequality is Dr. Joseph Stiglitz. He is a Nobel Prize winner, in fact, he has won really one and a half: one he shares with Al Gore in some ways as part of a team, and also of course a Nobel Prize in economics. The book is “The Price of Inequality and How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future”, and he teaches at Columbia University. Now great to have you here.

So now we are told by the Republicans and conservatives, no, inequality is awesome because if you give all the money to the rich, eventually, you know, they are so productive that they actually raise everybody’s standard of living. True or untrue?

Joseph Stiglitz: Untrue. This is the old-fashioned old idea of trickle down economics. Throw enough money at the top, everybody benefits. I wish it were true because we’ve thrown so much money at the top, yet if it were true, we’d all be great.

In fact, in recent years the middle has been doing very badly. The middle median income today is the same as it was a decade and a half ago in terms of wealth. New numbers just coming out this week from the Federal Reserve show that the wealth of the middle America is the same as it was the in beginning of the ‘90s.

Cenk Uygur: So no increase there. In fact I’ve seen the charts between 2001 and 2010, it went way down for middle-class earners. The only category it went up for unsurprising was the top 10%.

Joseph Stiglitz: And the top 1% did fantastically. They’re getting now 20% of all the income. In 2010, the year of recovery, they got 93% of the gains.

Cenk Uygur: So it appears that it’s a trick really to take money from the middle class and to give it to the very rich, and that the rest of it is just a bunch of excuses. We are going to talk more about inequality in a second but let’s talk about the politics of it for a second here before we move on.

Do you think that all of the people at those so-called think tanks who are funded by the Koch Brothers, etc., right, all the Republican politicians, some of the Democratic politicians, may actually have bought into this myth, or do you think, ah, this will be a nice cover for all of us to get paid.

Joseph Stiglitz: I think it is a sales job they’re doing. An example [was] with Paul Ryan:  when the data came out about how it would influence society, he said, we don’t care about equality of outcome. What we care about is equal opportunity.

The sad fact is that the United States is not only the country with the most inequality in outcomes, it is the country with the least equality of opportunity.  [Today in America, a] kid’s life prospect is more dependent on the education and income of his parent than in any advanced industrial country for which we have data on.

Cenk Uygur: Now that fact is never publicized in this country. And that’s why I often times get really frustrated with Democrats. I don’t think that they are progressives in reality. Because if you were a true progressive, wouldn’t you shut out from the roof tops, we killed equality of opportunity? We are supposed to be the land of opportunity. We are ranked the worst in that now among these developed countries.

So you say that there are other harms to inequality: increasing instability, reducing productivity, and undermining democracy. Why is that the case?

Joseph Stiglitz: Taking instability, it is not an accident that in the run-up to this recession, inequality reached such a high level. And in the run-up to the Great Depression, inequality reached a peak. The principle is very simple. Those at the top don’t consume all of their income. Those at the bottom do; they have no choice. So when we take money from the bottom to the top, total demand goes down.

There’s a tendency of the Fed when they see demand down to try to goose the economy. And that’s what they did in the years before the crisis. They goosed the economy through a bubble. But a bubble is not going to be sustainable; every bubble eventually breaks. And so that’s how inequality generates the kind of instability that we are going through.

One of the reasons we’re having such a weak recovery is demand is so weak. And one of the reasons demand is so weak is we have so much inequality.

Cenk Uygur: It seems like there’s a battle between enlightened self-interest [and short-term greedy] among the rich, because some rich, some millionaires, are coming out and saying, wait a minute, if there is no one buying our products, we are all going to go broke, right? And the guys who are short-term greedy, saying, no, I want all the taxes, I want all the money, etc. And if we go in this direction, one, I feel like they are going to crash the economy again and this time even worse. Am I being too pessimistic about that, or do you think that is the direction we are headed?

Joseph Stiglitz: I think that there is a significant risk, and let me put it in the following way. One of the lessons that most economists took out of the crisis was that we needed, for instance, to get our banks back to the boring business of lending and away from gambling and risk-taking. We didn’t do that. We said we have to make our banks more transparent. We didn’t do that.

In fact, in some ways the financial sector is worse because we made our big banks even bigger: too big to fail; too big to be held accountable. And the result of that is there is an incentive for them to engage in more risk-taking.

Cenk Uygur: Is it definitely going to blow up again?

Joseph Stiglitz: I don’t want to go that far but I think the risk is very high.

Cenk Uygur: Yeah I would. I think it’s inevitable. It’s just a matter of logic. If you keep taking this level of risk you will at some point crash.

Joseph Stiglitz: A chief example is what happened to JP Morgan. One company betting so much, losing overnight $2, $3, $4 billion, but we don’t know how much because it [the behavior of the banks] is so lacking in transparency.

Cenk Uygur: Exactly right. Now don’t just take my word for it. Nobel Prize winner in economics here, Professor Stiglitz, thank you so very much for joining us. We really appreciated it.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Cenk Uygur failed to follow up with the most critical question for the interview of Professor Joseph Stiglitz: so what do we have to do to reverse this inequality in income and wealth?

Speaking for Professor Stiglitz, the answer is obvious: reverse the process that has been occurring over the past thirty (30) years. Raise the highest marginal tax rates significantly on the wealthy, change the tax laws to end subsidies and tax loopholes for the wealthy, eliminate the capital gains tax rate for investment income, including that on the “carried interest” of investment CEOs and hedge fund managers, return the estate tax to previous levels and exemptions.

In addition, slash our imperialistic military budget, and instead of building infrastructure on foreign soils, invest in our infrastructure at home, creating jobs here in America.

Finally, reinstate and enforce both the Glass-Steagall Act as well as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, separating commercial from investment banking and breaking up the big banks.

This was the failure of President Obama, who ran in 2008 on a platform of “change”, “hope and change”, “change you can believe in”, “change the way Washington works”. President Obama surrounded himself with Wall Streeters instead of Progressive economists like Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich.

William Brighenti, Certified Public Accountant, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

President Barack Obama may have doomed his chances for a second term as President of the United States today because of a remark he made during a press conference at the White House today on June 8, 2012:

President Obama: The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone.

The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

Duh?! Does Marie Antoinette’s remark dismissing the starvation of millions of Parisians, “let them eat cake”, ring a bell?
 
“The private sector is doing fine”?!?! The world renowned economist, Paul Krugman, recently characterized our economic situation as a “depression”, and our President says during a White House briefing today that the private sector, the business sector, is doing fine, has created sufficient jobs for the 23 million Americans who are unemployed?!?!

Is this the Presidential gaffe that dooms President Obama’s prospects for re-election this November? Do you recall that other great Presidential gaffe back in 1976, when President Gerald R. Ford declared in response to a question from the New York Times’ Max Frankel, “There is no Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe”?

That remark cost President Ford his chances for re-election in 1976. All Republicans need to do after their convention this summer is just keep showing on television a video of President Obama saying over and over again, “The private sector is doing fine.” To make such a remark when 23 million Americans are out of work shows just out of touch President Obama is with the economic struggles of lower and middle class families and explains why his economic policies have failed over the past three and one-half years. Bolder, more aggressive, economic policies in 2009 when the President had a sufficient majority in Congress would have created a much better economy and employment situation in the United States today than the depression we now find ourselves in and from which we cannot escape.

No, Mr. President, the private sector is not doing fine. Perhaps if you had not surrounded yourself with economic advisors from Wall Street, like Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Lew Jacobs, et al, and had listened to the voices of labor, like Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, et al, the private sector would be doing much better, and real unemployment would not be around 20%.

It’s deja vu all over again:  Marie Antoinette, Gerald Ford, Neville Chamberlain….now, Barack Obama….

The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks Advisor

Barefoot Accountant: I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to interview you. I saw you on the Cenk Uygur’s show, The Young Turks, last December in 2010, where you seemed to speak what most Americans want from their leaders but are not getting from the two political parties that are in power.

I did become aware of the fact that Jon Stewart interviewed you, but I have never seen Wolf Blitzer or Chris Matthews interview you. Did Chris Matthews interview you yet, Rocky?

Rocky Anderson: I was interviewed by Chris Matthews but that was many years ago, and I think it was about the Olympics: that was when I was mayor of Salt Lake City. The same with Wolf Blitzer.

Barefoot Accountant: That’s sad because it seems to perpetuate the two party system that we have; it doesn’t allow us to have a third voice. But other than Cenk Uygur, has anyone else from the major media interviewed you since you announced your candidacy for President?

Rocky Anderson: Yes, I have been on CNN, MSNBC, RT Television; I was on with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd. I actually had gotten quite a bit of good media coverage, especially right after I announced that I was running, but it’s not very consistent and it’s certainly not anywhere close to media treatment of the Republican and Democratic candidates, which I think is really unfortunate because although they are making it look like they are saying different things, neither of these candidates are talking about a change in the real fundamentals.

Things like getting the corrupting influence of money out of our political system. And they are not likely to say that because they are benefitting tremendously from that. They have their hands out bringing in millions and millions of dollars weekly, and becoming beholden to those who are contributing to their campaigns in the meantime.

It basically is a fact that Congress and the White House are basically on retainer to represent the interests of those who have contributed to their campaigns and who fund the lobbying blitzes that take place in Washington. And all the time the public interest is being shafted.

My voice, and the voice of other third parties and independent candidates, has basically been censored by the system that has been so rigged by the two parties, even to the point where the two parties hijacked the Presidential debate away from the League of Women Voters: they formed their own Presidential Debate Commission, which makes it sound like that there is some kind of independence to it but the fact is that the Presidential Debate Commission is entirely organized and run by the dictates of the two dominant party candidates. Without the blessing of both the Republican and Democratic candidates, third-party or independent candidates are excluded – all further eroding any semblance of our democracy. Once again, the king-makers – owned and operated by corrupting corporate money – call the shots, while the public interest is further betrayed.

Barefoot Accountant: It’s unfortunate that it becomes so difficult and expensive for a third-party candidate to get the exposure and to even get on the ballot. I suspect that other third party candidates are experiencing that difficulty besides you.

I recently saw the interview of Ralph Nader’s endorsement of you, which was on April 17th. Brian Montpoli of CBS News, a political reporter, hosted Ralph Nader on his show. And Ralph gave you a glowing endorsement. I was very impressed by that. He called you very, very progressive: that you had a very, very progressive record. Of course, he mentioned your two terms as the mayor of Salt Lake City. But he also pointed out that your background includes that being a Constitutional attorney and a civil rights lawyer, which I was very pleased to hear and to learn.

And he gave examples of your progressive positions: about public financing, about the minimum wage, cutting the defense budget by at least 50%, and the environment, and so on and so forth. Can you iterate your major positions and how they contrast to those of the Democratic and Republican candidates?

Rocky Anderson: First of all, I was very appreciative of Ralph’s support of me. He never uses the word endorsement; he makes a point about that. I think the word support is better because he does not want to defend what something that I might say or do and have people say that he endorsed it.

I think that he and I see things through very similar lens. And that is, that our government should be acting on behalf of we, the people, and not be sold out to those who simply have the money to buy and pay for these politicians in Washington. So much of the failure in public policy that we talk about is due to that corrupting influence of money. You only have to follow the money to see why it is that we have so many public policy disasters, both emanating from the White House and the United States Congress.

Let’s take the biggest disaster that’s looming, and that is the failure of the United States to provide the essential international leadership on climate change. There is only one reason that we are not doing the right thing given the state of knowledge in the scientific community, near unanimity, probably 96%, 97%, of scientists in agreement about the scope of the problem with climate change; the causes, the human causes of climate change, primarily the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of forests; what can be done about it; what we are going to see in the future, the catastrophic consequences of climate disruption if we don’t take action now.

And people in the future are going to look back and say, why didn’t they, based on the knowledge that they had take responsible action to save us from these cataclysmic consequences? And I think the clear answer is the people in our political system have been bought off primarily by the fossil fuel industries, the coal, oil, and gas companies, and that’s why they haven’t acted in the interest us, the future generations, and the world’s inhabitants everywhere now and far into the future.

Same thing with health care. Bill, we’re the only country in the entire developed world that doesn’t provide essential health care for all citizens. It’s immoral. It’s politically incredible that we haven’t reached the point that every other industrialized nation has reached. They may go about it different ways, but not one of them rely upon for-profit insurance companies for the provision of basic healthcare. But we could we do in this country and it’s gotten so bad that when President Obama pledged to fix the system, he’s sold out entirely, as did Congress, to the for-profit insurance companies as well as to the pharmaceutical industry and that’s why our premiums continue to go up.

That’s why we have still the health care system that’s more than twice as expensive as the average among the industrialized world, and why even if the Obama health care plan is fully implemented, twenty three million Americans still will be without basic health care.

Follow the money. That’s why we are in the bind that we are in here in the United States today.

Barefoot Accountant: Rocky, if you were President and you had the backing of Congress, what system would you have proposed? I was very disappointed, you know, in 2008, I believed in President Obama when he said “change you can believe in”, “hope and change”, “change the way Washington works”. And I started to become very disenchanted starting in the spring of 2009, and then progressively it deteriorated. And I love your quote that I guess you uttered sometime in two thousand eleven when you left the Democratic party. And I think I beat you to that: I registered as an Independent before you did.

I expected President Obama to at least propose the public option; and he never proposed it! And I thought that was unconscionable. Ideally I would have proposed the single-payer system because I think probably that would be the most effective. But I’d like to hear what you would have proposed if you had—let’s just say you had the backing of Congress, and by the way he had, I think, fifty nine, sixty, votes in the Senate: he had the Congress in two thousand and nine. So what would you have proposed, Rocky?

Rocky Anderson: I would have proposed what the majority of the American people wanted, and that is the single-payer, Medicare-for-all system, so that you take out all of the profits that are going to the insurance companies, their marketing costs, payment of people to sit around in offices and try to figure out how to deprive us of coverage for insurance for which we paid outrageous premiums. This is what the American people want, and there is very good reason for it.

Single-payer systems have been incredibly successful in those countries where they’ve been implemented. But even multiple payer systems where they have been nonprofit insurers, like in Germany, it works out very well there as in Italy. Canada’s system, Taiwan’s system, they are single-payer systems: that’s what we need in this country because if we have those multiple payer systems I think you would see the same kind of corruption in Washington lead us to a far less efficient system.

And we have a single-payer system but it only applies to people above a certain age and that system is Medicare. We also have a socialized system in this country: it’s called the VA hospital, where not only the payer is the government but also the medical facilities belong to the government and those who work there are employed by the government. And the VA hospital has had some problems in the past but actually in terms of the quality of medical care, it’s ranked, I read recently, even above the Mayo Clinic for excellence in the services provided. So there are different ways of getting there but I think very clearly the single-payer Medicare-for-all system is where we ought to be.

Now President Obama promised a lot of things during his campaign, and I know that there a lot of people that wanted to believe. I frankly warned people that they were going to be vastly disappointed because I saw all sorts of signs even leading up to the election. President Obama promising us that he would join a filibuster when he was in the United States Senate and help block proposed legislation that would provide retroactive criminal immunity for telecommunication companies for their involvement in the illegal surveillance of American citizens communications. And then as soon as then Senator Obama won the Democratic nomination, he turned one hundred and eighty degrees and voted in favor of that legislation. And that’s after three telecommunication companies spent twelve million dollars during a three-month period of time for its lobbying blitz.

Now how many of us get to commit federal felonies and go to Congress and get Congress to say, “oh, never mind, we will grant you retroactive immunity under the law.” That’s the kind of two-tiered system we have in this country: two-tiered system of justice. We’re supposed to be a people who believe in liberty and justice for all and yet it really is a system where the system of justice is different depending on how powerful you are and how wealthy you are.

So President Obama showed his stripes even before he was elected. He voted for full funding for the illegal occupation of Iraq when he was in the United States Senate. He was in the hip pocket of the nuclear power industry when he was in the Illinois legislature. So when we started moving into that health care debate and he wouldn’t even put universal single-payer healthcare on the table, it didn’t come as much of a surprise that then he would back off on the notion of a public option.

But what really surprised even me is how timid he was, how quickly he took that option off the table. It’s almost like all the Republicans had to do was snarl a little bit and say that they were going to oppose public option and he came out, I’ll never forget his words, “Well a public option isn’t essential for health care reform.” That’s what he said. You know, at that, the insurance companies looked at it and they must have just been skipping all the way to the bank after that because now we got a system where the government purports to be able to tell everyone of us that we have to buy this perverse product from for-profit insurance companies.

Barefoot Accountant: Amazing. By the way, Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent book, “With Liberty and Justice for Some”. Perhaps you’ve read it. Is that why you chose the name for your party, Justice Party?

Rocky Anderson: No.

Barefoot Accountant: Why did you choose the name, justice, for the name of your party, the Justice Party?

Rocky Anderson: Because it connotes fairness and equity. We talk about economic justice, social justice, and environmental justice. And I think that the word justice captures perfectly well what it is that we are pursuing as the Justice Party and what I am talking about throughout this entire campaign.

There is no justice in a nation where we have the greatest economic disparity in terms of both wealth and income than at any time since the 1920s. Think about the massive increase in wealth during the past decade, more than decade, when there has been such great economic growth and yet stagnant wages for working men and women and their families. We built up a very healthy, thriving middle class after World War II. There was fairness in taxation: the wealthy were finally paying their fair share; it may have even gotten to the point where they were paying more than their fair share at least in the highest income tax brackets.

But now it’s just amazing to me that for the first time in our nation’s history that we could have been fighting two wars and charging it to our children. And at the same time, not just failing to pay as we went along and raising the revenues but actually giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. These tax cuts, if they continue, are going to cost our nation trillions of dollars. And we’re not looking out for those who come after us. We’re not really interested in reducing our debt when we turn a blind eye to the revenue side of our budget.

Sure, there are cuts that can be made. But it takes both. You know, if you run up your family credit card, you just don’t just say, “well, we’ll start spending less.” You’re going to have to go out and bring in more revenues to get it paid off and pay off the interest. But we are wasting so much money in interest payments on this outrageous accumulated debt in the neighborhood of $16 trillion right now. We pay every year as much in interest on that debt as we spend on twelve departments of the United States government. And that just screams out lost opportunities. And it also screams out that we really are mortgaging much of the future of later generations.

And at the same time with the baby boom generation now moving into retirement, fewer of us in the workforce, and not altering social security, we ought to be means testing it so that the wealthy who don’t need it aren’t going to be drawing off of it. At least it ought to be staged in over time, a means testing.

But we also have a cap on the payroll taxes for social security. So those who make over $110,000 a year are paying much less of their income as a percentage of income than what the rest of us are paying. There is no equity in that. There’s no justice in that. So that’s just one example, of course, and we could go on all day long to point out the injustices. But at the core of this, at the very root of it, is our system of government that has become so corrupted by money that nobody questions anymore on the right, the left, the middle, nobody wonders anymore why it is that Congress and the White House do or fail to do what they do because of the impact of money.

Barefoot Accountant: By the way, I agree with you 100% that the $110,100 cap on social security saves Mitt Romney 12.2% in taxes every year. And the reports are saying that in 2036 we are going to have a shortfall in social security and that we will only be meeting the obligations of 75%. That could easily be rectified by uncapping or raising the social security limit. I find it unconscionable that Warren Buffet and others are only taxed at 11%. When you and I have our own business, we are paying 15.3% in employment taxes right there plus we are paying federal income taxes, and we don’t get that capital gains tax break of 15%, which is ridiculous.

Also Congress voted down a House Bill, in fact, Chris Murphy, who is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut, also voted down that same House Bill, that would have tax “carried interest” not at capital gains rates. In other words, hedge fund managers, and investment CEOs are being taxed at 15% instead of 35%, what most Americans are being taxed at. That is egregious.

By the way, I am a little bit older than you: I was born in 1948. And I remember the highest marginal tax rate being 91%. When JFK became President, and then Lyndon Johnson, that rate came down to about, I think it was 77%. And we had a great boom. And he also introduced the investment tax credit an when the capital gains tax rate came into effect, I’m recalling this from memory as a child, but I think the capital gains tax break was half of the capital gains was not taxable and the other half was taxable at ordinary income tax rates, not 15%, but as high as 77%.

I saw a major change in tax policy and in the Democratic Party beginning around 1980. I was at Purdue University, and I was in a strategic management class, and I was the only one who saw major corporations, large conglomerates, as something to be concerned about: everyone was for it. Here were all your future MBA people that were buying into this big phenomenon, ignoring the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. I never hear that mentioned except from Ralph Nader and a few others.

In 1980 when Ronald Reagan came in, he lowered the highest marginal tax rate in the Tax Reform Act of 1986.  Then George Bush came in and raised it up, but I just saw a major change occurring in America and since nineteen eighty, as you mentioned, the greatest transfer of wealth occurred: the elite class increased their wealth by over four hundred percent while for 99% of Americans, their wealth has declined. So a lot of this has occurred because of the change in the tax policy, empirically if you look at the evidence.

Rocky Anderson: And a lot of it is because of the Democrats back then, but did you hear about Nancy Pelosi’s latest proposal—illustrating what the Democratic leadership in Congress has become—that she’s proposing now that instead of eliminating the budget-busting Bush tax cuts for those who make over two hundred fifty thousand dollars, she is suggesting that the tax cuts be eliminated only for those who make over a million dollars a year.

Barefoot Accountant: Well I think Obama even suggested that before her, too, right? Wasn’t that Obama’s proposal, too?

Rocky Anderson: No, he has been talking about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He apparently lacks entirely the capacity to go out and make his case to the American people so that they’ll push Congress to do the right thing. And so now what do we see from the Democrats? Moving up the two hundred fifty thousand dollar mark and allowing the Bush tax cuts to remain for everyone up to a million dollars. That’s unconscionable.

That’s telling our young people that we really don’t care about shouldering you with this enormous debt and the interest burden that they’re going to be shouldering. It’s saying that we’re not really serious about cutting our deficits, about getting a handle on our nation’s debt. And it’s telling working class people that there’s not a party anymore that’s really looking out for you.

Now those Bush tax cuts were to have expired. That was the promise made to the American people. Now the Republicans forced President Obama—but it’s not a force that I think he couldn’t have dealt with if he had anything in him to do it—he promised during his campaign to do it. He caved on those just like he caved on the public auction for health care. And now they’re actually talking about caving on not letting them expire except for those who make more than a million dollars a year.

People in this country, the middle class, should dismiss him completely out of town and say, you know, you are just trying to out Republican the Republicans. We are not going to put up with it anymore, they ought to tell the Democrats generally, and we all need to come together and change the system. And that’s why we formed the Justice Party, and it’s time to act.

You know, we watched people throughout the Arab world stand up against their dictators. It’s time that we, the American people, shrugged off our complacency, stood up, took a stand, and said, we’re not going to fall for this lesser of two evils nonsense anymore. This nonsense about spoiling the election. We are all going to assert ourselves, we’re going to draw the line saying we’re not going to put up with this anymore. We are going to support in different parties, support different candidates, and never again fall for this duopoly of the Republican and Democratic parties who profit so much from the corruption of our government.

Barefoot Accountant: By the way, I noticed a change in the Democratic Party up when bill Clinton was in office. You know, Alan Greenspan was hailed as the greatest Federal Reserve Chairman since the birth of the nation and he surrounded himself with Wall Streeters. A lot of changes occurred on Wall Street under Bill Clinton’s watch.

Rocky Anderson. Well, he got rid of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Alan Greenspan actually even with Glass-Steagall in place had allowed the merger of an insurance company, an investment bank, and and a commercial bank. He found a way to do that and then Bill Clinton basically said, and Congress said, well, we might as well open it up for everybody. Unbelievable that they would that they would let things get set up for this kind of economic disaster we faced. And now it’s more and more deregulation.

You know, Bill, my problem isn’t so much with the greed on Wall Street because we expect people to be greedy on Wall Street. And except for the massive fraud that took place, and every one of them that engaged in that ought to be held accountable, but they never will because Wall Street contributed so much to President Obama’s campaign and he surrounded himself with so many of these people, who would expect that they would ever prosecute anybody for their illegal conduct. Again it is this two-tiered system of justice that we have.

But when Congress and the regulators have deregulated to the point that these folks were able to engage in this reckless speculation and putting these fraudulent products on the market, these derivatives, putting these toxic mortgages together, and then selling them as if they were triple A rated securities. And you know who bought them? And it wasn’t just other banks; it was pension funds, working men and women retirement funds that were buying these products and now have suffered such a tremendous loss: on average around the country, one third of the value being lost. So all anybody needs to do is look at their 401(K) plan or their pension plan and see the losses from two thousand eight forward. We need to hold accountable all those who helped paved the way.

And then President Obama, who comes along after the fact and surrounds himself with the same people who helped pave the way toward deregulation, you just got to shake your head and say, why I do we ever put up with this? Isn’t there a point at which we’re going to say, we are drawing the line and we will never vote for a Republican or a Democrat when they have led us to this point of disaster.

And then, we have not even started talking about the imperial presidency and the destruction…I usually don’t stutter but I get so upset about this, being a lawyer, somebody who values our constitution, somebody who has always looked at our nation as being, at least aspiring to be so great and providing liberties and civil rights and human rights in a way that so few countries have ever aspired to do; and then to see the ratcheting up of the imperial presidency, Congress standing by allowing this to happen; and President Bush and now President Obama gathering to themselves so much power that was never contemplated under the Constitution even to the point of asserting the right to indefinitely detain up to somebody’s lifetime, even US citizens without charges, without trial, without legal representation, without the right of habeas corpus: it is absolutely subversive, it is anti-American. And we shouldn’t as a people ever allow that to happen.

But what happens? You get a Democrat to do it, somebody like President Obama, a President who we saw from the New York Times article today is approving, personally approving, the unmanned drone strikes that have killed so many innocent bystanders in countries where Congress has never authorized these acts of war, completely in derogation of the Constitution’s war power clause. We stand by and watch this happen in our country? Congress allows this intrusion on the powers that belong to it, including the sole perogative to declare war?

And then when somebody challenges these abuses to our Constitution, the very perpetrators of these offenses, the executive branch, goes into the courts and say, you can’t move forward with this case because to do so would mean the disclosure of important state secrets. And so the courts say, “okay, case dismissed”. So now we have no checks and balances in our system.

Bill, that is the very definition of tyranny. And we, the American people, owe it to ourselves, to our nation, to those who come along in the future, to stand up and not allow this to happen any further because up until twelve years, although we had our failings as a nation, we always aspired to those values that we’ve seen our generation seems to be okay about just letting go. Where are the lawyers?

Barefoot Accountant: By the way, there was not one Democrat challenging President Obama in a primary especially with this tyranny occurring. You know, I hope I am not guilty of committing Gowdin’s Law here, but you look in history, history repeats itself. You know, I saw Mein Kempf: my parents brought me to that movie when I was a child and we watched it, and I wondered how a whole race, German people, could allow this to happen. And now I see what’s happening in our country. And it’s almost like there is a complacency brought about via the media.

Joseph Goebbels, radio was very influential in Germany, Joseph Goebbels…Adolf Hitler was famous for saying, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes credible. And Joseph Goebbels took that statement one step further and said, the bigger the lie, the more credible it becomes.

And I look at our country now with the media and I guess I see a parallel here that the American people have become so complacent about our aggression overseas without an act of war. And even our Congress, I do not see, except for Bernie Sanders and maybe Ron Paul, but I don’t see people coming up and really challenging, you know, this sort of aggression against other countries. And we have been doing it now for twenty years, at least, if not longer.

Rocky Anderson: Yeah uh… and it’s often hard to make Nazi analogies without having them dismissed out of hand but I think the point is a really important one. Eugene Ionesco in his play, Rhinoceros, there was an allegory about the rise of fascism in Europe and people were just making all sorts of excuses why they shouldn’t get involved, why they shouldn’t stand-up and speak out against what they saw happen.

And we see the same thing in this country. People say, uh, it’s none of my business, or it’s so complicated and these people must really know what they’re doing. Well they don’t. They may know some things that are not disclosed to us because it has become such a secretive government but the fact remains we have people playing with joysticks with unmanned drones in Somalia, in Pakistan, even still flying over Iraq, even though we say we’ve taken our troops out, we still have unmanned drones there, in Yemen, and when we attack people there, we are taking them out left and right, there are also innocent people being killed. And then we wonder why are we less secure, why are those people so angry with us.

We have made Pakistan absolutely furious toward the United States. We’ve created such insecurity for the Pakistani government and created so much anger among the Pakistani people. Remember they are a nuclear power. Can you imagine al-Qaeda, or the Pakistani Taliban taking power in Pakistan because through our atrocities we’ve made the people so furious with the United States, and with any government that we might be helping out there?

As bad as our conduct has been toward others and other countries, even if we were simply to consider our own security, our own well being and the well being of those who come after us in our country, what we’re doing is so self-destructive. And we, the American people, can’t remain complacent anymore. We’ve got to stand up against this. And certainly we’ve got to stand up when we see the President claiming the power to indefinitely detain even US citizens. Is this Gulag America now for government can actually, agents of the government, has just come to your home, grab you up in the middle of the night, disappear you, put you in a military prison, your family not even know where you are, not provided any legal representation, not allowing independent forum for you to go to, to have somebody independently determine the lawfulness of your detention, and no trial and no charges?

This is unprecedented, Bill, in this country. And, again, it is not to say we have not had our problems in the past, but we’ve always aspired to much greater.

You know, after the abuses by the intelligence community during the Cold War, Congress, both Houses of Congress, had investigated committees, in the Senate it was the Church Committee. Even President Ford appointed the Rockefeller Commission to look into these abuses. And they were disclosed. We found out about the abuses by the FBI, by the CIA. There was legislation passed to try to make certain that these abuses didn’t happen in the future.

Now the message by just about everybody in Congress and certainly by our President and his administration is let’s just sweep it all under the rug. No accountability, we are just going to look forward and not backwards. No accountability for illegal surveillance of our communications, no accountability for war crimes, and if somebody challenges them in the courts, we’re going to make certain that the courts no longer provide a check on those abuses of executive power.

Again, it is absolutely subversive to our Constitution, subversive to the values that our country and its people have held since the very founding; it’s subversive to the rule of law. And without the rule of law, without one system of justice where nobody is above the law, we are living under a tyranny and it is getting worse.

I’m not an alarmist; I’m not exaggerating the situation. This is where things stand right now. And I would urge every American who values these long held values—the rule of law, our Constitution, due process, equal protection of the law, the principle that everybody is accountable under the law, and checks and balances among three the co-equal branches of government—all of us who believe in those values have got to take a stand and say, “no more”.

And the best time to do that is during an election, where we send a message that we, the American people, are not going to put up with it anymore.

Barefoot Accountant: Now, Rocky, you mentioned the woman’s suffrage movement, the civil rights, and there was a third one, Egypt, three instances where you can bring about change. There was also the Vietnam war movement. I was very active in that as well. I worked on Eugene McCarthy’s campaign in nineteen sixty eight. That was before your time.

Rocky Anderson: Oh, no, I knew Gene McCarthy well.

Barefoot Accountant: I collected the most signatures to get him on the ballot here in Connecticut so I had the honor of meeting him in New York. But what can the American people do now? I know the occupiers, I applaud them for what they are doing….

Rocky Anderson: I do, too.

Barefoot Accountant: What can the average American do now? I mean, I know we have to get you on the ballot in fifty states. I know here in Connecticut we have to get seventy five hundred signatures by August sixth to get you on the ballot. So let’s talk about what we need to do, what we can do as members of the Justice Party and as concerned citizens. What specifically would you suggest to the American people?

Rocky Anderson: Bill, there is not any one magic bullet. I think involvement in the electoral system is absolutely crucial. I totally disagree with those who say, well it’s broken and it’s so corrupt.

In addition to that we all need to work outside the electoral system as well. We need to take to the streets, we need to support the occupy movement. And that is not just a matter of taking some food over to those who are occupying; it’s getting involved, showing by numbers the American people have absolutely had it.

You know the occupy movement is supposed to be about the nintety-nine percent, it’s not just supposed to be about a few thousand people that are out there occupying. But it’s about all of us who have common interests and common concerns. And I wouldn’t keep out the one-percent either. There are plenty of people in the one percent that believe in these shared American values.

Yeah, you go back to the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the labor movement: they all were successful. They started in the streets. They were all successful because people at the grassroots kept up the fight. They had it in them to carry on a sustained battle for what was right. And we need to be able to do that in this country.

It’s not a one time deal. It’s not showing up at a demonstration, going back to sleep for six months. So doing everything we can. Showing up whenever there is any kind of public forum, demonstration, or rally, an occupy event, showing up when our elected officials show up.

You know, it is becoming more and more the trend as it is in Salt Lake City with our supposed—he calls himself a democrat but I think that’s a joke, that our Congressman, they call themselves blue-dog democrats, I call them yellow-bellied democrats— he doesn’t show up for public meetings any more. He holds town halls over the telephone, highly scripted, they’ve got the questions that are going to be asked. This is a Congressional representative and he’s been doing this now for years. Absolutely shameful.

Yet why we the people, when these folks are working for us, ever cast a vote for them again is beyond me. It shows the timidity of the American people in large part as well.

So I just say we’ve got to do everything we can. Express our points-of-view, let our elected officials know there will be a political price paid if they don’t do what we do demand of them. If our elected representatives are voting to continue the Bush tax cuts for those who are making over two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, we need to tell them they will never ever have our vote again.

Barefoot Accountant: Well, we don’t have choices given the fact that we have a republican and a democratic party where essentially they are the same on many of the foreign and economic policies—one is just a little bit more liberal on social policies. I think that’s why fifty percent of the electorate does not vote. And also people are so discouraged. As you said they feel that the system is broken beyond repair.

Rocky Anderson: I think that the electoral college also contributes to that.

Barefoot Accountant: Yeah, and I do think that we have a totalitarian corporate state, a dictatorship as you said. How can we work within the system now: all right support candidates such as yourself, take to the streets, anything else? You inspired me. When I heard you last December, you know, on Cenk’s show, you offered hope. And you were talking about this about this, about if Egypt can do it, so can we.

Rocky Anderson: Look at social media. The opportunities we have to spread the word. We will put out things and when I see a few dozen people share the messages, and all you have to do is make a couple of clicks, type in a few words maybe.

We’ve got to rise to the occasion. Just in the back of our minds we have got to keep that little voice going: do more; take every opportunity you have; write letters to the editor; show up at town meetings; let officials know that they are never going to have your support again when they act against the public interest.

This is supposed to be government of, by and for the people and instead it’s government of, by, and for the very wealthiest of corporate interest who have been buying their way in Washington DC for far too long. And that’s having a real impact, not only on we, the American people, but on people all over the world.

Barefoot Accountant: You are on the Justice party. Are you different on on certain issues from the Green party?

Rocky Anderson: You know I think the Green party has had a tough history. They’ve been around for over ten years; no major electoral successes. I respect what they’re doing. I respect their positions. I got to know Jill Stein a little bit. I think she’s a really great woman, and a very good candidate for the Green party. I admire what they’re doing. I’d like to see us all come together.

I really feel strongly that we can’t see ourselves as just simply liberals or conservatives anymore in this country. We have so many things that ought to be unifying us and we need a broad based approach. Maybe I’m naive about this but it seems to me on the most fundamental kinds of issues we can bring all sorts of people together, who say, okay we’ve got these differences; we’re not going to be so doctrinaire about it; we can hash out those differences down the road: but when it comes to getting rid of the corrupting influence money, restoring our democracy, restoring the rule of law, ending these wars, ending this pattern of wars of aggression.

Well you know, you talked about Nazi Germany before. Wars of aggression which are wars where you attack a country that doesn’t pose any imminent danger to you, it’s the very definition of our war against Iraq: it was clearly an illegal war of aggression completely illegal under the UN charter and under the Kellogg Briand Pact. But it was wars of aggression that were prosecuted for which people were convicted at Nuremberg.

The Barefoot Accountant

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Certified Public Accountant

Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

On April 17, 2012, Brian Montpoli, a CBS News political reporter, interviewed former Presidential candidate and consumer advocate champion, Ralph Nader. At 78 years of age, Ralph Nader is as intelligent and eloquent as ever, and, in my humble opinion, more ready than ever to lead our nation from its morass of problems than ever before.

Ralph Nader has recently published another book that we should all run out, buy, read, and follow:  “Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism:  Build It Together to Win”.

When asked by Brian whether it matters who wins the election next fall — Obama versus Romney — Ralph answered that essentially it only matters on certain social issues:  that Obama holds more liberal social positions than Romney; however, on our country’s militaristic and economic policies, Nader argues that the difference is minimal between the two candidates:

I think that they are pretty similar in reality toward Wall Street and corporate power, but they are different in terms of social services.  Obama is more protective of social security and medicare than Mitt Romney would be.

Brian Montpoli:  So you would prefer Barack Obama but on a lot of issues you see essentially the same candidate.

Ralph Nader:  Far too little difference.  We deserve more choices in this country.

Ralph suggests, like so many progressives — dating back to Gore Vidal’s essays on the “State of the Union” published in 1976 — that the property class, the elite, the 1%, the majority shareholders of Corporate America, control the two major parties since they are entirely dependent upon their political contributions; consequently, the only permissable difference allowed between the two parties are policies not in conflict with their financial interests.  And war is big business:  it accounts for 20% of our federal budget.  The stock values of defense contractors would fall into an abyss if a dovish government prevailed.

Ralph Nader is backing Rocky Anderson for President because Rocky had “a very, very progressive record” when Mayor of Salt Lake City and because he was a constitutional lawyer, a civil rights lawyer, a candidate of conscience for voters of conscience:

It’s good to have someone on the ballot who focuses on many redirections  that most people in this country would want and who doesn’t have marbles in his mouth.  And people need, as voters, to have more choice than the increasingly corporate indentured Democrat and Republican parties.

Nader believes that Rocky Anderson has a good message.  He wants to raise the minimum wage to $10.00/hour, putting tens of billions of dollars into the hard-pressed budgets of thirty million workers in our country.  He’s very good on cracking down on corporate crime.  He’s very meticulous and specific in adhering to the Constitution when it comes to not having wars of aggression undeclared by the Congress by the Presidency abroad.  And he’s very keen to paying attention to the cities and to advancing the kinds of public works programs to create all kinds of jobs to repair America–its schools, its public transit, its community health clinics, its underground infrastructure–good paying jobs that stay at home and are not exportable to China.

He adds that Rocky is very critical of the Citizens United case, that opens up the unlimited political contributions to candidates to corporations.  Nader asserts that Rocky is for public financing and free air time on the major networks.

Ralph Nader points out that the Occupy Wall Street movement succeeded in putting on the national agenda the inequality between the top 1% of wealth and power and the 99% and the rest of the American people.  And because of their actions and media attention, Nader observes that now people are talking about this inequality, where the head of Walmart makes $11,000 per hour plus enviable benefits and over a million workers at Walmart make only $7.25/hour, $8.00/hour, $9.00/hour, often without much benefits.  And that, in his opinion, is just simply insupportable, and that has resonated with the American people.

Nader also sees the expansion of the Occupy movement to assisting people in foreclosures, etc., and proposes to the Occupiers to endorse the $10.00/hour minimum wage that is largely supported by the American people.

Ralph Nader believes that the majority of American people support his proposals and that of his organizations; some of them are the following:

1. Minimum wage of $10.00/hour
2. Universal health insurance
3. Cracking down on corporate crime
4. Reversing a regressive war that a majority of the people are against in Afghanistan
5. Cutting the bloated military budget that Ron Paul and Barney Frank have combined to do something about in the Pentagon
6. Changing the fine print in all of those consumer contracts that strip people of their rights and access to courts
7. And many other “redirections”

Ralph fervently believes that polls of Americans on these issues support his positions, rather than those held by Democratic and Republican politicians because people want safe medicines, cars that are not defective, clean air, clean water, a fair shake in the marketplace, the prosecution and conviction and imprisonment of corporate criminals:  in essence, Nader concludes, what people want is an overall sense of fairness.

Because of the corporate advertisers and the corporatization of the media today, Nader aruges, that the media does not allow a lot of citizens groups to have an effective voice through them.

Nader sums up the essence of what he was advocating during the interview with a quote from Senator Daniel Webster:  “The great work of human beings on earth is justice.”  And, Nader notes, that’s what we should all strive for no matter how we specialize in life.

Ralph, you were the candidate that should have become President in 2000, 2004, and 2008.  Oh, what a lovely world America would be now if you had….

The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Rocky Anderson will be appearing on The Barefoot Accountant’s Internet Livestream Program on Taxes, Accounting, and U.S. Politics on Tuesday, May 29th, at 4:00 PM Eastern Time.

Rocky Anderson is the Presidential candidate for the newly formed Justice Party.  Formerly the Mayor of Salt Lake City for two consecutive terms from 2000 to 2008, Rocky recently left the Democratic Party because of his disenchantment with its ties to Corporate America.

In Rocky’s own words,

The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party.

During the interview, chat and phone lines are available to take your questions and comments.

The Barefoot Accountant’s questions will focus on the ever-increasing wealth and income disparity between the privilege and the average American.  Since the early 1970s, the ratio of CEO compensation to that of the average worker increased from 28:1 to as much as 325:1!  Conservative Democrats, like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and many Democrats in Congress are as guilty as Republicans in creating the great transfer of wealth from the average American to the elite in our country, resulting in the destruction of the middle class spawned from the New Deal of FDR.

Please do not miss this very important interview.  As Rocky argues, if Egypt can overthrow a dictatorship through a grass roots movement through political activism, so can we.  Tune in and find out how!

The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

There will be opportunities for viewers to submit questions to the guests via Skype, telephone, and chat. Videos and transcripts of the interviews will be made availabe on various websites, including youtube, the Patch, AccountingWeb, iShade, Connecticut Politics, the Barefoot Accountant, Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc.

The Barefoot Accountants livestream internet station on accounting, auditing, taxes, QuickBooks, and U.S. and Connecticut politics is available at http://www.cpa-connecticut.com/livestream.html.

A schedule of programs will be made available on the livestream station webpage. To receive an email of upcoming interviews and programs, please contact us to be placed on our mailing list.

Your comments, suggestions, and questions are always welcome.

Cenk Uygur: You might remember that between the years 2000 and 2010 we did massive tax cuts for the rich. How did that turn out for us? It turns out not so well. In fact, in that decade the poverty rate increased dramatically. It’s now at 15.1%. 46 million people live below the poverty line in America now. I thought that we were going to get trickle down. What happened? Something’s trickling, it ain’t wealth, that’s for sure, right?

And when we did recover from the gigantic recession that those tax cuts caused, where did the benefits go? Unfortunately, they didn’t go to us either. They went to the top 1%.

Do you know that in 2010 93% of the economic recovery went to the top 1%. So the rest of us got to share 7% of the economic recovery, but the rich got much, much richer.

I know two guys that are sick and tired of that. And they are Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West. They wrote the book, “The Rich and the Rest of Us: a Poverty Manifesto”. And they join us right now.

So let me start with Dr. West here. What went wrong? Why under a Democratic President, for example, did we not get a recovery that helped all of us but seemed to help mainly the top 1%?

Dr. Cornel West: My dear brother Cenk, what we have are structural tendencies within the system itself so that it is designed in such a way that the wealth goes up, wages stagnate and decline, poor people rendered invisible, and it’s true for both parties. The Democrats are better than the Republicans in terms of making gestures toward poor and working people but in terms of the actual suffering we need to look at that America from the vantage point of those who are suffering, poor people and working people.

Cenk Uygur: Tavis, I know that you two have taken a lot of heat for criticizing the Obama administration. Why take that on when you know you are going to get the heat and what got you guys so worked up that you were willing to go to that step?

Tavis Smiley: Thanks for having us on. It’s a great question. I prefer to say holding the President accountable as opposed to criticizing him. I think that our job in the media, my job and your job that you do so well every day on this network and on your program, The Young Turks, is about holding people accountable and not allowing them to push agendas that are antithetical to the rest of us when they coddle to those who happen to be wealthy in this country.

So I believe that you try to find the courage and conviction and commitment to raise your voice about the things that you care about. And that issue, for Dr. West and me, is poverty. We don’t see poverty as just a political, as just a social, or cultural or economic issue, it is all of those things, Cenk, but it is also the moral and the spiritual issue of our time.

And what we argue quickly in this text is that poverty threatens our very democracy. We argue that poverty is a matter of national security. We argue that there is no priority being given to the poor in this country. There seems to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington that the poor don’t matter. We cannot abide another race for the White House where the issue of poverty and poor people are not placed high on the American agenda.

Cenk Uygur: So what are you guys, crazy? We’ve got wars to fight. We cannot be worried about our own poor people. Seriously I love that you guys are bringing out this issue because apparently no one else in Washington gives a damn because they don’t seem to be talking about it at all.

So I hear you on that. But I think a lot of people at home are thinking, wait a minute now. We know the Republicans are not with us, and if the Democrats have not fixed it, then what hope do we have? How do we go about fixing this system?

Dr. Cornell West: Well, my dear brother, we build on the legacy of Martin King, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Dorothy Day, we have to hit the streets, we have to be willing to go to jail, we have to be willing to tell the truth, we have to be willing to bear witness.

Brother Martin used to say, the bombs dropped on Vietnam landed on ghettos, landed on poor whites in Appalachia, landed on reservations, landed on our brown brothers and sisters in Bario. There’s a connection between the drones on the one hand and the zones of poverty in the nation. We need to dot the “i” and see the intimate link between the war priority, the money in the military, but not enough money when it comes to education. Money for jails and prisons but not enough money when it comes to housing.

Cenk Uygur: So how do we get the politicians to actually listen to the voters? Because on so many issues the voters are clear. Over 80% say, will you, for the love of God, tax the rich already. They are not getting taxed enough. Mitt Romney paid a comically low tax rate, nearly 13%, 14% tax rate when he’s got a quarter of a billion dollars, but they won’t do it. So how do we get them to do it?

Tavis Smiley: Poverty can be so debilitating that people end up being rendered invisible and surrendering their agency. We do have agency, we do have voices, that need to be lifted.  The Occupy Wall Street movement reminds each and every one of us that we can make a difference. We can push politicians to pay attention.

President Obama is sounding a much more populist theme today because he is being pushed. We say all the time that great Presidents are not born, Cenk; great Presidents are made. They have to be pushed into their greatness. There is no LBJ if there is no MLK pushing him.

So we lay out in this book—not that we have a monopoly on the truth, not that we have all the great ideas—but we do lay out twelve poverty reducing, poverty eradicating, ideas that we got to talk about during this campaign.

Now here’s the bottom line, and I said this before. In the last race for the White House, Cenk, you recall that in three Presidential debates between McCain and Obama the word poor or poverty did not come up one time. Obama didn’t raise it. McCain didn’t raise it. The moderators didn’t ask about it.

Fast forward four years, one out of two Americans is either in or near poverty, half of America is either in poverty or low income, you can’t sustain a democracy that way, as I said earlier. The time is now for us to have a conversation about poverty.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama are going to have to talk about this issue. You just can’t talk about the angst of the middle class, given that the middle class is disappearing and that the new poor are the middle class.

Cenk Uygur: Your point on LBJ is so well taken. I was at his library and he said not only Martin Luther King pushed him but he was worried about Malcolm X. And so that happened, too.

We have 30 seconds left. Dr. West, I got to ask you, when President Obama does the populist speeches now on the campaign trail, do you believe him?

Dr. Cornel West: Yes and no. Yes, because there’s an element of populism that he leans toward; no, because when you look at what he does and who he chooses, from Geithner across the board, he is still so tied to oligarchs, he is still so tied to plutocrats, that only the pressure from the streets, only the pressure from going to jail, only the pressure of a reawakening trade union movement, and a focus on poverty, is really going to have the impact on Obama that Martin and the others had on LBJ.

Cenk Uygur: Alright. The book is “The Rich and the Rest of Us.” And I couldn’t agree more. Tavis Smiley and Cornel West. You guys have been great. Thank you so much.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
William Brighenti
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Welcome to The Barefoot Accountant’s livestream internet broadcasting station.  This program is dedicated to an open and free discussion of tax, accounting, QuickBooks, auditing, bookkeeping, and local as well as national politics, especially as they impact the livelihoods of small businesses and the finances of families and individuals.

We welcome all questions and encourage your involvement and participation.  There is a chat box available to field your questions.  Or you may call in and talk to us online:  (860) 249-1323.

We hope to interview individuals who specialize in taxes, accounting, QuickBooks, auditing, and bookkeeping or who are involved in local governments or are candidates for public office.  Please call us if you wish to appear on our program.  We would love to interview you and hear what you have to say.  Of course, the public is invited to call in and ask you questions.

Or if you have a business, a nonprofit organization, or are in the process of starting one, we welcome the opportunity to host you on our program so that you can introduce yourself to the community or promote your business or mission online.

All are welcome.  Your involvement and participation are appreciated.

Thank you for joining our community broadcasting network.

Kindest regards,

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Eliot Spitzer:  We’ve always known that Wall Street is the home of the Dark Arts.  One super trader is even being called Voldemort.  But unlike that villain, he can be named.  Bruno Iksil is the JPMorgan Chase trader, who single handedly moved the derivatives market last week with huge bets on corporate bonds.  The panic this created revealed the weakness of the Harry Potter born to vanquish him, the Volcker Rule.

Joining me now is Vanity Fair’s contributing editor, Bethany McLean.  Bethany, thank you for being here.  You understand all this stuff.  What was going on in the markets and haven’t we taken care of this problem?

Bethany McLean:  Well, I think it shows you that where there is a will, there is a way.  And unfortunately Wall Street has a will to subvert regulators, rather Congress’ best intentions with the Volcker Rule.  And seriously this proves that what we need is some sort of radical reform, not these half attempts to restrain behavior. 

Eliot Spitzer:  Okay, now let me pick up on a couple of things that you said.   It appears that what happened is that you have this one trader over in London placing these huge bets with JPMorgan’s proprietary money, which means that their own money was at risk with these huge bets.  Is that kind of what happened? 

Bethany McLean:  That is, but the justification from JPMorgan’s point of view is what the trader was doing he’s operating out of JPMorgan’s treasury and what he’s doing is simply hedging the bank’s other positions.  So he is not making proprietary bets.  He’s hedging and there is an exemption for that under the Volcker Rule.  It is not actually even clear to me that any kind of treasury operations would be included under the Volcker Rule anyway. 

Eliot Spitzer:  Okay, let me interrupt.  You are drawing distinctions here that only a securities lawyer can even begin to appreciate and understand.  It seems to me that the whole point of passing these laws was to keep these banks from doing something it was going to put a lot of their money at risk because when they lose, we end up bailing them out.  So have we missed the boat here entirely? 

Bethany McLean:  I think the only way to do this, I think banks have found an exemption or a way around the Volcker Rule.  They will continue to do so.  It’s the history of Wall Street.

Regulators put rules in effect; the big banks find a way around it; other banks say, “Oh, I’m losing my advantage.  Look at what this bank is doing.”  They copy it, and risk builds up in a dangerous fashion. 

I don’t understand, if we don’t go back to the days of the Glass-Steagall rule, which separated all investment banking activities from commercial banking activities, we could go back to something called Section 20, where they were required basically to be in separate companies, and I think the world would be a safer place. 

Eliot Spitzer:  Right.  Look, I certainly agree with you.  I think anybody—well, not anybody, I can’t generalize that far— but certainly a lot of people who have looked at this, and you wrote a spectacular book about it, anybody who’s really looked at the 2008 crisis agrees it is this repeal of Glass-Steagall, the merger of investment in commercial banking, the exponential increase in risk that left us as taxpayers holding the bag at the end the day is what took us over the precipice.  So you’re saying Dodd-Frank hasn’t really done a whole lot so far. 

Bethany McLean:  I think that there are ways around it, and on top of that, the Volcker Rule isn’t even going to be enacted for two plus years.  So between now and then you can bet that there will be just a continued, enormous, ferocious lobbying push. 

But the bigger issue to me is let’s just make a decision.  If we want a different banking system, then let’s have a different banking system: one that doesn’t consist of firms that are too big to fail; and one where investment banking activities are legally separated from commercial banking activities.  All of these half measures are destined to failure, I think. 

Eliot Spitzer:  I completely agree.   TBTF, too big to fail, is worse now than it was before the crisis.  We are the formal federal backstop behind these banks, giving them every reason to bet bigger and more ferociously:  to use your words, we’ve gone the wrong way.  

The only positive sign recently was that shareholders actually stood up this week under the “say-on-pay” rule and said they’d had enough with Vikram Pandit, actually one of the nicer of the guys of the CEOs out there.   So are shareholders beginning to flex their muscles a little bit? 

Bethany McLean:  I really hope that this is a sign that that’s the case.  And one of the most powerful agents for change could be shareholders if they chose to exercise their power.  And in the past they have been unwilling to do so, I think, because many big institutional investors their firms also manage big companies 401K business and they don’t want to be too activist and risk losing the lucrative money management business.  

Eliot Spitzer:  Bethany, can I interrupt? I’m so glad you said it that way.  I’d made that point at a mutual fund conference several years, many years, back now and I was descended upon as though I said something that was sacrilegious.  You’re exactly right.  Institutional investors refused to stand up even though they have a fiduciary duty.  We will have a whole other session on this some other day.  But you just said something so critically important about why shareholders and institutional investors don’t do what they should be doing.  

I want to pivot for one second.  Another issue. There is this rationale out there:  Treasury is saying, look TARP has made money for taxpayers.  Do you buy it? 

Bethany McLean:  I don’t think that’s the right question.  You could quibble with some of the accounting, first of all, but even underneath that, the question isn’t whether it has made money for taxpayers or not; the question is, the first one is, has it made enough money for taxpayers.  In other words were taxpayers fairly rewarded for the risk we took?  And I think the clear answer to that is no.  And the second answer is has TARP left us in better shape? Has the system been changed such that what happened in two thousand eight can’t happen again, and the clear answer to that is no.  

I mean it’s kind of a game of,  look at the birdie, look at the birdie, look over here, TARP didn’t lose money, and don’t look over here, back to this issue of the too big to fail banks in this banking system that we’re left with. 

Eliot Spitzer:  That’s exactly right.  And to a certain extent, it was hide the critical issue.  To another extent it was when the government came in with unlimited capacity to keep buying, inevitably it was going to drive those share values up, make the banks solvent, so we could almost guarantee it would be able to sell at the end of the day for more than it paid for.  But as you point out, that’s not the critical question. 

A little bit of time left.  You deal all the time with major financial institutions.  You have your finger on the pulse of the economy.  The economy is likely to be the outcome determinative in terms of November’s Presidential race.  Do you think the economy’s coming back, and I mean by the economy not just finance and the banks, I mean that the economy writ large where real jobs are created? 

Bethany McLean:   I don’t, and I tend to be probably too much of the skeptic, a contrarian, by nature so take what I say with a grain of salt.  But I think that the conditions that led to the financial crisis were actually driven a lot by growing income inequality, in a lack of jobs, people were taking equity out of their homes in order to be able to spend and live, and we have not addressed these fundamental issues yet.  And now we have a fundamental issue of an overly indebted society, both consumers and the government, on top of that.  

So to my mind we have two really fundamental issues.  Where are jobs going to come from in the future, and how are we going to get rid of our debt, both as a country and as people. And until we start having a conversation about those topics, I guess I have a hard time getting all worked up over monthly job figures. 

Eliot Spitzer:  Yes, you’re exactly right. We deleveraged one sector, which was the banks, by shifting a lot of their debt to the public sector.  We have not sufficiently deleveraged the housing market, which is why so many people are both underwater and cannot use their homes as equity, which drove so much of consumer spending in the past fifteen years.  Without those drivers, I’m with you: I have a hard time seeing where the economy comes back and how it comes back. 

Anyway, Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair contributing editor.  Thank you so much for your time tonight. 

Bethany McLean:   Thank you so much.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant

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Yesterday, Matt Taibbi, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, published an article entitled, “Why Obama’s JOBS Act Couldn’t Suck Worse”.  The following is an interview of Matt Taibbi on the subject of the JOBS Act, conducted by Eliot Spitzer on Viewpoint at Current TV on April 9, 2012.

Eliot Spitzer:  Last Thursday President Obama signed the so-called Jobs Act.  I call it the Return Fraud to Wall Street Act.  In his Rolling Stone blog this week, Matt Taibbi points out that not only is the name, Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, annoying and redundant but also the act itself will invite “a replay of the disastrous tech-stock bubble of the late 1990s.”

Joining me now is a man who will always be famous for one of the greatest metaphors of all time, describing Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”, Rolling Stone contributing editor, Matt Taibbi.

Matt, it is great to have you here.  Your articles are always spectacular.   You have a metaphor here; I will get to it in a little bit but first you have been so critical of this Act.  Tell us what people on Wall Street said about this Act.

Matt Taibbi:  I had a friend call me up this weekend basically and he didn’t even say anything on the phone…when I answered the phone he was just laughing hysterically uh… basically the upshot of it is that people just can’t believe how far they went in breaking down all the regulations that were enacted after the collapse of the stock bubble in the late nineties.  It’s just they’ve gone so far it almost boggles the mind.

Eliot Spitzer:   You know, it seems as though our short-term memory has diminished to absolutely nothing.  And you hear the President and leaders down in Washington all the time talking about fairness and enforcement, and then they pass a law that effectively repeals half of the meaningful rules that were put in place to prevent another bubble from being inflated.  What is their logic?  I mean, how do they rationalize this?

Matt Taibbi:  It doesn’t make any sense at all because really the stock market was one of the few markets that wasn’t a complete and total disaster and ripe with corruption.  And it’s the one place where America still had a relative competitive advantage relative to the rest of the world because investors around the world know that companies that are on the stock market have to conform to some basic regulations and the numbers that they submit are at least in the ballpark of reality.  Now all of that goes out the window.   Now there is no competitive advantage anymore.

Eliot Spitzer:   You give us the examples of this law now saying that new companies with valuations under a billion revenues won’t need to have certified public accountant records to validate their claims.  Why did they think that will help people raise money?

Matt Taibbi:  It doesn’t make any sense.  The analogy that I gave would be like announcing that all baseball rookies would be exempt from steroid testing for the the first five years of their career.  Sure, you are going to get a lot of home runs uh…for those first five years but you’re going to have to have a lot of asterisks in the record books afterwards as well.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  It is completely flawed logic.  They really think that if they don’t pass laws like this, that companies are going to flee to other jurisdictions.  But the reality is you don’t want a company that’s going to commit fraud to come here so that they can commit fraud.

Eliot Spitzer:   When I read the article that actually was the metaphor I just loved.   It is just like saying, look for the first five years you don’t need to tell us the truth.   You can just tell us whatever you want us to believe, and the example these days is Groupon, which was and is in the midst of an IPO, I suppose.  Its accounting has been subject to all sorts of attack.  Had this law been in existence, none of those issues could have come to light.

Matt Taibbi:  Right, and it places honest companies at an active disadvantage because they’re expending all this energy trying to conform and make all the numbers really add up whereas this other company can just make up all the numbers and go to investors and say “uh… here’s some numbers that we just cooked up and you’re free to believe them or not.  So there’s no emphasis now on being honest and actually conforming to the rules.

Eliot Spitzer:   Look, Wall Street went down to Washington and lobbied extremely hard to repeal the rules that were working.  Political question:  why did the President,  who was now running as a populist wisely or not, and a Democratic party that is trying to go back to its base and say we are protecting you from the avarice of Wall Street, why did they pass this almost in the dark of night?

Matt Taibbi:  It doesn’t make any sense at all.  Again politically it makes no sense because Obama is in a position where he basically has an election that he cannot lose:  it’s his to lose.  The only thing that could really happen is if he makes a mistake.  That’s the only way he can lose this election.  And here he goes and he hands an issue to the Republican nominee.  Basically an opponent can look at this Act and say Obama just gave a gigantic handout to Wall Street and made a return to the fraudulent days of the late nineties possible again.

Eliot Spitzer:   And I see such a huge tension between the argument that he’s trying to make—and he has been making it quite effectively—that he’s going to bring back some degree of rigor, some degree of integrity, transparency, to the markets, and then behind the mask of permitting capital formation a bit more rapidly we exempt companies from the obligations to tell us the truth about their financials.  I simply don’t see how you square those two arguments.

Matt Taibbi:  Sure, it rolls back elements of Dodd-Frank, it rolls back elements of Sarbanes Oxley, it roles back all these important regulations, it rolls back some of the work that you did obviously after the global settlement, all these things that Democrats theoretically have worked for over the past decade; and now it all goes out the window.  Why?  It doesn’t make any sense.

Eliot Spitzer:   And frankly I have never seen any real evidence that those rules prevent capital formation, despite all the rhetoric, despite all the talk from the other side, I have never seen one piece of evidence that substantiates their view.

Matt Taibbi:  The best excuse that they’ve given for why they need to eliminate this independent accounting rule is that it costs too much to hire accountants.   Are you really going to invest in a company that cannot afford to hire an independent accountant?   That doesn’t make any sense at all.  That just shows you how dishonest the law is if that’s the real excuse.

Eliot Spitzer:   Maybe they should have told that to the victims of the Madoff Ponzi scheme,  who also didn’t have an accountant.  Maybe we will bring Bernie Madoff back.  I guess he was supporting this bill.  Who knows.    Rolling Stone contributing editor, Matt Taibbi, thank you so much for your time tonight.

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

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[Loose transcription of interview on March 22, 2012 on Democracy Now]

In his new article, “Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail,” Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi describes how the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly helped keep Bank of America alive, propping it up with a $45 billion taxpayer bailout in 2008 as well as providing it with billions in “shadow bailouts” since then, despite Bank of America’s long record of what Taibbi describes as defrauding, quote, “everyone from investors and insurers to homeowners and the unemployed.”  Taibbi also recounts how fraudulent practices by Bank of America and other companies ravaged pension funds.  One hedge fund manager told Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone that Bank of America’s mortgage fraud resulted in, quote, “one of the biggest reverse transfers of wealth in history — from pensioners to financiers.”  “Most people think of [the mortgage crisis] as some airy abstraction — you know, bankers ripping off bankers,” Taibbi says. “That’s not what it is. It’s bankers stealing from old ladies and retirees.”    

In February, the Obama administration announced Bank of America and four other large banks had signed on to a $25 billion mortgage settlement to resolve claims over faulty foreclosures and the mishandling of requests for loan modifications. President Obama described it as a landmark settlement. But is the settlement for the benefit of those scammed or the scammers?

The deal is narrowly only supposed to cover a small part of the problems with the mortgages that went on during the crisis. It is only supposed to cover robo-signing.  Robo-signing is the practice of a bank employee signing thousands of documents and affidavits without verifying the information contained in the document or affidavit.   Rather than actually reviewing the individual details of each case, robo-signers assume the paperwork to be correct and sign it automatically, like robots.

The banks were lending billions of dollars to companies like Countrywide to make loans all over the place to anybody with a pulse.  After these mortgage companies made these billions of dollars’ worth of loans, these Countrywide-type companies would then sell the loans back to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Bank of America, who in turn would chop up these loans, turn them into securities, and ultimately sell them off to customers like unions and pension funds and foreign retirement funds all over the world. Because they were not like traditional bankers who would hold onto and service these loans over 20 to 30 years, they just simply stopped doing the paperwork on these loans. It was not cost-effective for them. Essentially they just completely stopped servicing the loans.  Only when they had to foreclose would they go back and try to reconstitute that evidence.  They would just assign a bunch of sort of entry-level people to make up affidavits so that they could go to court and foreclose on people. Of course, this was completely illegal. It was really a system of mass perjury. That is what this $25 billion settlement is supposed to cover, strictly the fraud in that one narrow area of this process. 

There are much, much bigger problems in the areas of creating loans and securitizing the loans. That’s where the real fraud occurred. The real fraud was when Bank of America or some company went to a union and said, for instance, “Here’s a whole bunch of mortgages we want you to buy. They’re AAA-rated. They’re all good.” And they left out derogatory information about how bad the loans really were. That was the real fraud. That supposedly is not covered by this settlement. But there’s some ambiguity about what this settlement covers. Some people think it does cover more than the robo-signing. And if it does, if there is a waiver for more than just robo-signing, then it would be an incredible giveaway to the banks. It might even be a bigger bailout than TARP. 

And this is, of course, extremely important to these pension funds, which were such huge investors, the California retirement and New York retirement funds, because they have all experienced huge losses. And now local government officials are reducing pension benefits because of the need to put in more money to these pension funds. So if they cannot recover from the fraud, it’s working people that are going to suffer in their pensions. 

That is what people don’t understand about this mortgage crisis. Most people think of it as some airy abstraction, bankers ripping off bankers. That is not what it is. It is bankers stealing from old ladies and retirees. That is what it is. They essentially went to pension funds, and they said, “Here’s a whole bunch of relatively safe, AAA-rated investments. AAA, that’s the same quality as United States T-bills or the sovereign debt of Luxembourg or something like that. It just earns you a little bit more, but it’s also AAA.” They bought this stuff. And then, a year or two later, they were looking at 30, 40, 50 percent losses. And that’s just money that’s coming straight out of the pockets of old people and retirees. 

Now, the problem is, are they going to be able to recover any of that money from the banks? With settlements like this, it just makes it that much harder for them to do that. And even though a lot of them have won settlements against these banks—New York State and New York City both won a settlement against Bank of America, $624 million—typically, it’s for pennies on the dollar. They only recover a small percentage of what they’re really owed. 

Matt Taibbi’s article contains a laundry list of illegal activities that Bank of America has been involved in, including a ripping off of the unemployed.  He asserts that there were a number of different scams they were involved with. 

According to him, one of the two most incredible scams involves municipal bid rigging.  In fact, Bank of America a couple years ago paid a $137 million settlement, because they were caught rigging the bids for municipal bond issues in at least 88 different cases across  25 different states. What this means is whenever some municipality, such as the City of Baltimore, wants to raise money, it would have to do it through an investment bank, and it is supposed to do it through an auction process, where all the banks compete to see how much they’re going to pay to get that business. Well, these banks have been systematically colluding and submitting artificially low bids, and there’s usually an insider on the municipal side who kind of games the whole process. They’ve been systematically doing this around the country for years and essentially cheating municipalities out of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues that they would have otherwise gotten. That’s a big one. 

The other big one, that’s more of a recent story, is Bank of America has been accused, along with a number of other banks, of artificially suppressing LIBOR, which is the London interbank exchange rate. LIBOR is basically the exchange rate upon which all adjustable rate investment vehicles are based on: mortgages, credit cards, everything. They’ve been artificially suppressing LIBOR so as not to pay out as much to any investor who has a LIBOR-based instrument. There’s $350 trillion worth of investments are based on LIBOR. So they’ve been gaming the game, essentially. There’s really nothing that these guys haven’t been involved with. 

As mentioned above, Bank of America was cheating the unemployed.  The bank has a contract in a number of states to distribute unemployment insurance benefits. People would get a prepaid Bank of America card.  In South Carolina, it was discovered that if the people getting the benefits did not go to a Bank of America ATM machine, that they could pay fees as high as $10 for each time they went to either a bank or another ATM. 

And other states, like Iowa and Oregon, and churches, like the United Methodist Church, are experiencing similar issues with Bank of America.  When the banks were packaging mortgages, they offered a kind of guarantee to investors. They said, “Not only do we personally guarantee that these mortgages met our underwriting standards, we also agree that if any of these mortgages are defective or in default … at the time of purchase, we promise to buy those mortgages back. So don’t worry about it. Buy this stuff. If anything is wrong, just come back to us. We’ll pay you.” And a lot of these lawsuits, like the United Methodist Church, like the State of Iowa, State of Maine pension funds, they looked at the stuff that they were buying, and they found that a sizable percentage of these mortgages were defective. And they went to go get their buybacks, but suddenly Bank of America is not answering the telephone. And that is what a lot of these lawsuits are about. They are contractually obligated to buy this stuff back, and they are just not doing it. And so, that is another thing that people are worried about they might get out of because of this foreclosure settlement and other settlements like that. 

Occupy Wall Street, over the winter, wanted to put a specific face on some of the issues that they were talking about. You know, in the fall, people had a sort of abstract conception of what they were protesting against. They wanted to say, “Let’s take a specific case of a specific actor, and let’s show people what these companies are really all about.” And there was some discussion over what company they should pick. And the almost universal consensus of all the experts that they talked to was, “You should go for Bank of America, because they’re involved in everything,” you know, whether it’s ripping off student loans, to the unemployed, to pensioners, to depositors. Bank of America got caught systematically overcharging its depositors by $4 billion. So they organized a series of protests. And there’s a campaign afoot to try to get people to move their money out of Bank of America. And this is going to be something that they’re going to focus on for the immediate future. 

Given the laundry list of all of these illegal activities, the trillion-dollar question is why is the government and the Obama administration not shutting this bank down, instead of continuing to prop it up with federal support? 

There is a rationale that one can maybe see for supporting some other companies, some of these other “too big to fail” companies, because they might be functional, thriving companies with a little bit of help. Bank of America has consistently made bad decisions, in addition to all these corruption—all these activities that they’ve been involved with. Without government support, they would have been out of business absolutely in 2008, because of all the problems associated with Countrywide. They have needed massive government support ever since. 

Just last year, they were in a very delicate situation where a number of their counterparties and creditors were concerned about the massive flow of derivatives that were on Merrill Lynch’s books. They convinced Bank of America to move that stuff onto its own depository side so it would be federally insured. So now we’re all on the hook for all this stuff. And that’s another thing that—another way that they’ve used the government to get out of their private problems. It’s just there’s an ongoing support of this company, and I think our administration believes that they have to support these companies at all costs.

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Cenk Uygur:  We are going to talk to Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone about a great piece on Bank of America being too crooked to fail…. 

$230 billion doesn’t begin to cover the level of fraud of Bank of America.  In fact, Countrywide was taken over by Bank of America.  And in Matt Taibbi’s news piece there is a stunning fact:  “a staggering 97% of the [Countrywide] loans didn’t meet the stated underwriting standards.”  So meaning 97% of them  were in someway fraudulent.  Is that a large enough number for you? 

And then the list of frauds that Bank of America has done is so large but let me give you just one sense of it here.  Bank of America paid a hundred and thirty seven million dollar fine for its sabotage of the government contracting process.  Now Matt points out that’s what mobsters used to do to rig bid on garbage collection, etc., etc.  It was a terrible crime; you went to jail for it.  Bank of America does it, they admit it, they pay a fine for it, and they are free to go.  And they do it all the time. 

Meanwhile what do the Republicans think?  Of course, we were supposed to bailout the banks.  Look at Mitt Romney on the campaign trail: 

“There was a fear that the whole economic system of America would collapse; that all of our banks, or virtually all, would go out of business.  And in that circumstance, President Bush and Hank Paulson said we got to do something to show that we are not going to let the whole system go out of business.  I think they were right.  I know some people disagree with me.  I think they were right to do that.” 

Cenk Uygur:  All right, well, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone is going to join us to tell us whether Mitt Romney is right or not.  I see you shaking your head already, Matt.  Go for it.  Is Mitt Romney wrong? 

Matt Taibbi:  Well you know what, I could almost see the argument that in two thousand eight when the government was blindsided by all the problems that happened uh… and all these companies were in trouble Lehman Brothers and Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns, I can almost see the rationale of coming in and saving some of these companies temporarily, uh… but not only did they not go in and take these companies over and fire all the people who were responsible for all of this fraud, they continued to support this company for years after they had already put it back on its feet, and that to me is what the most inexcusable part of it is.  It’s one thing that they gave it forty five billion dollars in two thousand eight, but they kept supporting it uh… with billions and billions of dollars of low interest loans after that, and that’s the real problem. 

Cenk Uygur:  So basically there were no strings attached and you know, and I think a lot of people look at that, and they look at that from a simplistic point of view because unfortunately a lot of media has covered it that way:  well, the banks took some money and then they paid it back and they are fine and they’re all upstanding citizens who, you know, make these million dollar contracts, etc., because they are geniuses.  Well, you know, your story says that might not exactly be the case.  So tell the people watching at home why do you think Bank of America, among the others, actually does fraud, does things that are criminal and should be, you know, it is not normal business that they should be rewarded for. 

Matt Taibbi:  First of all let me just back up with that that popular perception that these guys are really smart and they’re making their money honestly and they paid the money back.  These banks are essentially getting their money for free from the Federal Reserve.  Bank of America at one point had owed the Federal Reserve as much as ninety billion dollars.  They have basically this endless tap of zero interest loans from the Fed.

In banking the entire business is all about cost of capital.  If your cost of capital is zero, it’s virtually impossible not to make money.  Think about it.  They’re getting their money at zero from the government for letting it out to us at five percent for mortgages or fifteen percent for credit cards. How do you not make money when you have an endless supply of free money?  And that’s what uh… all these banks have been doing all these years.  They just simply go to the Fed,  they get a bunch of money, and then they lend it out to us, and they take the cut.  And that’s what they’ve been doing, before we talk about the fraud right. 

Cenk Uygur:  So the genius they had was, “hey, I got it.  It turns out I can buy American politicians.  And if I buy them, they give me free money, and with free money, I can’t lose.”   That’s the only thing they figured out. That our system is unfortunately deeply corrupt.  Now talk to me about the fraud and whether what they’re doing is, you know, in some way illegal or is corrupt. 

Matt Taibbi:  It’s totally illegal.  First you have to go back to two thousand eight, two thousand seven, two thousand six, that period.  What Bank of America and what all the big banks were involved in essentially was a giant fraud scheme.  It’s no different than here in the streets of New York where you see people selling fake Prada bags out in the street or phony blue jeans.  What they were doing was selling phony mortgages.  They were taking really poor mortgages, sub-prime mortgages of very poor quality lent out to extremely risky borrowers, and they were disguising them as Triple-A rated high quality loans.  They were essentially lending out home mortgages to everybody with a pulse.  They were taking those loans, chopping them up, and then selling them off to unsuspecting unions and pensions and foreign retirement funds, representing them as these high quality securities.   It was a giant fraud scheme.  They were doing this all over the world, and as part of these deals, they were required to buy back any defective loans that were in default, and that’s what Bank of America is facing right now.  They’re supposed to be buying back all these bad loans and they’re not doing it.  And there is this gigantic string of outraged customers knocking on their door demanding their money back.  

Cenk Uygur:  So opens up to things that are really important.  One is who did they rip off.  And as you explain, and again not explained nearly well enough in the rest of the media, it was the pensions.  And I talked to Nomi Prince, who used to be the managing director at Goldman Sachs, she said that’s the suckers at the table.   When you go to rob people, who do you go to rob?  The average American and their pensions.   So what did they do to the pensions? 

Matt Taibbi:  Look, who buys these mortgage-backed securities?  The customers were these big institutional investors and a very typical customer was like a state pension fund, the New York State Pension Fund, the New York City Retirement Fund, the Los Angeles County Retirees, the State of Mississippi Retirement Fund.  All these people went to Bank of America and they bought mortgage-backed securities that they thought were very high quality.  What people need to understand is that the fraud on Wall Street, they think it’s some abstraction, bankers ripping off other bankers, it’s some kind of insider trading scheme where it’s a victimless crime.  That’s not what it is.  It’s bankers ripping off old people and retirees.  They are essentially stealing their life savings and that’s what went on in two thousand six, two thousand seven, two thousand eight and beyond, and they still have not paid the money back.  

Cenk Uygur:  Now that’s the case of mortgages right, where they rip off the retirees, etc.  And then there’s the case of the municipal bonds where they rip off the local cities and then counties like Jefferson County in Alabama, go bankrupt, and then everybody loses their money.   They take the money from someone, and ultimately it is us that they take it from.   But Matt, as I am reading your long piece here, constantly the thing that they come back to is that there’s never any consequences.  They are in essence too big to comply.  Because they turn to government and say, “what are you going to do about it?”    

Matt Taibbi:  Yes, just this week we found out that the number one recipients of municipal bond business in America, the number one in two companies are still Chase and Bank of America, and those two companies both have paid hundred million dollar settlements for bid rigging.   Chase got caught in twenty five different states rigging municipal bids, and Bank of America got caught rigging at least eighty eight different bids in different municipalities.  And again this is not a victimless crime.  If your town wants to raise money and issue a bond to build a new basketball court or a school and they [the banks] are paying a million dollars instead of three million dollars for the [town’s] investment banking business, well that money eventually is going to come out of your pocket.  They are going to raise taxes to make up that money that they didn’t make from the banks.  So they are paying artificially low bids for these contracts and they’re doing it all over the country. 

Cenk Uygur:  Like you wrote, that’s what the mob used to do.  One last thing I have to ask you about.  So where does the money go.  All these people get ripped off.  Where does the money wind up?  

It’s interesting in 2011 Bank of America got over a billion dollars in a tax rebate.  They didn’t  pay any taxes.  In fact, they got a billion dollars back.  Why?  Because they said they got out $5.4 billion in losses in the earlier year.  Well the problem is that they paid $35 billion in bonuses and compensation.  So when you look at that, Matt, isn’t it obvious that the executives are just taking the money and putting in their pocket and then they go, oh, look at that, we had no profit, ha ha ha. 

Matt Taibbi:  Oh yeah, absolutely, that’s exactly what goes on.  And if it’s not converted into profits and bonuses they just leave it offshore:   that’s another method of dealing with the whole tax problem.  Bank of America last year, I think,  had seventeen billion dollars in revenues that stayed off shore.  So if they don’t want to pay taxes, they just issue bigger bonuses and leave their money overseas,  and they don’t pay taxes.  They didn’t pay a single dime last year or the year before in taxes which is an extraordinary  testament to the holes in the system.  

Cenk Uygur:  All right.  Matt Taibbi shedding light on this at Rolling Stone.  Great job.  Thank you so much for joining us.  Really appreciate it.  And let me just say this is one of the largest thefts in American history.  It is happening right under our nose and it is happening right now.  That’s what you got to know.  Not something that happened in the past. 

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Now do you still think that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are a bunch of crazy commies?!

The Washington Post reveals the inside scoop on the grand bargain last year and currently under consideration, affirming that President Obama, indeed, wants to cut corporate taxes while making up for the deficits by cutting social security, medicare, medicaid, healthcare, and other safety-net social programs yet raising taxes on the working and middle classes.  President Barack Obama is not a progressive President.

Obama’s top advisors of the grand bargain—the deficit-debt cutting deal last July—included William Daley, Chief of Staff, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, budget director Lew Jacobs, and Rob Nabors, the legislative liaison.  Obama was negotiating this deal with John Boehner and Eric Kantor.  The Republicans wanted Obama to give up plans to raise the highest marginal tax rate on the rich from 35%; rather, they wanted him to lower that tax rate as well as preserve the low capital gain rates on investment income, one of the biggest perks for the wealthy in the tax code, and exempt corporate profits from overseas from U.S. taxes.

In essence, the Republicans wanted Obama to cut social security, medicare, Medicaid, healthcare, and other social programs and in return for such, cut all the taxes on the rich, Wall Streeters, and multinational corporations.  The question is:  where was the deal here?  Even though they were cutting taxes in three different ways for the rich, Wall Streeters, and multinational corporations, they were not willing to raise taxes, but were merely willing, so to speak, to “simplify the tax code”, and rely on supply side economics (i.e., dynamic scoring) to provide a projected increase of $800 billion in governmental revenues.

What is surprising to many Democrats is that Obama accepted this Republican proposal; however, John Boehner, after conferring with Republicans, ultimately backed out of the deal since it was apparently not enough to appease House Republicans.  But White House administration officials announced this week that the deal is still on the table!!!

In summary, the deal is simply the following:  the Republicans get cuts to social security, medicare, Medicaid, healthcare, and other safety-net social programs that they demanded while they also get lower taxes on the rich, corporations, Wall Streeters, and multinational corporations that they desired.  What do the working and middle classes get from the Democrats negotiating on their behalf from this deal?  Nothing!  Nada!

Where is the “grand bargain”?  Where is the deal?  The rich and elite get lower taxes while the working and middle classes suffer more spending cuts to their social security, medicare, Medicaid, healthcare, and other benefits.

Has Obama forgotten what political party he belongs to?  Or have all Congressional Democrats and Democratic Presidents moved so far to the right that they are now indistinguishable monetarily and fiscally from their corporate Republican counterparts?

The Barefoot Accountant

We seemed to have entered an era where there is this group think of that no matter what you think of President Obama, in reality everybody needs to get in line and make sure that they follow whatever the President says because we are heading toward an election.  And I simply don’t agree with that.  

It seems like there is always an excuse of, it’s such a hard job, so progressives have to give President Obama all the breaks.  

Martin Sheen recently said, “It’s unrealistic.  I wonder how many of those progessives [meaning the ones that are criticizing him] are black?  How many of those progressives understand historically what happened?” 

So does that mean only Cornel West can criticize the President?  That you have to be black to be able to do a progressive criticism of the President?  I don’t think that that makes any sense at all, and that’s a needless injection of racism into this issue when it does not belong there. 

Here are some things that really concern me.  Recently I read in the news again about how they might be bringing back the “grand bargain”.   Do you remember what this is?  This is basically the Simpson-Bowles Commission that the President asked for and has been lobbying for and has wanted to do all along.  But do you remember the downsides of that? 

First of all, in this so-called grand bargain on the budget, they would do three times as many spending cuts as they would do so-called tax increases.  Now as a progressive, why in the world would I be in favor of that?  That’s a terrible ratio.  We already cut spending to the bone; he’s going to cut three times more than the tax increases.  I don’t agree with that.  I don’t care that we are heading toward an election.  That’s the wrong plan.  And in fact it doesn’t help his election chances at all; it would totally hurt him. 

Now here’s more downsides of the grand bargain.  It cuts social security.  It cuts medicaid.  It raises taxes for the poor.  It raises taxes for the middle class.  That’s where your tax raises are.  And it lowers corporate taxes.  To which I say, hell no. 

I am not going to get in line for that.  It doesn’t mean that I prefer Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or any of the other clowns.  No one is saying that.  But I am not going to sign onto something because the President is running for re-election.  Hell no.  I hope to God that they don’t do the grand bargain. 

Now when you look at President Obama in his entirety, it’s a complicated picture.  There’s definitely been upsides.  Let’s talk about the upsides for a second.  

They did healthcare reform.  I have my concerns about it but it’s at least 50% good and it was a big, big effort.  

There’s some defense spending cuts.  I would love more but there is some. 

On women’s rights, I actually think that he has been terrific:  fair pay act; affordable care act.

He stopped torture.  He has been terrible on civil liberties otherwise.  But he did shut down the black sites that the CIA was running and that stopped torture.  

He saved the auto industry. 

There was a stimulus.  It could have been larger, but it had significant effects on unemployment in bringing it down. 

Obviously he killed Osama bin Laden which was terrific. 

And he finally got rid of don’t ask don’t tell.  Again, that’s very, very good. 

But you also have to look at the downsides.  And let me give you a quick list of that as well. 

He was very easy on the banks. 

At the same time he was hard on whistleblowers:  not just Bradley Manning but corporate whistleblowers and other security interests whistleblowers. 

On civil liberties, honestly, I thought that he was a disaster.  National Defense Authorization Act, that allows for arresting U.S. citizens and giving them indefinite detention, which is terrible.  Warrantless wiretapping continues.  Drones on U.S. citizens, where he killed them without any due process. 

Domestic spending cuts have been significant, dramatic. 

The war on drugs.  He started out great in the first few years and then he turned around and doubled down on the Bush administration policies, busting dispensers in the states for no reason. 

And on immigration reform he has been horrible.  He has deported more people than George W. Bush did.  

And then my main beef with him, nothing on campaign finance reform, nothing.  He was supposed to change the system.  

So don’t have people tell you that you got to bow your head and go along. 

…

So if you are a progressive, Obama supporters will tell you because we are heading into an election, you should not criticize the President.  But it’s maddening to me that President Obama constantly goes to the right and it doesn’t help him politically.

The Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur:  Does President Obama have the right economic plan overall?  I’m not so sure.

Jimmy Dore:  No, he doesn’t have the right plan overall.  I don’t even know how these jobs are being created right now because he is not proposing measures to fix our problems.  And by the way, it’s good news that we created those jobs but that’s not even half of what we need to keep up….He’s not even proposing solutions to our problems.  He’s still not.  I’ve heard a lot of economists say that they are afraid of the [employment] numbers going back down again. 

Cenk Uygur:  At this rate, including the population growth, in order to get back to where we were, we still lost 5 million jobs overall in the recession, it would take till about 2087, I’m exaggerating, but an unbelievable period of time.

…

But in the long term, I am afraid that we have not solved any of the underlying problems.  We still have all of these houses underwater, trillions of dollars worth, and we didn’t address that.  We didn’t hold any of the bankers accountable; they can still take those crazy risks.  I am afraid that that’s going to blow up the economy at any given time.

…

Jimmy Dore:  When you say that he had initiatives for creating jobs …how many jobs was that projected to create?  A million or two jobs?  We needed twenty-five million jobs.

…

Cenk Uygur:  I think Jimmy is right here.  President Obama had a decision to make right in the beginning.  was he going to go large:  hey, we are going to do a smart energy grid; we are going to do transportation on a grand scale, which we needed.  We needed infrastructure on a grand scale.  He chose not to because he was afraid of Republican reaction.  God, I wish he made a different decision.

[The discussion now concerns Obama’s healthcare bill.]

Michael Shure:  …If there is an area of Obama policy where I believe that he did not go far enough, it is with Obamacare.  There was a poll taken in September of 2010, before the Congress turned over that November, that showed that the people who thought that the healthcare plan was too conservative outweighed those who did not like it by two to one.  That was an Associated Press poll.  People liked the healthcare then.  The Obama team did a terrible job, as you said over and over, of selling it, and of being on the offense and then going far enough.

Jimmy Dore:  …Wasn’t that a mistake to not implement [all of the healthcare benefits] right away [instead of deferring them to 2014]?

Cenk Uygur:  I always thought that waiting till 2014 was a terrible idea….But I think it was the wrong decision honestly.

There are two Obamas: the one as a progressive candidate, calling for immediate change; and the other as a conservative Democrat, appointing Wall Streeters as his top economic advisors. The campaigner speaking on behalf of Main Street; and the President catering to Wall Street.

What follows is a selective, partial, loose ”transcription” of Cenk Uygur’s thoughts on the two Obamas.

Cenk Uygur:  I want to discuss something that Arianna Huffington brought up on the Huffington Post:  Obama versus Obama.  The campaign Obama, whom we all like and was a wonderful progressive; we didn’t agree with everything that he said on the campaign but overall we take it; in fact, that is how we voted.  Governing Obama, a little different. 

Now we put together here a compilation of the two different Obamas.  Watch for yourself.

[While campaigning for President, Obama said about Guantanomo:]

Obama:  We are going to lead by shutting down Guantanomo and restoring habeous corpus in this country.

[But while governing as President, Obama said about Guantanomo:]

One way where we have fallen short is closing Guantanomo.  I wanted to close it sooner; we have missed that deadline. 

[While campaigning for President, Obama said about the Washington Wall Street insiders:]

You understand that in this election the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result.

[But while governing as President, Obama said about the Washington Wall Street insiders:]

Larry Summers also brings a singular combination of skill, intellect, and experience to the role that he will play in our administration. 

[While campaigning for President, Obama said about changing the way Washington works:]

I am running because of what Dr. King called the fierce urgency of now, because I believe that there is such a thing as being too late.

[But while governing as President, Obama said about changing the way Washington works:]

I always believed that this was a long-term project. 

It is going to take more than a year, it is going to take more than two years, it is going to take more than one term.  It probably takes more than one president.

Cenk Uygur:  The fierce urgency of now.   How do we get the campaign Obama to become the governing Obama?

Dean Obeidallah:  …I don’t know if it’s possible frankly, Cenk.  There is so much involved in our form of government that involves compromise….It’s going to take time.  He’s a president; he is not a king…It’s give and take with Congress…It’s a different reality.

Cenk Uygur:  Not buying it….If it was just, what could I do?  I couldn’t close down Guantanomo because the Republicans blocked it.  Then I would say that’s perfectly fair.

During the campaign he said that “I am going to double down on Afghanistan”, I think that’s fair; I don’t like the idea, but that is what he said during the campaign.

But there are so many times, when nominating Elizabeth Warren, he said “I can’t do it, the Republicans are blocking it,” but then he does a recess appointment anyway.

So he says I can’t get the public option because we can’t get past the filibuster.  They didn’t get past the filibuster anyway; they only needed 50 votes, they didn’t do the public option anyway.

So many times he makes a choice.  Larry Summers during that clip:  oh, I don’t want the same old guys.  Here’s freaking Larry Summers, who started the recession in the first place in a lot of ways.

So I don’t know.  Laura, let me get your thoughts on it.

Laura Bassett:  …But there are decisions that he made as President:  Larry Summers.  Congress did not have a knife to his throat telling him that he had to appoint Larry Summers for that position.  There are certainly ways that he could have compromised less and been a stronger President…. 

Cenk Uygur:  I don’t think he even meant it [his campaign promises].  I think his fundamental misdirection—and I am being kind here—was when he said we are going to change the way Washington works.  If you think you are going to change the way Washington works, and you appoint your economic team of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, you re-appoint Ben Bernanke, Peter Orszag:  every single guy on that is as guilty as possible on the Democratic side of starting the problem in the first place, then you have no intention of changing the way Washington works.  No intention.

Dean Obeidallah:  …He got there, things were different….There’s practicality….

Cenk Uygur:  On the first day it was different?!  On the first day he picked his economic team. 

When you look at this intent issue, and you see the economic team and you see all the decisions that he made, do you really think that he thought that he was going to change the way Washington works?

I don’t know which side is really worse.  If he is that naïve and thought, oh my God, I didn’t know that I was going to Washington.  That’s crazy.  Of course the Republicans are going to oppose you.  You didn’t know that the Republicans are going to oppose you?!  I don’t know what’s worse then:  knowing or not knowing. 

The Barefoot Accountant:  Of course, President Obama never intended to change the way Washington works.  Cenk Uygur is correct.  There is too much evidence to the contrary, beginning on his first day in office, appointing all those Wall Streeters to his economic team.

Obama talks left, walks right.  He walks right to the political donors on Wall Street.  He is a politician first and puts his political and personal future before country and campaign promises.

Perhaps he learned the art of political livelihood from his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, who supported NAFTA, deregulation of Wall Street, and corporate America, at the expense of the middle class.  Bill Clinton is very prosperous now, worth well over one hundred million dollars, far from the net worth of $250,000 when he first ran for the Presidency.  Bill Clinton receives $100,000 to $200,000 for every speech he gives today, like the one he gave in Hartford, Connecticut yesterday.  Over the ten years after leaving the office as President, Bill Clinton earned $75.6 million for paid speaking engagements, averaging $181,000 per event.  One can only imagine how many millions Barack Obama will earn giving speeches after his term in office.  

Not bad for representing the interests of Corporate America and Wall Street, is it?

William Brighenti, CPA
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Chris Matthews:  What do you make of the Super Pacs.  You are McCain-Feingold.  You are the classic guy that wants to clean up this business of politics.  It’s not a business.  It’s about our democracy. 

What do you make about the fact the President is going to go to a billion-dollar campaign.  The other party is going to a billion-dollar campaign and all this loose money coming in in big amounts. We used to call it soft money. Now it’s big Super Pac money.

Russ Feingold: I support the President for re-election. I’m a co-chair of his campaign. I made it clear I don’t agree with this. I think it’s a mistake for the President and his people to go down this road.

He is a person who really fights for the 99% and when you go and associate yourself with this kind of unlimited contributions, you are undercutting your message and you end up with something even worse. You’ll end up at the congressional level with corporate Democrats again as well as corporate Republicans.

We saw this movie before, before McCain and I banned soft money to the parties. You get trade agreements that ship our jobs overseas, consolidation of the media and the deregulation of Wall Street. This all comes when people end up raising this kind of money, and I think it’s a disaster for the country and I hope the President moves away from this approach.

He doesn’t need it. He can win without this unlimited money. People know who he is and know he’s doing a good job.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
William Brighenti
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Cenk Uygur:  We always hear from Republicans that taxes are too high, especially when it comes to corporations because those are the guys who fund their campaigns.  In fact, Rick Santorum just wrote an op-ed saying in order to “Restore America’s competitiveness, the corporate tax rate should be halved, to a flat rate of 17.5%.”  Brilliant:  cut corporate taxes even more, as if corporations in America were not getting enough of a big enough break.  Absurd.

But there is one guy who is taking them on:  it’s Warren Buffett.  Let us hear him out.

Warren Buffett:  But it is a myth that the American corporations are paying 35% or anything like it.  Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness.

Cenk Uygur:  Is he right?  Absolutely.  Look at this number.  Do you know what the effective corporate tax rate is in America?  12.1%.  It’s a 40 year low.  12.1%, not 35%.  The Republicans have problems with numbers.

Let’s go to the next set of numbers.  I will talk slowly so you can understand, GOP. 

Now here is the effective tax rate for all of these different industries:

Industrial Machinery:  13.5%

IT (Technology field):  2.5%

Utility:  3.7%

Where is the 35%?  I don’t see it anywhere!

Financial Industry:  15.5%

Where the hell is 35%?  Nobody is paying it.

Okay if you think that is bad, look at this.  Some of the top thirty (30) companies in between 2008 and 2010 had a negative tax rate. 

Do you know what that means?  We are giving them money.  They are not giving us money in taxes; we are giving it back to them.  It is insanity.

How about GE?  Jeffrey Immelt is now the head of the Job’s Council for President Obama.  They must be giving back to the community, etc.; they are such good citizens.  Let’s check out the numbers.

How much did they pay in taxes in 2010?  Zero.  In fact, they got so much money back in taxes so that it is in effect a 64% negative tax rate for them.  Overall between 2002 and 2011 they paid a 2.3% tax rate.  Over a decade they paid 2.3% on average.  Where the hell is 35%?

Nobody is paying 35%.  And they get rewarded by going on the President’s Job’s Council, like they are some great guys or something.

Now let me give you some more numbers on GE.  If they just paid the 29% tax rate, that would have brought in an additional $21.7 billion in tax revenue.   That could have created 400,000 jobs at $50,000 a year salary.  This is what happens when corporations don’t pay their taxes.  And at the end of all this, they are still bitching that they did not get enough of a tax break.  Are you kidding me?

Now here comes big loud-mouth Chris Christie and McConnell to complain that they are still paying too much, and complaining about Buffett.

Chris Christie:  He should just write a check and shut up.  Really, and just contribute, okay?   The fact of the matter is that I am tired of hearing about it.  If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check:  go ahead and write it.

Mitch McConnell:  With regard to his tax rate, if he is feeling guilty about it, I think he should send in a check. 

Cenk Uygur:  Oh, ho, ho, ho, they got him.  Why don’t you just write in a check, ha, ha, ha?  Listen.  That’s not how it works.  And Warren Buffett, when he was on CNBC said, you don’t take away trillions in deficits by making it voluntary.  That’s not how it works. 

And he said, if that’s how it works, for every Republican that pays extra voluntary taxes, I’ll match it.  And he said for Mitch McConnell, I’ll go three to one.  Every dollar he pays in taxes voluntarily, I’ll pay three times as much.  Do you know how much Mitch McConnell has paid extra?  Zero.  Not at all, because they don’t mean a word of it. 

But you must think if they are paying such low taxes, their profits must be in trouble, there was a recession, right?  Sixty year high for profits. 

Are you ready for this number?  In the third quarter of 2011 alone, $1.97 trillion.  They made that in a quarter of a year. 

But when it comes to their paying their taxes, are they going to pay it? 

They are not going to pay it. 

In fact, look at the chart from 1950 to 2009.  I think this is a killer chart.  This is the corporate taxes as a percentage of all of our taxes.  It nosedives.  It goes from around 30% to around 6% to 5%.  And then do you see the graph going way up?  The yellow number there?  That’s the percentage of taxes paid by us through the payroll tax.  Somebody’s got to pay the tax.  So when corporations don’t pay their taxes, who does?  You do!  The percentage of taxes that you pay through the payroll tax goes way up! 

Look, this is about justice.  The corporations are not paying too much; they are paying too little.  The effective rate is 12.1%.  So when they don’t pay their taxes, we have to pay more.  It ain’t right.  Warren Buffett is 100% right.  And Chris Christie should shut his mouth.

Transcription by

The Barefoot Accountant

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

What follows is an abridged transcription of an interview by Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks on February 24, 2012 of Tim Dickinson, correspondent with Rolling Stone, and Ari Berman, author of “Herding Donkeys”, on the topic, “Is Obama Soft on the Banks?”

Cenk Uygur: Is Obama soft on banks? Definitely. Eric Holder, our Attorney General, said at a speech at Columbia University, that their fight back against financial fraud has been a record of success nothing less than historic.

Tim Dickinson: Most people forget that before Barack Obama took off with all those small dollar donations in 2008, in 2007 he was flocked around by a small coterie of Harvard affiliated Wall Street types, like Michael Feldmen, Jamie Rubin, the son of the former Treasury Secretary. And so in many ways he is politically indebted to Wall Street in a very real way: they ponied up a lot of money for his campaign early, they established him as a serious political threat to Hillary Clinton. And then the campaign took off.

And that history is important in helping to understand why Obama has said to the Wall Street bankers, I am the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks. Why doesn’t Obama have a pitchfork? That’s part of the answer.

Cenk Uygur: Everybody should know that Goldman Sachs was the number one donor last time around. This time around he has already raised $9 million from the financial industry.

Let me read you, Ari, a quote from Eric Holder: “We found that much of the conduct that led to the financial crisis was unethical and irresponsible.” But we also discovered that some of “this behavior—while morally reprehensible—may not necessarily have been criminal.”

Ari Berman: If you watched the very good 60 Minute Special about why the government has not prosecuted any Wall Street banks, you would come to a very different conclusion.

And Senator Dick Durbin said a while back that the banks own this place, they own Washington, and as Tim mentions, that explains why there have not been any major prosecutions of the banks. There has been very little accountability with the bailout. There has been basically a return to the culture of the pre-economic crisis on Wall Street. That’s why the mortgage settlement that was just reached has been criticized by a number of people.

So on a number of different issues the Obama administration has been weak on the banks because the banks have so much influence in Washington.

Cenk Uygur: I should be fair on Eric Holder when he said that their success has been historic. Their success has been historic: it has been a historic failure actually. They have had less financial fraud cases against the big banks than any administration in the last twenty years. That’s a fact. They have been softer on the banks than President Bush, if you can imagine that.

Tim, here is Eric Holder saying, “So let me assure you. Whenever and wherever we do uncover evidence of criminal wrongdoing, we will not hesitate to bring prosecutions.” He has a funny definition of undertake, doesn’t he?

Tim Dicksinson: A judge recently rebuked the SEC for not bringing criminal charges, or at least settling a case, with Citibank in which the bank actually had to admit some wrongdoing.

There’s something to this, that Obama is in a difficult spot, where he is desperately trying to get the economy moving again and the financial industry is, whether we like it or not, an incredible driver of this economy. So you can understand sort of it goes against his gut judgment to be fighting for Wall Street bankers but there’s something about just giving this economy chugging along his top priority rather than politically satisfying vengeance against bankers. I think that has to be accounted for.

Cenk Uygur: I hear you. But my take on that is that it’s not about political vengeance. It would have been better policy to clean out the banks. In fact, that would have helped out the economy overall. But it seems that he didn’t have the political courage to do that. It seems that they convinced him to put a political band-aid on it.

Ari Berman: If you look at the main people that he chose as his economic advisors, their main thing was propping up Wall Street, getting it back chugging again, and not really shaking it up and changing it. And that was kind of the core philosophy that was basically the standard operating procedure for the Obama administration for two years.

Really it was only when Occupy Wall Street happened, that the administration sharpened its rhetoric and started talking in broad terms about the 99%. If there hadn’t been an Occupy Wall Street movement, Obama may very well still be defending the banks in much more rigorous terms.

It’s also important to note that Wall Street money now has abandoned Obama. Romney is outraising Obama by eleven to one on Wall Street. And that has a lot of Obama administration people worried, and so they want to get back on the side, in some cases, of the bank people to raise money from Wall Street for the re-election campaign.

Tim Dickinson: Jim Messina, the campaign manager, was just on Wall Street, a week ago, telling Wall Street bankers, that we might demonize Romney but we are not demonizing you guys. There has been this outreach to rebuild those bridges. It’s a tricky dynamic because he needs that money in this unlimited arms race.

Cenk Uygur: Yeah, it’s the same point that I was going to make. He promised them, “hey, don’t worry guys, we won’t hurt you.” Believe me, we know you won’t hurt them.

Loose transcription by the Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

President Obama is looking like a progressive and talking like a progressive, but is he walking like a progressive? His recent budget proposal, at first glance, may appear so; and in some respects, it even had the makings of a progressive plan that the American public desires as evident from a number of recent polls. Our country is fundamentally progressive: it wants to raise taxes on the wealthy; it wants to cut back defense spending; it wants to bring our troops home; it wants to balance our budget; and it wants to preserve social security and medicare. But is the budget of the President really reflective of the progressive position of a majority of Americans? Let’s look at the dirty details.

First off, the President is proposing $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1.00 in taxes raised on people making $250,000 or more. I don’t think this is anything to brag about if I were supposedly a progressive President proposing a budget to accommodate 99% of the citizens of the United States. In essence, Barack Obama is saying to the rich, Corporate America, and Republicans, “don’t worry, I am going to hit the middle class much harder than I hit the rich”. President Obama appears to be appealing to Republicans to assure them that he is really cutting spending for the middle class and the poor.

Looking at the cuts, we see that defense is being cut by $487 billion. Although this is good news, this cut is a little bit misleading since the troops are being withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan, and such actions are already reducing defense spending.

But medicare is being cut by $360 billion, which the Republicans will use against him, even though they had pushed for larger cuts.  And this cut will hurt the lower and middle classes; it is certainly not in their interests and is not progressive but quite conservative, if not regressive.

There is some great news, however:  farm subsidies are being cut by $278 billion.  Farm subsidies are a total waste of spending, the epitome of crony capitalism, benefitting largely the big agricultural conglomerates.

Now regarding the spending plan, there is some good news here: $30 billion to modernize schools; $30 billion to hire more teachers, police, and firefighters; $140.8 billion for research and development; and $476 billion for a transportation system, that has huge issues, but at least, it is a step toward reinvestment in our country.

Now how much will Obama’s budget proposal get from the rich in terms of tax reform? $1.5 trillion. The President is cutting $4 trillion overall from our deficits and national debt, so only $1.5 trillion will come from tax increases, whereas the other $2.5 trillion will come from cuts in spending. That is not good news.  If the budget were progressive, the ratio would at least be reverse, raising at a minimum $2.5 trillion from tax increases, with no more than $1.5 trillion from cuts in spending.

But at least taxes are finally going up for the rich, and this was needed long ago. For dividend income, which has been taxed at 15% under the current capital gains tax rate, it will be taxed up to 39.6% for those in the top bracket earning over $250,000 and filing jointly as a married couple and $200,000 for those filing individually. This alone is expected to raise $206.4 billion over the next ten years. That would be great; however, the Republicans will fight Obama tooth and nail on that proposal.

So what’s the catch? Of course, knowing how much of a Wall Streeter Obama is by now, there must be a catch; and, of course, there is.  President Obama is considering lowering corporate taxes!  But why would the President lower corporate taxes when we have a deficit problem?  Why cut medicare in order to lower corporate taxes for the 1%?  Why is Obama cutting $2.5 trillion from spending but lowering corporate taxes when our national debt and our annual deficits are at record levels?  The answer is obvious.  Obama is promising the business community giant tax cuts in order to get re-elected, that’s why.  He needs the corporate contributions for his campaign for the Presidency.  He needs to raise $1 billion in order to win the election in 2012.  So he needs to offer something to his primary donors, the Wall Streeters.

Our system is fundamentally broken. At a time when we are supposed to be worried about deficits and our national debt, President Obama is proposing to lower corporate taxes:  it is a gross injustice to the citizens of our country.

President Obama is always the appeaser, the Neville Chamberlain, willing to concede before the battle begins, giving more to the 1%, and less to the 99%, assuming that the majority of Americans will see this budget proposal as something that it desires, when in fact it cuts medicare and lowers corporate taxes, failing to seize an opportunity to truly cut deficits and restore equity in our tax laws.  What a sham of a budget proposal and what a wuss of a President.  Obama is Corporate America’s man in Washington, bought and paid for.

The Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur:  CPAC just concluded:  that’s the largest conservative gathering.  There were a lot of speeches, Herman Cain for one, as we showed you last week, who called all liberals stupid, which is rather ironic.  And of course, also ironically said that liberals like to do name calling.  I wonder how smart he is that he did that speech and did not realize the intense irony of what he just said.  

But he’s not alone.  Almost every speaker calls liberals one name or another.  Grover Norquist is the embodiment of corporate whoredom.  He’s basically the whore of Babylon.  Any rich person, any corporation, that wants a tax cut, they go to Grover Norquist, they pay him off, and he intimidate Republican politicians into never ever raising taxes. 

So he’s going to do that here, and then on top of that just for good measure, he’s going to insult liberals.  Let’s watch. 

Grover Norquist:  Our job is to say no to tax increases, stop throwing money in the center of the table, put our foot on the air hose, and watch that pile of cash begin to decline.  The left is not made up of friends and allies.  It is made up of competing parasites. 

Cenk Uygur:  Here is what I am done with:  all the name calling from the right and not responding from the left.  If the left ever says anything about the right, they cry like babies:  oh, no, I can’t believe it, name calling, how could they.  Meanwhile they get to call us parasites and whatever else they like, and that seems apparently perfectly acceptable to the mainstream media.  Well, two can play at that game. 

Here is what Grover Norquist is.  He’s absolutely scum of the earth.  He’s lower than scum.  I don’t know what’s lower than scum.  Well, I do know:  it’s called a Norquist.  

This should be like the definition of Santorum.  When you look up Norquist, it should say something that’s so dirty, so filthy, such a filthy whore, that it’s lower than scum.  That’s what Grover Norquist is. 

Because if you’ve got money, and you want lower taxes, and you want to screw over the middle class, you want to screw over the 99%, and you want to give everything to the rich and to the top corporations, Grover is on his knees ready for you. 

He will do whatever it takes.  He will intimidate Republican politicians, he will fluff you up, he will do whatever it takes because he is lower than scum, he is [the] whore of the earth.  How do you like me now, Grover?  Do you want to keep doing name calling?  Do you want to call me a parasite?  Do you want to call other liberals parasites?  

Well, I am going to stand up, okay, you God damn scum whore.  Do you want to keep representing the rich on your knees?  We are going to fight you.  We are not going to take your crap any more.  And we are coming for you. 

And if you are a little scared by that, a little intimidated by that—“oh my God, what if the middle class realizes how much we are robbing them”—well, you should be intimidated because we know you are robbing us.  And we know that you are doing it for the benefit of the rich in this country.  And we are coming for you.  

How do you like that, scum?

Cenk Uygur:  Today a giant mortgage settlement was announced for $26 billion.  But it has a lot of downsides to it, which we will tell you about in a second.  49 of the 50 attorney generals across the country have signed onto it.  Only the goof ball in Oklahoma, Attorney General Scott Pruitt, because he thought that the banks did nothing wrong.  I know, that’s why the banks always give you $26 billion when they did nothing wrong.  I guess he’s looking forward to making some money as a lobbyist later, that sellout, who screwed over the people of Oklahoma. 

As far as whether it’s a good deal or not, the President is convinced that it is a good one.  Let’s listen to him: 

President Barack Obama:  And no action, no matter how meaningful, is going to by itself entirely heal the housing market.  But this settlement is a start.  And we are going to make sure that the banks live up to their end of the bargain.  

Cenk Uygur:  Alright, I hope that is the case.  And he’s right:  it is a start, and it definitely has some good sides, which we are going to point out in a second.  Now one of the things that the President is pointing out is, hey, don’t forget, we can still go after the banks for other things that they have done wrong: 

President Barack Obama:  This settlement also protects our ability to further investigate the practices that caused this mess, and this is important.  The Mortgage Fraud Taskforce that I announced in my State of the Union address retains its full authority to aggressively investigate the packaging and selling of risky mortgages that led to this crisis.  

Cenk Uygur:  Alright, now that is good.  Now unfortunately let me share some of the bad stuff with you and I will come back to some of the positive moments here. 

There are 11 million homes underwater now, which means that they owe more money than the house is worth.  That’s a ton.  In this case, only 1 million will get aid, obviously not a great percentage.  

And for current homeowner relief, we are going to get $17 million in principal reductions.  Now that’s, of course, very helpful to the people who will get that aid.  But unfortunately negative equity in houses is $700 billion, meaning that’s how much more people owe than their homes are worth, so again, you see a giant disparity there, and one that is going to be hard to overcome. 

American homeowners are underwater on average by $50 thousand.  Now the average underwater here is going to get paid $20 thousand.  Of the ones who do get paid here will only get $20 thousand worth of help.  Now that is for the people who still have their houses.  

But a lot have already been foreclosed on.  In fact, in the last five years, 4 million homes have been foreclosed on.  But of those, only 750 thousand people will get help, so a great majority will not.  And of that three-quarter of a million people, they will get anywhere between $1,800 to $2,000.  And if you lost your home, getting $2,000 is not a great settlement for you:  it hurts very much. 

Now some of the upsides are fraud cases in New York will be preserved against the banks, we can still sue under the false claims act in California, there will be a federal mortgage investigation that continues as the President explained, secularization claims, tax fraud claims, insurance fraud claims, can still be brought by the attorney generals of the different states, and individual homeowners can sue. 

So there are still a lot of options for us.  Unfortunately the statute of limitations has run on some of those, and that’s why the banks, and, unfortunately, Tim Geithner, who helps the banks, dragged this out for so long so that we couldn’t bring some of the strongest cases.  That’s why Tim Geithner is known on Wall Street as “our man in government”. 

One other person who shares some of these concerns is Cynthia Kouril, who is a former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, and she wrote about this: 

“The court system will be permanently corrupted by forged and perjurious documents…This settlement is an incredible breach of social contract between the government and the governed.” 

So as you can tell, it really has some upsides and it has some downsides; it’s a tough bill to swallow for a lot of homeowners who will get no help from it.  On the other hand, we got something from the banks.  Let me bring in a reporter who has been covering this, Janelle Ross, a business reporter for the Huffington Post, to get a little bit more detail here. 

You wrote about a family that experienced foreclosure and how the banks strung them along.   I thought it was such an interesting case because so often in the media you hear people, the anchors, saying that these people were irresponsible and they had it coming.  But that is not always the case, is it? 

Janell Ross:  That’s true, definitely.  The family that I wrote about today, the Zapatas, who lived near West Palm Beach, Florida, certainly had enough income to afford the house that they purchased.  They were a family with savings before this crisis began.  So I don’t think that they would meet many of the typical criteria for a “irresponsible buyer”. 

Cenk Uygur:  So what did the people in the bank that held their mortgage do to them that was so egregrious that leads you to believe that maybe the bank did not have good intentions?

Janell Ross:  I’ll use the words of Monica Zapata.  What she told me about her experiences, that the bank that was managing, or as they say in the business, “servicing”, her loan, meaning that they were taking in her payment and also were in the position to approve a mortgage modification when the family ran into unforseeable financial troubles:  the economy declined, Mr. Zapata’s business began to fall apart, as you can imagine their income changed.  She immediately contacted her bank and asked for a change in terms. 

She filled out a forty page application.  That application sat with GMAC, in this case which later became Ally Financial, for about nine months.  And then she received notice that they were going to foreclose all the while she was checking in with the bank every two weeks, and she was being told that they were carefully considering her application, there were no hints at all, as she told me, that it was unlikely that this was going to be approved.

And she gets notice of foreclosure, and she goes to seek help from a nonprofit organization that works with a lot of homeowners facing the similar situation around the country , and they are encouraged to submit a second request for a mortgage modification, this time about fifty pages worth of documents, which they did two weeks before a deadline that was set by the bank. 

They submitted the application, received confirmation that the application has been received according to Mrs. Zapata, and a few weeks later were informed by GMAC that the mortgage modification was not received on time so the case had been closed, and there would be no modification made.  And GMAC moved to foreclose on this family.

Most remarkably, it seems that there was some effort, or perhaps some reason…one part of the foreclosure process in Florida requires lenders or servicers to sit down at a mediation session, a formal discussion with the borrower, to try to work out a last attempt at a deal, to try to keep the family in their home, or at least avoid a foreclosure where they have to get out quickly.  And that date kept being pushed back for this family to the point where they got to their final date, August 3rd, they were told that they would have to pay for the mediation session, which is not true. 

Under Florida law, the bank was supposed to pay for this session.  And as you can imagine, this family facing a serious financial crisis couldn’t afford to pay $400 an hour to sit down and talk with their servicer.   And the servicer sold their house on the very day of the scheduled mediation.

Cenk Uygur:  Right.  Janell, I’ll put it easier.  They got hosed.  They got screwed.  They got hoodwinked.  They did everything right, they submitted all the applications, they went to mediation, and the bank said, yeah, alright, we’re going to take care of it.  And the minute they could, they foreclosed on their house without asking them and going through the proper channels. 

And now what do they get.  They get a check for maybe $1,800 to $2,000 after they lost their $500,000 house.  It drives me crazy.  It was a great story.  Janell Ross from the Huffington Post, thank you so much for joining us.  We really appreciate it.

Janell Ross:  Thank you.

Cenk Uygur:  Let me say one more thing about this settlement.  Bank of America had already agreed to pay $8.5 billion.  And now that gets wiped out.  And $20 billion of this settlement doesn’t actually come from the banks; it comes from investors.  And guess who the investors are?  They are the people that the mortgages eventually went to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  Guess who’s paying the bills of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae?  Us, the taxpayers. 

God, this is frustrating!  We get a little bit of good news.  Overall there’s still a mountain of bad news here.  And this settlement here got some good parts but it’s got a lot of questionable parts, as you can see the devil is in the details.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The political debate over the government requiring catholic institutions to provide contraceptive coverage in the health care plans of their employees is not only continuing, it’s getting much hotter.  And it’s a debate that should have never happened.

The bottom line here is that, in a lot of ways, we’d be better off if we had a single-payer health care system where you didn’t have employers involved.

That was Peter Welsh, making the single most important point of the day on how we got to here.   The health care bill that President Obama signed into law is a virtually indescribable mess of compromises that included massive government giveaways to the pharmaceutical industry and most importantly to the health insurance industry.  The heartless conniving health insurance industries’ reward for decades for driving the cost of health care beyond the reach of 50 million people in the country was not government control of the industry’s pricing, but rather a government-delivered subsidy to help people buy wildly, over-priced health insurance with no real controls imposed on the price of that health insurance.  

You watched the saga of the health care bill becoming a law for over a year, right here on this network.  Night after night you saw a relentless stream of complaints about the compromises the democrats were making in response to the lobbying demands of the pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry.  You watched as it became perfectly reasonable and acceptable and routine to describe the bill here on this network as a wind fall for the insurance companies.

But the worst compromise of all was made before the democrats wrote the first word of the legislation.  They compromised on their ideal solution, single-payer health care for all, in effect, opening medicare for everyone.

Medicare for all Teddy Kennedy used to call it.  It was his ideal and it was President Obama’s ideal long before he was candidate for president.

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan.  Everybody in, nobody out.  Single-payer health care plan, universal health care plan, that’s what I’d like to see.

Five years later, as a candidate for president, then Senator Obama said this about single payer.

I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single payer. what I said was if I was starting from scratch, if we didn’t have a system in which employers typically provided health care, I would probably go with a single payer system.

When president obama and the democrats went to work on health care reform, they never once even considered a single-payer solution.  The word solution only applies to the single-payer model. Anything other than single payer, anything that continues to maintain the oligarchy of the health insurance companies, and the dysfunctional market they have created and manipulate every day, is not worthy of the word solution.

With a single-payer solution abandoned at the start, the democrats embarked on writing a by-the-way bill that would continue to sustain and promote the dominance of health insurance companies and continue to rely on employers to provide health insurance for their workers.

Employers should not be in the health insurance business. Carmakers should be making cars, not trying to figure out the rigged health insurance market. 

So, the new health care law did not solve our problems.  It simply traded some problems for new problems.  The newest problem involves the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church, as an institution, running hospitals and schools all around the world, is not confronted by a theological challenge of the kind we’re seeing today in any of the other countries where it employs people because those countries do not make the irresponsible mistake of relying on employers to help to pay for their workers’ health insurance.  This is a uniquely American problem because the American health care system is and remains a unique mess, where we now, after three years of the most successful health care reform president we have ever had, now have more people without health insurance in this country than when George W. Bush was president.

And that is no fault of President Obama.  That is the fault of our employer-based private health insurance system.  When unemployment goes up in our system, people lose not just their jobs, they lose their health care.  In other countries, they justs lose their jobs.  Those countries think that is bad enough.  Losing your job and your health care with it is an unrelenting piece of American inhumanity that will be with us forever under the new health care law.

The law is frequently and always falsely described as one that will achieve universal coverage in this country, that everyone will be covered.  That is not true.  That was never true.  In the first draft of the legislation, it very deliberately and consciously left out 30 million people.  Only in America can you write legislation that leaves out 30 or 25 million people as the law now does and claim you have covered everyone.

You have heard in the last couple of days people arguing that it is very important that we make sure all women have contraceptive care, and they are absolutely right.  But all women in this country do not now have contraceptive care, and under this bill they never ever will.  Not all of them.  The new health care law makes no attempt to cover all women or all men.  More than half of the 25 million people who will be left without any health insurance forever are women. They will forever not have any access to contraception other than paying for it at top dollar cost, over the counter, which none of them will be able to afford.  They are and will remain throughout this debate the forgotten women of healthcare reform.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur: Now we are going to dive into the body and heart of the GOP, which sounds a little scary, and find out what makes it tick. 

Now Newt Gingrich has been on the attack against Mitt Romney saying that this guy at Bain Capital would come in and clean out your jobs, and they don’t want me to talk about the rich but I’m going to tell you all about it:

Newt Gingrich: Don’t talk about who got all the money. Don’t raise the questions of looking at all of the decisions. Can’t we just move forward, letting the rich keep all of the money.

Cenk Uygur: Look at what the Republicans are talking about, we’re not going to let the rich keep the money. But the rest of the Republican Party is not happy about it. Now this clip of John Sununu, former Governor of New Hampshire, who is one of Mitt Romney’s top surrogates now, is really telling. He’s going to be telling about the people who gave Newt Gingrich money. Of course, Sheldon Adelson is one of those top guys. He’s one of the richest men in the world; he owns a lot of the casinos in Las Vegas. Look at Sununu threatening him:

John Sununu: Does he think that people don’t remember when people attack him and pay for the attacks in the primary, especially when one of the parties that is receiving that attack is the same investment community that he likes to go to to finance his expansions. There is just no commonsense in this process and you kind of feel sorry for people that aren’t that bright.

Cenk Uygur: That Adelson people had a great comeback to that: “yeah, he’s among the top twenty-one richest people in the world. Yeah, there’s no hope for people who are not so bright.”

But look at what he is doing here: he’s threatening these people. He’s saying the way the Republican party works: look, if you are a good boy, we get you a lot of money. If you are a big investor, or need investment like Adelson, the financiers come in for you. If you are Gingrich and you want to get the speaking fees, we will do that for you. But if you are going to go around here breaking the china, you’re done, we are going to cut you off.

Michael Shure: And we’re scared. That’s the other thing. The John Sununus of the Republican Party feel like in Mitt Romney they had their safe candidate. And here he was, we will present him to America, he’s got the polling the best against the President—there was a poll that showed Ron Paul tighter—but in general he is the safe guy. A lot of the Republicans of the John Sununu ilk love the safe guy. And now they panicked because they see the safe guy becoming unsafe from within. It’s like friendly fire and it’s hurting. I think the Republicans are scared.

Cenk Uygur: But I think that it goes deeper than that. Sam, let me go to you again. Look, I think they feel that Romney is their guy. Romney is going to give Wall Street everything that they want. A lot of those financiers that Sununu is referring to are behind Romney, and they thought they had this thing in a good lockdown, and now are saying, why are you [the Republican Party] trying to ruin the good racket that we got going on?

Sam Seder: But I think that it even goes beyond that. Do you remember about a month ago there was a story about Frank Luntz telling Republicans that they should watch out for this rhetoric that’s going out there, coming out from Occupy Wall Street. There have been reports that people have been warning bankers the real problem could be that if the Republicans actually adopt some of this language, I think that this fear goes even beyond some type of Republican loyalty, I think it goes to the heart that there is a real concern that there is something catching fire amongst the American public.

When you see that 66% from that PEW Survey that you talked about yesterday showing that Americans think that the biggest conflict is class conflict. Thing like race, things like age came in the thirties, even immigration was lower than that class conflict, this has got to worry the establishment in this country. And it’s got to really worry them when the Republican party starts talking this way. And so I think that you see not only a fear about what’s happening amongst the Republicans, they are afraid that this is going to unleash something across the country. And I hope they are absolutely right.

Ben Mankiewicz: When I hear John Sununu speak, I feel that Citizens United worked. Because what they were able to do was control people, control their crowd. And now you got a crazy billionaire in whose hotel that I am going to stay in this weekend and he’s throwing $5 million out there and they can’t stop it. And they got no control over this all of a sudden. And it’s speech.

Michael Shure: Adelson said to Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC on election night that it’s the law, that they are allowed to do that. And then O’Donnell asked, do you like this law. And he said, no, but it’s the law, I don’t like it, but it’s the law.

Cenk Uygur: Ben makes a great point. Now we’ve got these three actual maverick guys, unlike the fake mavericks in 2008: you got Adelson (the guy from Vegas that Ben was talking about) who gave $5 million to Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC; you got Foster Friess, who is the big founder of Santorum’s Super PAC—he’s the guy from Wyoming, and Mr. Friess is saying, I don’t what any of you guys think, I am going to give all of the money to Santorum; and then, of course, you have John Huntsman, Sr., backing John Huntsman, Jr., which is understandable. And they are saying, oh, you want us to stop? Nah, I don’t think so.

Ben Mankiewicz: Why: we’re beyond your reach; we are too powerful.

Cenk Uygur: Right. So weigh in here, Jimmy, is Citizens United screwing the Republican party?

Jimmy Dore: It is right now, and it might in the long run, too, because Barack Obama outraised John McCain last time. So it might screw them: who knows. The snake might bite its own head off.

Cenk Uygur: You know what’s interesting? Glenn Greenwald was in favor of Citizens United. You wouldn’t expect that at all, right? In fact, on the Young Turks, we had a debate between Glenn Greenwald and Professor Lessig from Harvard on Citizens United. And Greenwald in an interesting camp said let them all speak and see what happens. Sam, are we seeing it’s an unexpectedly decent point given that now the “establishment” can’t control these guys, and you got these guys saying, I have $5 million, you step aside, I am going to do some serious damage.

Sam Seder: I don’t know. I am not terribly excited about the prospect of just watching billionaires deciding who it is that they want to be President. They are going back and forth. What you are seeing is just how petty these guys are and just how little $5 million means to a guy who has a billion dollars. When I went out to buy this sweater vest, I thought more about that purchase that this guy who dropped $5 million. You know, Newt’s a good guy, he hates Islams, so I will give him $5 million, maybe I’ll give him $50 million, what difference does it make.

Michael Shure: Nobody says Newt’s a good guy.

Sam Seder: Adelson does.

Cenk Uygur: And the irony is, and it’s full of ironies, the rest of the Republicans are kind of pulling for Adelson for the first time in history, saying, okay, going to do some damage to Romney, let’s see how that works out. He’s not a guy that I agree with at all.

But I want to go back to the idea that we started with, which is how the Republican party works.  And I think that this is how they keep people in line with these threats, not just Sununu against Adelson, but much more effectively, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, who is a conservator blogger over there, saying, hey, all these guys who made this documentary about Bain, we are coming for you. She called one of their employers, a PR company, and said, why are you employing this guy who seems to be agreeing with Democrats and Progressives. And the whole system is based on how do you keep people in line.

Jimmy Dore: You know, Tony Blankley passed this week and everybody was talking about how a great guy he was. And he was. He was a nice guy, he was affable, he never yelled when he made his points. People liked to see him at parties and he was a good father and had a nice British accent. But no one is going to say what defined Tony Blankley, which was his inability to tell the truth unless it already lined up with his partisan view.

That’s the thing that kills me about the Republicans. You can have a great career as a right-wing talking head and columnist as long as you never really tell the truth.

Cenk Uygur: That’s exactly it. And David Frum actually said some very similar things. A huge neocon; but when he stepped off the reservation on a couple of points that they didn’t like, he was immediately fired. And he wrote about that: they made the gravy train stop. That’s how they keep everybody in line. It’s the party of the rich, funded by the rich, completely directed by the rich. The only reason that we are having a disagreement now is because a couple of the rich guys went off the reservation.

Jimmy Dore: And if there is a gravy train on the Left, can you point me to it? It’s filled with gravy.

Cenk Uygur: There’s no money. Everybody always talks about Soros. I haven’t seen a dime from Soros. Where are you Soros?

William Brighenti
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur: Do you know what we are doing tonight? The Mega Power Panel. Michael Shure is here: the Epic Politics Man; the host of 2012 on the TYT Network. Ben Mankiewicz, also with the Young Turks, and also with Turner Classic Movies. Jimmy Dore, the comedian, the host of the Jimmy Dore Show. Sam Seder from New York, the host of the irreverent Majority Report, which I rather enjoy. I think I will call this the People’s Panel.

First topic for the panel: are conservatives this week admitting that the country is fundamentally progressive? My thesis for that is that you have Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and John Huntsman all talking about breaking up the big banks, Bain Capital, and other terrible things. In fact, other conservatives, like Nikki Haley, are saying, these guys are admitting that progressives are right basically.

Nikki Haley: We have a real problem when we have Republicans talking like them Democrats against the free market. We believe in the free market.

Cenk Uygur: She’s not alone. And then Rush Limbaugh said this on his program about the line of attack against Mitt Romney:

“You have to say that Newt and Perry blew it the last two days. The attacks that they mounted on Romney are not defensible. This is not conservatism. It’s the polar opposite of conservatism.”

So Michael let me start with you. Isn’t that an interesting admission that some of the leading candidates on the Republican side say conservatism doesn’t appeal to voters. I’m going progressive.

Michael Shure: In a way it kind of justifies everything that we have been saying about Republicans for so long that they just march in lock step with one another. And then you see somebody veer off and go against that and this is what happens. It’s almost like they are against the dogma of Republican politics right now.

So it’s surprising and it is also comforting. Because we could be witnessing possibly the first fracturing of a party that we thought would fracture. I thought that it would fracture from the right. I thought it would fracture because some of what used to be called moderate Republicans (they don’t seem to exist at all anymore, at least elected ones don’t), I thought they were going to separate off. I thought that the really conservative religious zealots were going to be too distasteful for the majority of the party.

It turns out that what’s happening is your hearing some of the conservatives say, what this guy did in Massachusetts when he was working for Bain when he was on Wall Street is indefensible even from our party. So I think that this may be the dawn of the splintering of that party.

Cenk Uygur: Sam, on Thursday here, we talked about how 55% of Republicans either strongly or very strongly feel that there’s income inequality and that there’s a problem among the classes, that there’s a conflict there. So is the reason that Gingrich and Perry and all these guys are going in that direction because even the Republican voters are progressive?

Sam Seder: I don’t know if the Republican voters are progressive but that PEW survey that you cited that number across the board has gone up by 20% in just the past two years. And I think that what that shows is that the message that Occupy Wall Street has been articulating is spreading across the country.

And I think Gingrich and Perry are a little bit desperate. I think Gingrich really hates Mitt Romney, and I think that he knows that that message resonates.

It’s a fracture along the lines in the Republican party between sort of business interests and the financier interests. I welcome it. I don’t know if it will resonate with South Carolina voters but I think that it is something that’s good for the country as a whole because it is amplifying the message that we are getting from Occupy Wall Street and it is amplifying the message that progressives have been saying for years now.

Cenk Uygur: Gingrich is saying, I gotta get votes, so he says, Goddamn rich, they’re screwing us.

Ben Mankiewicz: I don’t think this is a sign of anything. I don’t think it’s a significant fracture in the party. I think it goes to what Sam said, Newt Gingrich hates Mitt Romney, and everybody else hates Newt Gingrich. And that’s essentially what it is.

That Gingrich is incredibly isolated, he is an angry man, he doesn’t listen to anybody, he is prideful, and he thinks that this is the best thing for him and that’s it. And now we are seeing people who you never thought would speak publicly against Newt Gingrich so offended by what Gingrich has done that people like Rush Limbaugh and Nikki Haley are coming out and condemning essentially Gingrich. John Huntsman, who no one is paying attention to, and Rick Perry are just along for the ride.

Cenk Uygur: I’m not buying that. They’re all going populist. Ron Paul is going populist.

Michael Shure: I think that one thing that Sam said we can’t gloss over. I think Ben’s right in large part, because this is about the sort of animus between the two to a degree but this is occupy: this is what the people in the Occupy Movement wanted. It’s part of the national debate right now even so much that the Republicans are talking about it.

And I think that is important. I don’t think you can overlook that for whatever else is involved in this. And the hate between Gingrich and Romney and, like Ben said, between Gingrich and everybody it seems, and it seemed that way for many years….

Jimmy Dore: Nikki Haley said we have a problem when Republicans start attacking other Republicans for free market capitalism. We have a problem when Republicans can start accurately defining the issues. That’s the problem. Oh my God, they are starting to really talk about what’s happening in this economy: we have to stop that, and we have to stop it now.

Cenk Uygur: I think Jimmy is 100% right. They’re panicking: they’re saying, what the hell is the matter with you? Our job is to protect the rich. If you are going to attack the rich, you are basically giving up the game here.

Ben Mankiewicz: I think that the guys who spoke out against this, Rudy Giuliani who spoke out against it and condemned Gingrich, and Nikki Haley, and Rush Limbaugh, and everybody at Fox, Sean Hannity, were so angry at Rick Perry, that eventually that that argument is going to come back and carry the day. Maybe I’m wrong, but if we are still talking about this in a month as we get closer to Super Tuesday, I’d be really surprised.

Sam Seder: The point is that this story is more important six, nine, and fifteen months from now than it will be in the next month. At the end of the day, you are right: Gingrich is going to go away, maybe he will hurt Romney in South Carolina, that remains to be seen, but this is going to be a big toe hold once the nominee is actually established in the Republican party because this puts pressure on Obama: you cannot be outflanked on the left by Newt Gingrich. It’s going to really hurt him unless he adopts some of this rhetoric because this is going to have more importance down the road than I think it even does now.

Cenk Uygur: Sam, I am glad you brought up Obama because I am going to go back to my central thesis: before the elections, give me the money, what do you need me to do; banker X, I will do this; banker Y, I will do that. But when the elections come around, all of a sudden everybody is a lying progressive. President Obama is talking about the 99%, but he still does Jacob Lew as Chief of Staff so he is not really acting on that, he is just talking the talk.

Huntsman is talking about how he is going to break up the big banks. That’s way left of Obama. If you told Obama let’s break up the big banks, he’d say, oh my God, please don’t do it: Tim Geithner told me not to do it. Ron Paul is way to the left of them on so many other issues. It turns out when you got to go get votes, you realize….

PEW Research just did a recent poll: what political title has the most positive ramifications? Conservative comes in number two. Number one in the country, 67% say progressive. It’s a fundamentally progressive country and these politicians know it.

Jimmy Dore: It’s funny because when Rush Limbaugh says that these attacks on Mitt Romney are indefensible, the reason why that he is upset about them is because they are defensible. If they were indefensible, nobody would care. They are very defensible, and that’s why they hate Ron Paul, too because half the stuff he says is defensible. If it were indefensible, nobody would care.

Cenk Uygur: That’s exactly right. When we come back, what makes the GOP tick because there is one clip that I really need you to see because it is an excellent indication of how the Republican party works.

William Brighenti
Certified Public Accountant
Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Cenk Ugur: We’ve got a new PEW Research Center study out saying that Americans are pissed about the state of our economic inequality. In fact, since 2009 things have gotten much, much worse. The conflict between the rich and the poor is either strong or very strong: now 66% of the American people. It was just at 47% in 2009. In just two years people have caught on as to what Warren Buffett said, we’ve got class warfare and unfortunately the upper class is winning. And they get the sense of injustice, and they are totally right about that.

But another interesting question in the PEW study was about why are rich people rich. That had an interesting answer. 46% said that they knew the right people or were born into wealth. 43% said that they work hard, ambition, or they got an education. 8% said both equally or neither.

A lot of those numbers are right. Some people were born rich, like George W. Bush whose father was rich; and some people earned it: Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc. But those people are not the issue here. And I don’t want anybody to generalize. Don’t hate the rich: that’s the craziest thing ever. Your local doctor is richer than the plumber. That’s okay: everybody gets that; nobody is opposed to that.

The question is, is there a certain subset of the rich who got there unfairly? Who fixed the system to be able to do that? And the answer to that unfortunately is yes. And that’s what people are angry about. In fact, I’ll give you just a couple of examples of what we are discussing.

Remember Hank Paulson? He was the CEO for Goldman Sachs, the head of one of the largest financial institutions in the country. And when he was there he had made $567 million from Goldman Sachs. He went over to the Treasury Department, where he was the head of the Treasury for the Bush administration, and what did he do? He gave Goldman Sachs a $13 billion backdoor bailout from AIG after the economic collapse. And that is one of so many different things that Hank Paulson and his cronies inside the Treasury Department and at the Fed did during the bailouts.

Now you have to understand why that is so unfair. What does a backdoor bailout mean? Goldman Sachs basically had made a bet that AIG in case of a disaster would be able to pay them. It turns out that AIG went bankrupt. They shouldn’t have been able to pay them at all. In those cases, with the conservatives saying, free market, you lose all of your money, it’s bad news for you. But in this case, it wasn’t. It was a sad day for us because the former CEO of Goldman Sachs was the Treasury Department head so he talked to Tim Geithner, among others, and said not only are we going to have this bankrupt company pay back Goldman Sachs with taxpayer money but we are going to do it at 100%.

That’s crazy. No way in a business deal when a company goes bankrupt and they owe a certain amount of money that they pay 100% of that. They went bankrupt. They pay at best a small percentage of that money. That’s normal business. But in this case we did not have normal business. They took $13 billion of your money, they took it out of our pockets, and they gave it to Goldman Sachs because the guy running the shop was from Goldman Sachs and had made over $500 million from Goldman Sachs.

That’s what we are angry about because they fixed the system. They took our money. If you made your own money, God bless your heart, we are all Americans, we have no problem with that.

Now in one other example is how they fixed the tax system. The Walton family is unbelievable. Do you know that six heirs of Sam Walton, who created Walmart, have the equivalent in wealth of 100 million Americans? Just six people have the wealth of 100 million Americans. So what have they been doing? They have been arguing all this time that the estate tax needs to be lowered. Why? Because the estate tax is so important to the Walton family. When their father passed away, they needed it to be lowered so that they could get paid more even though they weren’t the ones who had set up the business.  And when their kids are going to get the money from them–those kids didn’t do anything to set up the business either–but they are all going to get fabulously wealthy, and they want to be even richer.  So what do they do?  They buy politicians.  [Of course!]

From 1999 to 2006 alone, the Walton family spent over $10 million lobbying to lower taxes, especially the estate tax.  $10 million is a lot of money, but where did it get them? Combined with the expenditures from other rich families and other rich interests that gave money to all these politicians, they succeeded:  in 2010, as part of the tax cut deal, the Obama administration agreed with the Republicans that the estate tax should be lowered from 55% to 35%!

What did the Walton family gain from that? Given that they have a fortune of $84 billion, if you do the math, they gained about $16.8 billion. If you give about $10 million to buy some politicians, you get about $17 billion in return.  [Not a shabby return on one's investment, is it?]

There’s nothing wrong with the Walton family making their money. But when they fix the system so that they don’t pay their fair share, and their grandchildren don’t pay their fair share on money that they didn’t even earn, their grandpapa earned, it isn’t right!  That’s what Americans are now upset about.  That’s what they recognize.  Unfortunately almost none of our politicians recognize that because they are the guys who got bought by these rich interests.  [It's legalized bribery.]

So it’s our job to point it out here.  It’s part of the reason we call this place rebel headquarters because that is what we are talking about when we say that we are against the establishment.  The Hank Paulsons of this country are robbing us blind.  The Waltons pay less taxes, as the average guy pays more taxes.  [America is a great country, isn't it...if you happen to be rich.]

Warren Buffett has put out a call to many of the executives of the top companies saying if you can show that you pay more in taxes than your secretary does as a percentage of your income, that he will give them a tremendous amount of money. None of them have taken him up on it. Why? Because they all pay less than you in taxes as a percentage. Why? They fix the system. They bought our politicians.

Unfortunately we don’t have a representative democracy anymore.  That’s what we got to fight back against.

The Barefoot Accountant

If this is capitalism, wealth for the few, the elite 1%, at the expense of the working class, 99% of Americans, then ask yourself: is our capitalistic system working? Does creative destruction enhance profitability? Isn’t Mitt Romney a Gordon Grekko? Do you want Gordon Grekko in the Oval Office as the President of the United States?

But in all fairness to Mitt Romney, would any other Presidential candidate be any different?  Wouldn’t Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, John Huntsman, and even Ron Paul allow the continued consolidation of corporate companies, which have been closing down subsidiaries, laying off staffs, destroying jobs, in order to restructure for more corporate profits? 

And has President Barack Obama acted any differently as President?  Has Obama enforced the Sherman Anti-Trust Act?  Has he proposed the re-enactment of Glass-Steagall?  Isn’t Obama also controlled by the banksters and Wall Street?

In fact, isn’t our entire Congress, except for a very few like Bernie Sanders, in the hands of Wall Street, on the corporate payroll?

I read the plan, and I am impressed with some of its key components. Sadly, the plan has not yet received widespread and detailed coverage in the media. Perhaps thirty-four pages of specific proposals, comprehensive in scope, filled with statistics, and supported by countless references to articles by progressive economists and others, is too much for many readers and media editors to wade through. Consequently, I intend to provide an interpretation of her plan herein for those wishing an explique of her plan.

It is important to note that Congressman Chris Murphy has not published a plan of what he intends to promote and accomplish if elected Senator of the United States.  In fact, of the approximately ten (10) senatorial races scheduled for 2012, I know of no other candidates publishing a plan and detailing in one written document what they intend to endorse if elected.  For that alone, Susan Bysiewicz deserves a letter grade of “A”.

At the core of Susan Bysiewicz’s plan is a nominal (as low as .01%) “transaction tax” to be levied on speculative trading on Wall Street.  Although a very modest tax, Susan Bysiewicz, an economics and history major at Yale University prior to her attainment of a law degree from Duke University, projects that the tax would raise at least $150 billion annually in tax revenues.

She justifies the imposition of a transaction tax on the grounds that it would reduce the casino-like, irrationally exuberant, gambling element of trading occurring on Wall Street, producing needless volatility in market prices of stocks and bonds and, as a result, contributing to investment risk.   A transaction tax has been implemented in the United Kingdom and in other G-20 nations, and empirical evidence has shown that it would not impair the financial markets at all.  In fact, the United States previously had imposed such a tax for decades, from 1914 through 1966, while Republicans like Bob Dole and George Bush had previously endorsed a securities trading tax as well, even though they were Republicans.  Since Wall Street was ultimately responsible for the economic tsunami that occurred in 2008 and has been with us ever since, Susan Bysiewicz reasons that it should help pay back some of the costs borne by the middle class of America as well as be penalized for its knowing sale of “shit-backed” [my wording] mortgage securities, considering the fact that not one Wall Streeter has ever been indicted nor imprisoned for its fraudulent acts.

The funds from the transaction tax would finance two of the plan’s key economic components designed to return our country from the “depression” in which we currently find ourselves:  (1) a homeownship refinancing program to assist owners of mortgages “under water”; and (2) a clean energy program mandating that public utilities are forced to purchase renewable energy at contractually set prices.

I recall a similar homeownership refinancing plan being promoted at the end of 2008 and in early 2009, predicated on the government buying salvageable mortgages (that is, those in which the homeowner had the likelihood of servicing the mortgage if it were simply restructured), issuing 10 year treasury bills to finance the purchases, and then charging the homeowner an increased rate of a fraction of a percent higher than the treasury rate for the term of the mortgage.  The proposal’s appeal was multifold:

1. It would not result in a permanent increase to the National Debt since the treasury bills would be serviced by the payments received from the homeowners;
2. It would attack the principal cause of the economic tsunami, the subprime mortgages;
3. It would stop the spiraling decline in housing prices;
4. It would rejuvenate the housing industry and create more jobs;
5. It would increase the liquidity of the banks in order to spur more commercial lending, and thereby aid the recovery.

Susan Bysiewicz’s plan is similar but different in one respect.  Rather than focusing on lower interest rates, it would focus on lowering the principal balance remaining on these troubled mortgages to levels just below the current market values of the homes.  This, of course, would lower the mortgage payments of the homeowners and help keep them in their homes.  However, instead of issuing treasury bills to buy the mortgages, the government would pay for a refinancing of the mortgage and subsidize the excess of the mortgage balance over the remaining collaterized equity in the home with a portion of the revenues from the transaction tax.

The other key component of Susan Bysiewicz’s economic plan is her clean energy program, again largely financed by that tiny transaction tax (perhaps I should dub it the “ttt” or “TTT” element of her plan).  This plan would require utilities to purchase renewable energy from businesses, homeowners, et al, providing grid access to producers.  Again a portion of the transaction tax would finance the higher initial costs of electricity from clean sources until the technology develops to make it competitive to fossil fuels.  Since grid upgrades would be needed by utilities to provide access to the producers of this clean energy, the plan would rely on a national infrastructure bank to finance their cost; however, Susan Bysiewicz’s plan does not provide any further details on this national infrastructure bank.

For me, the transaction tax, the homeownership vesting plan, and the clean energy contracts program represent the economic heart of Susan Bysiewicz’s accountability plan.  But there are other components to the plan which I will attempt to summarize below.

The plan advocates ending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, the removal of the tax loopholes for large corporations, and the taxing of hedge fund compensation as ordinary income, with no portion receiving capital gains treatment.  The tax loopholes mentioned in Susan’s plan include the offshore tax havens currently available to corporations  in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Bahamas, etc., the tax subsidies to the oil and gas industry, the ethanol tax break for giant agribusinesses, the currently allowable deductions for extravagant entertainment, and the tax deferral of foreign source income, permitting corporations to offset federal income tax with foreign income taxes.  The latter tax corporate loophole is especially troubling to me since it encourages foreign rather than domestic investment.  In contrast, domestic corporations with no operations overseas do not receive comparable tax credits for state income taxes paid but merely a tax deduction.  Dollar for dollar, a tax credit is much more advantageous than a tax deduction since it minimizes taxes considerably, by about 65% on foreign source income.  So, logically, the question is why should corporations with foreign operations receive this more favorable tax treatment for its foreign operations as compared to its domestic operations?  Should they be so rewarded for investing in China and exporting our jobs overseas?

Another key part of Bysiewicz’s plan is her proposed attack on the corporate lobbyist control of government, including a ban on earmarks, contributions and gifts from lobbyists to members of Congress, a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizen’s United Decision and reverse the flood of corporate money into elections, and a five-year ban (instead of the current one year) on members of Congress from becoming lobbyists as well as on lobbyists from becoming members of Congress or senior congressional staff.  This component attacks the core of the corruption in Washington today, the influence of monied interests over governmental officials.  It is needed today more than ever since our government has become transformed through legalized bribery into a plutocracy from a democracy.

The remaining chapters of Susan Bysiewicz’s plan for America’s reform propose the return of American troops from Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the closing of many military bases in Europe and Japan, and immigration reform, since the latter system is broken, failing to enforce the laws and fostering a shadow economy.

All in all, the Accountability Plan of Susan Bysiewicz is progressive, specific, comprehensive, and scholarly:  it is supported by facts, statistics, and proposals by noted economists.  Susan’s plan demonstrates her avowed commitment to reform.  However, there are some obvious omissions from her plan from an aggressive progressive point of view:

1. There is no mention of the need for the re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act.  I found this omission disappointing, if not egregious, since the marriage of commercial and investment banking not only precipitated the Great Depression but also our very own in 2007, in light of the fact that it occurred merely within eight years of its repeal in 1999.
2. There is no mention of the need to revamp our trade agreements.  We need a level playing field in which to compete.  Our trade deficit continues to grow each year and our jobs continue to be outsourced overseas.  Why not propose an international minimum wage since we now have a global economy, and such an economy demands some minimal standards of fair play and human decency.  By exploiting and hiring labor in Cambodia at $.22/hour, or in China at $.25/hour, are we not all guilty of condoning slavery?  All humans deserve a minimal standard of living, including those in shanties in Southeast Asia and India.
3. There is no mention of a large-scale infrastructure program.  Obama in his recent jobs bill merely proposed a meager $140 billion investment in infrastructure, when economists are calling for an investment of at least $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.  America is now one of the shabbiest industrial leaders in terms of infrastructure.  Such an investment would create millions of jobs, improve our capital assets, spur research and development, and spawn new industries.
4. There is no mention of a major jobs bill like CETA or the WPA.  Extensions of unemployment benefits do little to restore hope and dignity to those who are unemployed.  Nor do they provide the on-the-job training necessary for those to be hired if and when the economy ever improves.  I got my first job on CETA; my father obtained his first job on the WPA.  These programs work.  And Americans want to work.

I cannot help but suspect that from their omission in her plan Susan fears being perceived as too progressive, pushing the envelope too far, alienating certain voters, or being labeled a radical.  Or perhaps she is not as aggressive as a progressive as I am or feels that full employment is attainable with a transaction tax, homeownership vesting program, and clean energy bill.  I disagree:  much, much more will be needed to achieve full employment.  More Elizabeth Warrens and Alan Graysons are needed in office today now more than ever.  And being labeled as a bold progressive has not hurt them:  rather, it has helped both of their campaigns.  I predict both Warren and Grayson will win their seats.

I urge Susan Bysiewicz not to hold back.  The American people are hungry for an authentic leader for real reform.  This is not the time to be perceived as too careful, too conservative, too calculating.  This is the moment for advocacy, for authenticity, for ardor.  And the depression (Susan’s own characterization of our circumstances today) now demands drastic, dramatic action, since the time for action was three years ago.

This was the failure of President Barack Obama, who campaigned on “hope and change” and “change you can believe in”.  Unfortunately, we do not see the change because he played it too safe, conceded early, failed to fight the good fight, agreed to too little.  Consequently our depression continues.  President Obama has not been bold enough:  he failed to walk the talk, and that is why many progressives have become disenchanted, if not disillusioned, with President Obama.  And so his presidency is now at risk.

And neither has Chris Murphy been progressive enough for me.  I recall attending one of his teleconferences in the summer of 2009 and hearing him urge patience to his Congressional constituents when they were losing their jobs, health insurance, and unable to pay their mortgages.  I heard him reiterate his faith in our present capitalistic system and the need for time for it to work.  I recall him saying that governments do not create jobs, businesses do.  But what if the jobs are being created everywhere but here?  I failed to hear Chris Murphy then propose major dramatic change and reform, a call to action, for all of us without employment and health insurance and on the verge of losing our homes.  It was at that moment in time I started to lose faith and hope in Congressman Chris Murphy.

In spite of his recent votes against the extension of the Bush tax cuts and the Defense Authorization Act, the fact that the securities and investment industry has been one of the top three industry donors to him concerns me.  How can I have confidence in him to vote for the re-enactment of the Glass-Steagall Act under those circumstances?  Is it any surprise that Representative Chris Murphy voted against H.R. 4213, “The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010”:  a bill that would have ended a tax break for executives of investment funds, leading hedge funds, private equity firms and venture capitalists; a bill that would have changed the tax treatment of “carried interest,” which is the portion of a fund’s investment gains taken by fund managers as compensation, permitting those monies to be taxed at the capital gains tax rate of 15% instead of at the ordinary income tax rate of 35%?

Is it any wonder that President Obama, too, never followed through with his campaign promises to enact much tougher reforms of Wall Street when Goldman Sachs (or should we say, Government Sachs) was his largest contributor in 2008?  Is it any wonder that Congress has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the multinational corporations with billions of dollars pouring into the campaigns of our elected officials via lobbyists, PACs, and contributions?

So when Congressman Chris Murphy repeatedly refused to grant me a short interview, saying he was too busy attending to the business of Washington, I could only suspect that, like most politicians, he was merely too busy raising money for his next campaign.

In contrast, Susan Bysiewicz had made herself readily available to each request for an interview.  I like that.  I appreciate her accesssibility:  isn’t that encouraging to the electorate, that a representative will make oneself available to one’s constituents?  I have never received the courtesy of a reply from Chris Murphy himself to my repeated requests for an interview.  Again, Susan Bysiewicz receives an “A” grade for her accessibility to the public for whom she intends to serve.  And I deeply thank her for her generosity.

I encourage all Connecticut residents and voters to read and study Susan Bysiewicz’s plan.  Several of its core features are great proposals.  Overall I give the plan an “A” grade, but with the proviso, “need for improvement”.  Yes, Susan, this is your plan, but all plans should be dynamic, not cast in stone, and as you prefaced at the commencement of the interview today, this plan evolved from listening to your constituents.  I urge you to continue listening to your constituents and to keep your plan open to further suggestions and improvements.

The Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur: Now I want to turn to a domestic issue here that is related to the economy. This is one of my pet peeves. Jay Carney was on the “Morning Joe” program and they asked him about how deep the recession is. Let’s listen to his answer and then I am going to set him straight.

Jay Carney: There was not a single, main stream, Wall Street, academic economist who knew at the time in January of 2009 just how deep the economic hole was that we were in. At that point we thought that we had shrunk by 3% in the fourth quarter of 2008, the last quarter that George W. Bush was President. As you know now, and I know now, it was 9%.

Cenk Uygur: No one could have seen it coming! This is what every government official has said for the last ten years. Hurricaine Katrina: no one could have seen it except the weatherman. Iraq war going disasterously: no one could have seen it except all of the people who did see it. And that list goes on and on.

Now the recession. Now it is funny that he says January of 2009 because right at that moment here are all of the economists who said it was terrible.

Paul Krugman: he said that the plan to jump start the economy was “nowhere near big enough”…it was “unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap”. And he said it was “the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression.” But nobody could have seen it coming. Do you think it is just Krugman?

Martin Feldstein, Harvard professor and former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan: he said “this recession is likely to last longer and be more damaging than any since the depression of the 1930′s.” But nobody could have seen it coming.

James Galbraith: “there are many good reasons to think” that America is in “a true financial crisis of the type in the 1930s.” But nobody could have seen it coming.

These are all in January and February of 2009.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics: “the economy appears headed toward its worst downturn since the Great Depression.” But nobody could have seen it coming.

Look, they say that to avoid responsibility. The reality is many progressives in this country said your stimulus package is way too small, and you did not listen. Instead you listened to Tim Geithner, who said, hey, you know what? Make a third of it tax cuts.

Instead you gave into Republicans. Okay, okay, okay, we will keep it under a trillion dollars. We don’t want to overspend.

And what happened? We have unemployment that at this point not only near 9% but as you will find out later in the show in reality it is closer to 11%. It was too small, and people saw it coming. You just didn’t listen to them because you listened to the establishment and not the progressives.

I am telling you that as a friend because you got to turn around; you got to change course.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC