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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

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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

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Certified Public Accountant

Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

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

Certified Public Accountant

Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Berlin, Connecticut

[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.

Video and review/transcription provided here by The Barefoot Accountant

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Certified Public Accountant

Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

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. 

Transcribed by The Barefoot Accountant

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Certified Public Accountant

Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

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

Recently one of our clients, Mike Panzarella, the owner of Strictly Chimneys, LLC, located here in Kensington (Berlin), Connecticut, was interviewed by Fox News to render his opinion on the chimney repair work undertaken by another chimney repair company. A homeowner in Cromwell, Connecticut, apparently complained about the quality and price of work done this year by an out-of-state chimney repair company, and Fox News interviewed the homeowner as well as Mike Panzarella in order to investigate and publicize the homeowner’s complaint.

Mike was approached by Fox News because he has an excellent reputation as a chimney repair expert. Mike Panzarella services the chimney repair work of the Governor’s mansion here in Connecticut, and has been in the business for years, starting in the trade as a teenager.

We personally know Mike Panzarella and have the highest respect of him as a reputable businessman and citizen of Berlin, Connecticut.  He is an expert in the field of chimney repair and cleaning, is impeccably honest, and can be trusted to stand behind his work and charge a reasonable, honest fee for his services.

It is noteworthy to point out that Strictly Chimneys, LLC has received an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, and has been a member of the National Chimney Sweep Guild and the Chimney Safety Institute of America.

Perhaps even more noteworthy, last October when we had lost our power from storm Alfred for nearly a week, and the temperature of our home declined to 45 degrees at 11 PM one evening, Mike Panzarella graciously offered to bring some wood over to our home and start a fire in our fireplace, after ensuring that it was safe to use.  He was the only individual who showed any concern for our welfare during that very difficult time for our family. For that courtesy and kindness alone, we shall forever be in Mike Panzarella’s debt.

We are proud to know Mike Panzarella, and honored to have him as a client.

Below is an unofficial transcript of the Fox News broadcast, “Cleaning You Out”, televised on February 3rd, 2012, featuring the expert opinion of Mike Panzarella of Strictly Chimneys, LLC.

Audrey Kuchen:  Anyone with a chimney knows how important it is to keep them clean, but at what cost, and how do you know who to trust?  

Jennifer Bosworth:  Fox Connecticut Beau Berman found one company whose Better Business Bureau rating failed miserably but it hasn’t stopped them from doing business right here in Connecticut.

Beau Berman:  When two men from Lysco Contracting showed up at Alice DiDomizio’s home offering to fix her chimney, she said okay.  They offered the 80 year old Cromwell woman a cheap chimney cleaning, but a few hours later, she was writing out a personal check for $5,000.  That’s when her granddaughter Katie came home.

Katie DiDomizio:  “They had told her to write the check out to his name, and not the company name, and that’s when I got suspicious, and I went into the other room and called my dad.”

Beau Berman:  The workers were out the door while Katie was still wondering what happened.

Alice DiDomizio:  “Because the price was a lot of money, for sure, you know what you put in.”

Beau Berman:  Katie went online, finding dozens of posts about Lysco Contracting.  In 2010 Main Attorney General, Janet Mills, sued Lysco Contracting Inc. for unfair and deceptive trade practices.  The suit called Lysco a Massachusetts based company and alleged that it convinced homeowners they needed repairs that were in fact unnecessary.

In Connecticut marketers identifying themselves as Lysco have been placing calls, including one to State Senator Bob Duff at his Norwalk home.

State Senator Bob Duff:  “Some gentleman started talking to me about my chimney and getting a cleaning.”

Beau Berman:  He hung up when the caller became aggressive. 

State Senator Bob Duff:  “So I did call back his number and found out that it was a phony number.  This company, Lysco Corporation, not only have they had problems in Connecticut, they’ve had problems up and down the east coast.”

Beau Berman:  Unfortunately Alice DiDomizio never saw the warning.  So we called the Berlin company, Strictly Chimneys to inspect the work.  The company is contracted with the State to sweep the Governor’s Mansion’s chimneys.  Owner Mike Panzarella said he has heard similar stories before about all sorts of chimney companies.

Mike Panzarella:  “We’ve gone and checked about five of these people’s chimneys and not one of them needed that liner.”

Beau Berman:  Down in DiDomizio’s basement Mike took a look inside.  He finds stainless steel liners for two furnaces but he says that the work isn’t done well.

Mike Panzarella:  “You’re supposed to have 18” from this pipe to any combustibles.  You don’t have this here.  So what we would have done is put a shield.”

Beau Berman:  The men did perform work but there are other issues that Mike discovers outside on the roof. 

Mike Panzarella:  “Do you see the mortar?  It’s all sand.  This is not how you repair a chimney.”

Beau Berman:  He said that the job is the equivalent of a band-aid. 

Mike Panzarella:  “For what they paid, these people are not doing things the way it should be.”

Beau Berman:  Not when it comes to their work or their paperwork.  On this receipt their license number is listed.  In a call to the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection we found Lysco Contracting is registered.  The problem is they are registered out of Deer Park, New York, making it hard for Connecticut to go after them. 

Lysco also has addresses in Maine and Massachusetts.  At the Better Business Bureau website, Lsyco carries an F rating. 

We reached Lysco by phone and spoke to a representative named Lee Erickson.  

Fox News representative:  “You are being sued by the Maine Attorney General’s Office, an F rating with the Better Business Bureau….”

Lee Erickson:  “That’s a funny thing.  With the Better Business Bureau, I don’t understand how they can even give us a rating.  We are not accredited with them.  And when they get complaints, I reply to every single one.  I explain to them exactly what happened from start to finish.”

Beau Berman:  The Lysco rep defended their work in Cromwell.

Lee Erickson:  “We were there for hours upon hours.  This wasn’t like an in and out, sheisty kind of work.  This was all done up to Connecticut State Code.”

Mike Panzarella:  “She probably overpaid by maybe $500 to $1,000.”

Beau Berman:  Back at the house Mike sums up the transaction with the DiDomizios.

Mike Panzarella:  “They found a chimney here that actually needed work.  But what they did was a little less than standard in my opinion.”

Beau Berman:  But he said these visits often turn out worse, and they can be from any number of companies. 

Mike Panzarella:  “I just feel bad for the ones that got scammed.  It’s kind of a scare thing where they tell them you could die from carbon monoxide:  that’s serious; you can’t tell people that.”

Beau Berman:  Mike’s fear is that this will continue unless the State steps in. 

Bob Duff:  “It really is difficult to prosecute some of them, and I think it behooves people who get these kinds of calls to hang up.”

Beau Berman:  From Cromwell, Beau Berman, Fox Connecticut.

Audrey Kuchen:  When hiring a chimney company, check whether they are a member of the Chimney Safety Institute of America and the National Chimney Sweep Guild.

Jennifer Bosworth:  Lysco Contracting says they are fighting the lawsuit in Maine.  The Maine Attorney General’s Office tells us it is headed to trial soon. 

William Brighenti, CPA
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

Lehman exacerbated AIG.   The simultaneous payouts of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) put catastrophic pressure on AIG. 

Wall Street started bundling home loans together as mortgage-backed securities and selling slices of those bundles to investors.  And they were making big money.  So they started pushing the lenders saying, “come on, we need more loans.” 

The lenders already had given loans to borrowers with good credit so they went bottom feeding:  that is, they lowered their criteria.   Before you needed a credit score of 620 and a down payment of 20%; later they would settle for 500, no money down.  And the buyer, the regular guy on the street, assumed that the experts knew what they were doing.  He said to himself, “if the banks are willing to loan me money, I must be able to afford it.”  So he reached for the American Dream:  he bought that house. 

The banks knew that securities based on shit-bagged mortgages were risky.  So to control their downside, the banks started buying a kind of insurance.  If mortgages defaulted, the insurance company would pay:  “default swaps”.  The banks insured their potential losses to move the risk off their books so they could invest more, and make more money.  While a lot of companies insured their stuff, one was dumb enough to take on an almost unbelievable amount of risk:  AIG. 

Why did they do that?  Fees!  Hundreds of millions in fees.  AIG figured that the housing market would just keep going up. 

But then the unexpected happened:  housing prices went down.  Why?  The poor bastards who bought their dream houses, when the teaser rates on their mortgages ran out, their payments went up beyond what they could afford to pay, and they defaulted.  And with the high default rates, the supply of existing housing on the market dramatically increased, driving prices down.  As a result of the spiraling increases in defaults, and the falling prices in housing prices, the mortgage-backed securities tanked, and AIG not only had to pay off the swaps, but it had to pay all of them  off, all over the world, and all at the same time.  Needless to say, AIG could not pay, and therefore AIG went under. 

Since AIG had insured a great number of banks, they all booked massive losses at the same time.  And many of them, in turn, went under.  And the whole financial system came tumbling down in 2008.

You may wonder, why wasn’t it regulated?  The simple answer is that no one in the financial services industry wanted it regulated.  They were all making too much money.

Cenk Uygur:  You often hear the excuse from the government:  “Well, we would love to do the financial fraud cases but we just don’t have the resources and besides we have been awfully tough on the banks.”  Laugh along with me. 

But Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes actually did a very good story where he talked to Larry Brewer who is the head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, and he asked him about the Sarbanes Oxley Act.  The Sarbanes Oxley Act is an act that says CEOs have to sign on saying they are not committing any fraud in this company, and if it turns out not to be true, they get up to five years in prison.

Now with this financial collapse, companies like Countrywide where there was widescale fraud is a perfect place to use the Sarbanes Oxley Act to hold those top executives accountable.  And Kroft asks him here in this segment of the interview why he didn’t do this.

Steve Kroft:  Do you lack confidence of bringing cases under Sarbanes Oxley?

Larry Brewer:  Steve, no one has really accused this Department of Justice or this Division or me of lacking confidence.  If you look at the prosecutors all over the country, they are bringing record cases with respect to all kinds of criminal laws.  Sarbanes Oxley is a tool but it’s only one tool. 

Cenk Uygur:  No one is accusing you?  I’m accusing you.  And record cases?  That simply isn’t true.  In fact, we have the numbers to show you.

A Syracuse study actually looked into this and they found out that the prosecution of federal financial cases went from a high of about 3,500 cases in 1999 down to 1,251 cases in 2011, and 1,365 cases in the last full year of 2010. So that number went way down, not up:  fraud cases down 57%.  So what happened to the fearsome Obama Department of Justice that no one accused of not following through on these cases?  I accuse you because I have the numbers.

A lot of people will say, Cenk, you don’t understand, there is nothing that they can do, they just don’t have the resources.  Really?  Interesting because David Sirota points out in an article in the Washington Post today about when the government goes after food stamps.  It turns out that when they are going after food stamp fraud, they’ve got plenty of resources. 

In fact, at the state level in 2010 they conducted 847,000 fraud investigations.  Okay that’s the state level, but how about the federal level?  Nearly 5,000 undercover investigations, which take longer, 5,000 versus only 1,200 against the financial executives.  Gee, I wonder where their priorities are; I can’t quite tell.

By the way, do you know how much there is in food stamp fraud in the country?  $753 million.  Now that sounds like a lot, and I want you to pursue that, I don’t want there to be fraud at that level, but the banks did not do millions, they did billions, not billions, sometimes trillions of dollars from us.  That’s much more important but somehow you just can’t find the resources for it.

Matt Taibbi also had a good piece about this.  He talked about a mother of two in Mississippi, named Anita McLemore, she apparently asked for food stamps when she had a criminal record, having been busted on drugs before.  How dare you?  Apparently you can’t feed your kids if you have a criminal record from before.  So they said, this is fraud.  We got you.  How much fraud did she do?  She did $4,367 of fraud.  Not millions, not billions, not trillions, just $4,367 worth of fraud.  Do you know how much she got?  She got three years in prison.

Here’s what Judge Wingate said when sending her away:  

“The defendant’s criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court.”

Well, how about the guys that have been the beneficiary of trillions of dollars at the federal level?  No, we don’t have resources for them.  We have to go after mothers of two who are trying to feed their kids.

But there are other things that we spend our money on.  How much money did we spend on the war on drugs?  $15 billion that the federal government spent:  that’s $500 a second.  You see, when you have the resources, apparently you know where to spend them.  $25 billion at the state and local level as well.  So $40 billion for the war on drugs, but for financial fraud, golly gee willickers, we just ran out of time and money, we were just about to get to it after the war on drugs and food stamp fraud.

Do you know how much they spent in New York City just evicting Occupy Wall Street?  $13 million.  But golly when it comes to Goldman Sachs, what’s weird is that they  just ran out of time.

By the way, Goldman Sachs, I believe, was the number one contributor to Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.  A wild coincidence I’m sure.

Now let me explain something to you.  It’s not like I think Obama is personally corrupt like he gets in a smoked-filled room with Lloyd Blankfein and says, how do you want me to cheat the system for you.  He’s not Blago, right?  But it is that he responds to financial incentives probably often at times not even recognizing it. 

Campaign finance reform is at the root of all of this.  Until that is changed, you are going to be going for the person or the company that has the money on you.  And that’s just the way it works.   Until that is fixed, until Citizens United is turned over, until there is a constitutional amendment, that’s the root of the problem, nothing is going to change priorities wise.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur:  President Obama is in Kansas yesterday, and something surprising happened:  he gave a really progressive speech.  Okay, that’s fantastic.  But as you read or heard the speech, I thought, I wish he meant it.  So what I am going to do is break down the speech and show you what he said and what he has actually done over the last three years.  So let’s look at the first part.

President Barack Obama:  For most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded.  Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people.  Fewer and fewer people who contributed to the success of our economy actually benefitted from that success.  Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and investments, wealthier than ever before.

Cenk Uygur:  Yeah, that sounds great.  The only question is, what did you do about it in the last three years.  And let me tell you the real record.  When it came to hedge fund managers, they get a 15% tax rate, which is lower than that of the average American.  When it came to capital investment, dividend investment…capital investment is over 50% for just the top 1%…that tax rate is also at 15%, and also less than that of the average American.  So why did they get to keep all those tax breaks under this so-called progressive administration?

Meanwhile trillions in spending cuts, including heating assistance to poor families who are now getting totally cut off:  in New Jersey there are a quarter of a million families who need heat in the middle of winter who won’t be getting it….So why did you maintain that system?  I wish that you really believed what you were saying.  Now let’s go to the next clip.

President Barack Obama:  Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history, and what did it get us?  The slowest job growth in half a century.

Cenk Uygur:  Alright, that’s true.  So why did you renew those Bush tax cuts?!  I know what your answer is:  Oh my God, the Republicans made me do it.  But if the Republicans make you always do what they want, then why did we elect a progressive president?  So I can’t believe that you are talking about the Bush tax cuts when you agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts.  To me, all this talk is fine but you gotta walk the talk, and he didn’t do it.  Now watch this next part.

President Barack Obama:  We all know the story by now.  Mortgages sold to people who couldn’t afford them, or even sometimes understand them.  Banks and investors allowed to keep packaging the risks and selling it off.  Huge bets and huge bonuses made with other people’s money on the line.  Regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all of this but looked the other way. 

Cenk Uygur:  Right.  So what did you do with the regulators?  Under Bush, I agree with you that the regulators were totally relieved of duty, basically.  There’s a little office called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  What it does is after the regulations are passed in the different departments, it waters them down.  So under Bush, 64% of the regulations got watered down, which is terrible, right?   Under Obama, it was 76%:  it was more!!!  Why did you water down regulations more than Bush did?  That doesn’t make any sense? 

How about for the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.  84% of the regulations were watered down.  So where are those regulators that you were talking about?  I wish you meant it but you didn’t.  Here’s another part.

President Barack Obama:   Now in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from some kind of collective amnesia.  After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis, the worst financial crisis, since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess.  In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle class Americans for way too many years. 

Cenk Uygur:  So why are you letting them?  Now let me tell you the record.  The number of fraud cases brought by Obama’s Justice Department is lower than the number brought by Bush’s Justice Department.  We got the stats on that in the next segment of our broadcast.  When you talk about how the banks are doing their business, Obama talks a half of a mean game about it, but then when he turns around, they can still do the derivatives trading just like they could before, the banks are even larger than they were before, and they still gamble with our money.  So what did you do to fix it?

But when elections come around, all of a sudden Obama sounds like a progressive.  Now let me show you a chart which is absolutely stunning.  The big banks got $7.7 trillion from the Fed, and, of course, they got another $700 billion from TARP.  And what did they get for the homeowners, the guys that Obama says that he’s looking out for now?  $2.6 billion. 

So where were you when the time was for walking and not just for talking?  And now the last part that annoyed or enraged me the most.

President Barack Obama:  Inequality also distorts our democracy.  It gives an outsized voice to the few, who can afford high-priced lobbyists, unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder.  It leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them.  That our elected officials are not looking out for the interests of most Americans.

Cenk Uygur:  But what did you do about it?  I thought that was the whole point of your campaign in 2008.  That’s why I was excited by it.  But was there a single campaign finance reform legislation?  Public financing?  Nothing.  Taking on corporate personhood?  Nothing.  Unlimited corporation donations?  Every once in a while he would say, “oh, it’s not a good thing.”  But what did he do about it?  What legislation did he push?  Nothing.  That is what is so frustrating.

Now you might ask, if he doesn’t act progressive, why is he talking progressive?  That’s because an election is coming up.  In fact, a guy who has an online show actually predicted that Obama would do exactly this a bunch of months ago.  Let’s check that out.

Video of Cenk Uygur on TYT:  President Obama tells us if he gets a second term, oh, boy, then he’s going to be a lion.  He was a lamb the whole first three years but watch out, as we get closer to the election, believe me, President Obama is going to sound a lot more progressive because the country is progressive.  He knows that’s how you get votes. 

Cenk Uygur:  And that turned out to be exactly right.  Here we go.  This is basically his first unofficial campaign event and all of a sudden President Obama sounds like a real progressive.  Me, personally, I’m not buying it.

But I want to talk to a real progressive.  Most certainly the most progressive senator, Bernie Sanders from Vermont.  Senator Sanders, great to have you with us.  First question for you:  you just heard what I said about President Obama.  Do you believe him when he does these great big progressive speeches?

Senator Bernie Sanders:  Well, I think you ask the right question, Cenk, and that is, where has he been for the last three years?  The election is coming up.  He understands that the American people are sick and tired of seeing the rich get richer, the middle class collapsed, poverty growing, and he’s talking to that issue.

But in terms of Wall Street, we need to be breaking up these giant banks.  The President was not there. He reappointed Ben Bernanke to be chairman of the Fed.  We needed a new approach toward the Fed.  He didn’t do that.  So I think the answer is that what the American people have to do is say to this President, “look, if you want our support, you are going to have to do more than just talk the talk.  We want some legislation, we want some fight, we want you to start standing up, taking on the Republicans, and if they filibuster, you take them on, don’t cave in.”

Cenk Uygur:  So my theory is, that you act progressive to get votes because in fact Washington knows—they always claim otherwise on TV—but they know that the voters are actually progressive.  They can read polls, right?  But when you go to get the money, well, then you’ve got to be pro-establishment.  So Obama acts progressive, gets the votes, and then when he goes in office he gets Ben Bernanke, as you said, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Ron Emanuel, all the establishment guys.  He collects money for three years, and then he turns around and wants our vote again.

Bernie Sanders:  This is what Washington does know.  Washington does know that the American people do not want to cut social security, medicare, and Medicaid.  Washington knows that the American people want the government to start taking on the big money interests and Wall Street.  Washington understands that the American people are demanding that the wealthiest folks in this country start paying their fair share of taxes and that we end all of these outrageous loopholes that corporations now enjoy.  That’s what the polls tell us.  That’s what the vast majority of the American people want.

You are raising the question, which is a very good question, and I applaud you for raising it, is the President just giving us what the polls are telling him to do or is he, in fact, going to stand up and fight.  And what I am suggesting right now is that the progressive movement in this country has got to tell this President, “don’t take us for granted.  We want to see you right now, not next term, right now leading the real fight against right-wing extremism.” 

Cenk Uygur:  Now that’s exactly right, Senator Sanders.  So I think that the most important question is, how can the President prove himself over the next year, because the speeches are easy.  We heard the speeches before, then we saw the action.  So what can he do now before the election—he still has a year left—that would signal to progressives, that he is actually progressive and actually trying to get something done?

Bernie Sanders:  Alright, the President has got to go up there and say, “you know what?  I talked a little bit about cutting social security and medicare and Medicaid, I was wrong.  I ain’t going to do that.  In the middle of a recession, these are life and death programs for tens and tens of millions of Americans.  You have my word, we are going to defend to the death social security, medicare, and Medicaid.”

The President right now, as we go forward, you raised this point, I come from a cold weather state, the President talked about major cuts in the heating assistance program for low income people and seniors, the President has got to get on board and say, “sorry, we are going to defend those programs.  We are going to ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes.”

I’ll tell you another issue that the Occupy Wall Street people raised very prominently, and that is the power of Wall Street:  the need to start breaking up these huge banks, the top six of which have assets equivalent to two-third’s of the GDP of the United States of America.  I would love to see this President get up there and say, “you know what?  Wall Street caused this recession.  We got many banks that are bigger now than they were before we bailed them out.  We are going to break them up.  That’s what we are going to do.  If Wall Street doesn’t like it, so what.”

Cenk Uygur:  Senator Sanders, unfortunately we are out of time, but I totally agree with you.  And there is a way to do it.  Unfortunately right now he is still offering medicare and social security cuts as concessions, which drives me crazy.  But you know what?  Even past the one hundred mistakes, if between now and the election, he breaks up the big banks, I say, alright, great, that’s it, mission accomplished.  That’s good enough for me.  I don’t want everything.  I just want some sign that you actually care and that you are actually going to take some action.

Bernie Sanders:  Cenk, I think what you want and the American people want to know that he has the guts to mix it up with the big money folks.

Cenk Uygur:  Exactly.  Senator Sanders who does have that guts, thank you so very much for joining us on the program. 

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant

Cenk Uygur on Current TV, interview of Vermont Senator, Bernie Sanders, on President Barack Obama’s recent progressive speeches.

Barefoot Accountant:  Let go on to discussing the equity of the tax laws.  Warren Buffett’s effective tax rate has been reported to be 11%.  In comparison, that of the average American is approximately 18%, without including payroll taxes, which would bring it in total to 25% for those employed, and up to 33% for those self-employed.

What do you think needs to be done to create tax equity in America. Do you think that the highest marginal tax rate should be increased on the wealthy? Presently, it’s 35%. As you know, last December President Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for another two years. As you recall, under President Clinton, the highest marginal tax rate was 39.6%.

The Progressive Democratic Caucus has proposed a dramatic increase in the highest marginal tax rate to 49%. I can recall the highest marginal tax rate in the 1950s being 91% under President Eisenhower. And I do not think that it was below 75% until 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office.

What do you think should be done to create tax equity in America?

Susan Bysiewicz: First of all there is a very large gap between the richest and the poorest in our country, and this gap has never been so large in our nation’s history. Here’s why we are where we are.

We are in a situation where we have a huge deficit and that deficit is with us for two main reasons:

First, because we had two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost us $1.26 trillion, and I opposed both of those wars from the start. But we put $1.26 trillion on our national credit card for those wars.

And in addition we have the costs of the Bush tax cuts that you mentioned, the largest in the history of our country. And those tax cuts have cost almost $3 trillion. So those tax cuts cost more than two and one-half times what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost. And I don’t think many Americans are aware how expensive those tax cuts were.

So you take those two things and you have $4 trillion of debt that they brought us.  And the question is how do we get out of that very large hole.  And cuts alone in spending are not going to get us there. 

And what we will have to do is have shared sacrifice, and we will have to raise revenue.  And I think first and foremost we should end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.  I think that is something that is very important to do.

We had the opportunity to do that last year before the election; unfortunately, there wasn’t the political will to do that. And we really need to address that sooner rather than later because if we don’t, those inequities are going to continue. And I say that because with the raising of the debt ceiling, we see even more burden being put on the most vulnerable of our citizens: you know, children, the elderly, the sick.

We really need to rearrange our national priorities if we are to address these issues that you are talking about.

Barefoot Accountant: I don’t know if this is a fair question, but I was disappointed to see that in the negotiations involving the deficit and the debt ceiling there would be no tax increases but they are expected to cut $2.1 trillion, including cuts in social security, medicare, and medicaid.

Would you have voted for that bill?

Susan Bysiewicz: No. Adamantly no. I will say this. We had an opportunity when this debt ceiling debate began to address two really important issues. And one of those issues was to address job creation. And I don’t see anything in that legislation that helps grows jobs.

And the second part of the issue that didn’t get addressed for the long term is putting our country on strong fiscal footing. There was an opportunity to do both of those things. Unfortunately we really didn’t do either. We did enough to make sure there wasn’t a financial collapse.

So I understand why some members of Congress voted for the raising of the debt ceiling. It’s something that we had to do, I believe. But the opportunity was lost to make some long term structural changes to reduce our debt and to create jobs in our country.

Transcribed by William Brighenti, Certified Public Accountant, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Nov 22

Dear William,

It’s the same old story.

Once again Congress has been paralyzed by the gridlock of partisan politics. Even as we face a financial crisis unparalleled in our nation’s history, Washington is more concerned with party politics than with tackling the massive debt that threatens to cripple our government.

Extraordinary legislative powers were granted to the supercommittee so that it could make real progress on balancing our budget – yet even the supercommittee was unable to set politics aside and put our country first.

What’s worse is that the failure of the supercommittee is just one of several times this year that our own government has brought the American economy to the brink of collapse.

This spring, we faced the real possibility of a government shutdown when Congress only narrowly passed a last-minute spending bill, and over the summer, there was the threat of default during the heated debt ceiling debate.

We can’t keep playing these games.

Our country needs real leaders who want to solve our problems – not add to them. Help me break the stalemate in Washington by supporting my campaign with a contribution of $5, $15, or $25 today.

It’s time for Washington to make some real decisions about how to get our budget back on track, and we should start by developing a tax code that is fair for all Americans. That means repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and eliminating loopholes that allow many big corporations to pay little or no taxes.

Nearly four years have passed since the start of the recession, yet Congress still doesn’t have its priorities straight. The failure of the supercommittee is just one more example of Washington putting partisan politics before progress – even as American families suffer.

The stakes are too high to continue on with business as usual. Can you contribute $5, $15, or $25 right now to help me bring my record of getting things done to Washington?

Together, we can make Washington start working for the American people again.

Sincerely,

PS – Let’s send the message that we’re going to hold Washington accountable! Help me end November strong by supporting my campaign with a contribution today.

Jeffrey Butler, COO of CL&P

In 2009 Massachusetts imposed steep penalties on utility companies for failing to meet legislated standards of power restoration:  2.5% of their annual revenues.  Under such a system of standards and penalties, CL&P would have been assessed penalties of $20 million.

Connecticut needs to send a warning to Jeffrey Butler and CL&P:  devote more attention and resources to your power restoration efforts or else pay a steep penalty!

And I thought not having heat, hot water, and electricity for a week was rough!

Let’s face it:  Herman Cain had a really rough week.  Even though I did not have any heat, hot water, or electricity in Connecticut all week due to the effects of the severe snow storm Alfred, I still would not have exchanged weeks with Herman Cain.  Imagine having three women coming out and accusing you of sexual harassment in a week’s time!

Although I do not think Herman Cain is any more qualified to be President of the United States than my cat, Murphy, who, I sincerely believe, is more intelligent than Herman Cain, I do feel sorry for what he endured this week in the media.  Consequently, I decided to give him a few tips to help his campaign and to overcome any possible slip in his ratings from all of this recent publicity involving the harassment of women by him.

What do you get when you combine 6 with 9 three times? Something more meaningful than 9-9-9!

First, instead of using the 9-9-9 as the slogan for his tax plan, in keeping with his recent alleged sexual notoriety and his alleged sexual harassment, I suggest that he capitalize on such by changing his numbskull nein-nein-nein slogan to one conveying a more human and loving touch, such as 69-69-69.  That would certainly be an attention getter!  It definitely would be a little more catchy than the redundant 9-9-9, with its devilish combination of Michele Bachmann’s assessment of Herman Cain’s tax plan–that is, her renaming of it as the 6-6-6 tax plan–with Herman’s simplistic 9-9-9, while at the same time reminding all of us of how well he successfully settled those sexual harassment charges against him, the little devil.  This is certain to appeal to the majority of voters, especially to those who have not the faintest idea of its sexual connotations, and to the religious right, the most important voting segment of the Republican party, because of its devilish overtones and because, quite frankly, many of them do not have the faintest idea of its sexual connotations either.

“Since you spent the night at my apartment, I thought that I would serve you breakfast in bed.”

And instead of slogans containing Coolidge allusions to his former pizza business, such as a “pizza in every oven”, I again suggest something more human, kinder, and less chauvinistic, such as, “since you spent the night at my apartment, I thought that I would serve you breakfast in bed.”  Of course, this would bestow upon Herman that sweet Alan Alda aura, helping him to get more of the woman vote in 2012, since three women in a week charging him with sexual harassment has certainly diminish his prospects in that all-important segment.

Who's Your Daddy?

While at the same time, to prevent Herman Cain from losing any male votes from any allusions to Alan Alda in the attempt to appeal to the women voters, I would then add a counter-touch of machismo to his image with another slogan, such as, “Who’s your Daddy?”, appropriately captioned under a picture of Herman wearing a fedora and sunglasses and resembling a pimp, which is actually the true vocation of all politicians, who have been known to pander for money 24/7.  Although many would advise Herman Cain to burn his pimp hat, especially in the light of sexual harassment charges, I heartily endorse him looking like a pimp since it would be a sure wallet opener for campaign contributions of at least a fin.

Other sure campaign slogan winners for Herman Cain include:

Instead of the trite “change you can believe in” or “hope and change”, how about “Herman Cain 2012 – Change…into something more comfortable!”

And instead of the idiotic “We want Cain”, how about “Cain:  You know you want it!”

Finally, how about something really honest about Cain’s supporters – “Cain will kill every Able American on the Left!”

I sure hope these modest campaign suggestions help Herman Cain.  I would hate to see him drop out of the race any time soon since that would certainly make the 2012 Republican primaries less entertaining than they have been thus far.

The elite 1% of our population has virtually all of the eggs. We need the eggs; however, since our elected officials get their very own eggs from this elite class by serving its interests, we get fewer and fewer eggs, if any, while this 1% continues to get more and more eggs. Our Presidents, Representatives, Senators, Governors, et al, regardless of party affiliation and except for a few honest politicians, who are becoming fewer and fewer in numbers as the years pass, are essentially on corporate payrolls, earning their salaries and bonuses, i.e., their eggs, at our expense. Although we keep needing the eggs, we keep not getting the eggs; in fact, we are at the point of not getting any eggs at all.  All we get are mere promises of future delivery of eggs if only we further reduce taxes on the elite 1% so they can produce more eggs and keep more eggs.

And we continue to believe this prescription, this trickle down nonsense, as the economic gospel of Adam Smith, when, in his Wealth of Nations he warns us of the dangers of government colluding with commerce: that is, passing laws favoring the wealthy, bestowing upon corporations the rights and privileges of individuals as in the Citizens United case, eliminating competition, not enforcing a level playing field in commerce, and assisting the big corporations to drive small businesses out of the marketplace.

We have the old dilemma of the fox guarding the hen house. Is it time to shoot the fox?

When I requested a transcript showing any and all income received by the corporation for the specified years, I was informed by the Internal Revenue Service employee on the telephone that there was no information available for that time period.  Puzzled I asked if there were any 1099s received by the IRS for that corporation, to which the IRS employee replied that he could not respond to my question since I had not specified 1099s under the caption “Tax Form Number” on Form 2848.

Anyone who has ever filled out a Form 2848 before knows that the Tax Form Number refers to the appropriate applicable and general tax form associated with the Tax Matter described on the form.  For instance, when declaring authorization for income taxes,  for “Income” tax under “Tax Matters”, the appropriate general income tax form for the reporting of that tax matter customarily would be the appropriate income tax return for the tax entity granting Power of Attorney.

For income tax matters, 1040 would be the “Tax Form Number” for individuals, 1120 or 1120S for corporations, 1065 for partnerships, 941 for trusts and estates, etc.  Of course, all informational forms pertaining to that general tax form of the entity would be included since they would constitute individual income or expense items reportable on the general income tax form. 

Since the IRS employee appeared young and inexperienced, I requested to speak to his superior.  However, his superior also asserted that she could not disclose any information that had been reported on Forms 1099 for that corporation since that form number had not been included under the caption “Tax Form Number”.

At this point, I became quite upset with the incompetency of these two IRS employees.  Employees hired by the federal government to service informational needs of tax preparers, tax attorneys, certified public accountants, individuals, or businesses should understand that certain general tax forms include those of the individual and specific items comprising the elements of the general tax matter and form.  For corporate income, various 1099 forms are often issued to the corporation reporting nonemployee compensation, rent, interest, and the like in order to assist the corporation in the preparation of its Form 1120.  For these two IRS employees to not understand the hierarchal nature of the informational forms displays a serious lack of understanding of the Internal Revenue Service tax forms; it also exhibits on their part an embarrassing degree of incompetency.

Frustrated, I attempted to report this incompetency to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas H. Shulman; however, a telephone number was not published on the internet.  Nor was such available in a published federal phone directory.  Perhaps if Commissioners of governmental offices published their telephone numbers, they would be made aware of the incompetency of some of their employees, I wondered.

After calling my Congressman, John Larson, and speaking to one of his aides, I was able to contact a staff employee of Douglas H. Shulman and report my complaint.  Several days later I received a call from a manager at the Internal Revenue Service who acknowledged that there was a “misunderstanding” involving the IRS employees who had refused to provide me with the 1099 information and that she would do so.  She added that training materials needed to be clarified to prevent such misunderstandings in the future.  To my disappointment, she did not apologize for the inconvenience to me from the “misunderstanding” on the part of the IRS agents.

But is this simply a misunderstanding on the part of two IRS employees?  Or is this indicative of a lack of competency on the part of the employee and his supervisor?  This is not the first time that I have detected such upon calling the Internal Revenue Service.  Perhaps you have called the IRS only to be transferred an infinite number of times to different individuals, indicating not only a lack of an answer to your question at hand but also not even having the faintest idea of where to transfer the call in order to obtain an answer.  Over the years I have detected a consistent pattern of incompetency on the part of a significant number of employees at the Internal Revenue Service; certainly not all of the employees but definitely a significant number.  What can account for this level of incompetency of employees at the Internal Revenue Service?

I can only surmise what may be the root of this level of competency at the Internal Revenue Service.  Can it be that instead of stressing education, experience, and certifications as appropriate criteria for hiring, the IRS has placed too much emphasis on other criteria?  One can only wonder and surmise.

His nein-nein-nein final solution (aka, 9-9-9) to our country’s fiscal problems would plunge our country into a depression from which we would never recover. Imagine only taxing the rich 9% of their incomes; they presently pay around 15%.  Think of the dramatic increase in poverty resulting from imposing 9% taxes on the incomes of the poor as well as on every purchase made by the poor, including those for basic everyday living expenses.  Instead of the poor receiving a much needed, helping hand in the form of tax credits, they would be shot with a double-barrel shotgun blast of two taxes!  Talk about class warfare, my dear Paul Ryan:  that’s a very confused–or should we say mercenary–Robin Hood stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

This guy actually graduated with a degree in mathematics?!?!  It must be some sort of new math because I cannot figure out his 9-9-9 answer to our country’s never-ending recession (which in reality is a depression, but the politicians and banksters are too afraid to tell us so).  Can you follow his math?!  Perhaps he forgot to carry a 1 somewhere?

But Cain is not pure evil in his Garden of Pizzas:  he would not kill the super big and enormously profitable corporations with a triple tax.  Unlike his biblical predecessor, he would lovingly spare the corporations from a fate that Republicans regard worse than death:  i.e., an income tax.  God bless this servant of the Lord.

And I love his take on those suffering Americans without a job: “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!” Doesn’t that remark remind you of Marie Antoinette’s insensitive dismissal of the millions of starving peasants of France with her memorable, Caineseyan economic plan:  ”let them eat cake”? To venture this remark clearly shows that this pizza guy has three of what I only have two of; but little upstairs, if anything.

I ask you, Professor Cornel West of Princeton University, is Herman Cain trying to outwit Barack Obama as the new “Black Mascot of Wall Street”? Or is he just trying to sell more books, sell more pizzas, book more honorariums, and…gosh, could it be, just make lots and lots of money with his cheesy sloganisms?  Recall that Herman Cain is a motivational speaker:  yeah, Herman, you already told us a million times how anyone can become a billionaire making, selling, and delivering pizzas.  Yeah, we know, just look at all those Greeks rolling in dough down at the corner pizza restaurant.

Nevertheless, Herman Cain is leading other Republican candidates in recent polls.  Americans sure love their pizzas, especially when they are topped with cheesy slogans.  Well, thought out, economic plans are too hard to digest for the American gastroeconomateur, but sugar-coated, bite-size candynomics are so much easier to swallow.  And your dittoheads love them!  Ask Rush.  He’ll tell you.

No complex mathematical algorithms or detailed campaign strategy for Herman Cain.  Just simple slogans for the simple minded, who are wolfing them down as if they were double-cheese pizzas.  This motivational speaker knows how to keep the kiddies coming back for more. 

But let’s not give too much credit to Herman Cain for the success of the 9-9-9 slogan.  Remember how one politician was leading in the Republican polls four years earlier with a very similar campaign platform except for two (2) numerical digits?  And do you remember how many times Rudy Giuliani, while running for President, repeated the word 9-1-1 so that it eventually assumed the appearance of his entire campaign platform?  If you do, then you must be Albert Einstein reincarnated because I lost count after infinity raised to the nth power.  But to Giuliani’s credit, he was not as redundant as Herman:  at least he included another digit in his mystical refrain.

But that’s the power of mysticism, isn’t it?  Adolf Hitler and Joeseph Goebbels brainwashed the peoples of an entire country by repeating a big lie many, many times.  In fact, Goebbels further believed and said, “the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed.”  Then the lie was that the Jews caused the economic depression of Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s; now it’s our oppressive taxes on corporations and the rich causing our economic misery.  Herman and other Republicans exclaim, if only we eliminate taxes on both, they will benevolently create jobs here in America.  Sound familiar?  Isn’t this just Ronald Reagan’s Lauffer-curve, trickle-down nonsense rehashed for the present generation and the previous generations suffering from Alzheimers? 

Imagine calling the White House in 2012 and hearing, “America’s Pizza…can I take your order?”  “Herman, I want a pepperoni pizza….and please, no anchovies this time.” 

Herman Cain’s tax and economic plan for America sure smells fishy to me.  What’s your next cheesy slogan, Herman?  A pizza in every oven?  Oops, excuse me, but did he already say that?!

We need someone honest and patriotic like Warren Buffett to run for President of the United States. He is courageous and bold enough to say what needs to be said about our country’s fiscal problems: that we need to raise taxes on the rich, since the top 1% have had a tax holiday for the past thirty years.

We were all snookered by Barack Obama back in 2008 when he was running for President, promising to raise taxes on individuals with taxable incomes over $250,000 per year. However, three years later, nothing has changed. President Barack Obama never even proposed that tax increase; in fact, Obama agreed to the extension of the Bush tax cuts last December instead of raising taxes, hinted at lowering corporate tax rates, and dramatically reduced the estate taxes on the rich. So we have all been conned by “the Black Mascot of Wall Street” (as the black professor from Princeton, Cornel West, has rightfully dubbed him).

Warren Buffett knows that even the rich do better when the wealth is spread around. Gross Domestic Product increases since consumers now have the money to purchase the cars, computers, ipods, homes, appliances, etc., that revs up manufacturing and the wheels of production. Stock prices increase and the rich even make more money.

The Republican proposal, to lower taxes on the wealthy, and to eliminate corporate taxes entirely, would drive our country and the entire world into a deep depression, the likes of which have never been witnessed. Jobs in this country would not result from such a Calvin Coolidge tactic. Only more dividends for the rich and more investment monies for plants in China would be its results.

Wake up, America. It’s time to assemble and rebel against the banksters of Wall Street and their Democratic and Republican politicians who are on their corporate payrolls in the form of political contributions. Demand economic justice. Support someone for President who knows what’s good for Wall Street, for America, and for everyone’s wallet. Sign the petition below to draft Warren Buffett for President.

Dear William
I wanted to share with you a statement that I just released to the press about President Obama’s decision to remove all troops from Iraq by the end of the year. As you know removing our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan as soon and as safely as possible is something I care deeply about. I look forward to talking with you soon. You’ll find the Statement Below:

Susan Bysiewicz’s Statement on President Obama’s Decision to Leave Iraq

For Immediate Release
October 21, 2011
“Like many Americans I was very glad to learn of President Obama’s announcement today to remove all troops from Iraq by the year’s end. I have been calling for the immediate and safe withdrawal of all our troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan for over a year. We owe our soldiers and their families our deepest thanks and gratitude for the sacrifices they have made and the excellent job they have performed. President Obama should make the same decision in Afghanistan and bring all our troops in Afghanistan immediately and safely.”

Sincerely,

SHARPTON: Folks, sometimes a picture says a lot more than words ever could. Just take a look at this photo of Mitt Romney from his days as a Wall Street businessman at Bain Capital.

This is Willard right here in the middle. They`re posing with dollars and big bills, even dropping literally out of his suit.

This is the man that is obviously in the culture of where they think it`s just fine to have money literally dropping out of their pockets, just money everywhere, rolling in money. This is the man that wants to preach austerity.

At Bain Capital, Romney was a “vulture capitalist.” That`s in quotes.

He often bought companies just to break them up and sell them off for large profit, laying off thousands of workers in the process. Some of those laid-off workers spoke out in this political ad from 1994 when Romney was running for Senate against Ted Kennedy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I don`t like Romney`s creating jobs, because he took every one of them away.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I worked there 30 years, and I never dreamed that I`d lose my job.

NARRATOR: Mitt Romney says he helped create 10,000 jobs. The former workers at SCM in Marion, Indiana, say something else.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If he`s created jobs, I wish he could create some here, you know, instead of taking them away.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHARPTON: All those worker layoffs made Romney a lot of money. He`s now worth between $190 million and $250 million, yet his estimated rate is just 14 percent. Fourteen percent is his estimated tax rate, much lower than 35 percent tax rate paid by working class folks like teachers and firefighters.

Fighting that kind of injustice and inequality is what the Wall Street protests are all about. That`s why thousands of people turned out for our jobs rally on Saturday.

It`s clear what the American people want. They want justice. It`s clear what Wall Street wants. They want Willard Mitt Romney, because he`s their kind of guy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROMNEY: Corporations are people. There are people who work there. There are customers that are people. Shareholders are people. They`re people. Raising taxes on corporations is raising taxes on people.

When you tax corporations, either the employees are going to pay or the shareholders are going to pay or the customers are going to pay. And so corporations are people.

We could raise taxes on people. That`s not the way –

AUDIENCE: Corporations!

ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We can raise taxes on –

AUDIENCE: No they`re not!

ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.

(LAUGHTER)

ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SHARPTON: Joining me now, MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry, Tulane professor and columnist for “The Nation.”

Melissa, can a Wall Street candidate like Willard really succeed in this political climate today?

MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Possibly, and here`s why. Because we have a big mismatch between what we think is true about how Republicans perform economically and how Republicans actually perform economically. So, ,after I talked with your producers, I was so excited that we were going to be on set today. I did a little bit of my wonky research and was looking up to be sure that I wasn`t going to misstate any facts here.

SHARPTON: Well, you`re our favorite wonk. So what did you come up
with?

HARRIS-PERRY: Well, from the period of FDR until 2000, we had just as many years with Democratic presidents as we had with Republican presidents. So it makes a nice kind of comparison.

And when you look at economic performance on all the major economic indicators, Democratic presidents outperformed Republican presidents on GDP growth, on full employment, on relative equality — there`s always a great deal of inequality in the system, but relatively more equality in the system when Democrats are presidents than when Republicans are. And yet, business leaders tend to prefer Republicans as candidates.

SHARPTON: OK. Now, let`s take this slow. Let`s un-wonk this for those that are at home like me that are not wonks.

You`re saying that since FDR, we`ve had just about an equal amount of Democrats in the White House as Republicans, but that the gross –

HARRIS-PERRY: GDP, which is sort of gross domestic product, how much the economy is growing –

SHARPTON: — grew more under Democrats than Republicans?

HARRIS-PERRY: Consistently.

SHARPTON: But isn`t their calling card that they grow the economy?

HARRIS-PERRY: It turns out they actually grow the deficits. Deficits get higher under Republican presidents. GDP gets higher under Democratic presidents. Relative equality under Democratic presidents, higher inequality under Republican presidents.

But business leaders consistently prefer Republican candidates. Do you know why?

SHARPTON: Let me show this to help support your argument to the American jury watching.

Under George Bush, the economy, 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the rich.

HARRIS-PERRY: Yes, and that`s why. So the reason –

SHARPTON: This is to the top one percent.

HARRIS-PERRY: That`s right. The reason business leaders prefer Republicans isn`t because they`re better for the economy. It`s because they`re better at growing the individual wealth of the wealthiest group.

So the one indicator that goes way up under Republican presidents is that the very top percentage actually accumulates a higher percentage of the wealth.

SHARPTON: You see, you`re answering something that I didn`t understand, because I got up yesterday morning to go to the King Memorial dedication, and I see in “The New York Times” this story that Wall Street, who President Obama helped bail out, is giving their money to Romney.

Look at this. I mean, how do you have a guy bail you out and then you contribute more to the guy that`s trying to run him out?

Look at the figures — $1.5 million has gone to Romney already. Only $270,000 has gone to President Obama. That doesn`t make sense — or maybe it does.

HARRIS-PERRY: Look, it`s a really clear formula. The fact is that we actually do better as a country when we spread the wealth around.

Remember those kind of, oh, he wants to spread the wealth around, he`s some kind of communist, socialist, that sort of discourse? But the fact is, just in a capitalist system, just in a system where we want to grow our economy, have more consumers, have demand for the products that people are creating, all of that actually does better when working class people have disposable income to purchase homes, to purchase cars, to purchase iPads, all of those things. But what Republican administrations typically do is grow deficits, because they grow military spending and they cut taxes and they grow the wealth of the tightest top one percent.

SHARPTON: Wow. Well, thank you.

That`s why everybody thinks I`m smart. I talk to you, and then I walk out and I just rehash it. Sometimes I give you credit. Just sometimes.

Melissa Harris-Perry, thanks for being with us.

Only $140 billion of that bill will be spent on public works construction projects, commonly called infrastructure spending.  The majority of the bill is merely an extension of tax cuts and other benefits, crumbs to the American public, to create the impression that Obama shares your pain and is proposing something in response.

For decades our country’s infrastructure has been deteriorating.  Economists estimate that we are in need of immediate repairs to roads, bridges, and other structures of at least $2 trillion, ranking us high on the list of the shabbiest countries in the world:  we are ranked a poor 24th on the list of best infrastructure countries.  Spending $2 trillion on infrastructure projects in the United States would create millions of jobs in our country now.  Didn’t we spend $1.6 trillion destroying and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan over the past ten years?  So why not propose what economists have been urging ever since Obama was elected in 2008 in order to get this country out of a depression:  propose a major infrastructure bill, and tax the rich and those mammoth multinational corporations to fund the measure?

Recall in 2008 economists were arguing that an infrastructure bill of $1.5 trillion was needed to reverse our economic downslide into a deep and never-ending recession.   So what did Obama propose?  A $767 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act providing a measely $111 billion in infrastructure spending.  Imagine if he had been bold enough then, with a Democratic House and Senate behind him, to propose a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill?  Imagine the jobs that would have been created and the state of our economy now?

$140 billion is merely a crumb thrown to union bosses so that they will rally the troops to support this moronic, Wall Street President.  It is a band-aid for a heart transplant patient bleeding to death.  I voted for this clown in 2008, for “hope and change”.  For him to tout this measely $140 billion as a job creator is an insult to the American consciousness.  It’s Marie Antoinette saying to the starving mobs of Paris, “let them eat cake”. 

It’s time to replace this buffoon.  The problem is that there are even bigger clowns running against this President on the Republican side.  Every Presidential candidate in the race today (except, perhaps, for Ron Paul) is a puppet of Wall Street, catering to that 1% elite group that contribute and support their politicial campaigns.

Only a few politicians would ever challenge Wall Street:  Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and a few others.  The majority are on the corporate payroll.

If there is anything worse than a Republican, it’s a Democrat in the hands of Wall Street pretending to represent the interests of the lower and middle classes.  Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton served the interests of Wall Street very well, promising much to the general populace but all in all doing very little for them.  Deregulating Wall Street, endorsing NAFTA, appointing Wall Streeters to key cabinet positions contributed to the economic collapse of our economy.  Obama’s bailout of Wall Street at the expense of the middle class has only contributed to middle America’s hardships.  Both are guilty of treason.

Incidentally, for all you Fox News addicts and Russ Limbaugh dittoheads, when taxes are raised on corporations and the rich, the corporations invest in capital assets in order to minimize their tax liabilities, thus creating jobs.  Duh?!

Isn’t it time to limit the public service of all individuals by adopting term limits?  Haven’t we all witnessed enough fraud, malfeasance, and misappropriation of public funds by now to realize that by allowing individuals to serve endless terms in office, power becomes entrenched and concentrated in the hands of a few?  Despots, tyrants, dictators, and God have unlimited terms.  Democracy thrives on the participation of the many, not just the few.

An effective internal control system necessitates rotation of duties.  Without such, individuals are more likely to perpetuate and conceal acts in violation of public trust.  It is not unreasonable to limit an individual’s service in a public office to no more than two terms.  We limit the term of the President of the United States to two terms; in fact, none other than Richard Nixon proposed a one term limitation to the holding of public office of six years duration.  Recall that Watergate occurred because of his desire to win a second term of office.  Imagine how different our history might have been written if he had only been allowed to serve one term in office.

Of course, term limits apply to public positions at the local level as well.  In fact, there may even be a greater need for term limits at the town level of government than at the national and state levels since a municipality often lacks adquate funds for a full-time, independent, and sufficiently-staffed internal audit department to monitor its personnel and operations on an ongoing basis.  The general public is often unaware that annual financial audits performed by outside certified public accountants are not designed to detect fraud.  Unfortunately, fraud investigations are typically initiated only after the malfeasance and misappropriation have already occurred.

Perhaps it is time for the citizens of Berlin, Connecticut and those of every municipality to consider the terms of their presently elected officials and to determine if it is time for a healthy change of public officials.  The Red Cross recognizes the need for fresh blood; and so should the residents of Berlin, Connecticut and those of other towns throughout the United States.  Rotation of duties is essential to any good internal control system and should be implemented in the public as well as in the private sphere in order to mitigate any possible abuses of entrenched power.

Herein is his reply to the Barefoot Accountant’s email, received on August 15th.  A video and transcript of Susan Bysiewicz’s response to virtually the same question can be found at The Barefoot Accountant interviews Connecticut’s Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, Susan Bysiewicz. Video and transcript of interview, Part I: How the government can create jobs.

Dear William,

I hear politicians talking all the time about “creating jobs”. But the people I meet throughout Connecticut rightly ask, “Great, but what are you doing about it?”

So I wanted to give you a quick update on what I’m doing in Washington and Connecticut to improve consumer confidence and spur immediate and long term job creation.

Last Friday, I hosted a press conference in Waterbury to call on Congress to pass a major investment in funding for roads, bridges and rail lines. The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives is proposing to slash funding for infrastructure projects which could cost us 6,000 jobs here in Connecticut. Senator Blumenthal joined me for the event, which was attended by over 100 workers engaged in the construction trades.

Last week I released the results of a survey of 151 Connecticut manufacturers conducted by my office. The news was good – half of all manufacturers reported plans to add jobs in the next year. This is the kind of good news our economy needs, and I held a press conference with Senator Blumenthal this week to announce the good news. And the data from the survey regarding the obstacles manufacturers face in creating these new jobs is already helping me develop new legislation to attack these problems. The survey proved what I have been saying for years – manufacturing is far from dead in this country—in fact, the industry in on the verge of a rebirth that will put Americans back to work, and I’m working hard to ensure that Connecticut leads the way.

In July, I successfully passed an amendment to the State Department funding bill that would apply the language of the Buy American Act to purchases made for items used by the State Department overseas. Currently, Buy American provisions only apply to the purchase of items that will be used within the United States, but in FY09 and FY10 alone, the Department of State spent over $1 billion on articles, materials and supplies manufactured outside the United States. Requiring our embassies to comply with the Buy American Act is a simple but effective way to create American jobs through smarter procurement policy.

And earlier this year, I introduced the American Jobs Matter Act, which would require all federal contracting officials to accept and solicit information from businesses regarding how many American jobs would be retained or created if their bid was chosen. We came close to passing this common sense legislation in the House, but it ultimately was rejected by the new majority (we lost by 4 votes!). The good news is that this bill has a new, strong champion in West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who has introduced the American Jobs Matter Act in the Senate.

I will keep you informed as these efforts move forward, and let me know what additional ideas who think will help us get our state’s economy up and moving again.

Sincerely,

Congressman Chris Murphy

The obvious question is:  why did Chris Murphy wait until this year to act on creating jobs when our country has been in a deep recession for years?  Similarly, why has President Barack Obama waited nearly three years to raise taxes on millionaires in order to reduce deficit spending instead of his previous willingness, over the past year, to consider cuts to social security, medicare, medicaid, and other social programs?  Could it just be merely election-year talk to get re-elected?  LOL!

The Barefoot Accountant

On August 5th, 2011, the Barefoot Accountant interviewed Susan Bysiewicz, a Connecticut Democratic candidate for the United States Senate.  In part 1 of that interview, Susan Bysiewicz discussed how the government can create jobs in America today.

In the second part of that same interview, presented herein, Susan discusses how to make free trade fair trade, government contracts to foreign entities, corporate taxation and repatriation of profits, Citizens United case and the Clean Elections Law.

How to Make Free Trade Fair Trade?

The Barefoot Accountant: We have free trade agreements, but do you think they are fair trade agreements? A lot of jobs have been sent overseas. I recently called the Hartford Courant regarding my subscription, and I contacted someone in the Philippines. I was surprised by that. And when I call AT&T and Comcast for my local service, I am transferred to someone in India, China, the Philippines, or elsewhere.

What can we do to make our free trade agreements fair trade agreements?

Susan Bysiewicz: That’s precisely the issue. NAFTA, it is estimated, has sent about a million jobs out of our country. And we have negotiated some other free trade agreements. I’d like to see free trade agreements become fair trade agreements.

And by that I mean there should be a level playing field. And there isn’t at the moment because other countries do not have the environmental regulations, the safety regulations, the labor laws that we do, that protect our workers and protect our environment.

And I am a very strong supporter of the Fair Trade Act that Representative Michaud of Maine has proposed. And what that legislation says is that we should renegotiate the free trade legislation that has been passed to make sure that it is fair. That is, if there is a level playing field with other countries with respect to labor, environmental, and safety laws.

Government Contracts to Foreign Entities

The Barefoot Accountant: Related to that, I have witnessed a number of tax returns of people working overseas in the Middle East, they are working for companies that were set up by companies here in the United States to avoid the labor laws and the tax laws. I won’t mention any names, but these are government contracts and we are giving them to foreign entities who are not complying with our labor laws and so forth.

How would you address problems such as these?

Susan Bysiewicz: I guess I would say this. If we are going to give government contracts to private companies, then we ought to look at whether they are complying with all of our laws and regulations because we certainly shouldn’t reward companies with lucrative federal contracts if they are not abiding by other federal laws, particularly tax laws.

And I think you’ve alluded to another issue with your question, which is, should we change some of the tax laws that actually encourage American companies to go overseas. And I think that’s important to take a look at because we shouldn’t have a tax code that encourages our companies to go outside of our own country.

Corporation Taxation – Repatriation of Corporate Profits

The Barefoot Accountant: Let’s explore that further. Would you be in favor of repatriating corporate profits at 3% to 5%? Congress and the Administration are already talking about that. These large corporations now, instead of paying 35% or 38% corporate tax rates, want to bring their corporate profits back to the United States and only pay 2-1/2%, 3%, maybe 5% at most.

Susan Bysiewicz: Look, I think that we should explore ways to get companies back here and encourage them to be investing in our country. I think an even bigger problem though is this: it’s estimated by the Congressional Budget Office that 55% of American companies are not paying any corporate income tax. And so what we ought to be doing is reviewing our tax code to ensure that we streamline it: that we get rid of a lot of our tax loopholes because the sad reality is we have the best tax code that money can buy.

You have a lot of really big corporations that have used lobbyists and PACs down in Washington to get very favorable tax treatment. And it’s not fair. So if we want to get our country out of this huge hole that we are in, it seems to me that we should revise our tax code, get rid of those loopholes, and we probably could even reduce the corporate tax rate because we’d be raising more revenue because every corporation would be paying their fair share.

Sherman Anti-Trust Act – Citizens United Case

The Barefoot Accountant: We are touching upon a subject that I wanted to discuss at the end of our interview, so maybe we can talk about it now. It’s about the size of big business. When I was growing up, I would hear the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. I don’t hear that term much anymore. There seems to be these large conglomerates, and they are too big to fail, too big to jail. And they seem to have a lot of influence on our government. Some even think that they control the government. How can we control and separate big business from government?

Susan Bysiewicz: Well, I think that one of the reasons we are in this place has to do with a Supreme Court decision called the Citizens United case. And that case in essence says that corporations are people and that corporations can spend as much as they want to support or to defeat particular candidates. And I believe that history will show that this is one of the worst decisions that the Supreme Court has made over the past hundred years.

Unlimited corporate contributions were never allowed prior to that case. And so, I tell you this, that the first bill that I would co-sponsor when I get to Washington will be the one that has currently been proposed to create a clean elections law at the federal level parallel to the clean elections law that I fought for here in Connecticut.

And that law is very simple. It says that in Connecticut if you would like to run for statewide office or for the legislature, you’d have to raise a large number of small contributions to show support. And then once you do that, each candidate for that office who participates in the program gets the same amount of money from the clean elections fund. And I think that we should have that same system in place at the federal level.

We now had a couple of very successful elections in Connecticut. And as a result, the elections are about people and issues, and they are not about special interests or political action committees. And I think that is very, very healthy for the process, and I would love to see that same system brought to our federal government.

The Barefoot Accountant: I agree 100%.

[End of Part II of Interview.]

Click the following link for Part I of the Barefoot Accountant’s Interview of Susan Bysiewicz, Connecticut Democratic candidate for the United States Senate:  How the Government Can Create Jobs.

For those of you who wish to support and contribute to Susan Bysiewicz’s campaign, you may do so by clicking on the following link:

The Barefoot Accountant

Barefoot Accountant: Hi, Susan. I appreciate you taking the time today to allow me to interview you.

Susan Bysiewicz: Thanks for doing this with me. I appreciate the opportunity.

Barefoot Accountant: I am a certified public accountant operating a small public accounting practice in Berlin, Connecticut. I would like to ask you a series of questions dealing with pocketbook issues of Connecticut residents. I have witnessed a lot of pain preparing tax returns and financial statements of small businesses and tax returns of individuals. So I have tried to focus my questions on the pocketbook issues facing working class and middle class people, and I would like to present them to you today, and I appreciate you taking the time from your busy schedule today to address them.

The first question I have concerns the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate has dropped one-tenth of one percent down to 9.1%, but it is still officially at 9.1. However, according to Morton Zuckerman of U.S. News and World Report, he has mentioned that the real unemployment rate is approaching 20%. I agree. And as you know, people fall off unemployment after so much time, and a lot of people are underemployed.

I would like to ask you, how do you propose to create jobs in America now if you are elected Senator of Connecticut?

Susan Bysiewicz: Well, first of all let me just say a few things about the unemployment numbers in Connecticut because this goes to your bigger question of how are we going to create jobs.

And, yes, you see unemployment hovering at around nine percent but I do believe in parts of Connecticut that rate is higher. In Windham County, for instance, people in Eastern Connecticut are struggling and the unemployment rates there are higher than nine percent. And I think there are many people who had been unemployed for so long they just given up. So I couldn’t dispute the numbers U.S. News and World Report had given because I have been all over the state visiting with people who are getting very, very discouraged.

And what I know is this: that we have made some progress in getting jobs back. We lost approximately a hundred and thirty thousand jobs during the recession. We have ninety thousand that we have to get back. Forty thousand we grew. And so it would not surprise me to have more than a hundred thousand people looking for jobs. And those numbers don’t include the thousands of young people who are graduating from high school and college who are looking for work.

And if you are working on a Senate campaign as I am, it’s great having interns who are willing to volunteer for free. And I know of a lot of young people, since I have three teenagers who are done with college and who are volunteering or out very actively looking for work and having a very difficult time.

And I’m running for the Senate because I’d like to make this state a place where we are growing job opportunities for everyone and we’re able to keep our young people here.
Right now that’s not happening. We’re continuing to lose more young people between eighteen and thirty five than any state in the country.

So your question about how we’re going to create jobs is really, really important and I would like to share with you some of the things that I think the federal government could be doing to help grow jobs in Connecticut and in our country.

And I would highlight just at the outset on that point, that government doesn’t create jobs; it’s businesses that create jobs but there are some things that the federal government could do to help job creation.

And first and foremost we could be investing in infrastructure in this country and rebuilding roads and bridges, and we could be investing in high-speed rail and transit systems that would make economic development in our state much more vibrant. Right now Connecticut has crumbling roads and bridges, many of them have not been repaired work or fixed well since President Eisenhower built the highway system. And I look at other states like New Jersey and New York: they’re very densely populated states that have much more sophisticated public transportation systems than we do.

So I think that we missed an opportunity during the recovery period when President Obama.helped to pass the Recovery Act. There was some investment in Connecticut infrastructure but not enough to make a real impact to grow good jobs.

Also I think the government has a really strong role to play in terms of funding research and innovation. And if we were investing more in basic scientific research and encouraging innovation, we would be helping to grow jobs in Connecticut and in our country. We have some really great colleges and universities, both public and private, and to the extent that there are more grants given at those public and private universities to do scientific research, that will grow jobs in the future.

And the third thing that I would mention that is really key is getting a national energy policy for our country so that we can be growing green jobs not only in Connecticut but across our country. And that would also protect the environment and make our country safer.

The other point that I would make on job creation is the key to job creation in Connecticut and all across our country has been this: that small businesses have created the lion share of the new jobs. And we can quibble about the statistics. Some statistics say sixty six percent of the new jobs come from small businesses; others say ninety percent.

That’s my passion. My passion as Secretary of State for twelve years and my passion as someone who would like to serve in the United States Senate is to look for ways to support small businesses, to reduce some of the challenges that they face, because in the end, the lion’s share of the jobs have come from small businesses. And Washington just hasn’t gotten the job done with respect to small businesses.

[End of Part I of interview with Susan Bysiewicz.]

Click the following link for Part II of the Barefoot Accountant’s interview of Susan Bysiewicz, Connecticut Democratic candidate for the United States Senate: Fair Trade Agreements; Corporate Taxes; Repatriation of Corporate Profits; Corporate Control of Government; Clean Elections Law.

The Barefoot Accountant

Over the past couple of years, Republicans have moved to the extreme right on the political spectrum, allowing President Obama to inch over to the right of center for political advantage. Progressives need a choice to Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. There has been consistently one champion for all Progressives since Obama assumed office as president, and that champion has been Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont.

Please sign the petition to urge Senator Bernie Sanders to run for President. The future of the middle class and your children depends upon it. To sign the petition, simply enter your name, address, and email address in the comment box below.

I attempted on three occasions to point out the hypocrisy and bigotry of Al Sharpton’s recent remark that he would never criticize President Barack Obama because he was black.  I also pointed out that Sharpton’s bigotry in the past included Jews (calling them “diamond merchants”), Greeks and gays (calling Greek philosophers “homos”), Mormons (characterizing them as nonbelievers), and Caucasians (falsely accusing six white men of raping a young black woman, Tawana Brawley).

The editors of firedoglake.com refused to publish my blog entry on the grounds that it was inflammatory and lacked a syllogistic argument, even though Al Sharpton’s controversial remarks have been widely published elsewhere and the fact that their utterances have been confirmed by the press obviates any need for further confirmation or proof of their veracity.

Regarding the editors charge of being inflammatory, what is more inflammatory:  my reporting on and satirizing the bigotry or Sharpton uttering the bigoted statements in the first place!  I agree that Sharpton’s utterances are indeed inflammatory.  That’s what prompted me to list all of the bigoted statements that he made over time so as to question the choice by MSNBC TV of Al Sharpton to be its political commentator on prime time at 6 PM every evening.  Who’s next on the line up to host a news show on MSNBC … the Reverend Jeremiah Wright?

It makes me wonder if Phil Griffin and Comcast and GE now control firedoglake.   Or did it simply make a deal with MSNBC similar to the one Al Sharpton made that got him that 6 PM news slot on MSNBC TV?

Incidentally, for all of you incensed about Cenk Uygur being removed off the air and replaced by Al Sharpton, please petition Phil Griffin by clicking Bring Back Cenk Uygur to MSNBC TV, selecting “Sign Petition, and entering name, address, and email address.

The Barefoot Accountant

The taxpayers of Berlin, Connecticut cannot afford another increase in property taxes. We, the undersigned taxpayers, petition you to hold the line on property taxes and not to increase property taxes as long as unemployment remains above 5% in our country.

It is time to exercise fiscal restraint. No more increases in property taxes until or unless our economy recovers. Many of your citizens are suffering severe economic hardships, including the loss of jobs and homes, if not bankruptcy.

Please stop raising property taxes in Berlin, Connecticut. Property taxes are a regressive form of taxation; consequently, we need you to protect the wallets of the middle class citizens of Berlin, Connecticut by opposing any further increases in property taxes.

The Reverend Al Sharpton has replaced Cenk Uygur at 6 PM EST on MSNBC TV. In comparison to Cenk, Al Sharpton is a disappointment as a political analyst. For starters, he declared in a recent Leslie Stahl interview on 60 Minutes that he would never criticize President Barack Obama because he is black. Is that not a rascist remark? Is it not ironic, if not hypocritical, for a civil rights leader to utter such a statement? Is this the appropriate posture for a political commentator? Is it objective to side with a politician strictly on the basis of race? Should not the purpose of a political news show be truth telling and challenging the government?

Secondly, in my opinion, the Reverend Al Sharpton is not an eloquent speaker. At times his syntax seems discombobulated and his enunciation incomprehensible, leaving me with the impression that he may not have command of the English language. Often I wonder if I am listening to a bible-thumping minister rather than a journalist. I do not believe that Professor Higgins would have any difficulty identifying his geographical origins from his speech.

Lastly, Al Sharpton, though perhaps street-wise, does not impress me as having the appropriate contextual legal and economic knowledge to adequately challenge his astute, polished, well-scripted and rehearsed political guests on the show. Recall that Cenk Uygur holds a law degree from Columbia and a business degree from Wharton; consequently, he possesses the requisite understanding to delve into the intricacies of law and government involving the economy and taxation, the bread and butter issues of working and middle class Americans.

Al Sharpton, on the other hand, dropped out of Brooklyn College. Although he possesses a solid background in civil rights issues, given what I have heard over the past couple of weeks on MSNBC TV, I do not believe that he has the required detailed understanding of law and economics and taxation to address his guests in as successfully a challenging manner as Cenk, who scored many hits in exposing the weaknesses and fallacies of the arguments of his guests. In my opinion, Cenk cross-examined his political pundits with the skill of a prosecuting attorney. Al, on the other hand, sort of pounds his guests with the fervor of an evangelist in a preachy fire-and-brimstone, huff-and-puff manner, at times appearing not to truly listen in detail to the statements and responses of his guests, and consequently, failing to respond in point-by-point fashion to them in order to expose their weaknesses.

For all of the above reasons and others (I also liked Cenk’s playful manner and sense of humor), I want Cenk Uygur back at 6 PM EST on MSNBC TV. I can no longer endure watching and listening to the Reverend Al Sharpton on MSNBC TV at the 6 PM news hour. If you feel similarly, please join with me in informing Phil Griffin and MSNBC TV that unless they bring back Cenk Uygur on the 6 PM show, or on an equivalent evening hourly program, and own up to having exerted pressure on Cenk and other program hosts not to challenge the powers of the “establishment”, that you intend to boycott the network, too.

Mara Lee

On July 27, 2011, the Hartford Courant published an article, “Next Week’s State Income Tax Bite? Not So Big For Most Workers”, written by Mara Lee, a business reporter on its staff. In that article, Mara Lee remarks that the state income tax is higher on people with higher incomes, reporting that it will not hurt the bottom half of workers and most retirees. However, what is disturbing to me is the impression that her article leaves with the reader:  that is, any criticism of the new tax bill on the grounds that it fails to spread fairly the tax burden on all groups is unfounded and mere class warfare.

Unfortunately, Mara Lee and Peter Brown, assistant director for Quinnipiac University’s Polling Institute, whom Mara Lee quotes in her article, miss what the public has not: that the super rich, as always, got off very lightly with this new tax law.

Of all the individuals, those with Connecticut taxable incomes of $500,000 are hurt the most by the new tax law. However, all those S&P CEOs in Fairfield County, who earn on average $9 million annually, were given a pass. Let’s run some numbers to illustrate.

Assume a physician or an attorney practicing in Connecticut has taxable income of $500,000. Under the previous tax bill, this individual’s tax liability would have been $24,800; however, under the new tax bill, this individual’s tax liablity would now be $31,050, representing a 25.2% increase in taxes.

Now let us examine the effect of the new tax bill, Senate Bill No. 1239, on the Connecticut income tax liability of the average $9,000,000 salary of an S&P CEO, a number of whom live in Fairfield County, Governor Dannel Malloy’s home territory. Although this individual’s state income taxes would increase $23,250 over that under the previous tax rates, percentage-wise it is a modest 4.03% increase in taxes: a percentage increase 20.9% less than that born by the middle-class professional citizen.

The article’s suggestion that Senate Bill No. 1239, Governor Dannel Malloy’s recent tax bill, is fairly progressive, equitably increasing taxes on the wealthy, misrepresents the actual nature of the bill: it unjustly favors the wealthiest citizens in Connecticut, targeting the middle and upper middle classes in Connecticut, as clearly evident in these two examples.

One can only wonder if Mara Lee bothered to read Senate Bill No. 1239 and investigate the tax effects of the tax bill on the various economic classes since she failed to mention the material discrepancy in tax rate increments between those individuals with taxable incomes of $500,000 per year and those with taxable incomes of $9,000,000.

If you, too, wish to see the wealthy, the super rich, the Wall Street barons who caused the collapse of our economy in 2008 and stole trillions without one being convicted and sentenced for the crime of the millenium, then sign the petition below to raise their taxes.

Change.org|Start an Online Petition »

The Barefoot Accountant

President Barack Obama is indeed a very Wall Street President, not unlike Bill Clinton and several others. Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, et al are Wall Streeters, and they were his chief economic advisors. Is it inconceivable that race was used in politics to advance a political agenda? Is it inconceivable that Obama was used as a Judas Goat by Wall Street to advance its own agenda? Did not Wall Street “hire” a “B” actor in 1980 to advance the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of our country?

Coming up as the next Wall Street mascot, of course, will be the first female President, Michele Bachmann, eliminating corporate income taxes. Again, the establishment controls the government and its players, and it gives us personalities and actors to read its scripts, utter its propaganda, and promote its agenda.

Cenk Uygur joins the Majority Report to speak in detail with Sam Seder and answer questions by listeners concerning his departure from MSNBC and what’s next.

Real issues ignored as mainstream floats on tip of tabloid iceberg. Yellow journalism.

Cenk Uygur very public feud with MSNBC made headlines when “The Young Turks’” host and creator called the cable network out for calling him an “outsider.” Uygur has made statements about why he is not choosing to renew his contract with MSNBC after executives told him that he has upset some “insiders” with his no-holds-barred stories on Washington which reveal the corruption from both parties. “If they want to call me an outsider, that’s alright,” he says on the What’s Trending Live show.

“I embrace that. Yeah, we’re outside of Washington, we’re outside of the establishment and we’re challenging them, saying, ‘You’re not doing right by the American people.”

Uygur, whose “Young Turks” program has now expanded to six channels on YouTube, believes that cable news, while not afraid to pick a Democrat or Republican side, won’t report the real story: Money is what rules both these parties and is the reason why regardless of affiliation, politicians end up making the same decision in the end.

“It’s perfectly okay in cable news to play Democrat or Republican. But, when you say the whole system is corrupt, there’s an issue with that,” he comments.

That’s why Uygur is thankful for YouTube, which he believes is the truly democratic platform that gives everyone a voice.

“Five years ago, your only place was radio or TV. In order to get on the radio or TV, you had gatekeepers. On YouTube you don’t have gatekeepers: They just put you out there and say good luck. If the audience responds to you, fantastic. If it doesn’t it doesn’t. Can it get more democratic than that? If you want to do a strong independent show, YouTube is great for that,” he explains.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks and former MSNBC host on the show to discuss what Phil Griffin had told him, how long he thinks the establishment mentality could last, and the future of media.

The popular host of The Young Turks news show,Cenk Uygur, decided to leave MSNBC after his bosses hinted that he needs to become more a part of TV establishment and be less critical of US politicians. Is this a sign of mainstream media becoming even less free than a few years ago? Dave Saldaña, communication director of Free Press, explains why the need for honest journalism is important for society.

When it comes to the mainstream media, coverage seems ever more headed in the direction of sensational and overplayed stories of personal scandal (witness Weinergate and Casey Anthony Trial coverage). Behind the scenes, something more insidious may be behind the tabloid direction. Recently defected MSNBC news anchor Cenk Uygur reveals he left the network because he says he was told not to pursue hard-hitting stories that may offend the nation’s establishment elites.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to media news. After giving a nearly six-month tryout for the internet talk show host Cenk Uygur, the cable news channel MSNBC is preparing to instead award its 6:00 p.m. prime-time slot to the Reverend Al Sharpton. MSNBC president Phil Griffin offered Uygur a well-paid but lower-profile on-air slot, but Uygur rejected the offer, saying the decision to demote him was politically motivated.

Uygur is known for aggressively interrogating leading Washington figures and challenging the political establishment, which he alleges made some MSNBC executives uneasy. On his internet talk show, The Young Turks, Uygur described what happened last April when Griffin called him into his office.

CENK UYGUR: I got pulled in, and they told me, “Hey, listen. We were just”—or, it was actually one specific person, the head of MSNBC. He said, “I was just in Washington, and people in Washington tell me that they’re concerned about your tone.” I was like, “Whoa!”

JUAN GONZALEZ: Uygur said Griffin also reminded him that the channel was part of the “establishment,” so he must conduct himself accordingly.

This is not the first time a journalist has accused MSNBC of applying subtle, yet clear pressure to shape its political programming. Jessica Yellin covered the White House for MSNBC and ABC News in 2002 and 2003 at the onset of the Iraq War. In 2008, she told Anderson Cooper that news executives meddled with how she covered the war.

JESSICA YELLIN: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings. And my own experience at the White House was that the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives—and I was not at this network at the time—but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president. I think, over time, as President Bush’s—

ANDERSON COOPER: Really? You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

JESSICA YELLIN: Not in that exact—they wouldn’t say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces, they would push me in different directions, they would turn down stories that were more critical, and try to put on pieces that were more positive. Yes, that was my experience.

AMY GOODMAN: And in that case, she was talking about the Bush administration. That was Jessica Yellin, former White House correspondent for MSNBC.

We invited MSNBC to join us today, but they declined. However, MSNBC spokesperson Jeremy Gaines did provide us with the following statement. Quote: “Cenk’s claims are completely baseless. In fact, we were working on a new contract, to develop him into an even bigger television talent. We did have numerous conversations with Cenk about his style, not substance. It’s unfortunate that he’s decided to depart in such a negative fashion,” he wrote.

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said Wednesday in an email to the New York Times that his staff did not raise any concerns about Cenk Uygur’s show “with Phil Griffin or anyone else” at MSNBC.

So, well, Cenk Uygur is joining us himself from Los Angeles to speak for himself. In addition to his recent prime-time talk show on MSNBC, Cenk Uygur blogs at several liberal websites and hosts a popular internet and radio show called The Young Turks.

Cenk, welcome to Democracy Now! What happened?

CENK UYGUR: Well, it’s exactly as I explained on The Young Turks. You know, I was going along doing a program. You know, they did have, early on, some stylistic comments. I was trying to listen to them, you know, in terms of body language—don’t wave your arms, act like a senator. I don’t know why you would want a talk show host to act like a senator, but fine, it’s the medium that you’re working in. If I’m working on the internet, you know, it’s different than working on television. And, you know, taking those points is no problem at all.

But in April, when they pulled me in, Phil Griffin gave me this big speech about how we’re the establishment, and it would be cool to be like outsiders, but we’re not, we’re insiders, and we have to act like it. And I remember thinking at the time, well, there’s no way I’m going to do that. So I’m going to give them what I got. And then, if they like it, they like it. If they don’t, they don’t.

And honestly, I didn’t know which way they were going to go with it, because I know how much they care about ratings. So I figured if I delivered good ratings, that that would probably do the job. Well, it didn’t, because I delivered really good ratings, beating CNN significantly, handily, and also improving upon the numbers from last year. So there’s no question about the ratings. And then they pulled me in and said, “Well, you know, we’re going to go in a different direction at 6:00 anyway.” And when I asked them about it, they didn’t really have a good answer as to why, leading me to believe that that giant conversation we had three months ago might have been part of the reason.

AMY GOODMAN: In December of last year, Phil Donahue joined Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker on their show to discuss his ouster from MSNBC during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Donahue was the lone journalist daring to publicly oppose the war at its onset.

PHIL DONAHUE: I opposed the war.

ELIOT SPITZER: And was that one of the reasons they pushed you off?

PHIL DONAHUE: Oh, read the memo—

ELIOT SPITZER: Right, right.

PHIL DONAHUE: —published by the New York Times.

ELIOT SPITZER: So, your—

PHIL DONAHUE: “Donahue’s antiwar voice is not going to work against the flag waving on the other station.” Donahue and any antiwar voice in 2002—

ELIOT SPITZER: Right, right.

PHIL DONAHUE: Remember, they’re all doing what I did then now.

ELIOT SPITZER: Right.

PHIL DONAHUE: I mean, the whole channel is now.

KATHLEEN PARKER: But listen—

PHIL DONAHUE: You could not criticize this war four months before the invasion.

ELIOT SPITZER: Right.

PHIL DONAHUE: It was not good for business. You had—General Electric had no interest in featuring an old talk show host who was against the president’s war. It was—it was unpopular. You weren’t American. This is what you get with corporate media. It’s going to happen again.

AMY GOODMAN: Cenk Uygur, does your situation compare to that of Phil Donahue’s? Do you think Al Sharpton would take a very different political line than you would?

CENK UYGUR: So, there’s a couple of different things here. First of all, it’s not just Phil Donahue. I had Jesse Ventura on The Young Turks a little while ago, maybe over a year ago. And what people don’t remember is that he also had a big contract from MSNBC at the time to do a show, and they told him, “You know what? It’s OK. Take the money. You don’t even have to do the show.” Why? He said they found out that he was against the Iraq War and said, “That’s OK. We don’t want you on air then.” OK?

And Ashleigh Banfield, when she gave a great speech in Kansas about how the war didn’t make any sense, she went from their star reporter to literally being moved into a closet. And they wouldn’t even let her out of her contract so she can go on another network and talk. It was unbelievable.

Now, the distinction there is Donahue, Ventura, Banfield were all under different management at MSNBC. So you have to be clear on that, and you can’t put that on them. But the similarity is that it is corporate media, right? And whether it’s the pressure to go right, the pressure to go left, pressure to appease the Bush administration, or pressure to appease the Obama administration, it exists. And it’s not just MSNBC. You think that the CNN hosts can aggressively challenge government officials? I don’t think so. It doesn’t look that way at all. And of course, when you get to Fox News, they’re a whole different animal: they’re purely propaganda. So, to me, this is not an issue of just MSNBC management now, no.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But Cenk, also there are several liberal hosts still on MSNBC, but they also manage to be basically very supportive of the Obama administration. You were perhaps one of the most critical hosts, in terms of raising questions about the Obama administration’s policies.

CENK UYGUR: Well, there’s no question that I was by far the least supportive of the Obama administration. I saw your last segment, and I couldn’t agree more with your guest. I think President Obama is clearly, you know, a Republican. I know, because in the 1990s I was a Republican, and he’s way to the right of me, and I’ve hardly changed any positions. The political spectrum has shifted massively to the right in this country, and nobody wants to talk about it.

And the Obama, you know, supporters, I don’t know what they want the hosts to do. So, we fought so hard to make sure that Bush didn’t cut Social Security. So are we supposed to cheer when Obama cuts Social Security? We fought so hard to make sure that Bush didn’t give more tax cuts to the rich. Are we supposed to cheer when Obama gives more tax cuts to the rich? And the list goes on and on.

Now, it’s very important for me to make this distinction, because I really believe it. The hosts are totally different than the management. And it is an interesting way that you acquire power within these corporate organizations, right? I think Rachel Maddow has done a brilliant job in becoming more and more independent. And I think she does a fantastic progressive show, and she did it by accruing power, by getting better and better ratings. And so, my beef is not with anybody on air at MSNBC at all. I think Ed Schultz does a strong show. And, you know, if they have slight differences of opinion on—

AMY GOODMAN: Cenk, we only have 20 seconds. I want to ask you—MSNBC said they were offering you a better position. Can you respond to that?

CENK UYGUR: Well, better as in a lot more money, but it was for weekend hosting and for a contributor role.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to have to leave it there. I want to thank—

CENK UYGUR: So, I—

AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead. Five seconds.

CENK UYGUR: So, it’s not like there was a disgruntled employee or not. I just didn’t want to do the kind of programming they wanted me to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Cenk Uygur, I want to thank you for being with us, the “Young Turk.”

The most important message out of Cenk Uygur’s departure from MSNBC TV is not about Cenk Uygur or about MSNBC. It’s about the media and the press in general: are we going to be honest with our audience. Are we going to trade in honesty and truth in information that we are supposed to gather for access. Cenk Uygur could not stand that about the mainstream media before he went there; he used to tell the young turks audience that this was a huge problem. And now that he has been inside that machine, it turns out that he was totally right about his outside perception of it. The problem is that they are obsessed with access. And he could not have access to the Democratic voices going into an election with his very critical tone.

Scary, huh? That the government is controlling the media? Are you surprised? Of course not!

Bad poll numbers for President Obama. PEW Research Center just came out with numbers saying that his approval number is down to 44%. In May, it was up to 56%, losing 12 points. By most polls he has lost 4 to 7 percentage points. PEW has the most, Washington Post has the smallest margins, but obviously those numbers are not good.

There are a lot of numbers that are not good. I will give you one of them. 90% of Americans according to the ABC Washington Post Poll think the state of the economy is either not so good or poor. It is very hard to win re-election when 90% of the country believe that the state of the economy is in really bad shape.
So those numbers do not bode well, but what is more important and interesting for the President, in terms of can he get people to come out and vote and actually win the election, can he organize and energize his base, is the numbers when it comes to progressive voters. And there we have some serious trouble. These overall numbers can go up and down. They went up when he caught Bin Laden; now they are going down because of the economy, etc. But when you look at the base, it’s eroding. Let’s take a look.

CNN says that there is growing dissatisfaction on the left and that is helping to erode his numbers. “Roughly one in four Americans who disapprove of the president say they feel that way because he’s not been liberal enough.” Now that’s going to blow away Washington conventional wisdom: Fox News called him a socialist so how can he not be liberal enough?

But, no, the reason his numbers are going down because people are saying, “hey, wait a minute, this guy’s not liberal. Why is he agreeing with every single thing that the Republicans propose?” That’s why his numbers are going down. By the way, this is the last time you will hear this. Even though it’s CNN’s own poll, they will never talk about it again. Every time they talk about President Obama and his low approval numbers, they will frame it in the context of not agreeing with the Republicans enough. Watch, you’ll see.

Washington Post ABC News Poll: the number of liberal Democrats who strongly support Obama’s record on jobs has plunged 22 points from 53% last year to 31%, meaning even liberals are saying, Obama is not creating jobs. And at this point as he is trying to cut spending, he is not even trying to create jobs. These liberal Democrats are right.

Point number three: The President’s actions have helped the economy. That number has dropped from 77% in October among African Americans to just over half of those surveyed. So even among African Americans it’s just barely over half of them that say he has helped the economy. That is a very bad number. The base is eroding like crazy.

Point number four: the President’s approval rating among self-identified “liberals” has dropped to 70%. You might say that 70% is a big number, but that’s 30% of self-identified liberals saying I don’t like the Democratic President; I do not approve of him. Understand it is such a partisan game. Are you on team Democrat or team Republican: that’s how it has been classically. For liberals to say I do not like the captain of my own team, I do not approve of him, that is a very bad number.

Point number five, and this is the poll that they did at the NetRoots Convention: 80% of the people there said President Obama was doing a good job. Remember, at the convention, they were all riled up and asked, are you in favor of your President or against him, 80% said yes: although it appears to be a big number, these people are all supposed to be on his side. But when you look beyond that number, when you look at how many liberals strongly approve of a Democratic President, Barack Obama, that number is only 27%.

Do you know what that means? That means that they are not excited. That means the hardcore guys, the guys at NetRoots, the bloggers, the people watching my show, etc., they are all going to vote anyway because they care about politics. But the people who are not excited, who don’t care a lot about politics, those are the ones that we are worried about that are not going to go to show up to vote because people are not excited, there is no strong approval.

Okay, the last poll number, point number six: nearly half of Obama’s own base–45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents–want someone to challenge him for the Democratic nomination. Everybody in Washington says, primary, that’s crazy; of course, you can’t primary Obama, that would hurt the Democrats. That’s crazy talk, totally unacceptable. But 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say by all means, please do so: please challenge the President because they do not strongly approve of him and a lot of them flat out don’t approve of him at all, and a lot of that is because they don’t think he is nearly liberal enough. And by the way, they are absolutely right.

So now in the midst of all of that, President Obama is talking about a grand bargain where he would cut social security, where he would cut medicare, and where he would cut the top tax rates, and he would throw in a tremendous amout of spending cuts on top of that gift packaged up for the Republicans.

And, gee, I wonder why he is losing his base.

It’s a sad day in Mudville, USA, when the powers-that-be dictate the news, isn’t it? The establishment and Washington did not appreciate Cenk Uygur’s critical tone and demanded that he tone it down. MSNBC TV is owned by G.E., a company that Cenk Uygur often criticized. And Washington, including Congress and President Obama, were virtually challenged and criticized by Cenk Uygur every night. No wonder they did not like his tone.

Al Sharpton told Leslie Stahl recently that he would never criticize President Barack Obama:

LESLEY STAHL, CBS (OFF CAMERA): Sharpton told us that having a black president is a challenge: if he finds fault with Mr. Obama, he’s aiding those who want to destroy him. So he has decided not to criticize the president about anything – even about black unemployment that’s twice the national rate.

(In other words, it is okay to criticize white politicians but not black politicians. Is that not a rascist position, Reverend Al Sharpton?)

Is it any wonder that Al Sharpton is now Cenk Uygur’s replacement on MSNBC TV?

Cenk Uygur did not fail in his ratings. He placed number 2 at his time slot, second to Fox News, beating out CNN at that hour. In fact, he increased the ratings of the 6 PM MSNBC TV program over that of last year when Ed Schultz hosted the show at that time.

Cenk Uygur has degrees in law from Columbia and in business from Wharton’s School of Business. These are very impressive educational credentials for a political journalist, especially when our economy is at the forefront of the American public’s consciousness. Al Sharpton attended Brooklyn College for two years before dropping out. Can one compare the sophistication of these two individuals? I cannot understand what Al Sharpton is saying half of the time on MSNBC TV. Can you?

Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources interviewed Cenk Uygur about his departure from MSNBC and suggested that Cenk was removed from the show because of his strident tone, and not because he challenged politicians. Cenk Uygur disagreed, saying that it was not his style, but the substance of his presentation on the show that was the cause of his removal from the show. Cenk believes that Washington objected to his repeated attacks on the President, the administration, and both the Democratic and Republican parties, and, in response, these groups pressured MSNBC to have Cenk tone down his attacks. In support of his argument, he observed that his replacement, Al Sharpton, had said in a recent interview by Leslie Stahl that he would never criticize President Barack Obama. One can only ask why someone would make such a blanket statement, especially one who is supposed to be a voice of truth and justice.

Although Cenk Uygur, like many talk show hosts on television, at times became heated during exchanges with guests, he conducted himself as a gentleman and always argued from facts, never indulging in ad hominem or personal attacks. In my opinion, Cenk Uygur was removed from the show, not because of his ratings, or because of his aggressive and challenging tone, but because he ceaselessly attacked the Washington establishment, exposing their lies and hypocrisy, including those of President Barack Obama.

Listen to the interview of Cenk Uygur by Howard Kurtz and judge for yourself. I was very disappointed in Howard Kurtz’s posture during that interview since he is supposed to be the true voice of journalism. Can journalists have two masters? Are journalists to be ruled by their employers and their sponsors, or by the public’s need for truth? Howard, your position in the interview revealed your true allegiance.

We have witnessed the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the super rich over the last 30 years: the rich have increased their wealth by over four times over the three decades since Ronald Reagan became President.

The decrease in the highest marginal tax rates from 70% to 33% on the rich has not led to any trickling down to the lower and middle classes nor has it created any jobs: that is a myth perpetuated by the mouthpieces of the rich. And the reduction of the capital gains tax rate has not led to any significant investment in capital assets in America in recent years.

It is time to end deficit spending. And the first measure that needs to be adopted is to raise taxes on the wealthy.

The second step would be to cut defense.

Let’s get started. Please sign the petition below and help the rich find their wallets.

Remember Warren Buffett’s call-to-arms:

“there’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Winning? They are kicking our asses all the way back to the America prior to the New Deal of the 1930s, when laborers were paid a $1 a day without any employee benefits.

It is time for Connecticut residents to petition Governor Malloy and their State Senators and Representatives by demanding a more equitable tax bill for the middle class:  that is, one that spreads the pain more evenly to all of its citizens.

If the tax rates on middle class citizens can increase by as much as 30%, then certainly the tax rates on millionaires and billionaires can increase by at least that amount as well.

If you wish to add your name to the petition that we will be submitting to the State of Connecticut to amend Senate Bill No. 1239 (SB1239), please include your name, address, and email address on the petition that appears below.

Let’s spread the pain equitably all around so that everyone shares the pain, including the aristocratic class in Fairfield Country, one of the richest counties in the entire United States, where many of those Wall Streeters, who were responsible for our country’s economic collapse, live.

Do you want the most wealthy in Connecticut to pay their fair share in taxes? Do you want the Wall Streeters who caused our economic collapse to pay more in taxes? If you do, then click on the link below and sign the petition.

Barefoot Accountant

CENK UYGUR, HOST: The Republican reverse: Robin Hood strikes again. Tonight, Chris Christie whacks the workers in New Jersey. This is about one thing, raw political power. Republicans continue their war on the middle class.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie took a victory lap today after his state approved a rollback of benefits for 750,000 government workers and retirees. They must be so proud. The bill increases what workers contribute for their health insurance and pensions, suspends cost of living increases to retirees` pensions, and curbs the contract bargaining rights.

But wait a minute. It curbs union bargaining rights? That`s funny. Just three months ago, Christie was all for union rights. Remember? This is what he said –

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE (R), NEW JERSEY: I love collective bargaining. We`re ready to collectively bargain. And let`s have it be real collective bargaining where someone is in there representing the people who pay the bills.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: Now he seems to have conveniently forgotten about that as he took away their bargaining rights anyway. And this morning, he defended his plan.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRISTIE: A bipartisan plan where we compromised to put the people first, Matt. The taxpayers is going to save over $130 billion over the next 30 years. We needed to bring equity and shared sacrifice into this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: Shared sacrifice? I see where the workers are sacrificing. Where is the sacrifice for the rich? Remember, Christie just vetoed a bill that would have increased taxes on millionaires. He saved them hundreds of millions of dollars for the rich. Where is their shared sacrifice?

In New Jersey, equity and shared sacrifice has actually meant outing state aid — cutting, I should say, state aid for needy cities. And the results honestly have been disastrous. Newark alone was forced to cut 167 police officers. The result, murders are up 65 percent from a year ago. Jesus, 65 percent.

You know why that happens? That happens when you take cops off the street, because you just had to give more money to the millionaires of New Jersey. And then you`re surprised, right?

Shared sacrifice? What`s he talking about? When is the last time his rich buddies shared any of the sacrifice? It turns out the people of Newark are the ones getting all the sacrifice.

Now, let me show you how the GOP`s reverse Robin Hood works in general. The rich give campaign contributions to the GOP Party, who in turn cut programs for the working class to fund tax breaks for, you guessed it, the rich. Funny how that works.

Today, the great example of that comes from the other favorite union-buster, Scott Walker. This Sunday, he will sign a budget that includes $2.3 billion in tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Up until a few hours ago, he was going to sign that bill at, you guessed it, the business of a man convicted on charges of tax evasion.

The irony here is that the man didn`t need to evade those taxes at all. All he had to do was wait for Scott Walker to get into power. Then he could have qualified for legalized tax evasion through the Republican Party. And that about sums up the state of the Republican Party right now, legalized tax evasion for the rich and pain and sacrifice for the rest of us.

Joining me now, Democrat from New Jersey, Senator Frank Lautenberg.

SEN. FRANK LAUTENBERG (D), NEW JERSEY: Hi.

UYGUR: Senator Lautenberg, great to have you here. Chris Christie is unpopular right now in New Jersey. He`s got an overall unfavorability rating, but yet he is still getting this done. Why do we have this deal in New Jersey today?

LAUTENBERG: Well, because a lot of people capitulated their beliefs and threw their hat in the ring to be friendly with this bullying governor of ours. And remember what this governor is doing. Not only is he cutting people`s incomes, increasing their costs, but also, he is has taken the liberty of giving away New Jersey money.

We had a $6 billion transit commitment from the federal government and the New York Port Authority and he gave it away. We took $400 million worth of education money that was going to the benefit of people living in New Jersey, and he lost that. And he`s given away further assets, and we just don`t understand it. Why is New Jersey the giveaway state when we need so much help?

UYGUR: Well, Senator Lautenberg, I understand what you are saying. You mentioned the word “capitulation,” though, and I think that`s an interesting word to use there, because, look, we have seen this over and over. Republicans come in like tough guys, and Christie — and I`m calling Christie “Governor Paulie Walnuts” now, yelling at his own constituents in harsh ways, et cetera, et cetera.

I understand that. But Democrats had to sign off on this in New Jersey. My God, why in the world would you do that?

LAUTENBERG: Why? Because I`m sure that it`s not without getting something for their own need in return. And it`s the wrong way to do it. We have to stand tough, because we`re being slashed at all across this country.

And I say we, the Democrats, but I`m concerned more about the people who work for a living that permit those of us who have been successful to be successful. And it`s not happening. So they`re just quitting and going along with the governor, with whom they violently disagree but don`t have the guts to stand up to.

UYGUR: Senator, I want to talk about how we fight back. Right? Because I want to show you two sets of numbers here which I think are so his stark and could help in fighting back.

We told you about Newark. And you know about Camden, of course. You`re the senator from New Jersey. What they did was they initially had to cut half of their police budget and half of their police department because they didn`t have enough money from the state government. Violent crimes spiked 18 percent just in the first quarter alone, and then they had to panic and hired back those 50 police officers, because you can`t have cities without police officers.

This is crazy. And why do they do all this? Well, again, Chris Christie vetoed a bill that would have raised $637 million because he wanted to protect millionaires.

I mean, isn`t this an amazing case to make to the voters of New Jersey? Shouldn`t Democrats be on fire in New Jersey making this case?

LAUTENBERG: Yes, you`re darned right. And the fact is that in Camden, police weren`t available enough to go to burglary scenes, but had to record it on a disk and check up on it later. It`s outrageous.

And we`re being swept away by a bullying governor who promises retribution if you don`t go his way. Well, the retribution, in my view, is going to come from the next election, and we`re going to see it directly as his numbers fall now, and I believe will continue to fall heavier, in the very near future.

UYGUR: Last question for you, Senator. Do you think Chris Christie is really playing more to a national audience, a national Tea Party Republican audience, rather than your own state, in order to — I don`t know if he is trying to be president, vice president. I don`t know what he`s running for. But do you think that`s the real game here?

LAUTENBERG: You put the words in my mouth. He is looking at the national picture, because what he is doing to the people in of New Jersey is going to hurt so much, that he could very well be swept away there. But he is willing to trade it for a shot at the big job. That`s my belief.

UYGUR: All right. New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, thank you so much for joining us this evening. We really appreciate it.

LAUTENBERG: OK.

UYGUR: All right. Now, let`s be clear, one of the reasons that the GOP governors are attacking unions is because they fight for Democrats. Outside groups spent nearly $500 million during the 2010 election cycle to run ads, make phone calls, distribute literature to sway the electorate. That`s how it works.

Now, during the midterms, six of the top nine groups that gave that funding were conservative. Only three were liberal, and all three of those were unions. Now do you see why they attack the unions?

But Democrats are now trying to fight back against that disparity with outside fund-raising groups of their own. They are fighting fire with fire, or you could say money with money.

Joining me now, former deputy White House press secretary and senior strategist to the political group Priorities USA, Bill Burton. Bill, good to have you here.

BILL BURTON, FMR. DEPUTY WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Thanks for having me on.

UYGUR: Absolutely. Look, there`s two sides of this, right? Fire fight with fire, and then there is the side of, well, then we`re in the business of taking corporate money. So, first, let`s address the first point.

You know what? Actually, let me let you respond to Senator Feingold, because he directly challenged you guys on this issue at Netroots. Let me play a clip for you guys.

BURTON: OK.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUSS FEINGOLD (D), FMR. U.S. SENATOR: I emphasize the ability to fight fire with fire. But Democrats should just never be in the business of taking unlimited corporate contributions. It`s dancing with the devil, and it`s a game that we will never win.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: Well, what do you think about that, Bill?

BURTON: Here is the question. Do you want Karl Rove as the Koch brothers to have unlimited influence on this election with no response whatsoever from the Democratic side? Our view is that, we might not like the rules, but they`re the rules that we`ve got in this election cycle, and we`re not going to give Karl Rove and the Koch brothers any more advantage than they`ve already got.

They`ve got deep pockets from the oil companies, deep pockets from their rich friends in Texas, who all can spend unlimited sums of money. We`re not in the business of saying, OK, we`re all right with your hundreds of millions of dollars washing over the candidates that we care about, the values that are important to us, just because we want to make — just because we want to make a political point. We don`t want to make a political point. What we want to do is make sure that the right wing doesn`t have undue influence in this election cycle.

UYGUR: I`m really, really split on this, because I totally here what you are saying. And look, anybody who watches this show knows I`m a big fan of fighting back. And you guys are fighting back.

BURTON: Absolutely.

UYGUR: No question about that. Right? So I get that and I love fighting fire with fire. Having said that, I`m a little concerned that, you know, look, when you take corporate money, there`s certain understandings that come along with it. Are you guys beholden to those understandings?

BURTON: We are not beholden to any understandings. Anybody who wants to participate through our group knows exactly what we`re doing and why we`re doing it.

And the best example of why our group exists became clear today. Karl Rove`s group, today, said that they are starting a $20 million advertising campaign over the course of the next two months, $5 million over the course of the next two weeks.

Now, are we to sit by as Democrats, as progressives, and say it`s OK for Karl Rove and his agenda to have all that influence, to have all that impact on the election and do nothing? Our view is that this is why we exist.

If you`re a Democrat, if you`re a progressive, if you care about the things that Democrats care about, get involved, participate. Because we cannot stand by again and see what happened in 2010 happen once again in this election where Democrats got run out of town as a result of the hundreds of millions of dollars that right wing groups were putting into this election.

UYGUR: So, again, Senator Feingold would say, yes, I get it. All right? And you don`t want to do as some people have said — I think Debbie Wasserman Schultz said you don`t want to do unilateral disarmament. I`m the last guy in the world who wants to do unilateral disarmament. So I understand that concept.

But at the same time, Senator Feingold says if you play this game, you eventually wind up losing because corporations are going to back Republicans more than they`re going to back you guys, so it`s better to just change the game rather than just to play within it.

And I get that you`ve got to do both. You`ve got do both. I get that. Right? But how do you plan, if you do it all, on changing the game?

BURTON: Well, a couple of things. We actually have no — we have no doubt that Republicans will be able to raise more corporate money. They`ve got oil companies who are making record profits right now who can cut checks for $20 million, $30 million, $40 million and not even think twice about it. It`s what they sneeze on any given Tuesday.

But what we are trying to do is make sure that Democrats and progressives and people who actually care about changing the rules get in control. We want to change the rules, but you can`t change the direction of the bus if you don`t have control of the steering wheel. And our view is, we`ve got to get control of the steering wheel.

These Republicans, Karl Rove, the Koch brothers, none of these folks who are trying to get involved and sway this election have any interest to change the rules. We do. The people we support do. And that`s going to be something that only has a chance if Karl Rove and the Koch brothers lose.

UYGUR: Bill, final thing on this, look, I get that side of the equation, again, for the eighth time. Right?

BURTON: Sure.

UYGUR: If you have a Republican in there, they`re going to let Wall Street run wild, they`re going to give any kind of break to the oil companies. There`s no question about that. It`s a historical fact. That`s what they do every single time.

BURTON: Absolutely.

UYGUR: So the alternative is hideous. I know that. Right? Now, having said that, look, right now, we`ve got President Obama having dinner with Wall Street guys in New York this month because he`s got to raise money. Right?

And we had the Dodd-Frank bill that a lot of progressives thought was incredibly weak because we didn`t want to offend the Wall Street guys. And that`s partly because the Democrats take their money, too. You`ve got acknowledge that`s a problem.

BURTON: I can assure you that there`s a lot of folks on Wall Street who didn`t like Dodd-Frank either. It`s the sort of thing where you had critics on the right, you had critics on the left, and he tried to do what he thought was best for the country. That`s the thing, is that what we believe are, you know, true core progressive values, that`s what we are trying to advance here.

And sitting by and letting one side participate with unlimited donations just isn`t going to help advance our values. What it`s going to do is going to slow us down. It`s going to make us lose elections. It`s going to make sure that the things that we care about are not advanced in Washington. We have seen enough of that. But if these guys win, we know what the outcome is going to be.

UYGUR: Right. Look, Bill, I appreciate you coming on here, Bill Burton, and talking this through. And it is interesting. My final thing from my perspective is, I wish we could do both things. Right?

BURTON: Sure.

UYGUR: But, yes, you`ve got do what you`ve got to do to win the next election. I get that. But at the same time, man, we have to spend all of our time and energy changing the game, because eventually I think Senator Feingold is right. We lose this game of corporate cash.

And most importantly, and the reason I care about it, is that the American people lose that. The corporations wind up shifting all the taxes on to all of us. And we`ve got to change that game entirely.

I we wish we could take some of the money you`re raising, everybody else is raising, and direct it towards campaign reform, because we`d all be 10 times better served.

BURTON: And let me just say as a final point, I respect Senator Feingold`s opinion, I respect what you are saying right there. And our view is that, if you want to change the game, you`ve got to be in control of it. And if the other guys are in control of it, we know exactly what`s going to happen.

UYGUR: All right. Bill Burton, you`re very clear. Thank you for joining us tonight. Appreciate it.

BURTON: Thanks for having me.

The Barefoot Accountant

William Brighenti, Certified Public Accountant, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

UYGUR: Once budget talk turned to taxes the Republicans ran for the hills. They didn`t want to be anywhere around there. So now it`s time for President Obama to step in to close the deal.

Today, we got word Obama will meet with Democratic and Republican leaders, one on one, starting Monday. The goal is to get the top leaders together so that they can finish those talks that got derailed when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl pulled out on Thursday and ran away.

Profiles in courage, those Republicans are. Very, very bold.

But it might be tough to get a deal no matter who is in the room for one simple reason. Republicans are now brazenly admitting they`re entirely unwilling to negotiate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R), MINORITY LEADER: Over the past several days, some have suggested in various news stories that the real goal of these talks is to devise a plan that satisfies one side by reducing the debt, and satisfies the other side by raising taxes. The suggestion here is that all — this is all just some quid pro quo exercise between the two parties. This is a dangerous trend, and it is wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: Yes, that`s how negotiations work. You give something, they give something. What do you want? I want everything, and I want the Democrats to give everything to me, and I give nothing in return.

Come on, man. I get frustrated. How many times have we seen this?

The problem is that the Democrats encourage it. After reportedly giving away $2 trillion in spending cuts, they`re now suggesting that negotiations over tax cuts are just beginning.

The Democrats are now offering new concessions. Yesterday, Democratic Senator Max Baucus called for a deal that would include new taxes and “additional cuts to Medicare.” That is absolutely unbelievable.

You know, there`s another way to do this. When the Republicans say that the trillions in spending cuts don`t count, and they will offer nothing in return, you walk out. In fact, you kick them out of your office and you tell them, you know what? These talks are now over.

We will now take our case to the American people and tell them that you are protecting tax breaks for corporations, millionaires and billionaires who fund your campaigns. You are dirty, corrupt politicians who want to unload all of the country`s problems on the middle class.

In other words, here is the other alternative — you give them hell. When is the last time the Democrats did that? What, 30 years ago? Never?

You want to fight for our side? Anybody want to fight?

More concessions. Unbelievable.

All right, let`s bring in Ezra Klein, MSNBC contributor and a reporter for “The Washington Post.” He`s got a lot to say about how — why Cantor fled the budget talks and the gamble on America`s debt that both sides are making.

All right. Ezra, come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.

You give away $2 trillion and then you say, all right, now let`s talk about taxes? Can anybody be that stupid?

EZRA KLEIN, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: I think if you look at their political side, they probably think they did a good job here.

(LAUGHTER)

KLEIN: Look at where the three sides are, right? On the one hand, you have the Republicans stomping out in a tantrum from the room. You have Mitch McConnell denying that what happens in politics is under any circumstance a negotiation. That is suddenly not allowed.

You have Eric Cantor saying the Democrats gave us everything we asked for and we decided to stop negotiating with them.

And you have Barack Obama — and this is important today — refusing to fire. Jay Carney and Barack Obama continued to sound conciliatory.

UYGUR: Of course!

KLEIN: So what they think will happen here, I mean, if you look at what their strategy is, they think that they`re going to look like the bipartisan guys. And when this debt ceiling thing actually begins to implode on itself because Republicans won`t come to an agreement on it, Republicans are going to be left holding the bag. That`s their plan.

UYGUR: No, no. Look, that`s always their plan. Their plan is, never fight back, and then give the Republicans almost everything they want, and sometimes even more, and then go, aren`t I so bipartisan? Well, I`m not interested in that plan, because in that plan, the middle class gets screwed again, and the rich pay none of the share again.

Look, here`s the thing. Ezra, if they said, like you said, hey, you know what, the Republicans are walking out, we seem like the reasonable guys, and the American people will side with us, but that presupposes that they play chicken, that they go to the end here.

But they`re not going to. You know it, right? The Democrats — who loses in a game of chicken between Democrats and Republicans? One million percent of the time, the Democrats. Right?

So they`re going to give in at the last moment and give the Republicans almost everything they want, aren`t they? That`s what happens every time. I would be shocked if anything else happened.

KLEIN: I think we`ll have to see.

So there are two bets here, right? The Republicans have bet that, as you say, Democrats will not go to the edge on this, they will not play chicken all the way to the end. And Democrats are betting, or at least hoping, that when they get to the end, that Republicans will have looked so bad for what they are doing, that the pressure on them will become unbearable.

What happened in `95, when Clinton and the Republicans went to a shutdown over the debt ceiling, was they almost got to the point where they stopped sending out Social Security checks. And as the Republicans realized seniors were going to blame them and they were going to take the heat in the next election, they broke on it.

And that is — if you look at the people the White House hired, it`s all those same people from the `90s. So that is certainly the playbook they are trying to run.

UYGUR: How has that playbook worked out for them so far?

KLEIN: I think opinions vary on that one.

(LAUGHTER)

UYGUR: Yes, they vary. No, every single time they are like, oh, boy, we have got the Republicans under pressure now because we have been so reasonable in giving them everything. And they`re going to have to buckle, right?

They have not buckled once. That is the world`s worst playbook.

1995? They might as well be going to an 1895 playbook. That is so outdated.

That`s not the same Republicans. They never give in. And these people don`t seem to understand negotiations.

But look, speaking of Republicans, there is an interesting twist here within the Republican Party. Eric Cantor walked out. That wasn`t just a negotiation tactic, right? There was also some internal strife.

What`s that about?

UYGUR: It really looks like that. Eric Cantor`s statement was fascinating.

He didn`t say, as Mitch McConnell did, as Jon Kyl did, these negotiations are going terribly, we don`t want to do taxes, we`re out. He said, at this point, I can`t cut the deal for you. You`re going to have to have Speaker Boehner do it.

And what he was doing there was he was passing the bag that Boehner put Cantor in these negotiations because Cantor is a conservative emissary in the Republican House leadership. He`s the guy who the Tea Party trusts.

And so, for Boehner to cut a deal and not have the Tea Party rebel against him, he needed Cantor to be there with him there to cut it. And Cantor got it right up to the point where conservatives would stop being happy, right up to the point you needed taxes. And he didn`t stay in that room and say we`re not being able to make a deal.

And he and Boehner didn`t come out together and make a statement. Cantor walked and said it`s up to Boehner now.

And so, if Boehner ends up cutting the deal, the Tea Party is going to turn on him, and it`s going to help clear the way for Cantor to be Speaker or minority leader in a couple of years. But either way, it`s not a real profile in courage on Eric Cantor`s part.

UYGUR: So, Ezra, that leads us to the last thing here, because when you get to Boehner — and I know Obama was supposed to soften him up by playing golf. Softening up Republicans. Anyway — OK.

So they get to Boehner, right? But look what Boehner has said about taxes before. Let`s roll it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BOEHNER: Tax hikes are off the table. The American people don`t want us to raise taxes and they know that we`ve got a spending problem.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: So, what is Boehner going to do? Is he going to say, OK, yes, I was kidding, now we`re going to raise taxes, or is he just going to stick to his line and think that the White House will buckle because they have every other time?

KLEIN: I think he`s going to stick to his line.

Look, Boehner is — because of what Cantor did, and because of internal dynamics, Boehner is weak. And so Boehner came out immediately and said of course I won`t raise taxes.

What Boehner eventually needs to do, and what the Republicans eventually will probably have to do, is raise taxes in way that their people don`t agree is a tax increase, something like closing budget expenditures, loopholes and tax breaks. So far, in this negotiation, they`re not willing to do it. But at some point we`re going to have to cut some sort of a deal here.

And right now — and this is true on their political team — the White House thinks they have got a winning argument. As you know, tax hikes on the rich are a heck of a lot more popular than Medicare cuts. So they`re not particularly afraid, at least in theory, of bring this to the American people. The question ends up being how afraid they are of letting the debt ceiling collapse and do damage to the economy.

UYGUR: Right, which, of course, the will, at the end, say we can`t do it. We had to give in. They held the American people hostage. You know, we had the winning argument, we just didn`t use it.

How many times have I seen that movie? You look forward to it. I could be wrong. I won`t be, but let`s see what happens.

All right. Ezra Klein, MSNBC contributor and reporter for “The Washington Post.”

Very good reporting on this. Thank you.

KLEIN: Thank you.

The Barefoot Accountant
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

How about cutting their vacation time? Let them just take the same number of holidays and vacation that we are allotted: the seven (7) major holidays and a couple of weeks off for a vacation. So instead of 26 weeks, let them set an example and get 3 weeks off. It’s time to cut, alright, it’s time to cut all the time off members of Congress get. Maybe by cutting all the time off, Congress will get something done and fix our economy.

There’s no talking to the Republicans literally because they will storm out of the room like little kids: “I’m taking my budget and going home.” Today a major breakdown budget negotiations as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor flat out bailed on the talks. He said he cannot deal with any more talk about raising taxes on billionaires. Poor Cantor.

Moments ago Nancy Pelosi responded to Cantor’s move in an exclusive interview with our own Lawrence O’Donnell: “It’s an interesting tactic. It doesn’t happen to be valid because the point is that we are willing to have a balanced package. They are not. They are not. They do not want to talk about taxes, Eric Cantor. But it is interesting that they—and I knew, and we all said what they are going to do is say, even though we can agree on certain cuts, you won’t go for them unless we raise taxes to the American people. No we are not. We are just saying to make our tax system fair so that everyone pays their fair share.”

Now hours after Eric Cantor pulled that, Republican Senator John Kyle did the same: “Apparently they got budget interruptus.” Until finally planned talks led by Vice President Biden were simply cancelled for the day. John Boehner says he understands Cantor’s hissy fit: “I know the frustation that he feels when Democrat members continue to want to bring tax hikes into this conversation….And I think Mr. Cantor has made it clear that these conversations could continue if they take the tax hikes out of the conversation.”

Well the obvious reality is that the GOP thinks that they can push the Democrats around, so they are drawing another line in the sand on taxes. And honestly, who can blame them? The White House as usual had an inexplicably horrible strategy in these so-called negotiations. They agreed to at least $2 trillion in spending cuts before they even started talking about taxes. And now they are expecting Republicans to discuss taxes after they already gave them the spending cuts? Why would they do that? Can anyone be really this bad at negotiation?

And by the way, if that negotiation strategy sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Obama gave Republicans more than they originally asked for when he agreed to roughly $38 billion in budget cuts to avoid a government shut down. Now who gives their opponents more than they ask for? Months before that, the President agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

These guys are like a reverse price line. They go in and make the highest bid against themselves and then wonder why they didn’t get a good deal. And that’s exactly why Republicans now believe that the White House will roll over every single time. But don’t take my word for it; take Mitch McConnell’s: “They could not get a tax increase on people making a million dollars and up through a Congress that they had overwhelming control of….Taxes aren’t going to be raised. If they couldn’t raise taxes when they owned the government in the last Congress, you know that they cannot do it now.”

Ah, he’s rubbing their faces in it. But the really scary thing, Democrats are signaling that they may not only back away from raising taxes on the rich—are you ready for this—they might also be willing to lower taxes on corporations; [Virginia Senator Mark Warner, a member of the Deficit Commission said], “The way we’re dealing with revenues is not raising taxes, we are actually going back to the Reagan approach, which is lowering tax rates, getting rid of a lot the tax exemptions….”

We are going to sum it up. They are going to slash programs that help the middle and low income families while lowering corporate taxes. So you tell me, are Democrats the worse negotiators in human history? Or is everyone in D.C. playing a game on us, where they know what the outcome is, where we are going to take the hit again and the rich and the powerful are going to slide again.

Alright, well let me pose that question to a man who does not play those games, Independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Senator, great to have you here. As I look at this, I think, wasn’t this the most obvious to be expected move of all time when you first give away the spending cuts and then, gee, why, I wonder why the Republicans didn’t go along with the tax cuts?

Senator Bernie Sanders: Cenk, I think you hit the nail right on the head. And here’s the pity of it all. By overwhelming numbers of every single poll that I have seen, that deficit reduction must be accomplished through shared sacrifice. That the wealthiest people in this country can no longer enjoy huge tax breaks. That corporations making billions of dollars in profits are not paying a nickel in taxes. Have got to have those loopholes addressed. That’s what the American people believe in overwhelming numbers.

My view is that the President has got to use this Republican walkout as an opportunity. And what he has got to do now, very firmly, is go to the American people and make it clear that he will never support deficit reduction which does what the Republicans want. And that is move towards a balanced budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children, and the poor. And you know what? If he does that, he is going to have the American people in huge numbers on his side.

When Mitch McConnell says, oh, they want tax increases, what we are talking about is undoing Bush’s tax breaks for the rich, plugging loopholes which allow millionaires and billionaires to stash their money in the Cayman Islands and not pay a nickel in taxes. When we say that we want to address those issues, the American people are with us. The President must take that fight to the people.

Cenk Uygur: Senator Sanders, I wished the President would listen to you. That would be awesome, that would be perfectly logical, you would have the people behind you. I really doubt it. So I am going to ask you a question about whether you think the White House is a little naïve or somehow the fix is in. Because I want to show you a clip from earlier, after we gave away all those tax cuts again to the rich, the President was asked about what is going to happen during these negotiations. And an interesting response. Let’s look at this:

Obama: “When you say that they will have a significant amount of leverage over the White House, what do you mean….Here’s my expectation, and I will take John Boehner at his word, that nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse. That that would not be a good thing to happen.”

Cenk Uygur: Senator Sanders, when I saw that happening when it happened, I was like, really, is he going to take Boehner at his word? I look at that and I really wonder, and you are in Washington, and you are a Senator, and you know better than I do, I think can he possibly mean that? Does he really think that Boehner would say, oh, yeah, I will do whatever you want, I will just do what I told you that I was going to do….

Senator Sanders: The President understands that for the first time in our history not paying our debts in a world economy which is on very shaky grounds would be a very bad thing. And the President is clearly right.

But on the other hand, what we also know, Cenk, is the Republicans are tough. Yeah, they understand the repercussions of this but they are prepared to take it to the President. And I think the dynamic of it is that they assume that they are going to be firm and that they are going to prevail and that the White House and the Democrats will collapse.

And again, the absurdity of this is that the vast majority of the people support the Democratic proposal. And what the President has got to say is if you Republicans choose not to raise the debt ceiling, if you choose for the first time in American history not to pay our debts, and if we enter a depression, or huge kinds of financial instability, the American people will know that that financial responsibility is on your shoulders. You are the ones who have done it. You refused to compromise and you have done it and we are going to take the case to the American people.

But to keep backtracking, to keep capitulating, I think is not what the American people want. You know, we talk in a general sense of a trillion dollars in cuts. Do you know what we are talking about? We are talking about throwing millions and millions of people off Medicaid, we are talking about making it impossible for working class families to send their kids to college. We are talking about cuts that are in nutrition, which will increase the amount of hunger.

This is a lot of pain that the Republicans are tossing out while they want to protect their rich friends. The President has got to stand tall, take the case to the American people, and hold the Republicans responsible if the debt ceiling is not raised and the repercussions are bad.

Cenk Uygur: Senator Sanders, to buttress your point, I want to give you another poll on the Paul Ryan’s plan. The American people hate it. 57% saying that we would be worse off, 34% saying we would be better off. Those are terrible numbers obviously for the Republicans.

So we got the wind at our back. But my guess is, my very, very strong hunch is, that we are going to come out of this with, they are going to take some tax loopholes away, and there’s going to be a deal at the end, but they are actually going to lower corporate taxes. When that happens, I cannot begin to tell you the disappointment in real Americans. I have seen it in poll after poll. What’s going to happen in Washington, are they just going to go along with….?

Senator Sanders: All I can tell you, Cenk, is I am going to be on the floor, I believe, at 4 PM Monday talking about this issue. This is bad public policy. The middle class is collapsing, they don’t deserve cuts, the rich are getting richer, they have got to pay their fair share of taxes.

And second of all, this is what the American people believe in. They believe in the concept of shared sacrifice, not balancing the budget on the most vulnerable people in this country. So I am going to do my best. And the American people have got to chime in very loudly and say, hey, Mr. President, stand with us, stand with us, and be prepared to take on the big monied interests. We will be at your back.

Cenk Uygur: Alright, that would be fantastic. Senator Bernie Sanders, as always, a great pleasure. Thank you for joining us.

Senator Sanders: My pleasure.

Cenk Uygur: Alright, and now with me, Dana Milbank, national political correspondent with the Washington Post, and Michael Steele, former RNC chairman and MSNBC contributor. I want to talk to you guys a little bit about why Cantor did this, why the Republicans did it, and how does this all play out.

First of all, Dana, it is also possible of course, and not just possible, certainly at least a part of the equation, is that Cantor is doing this in relationship to John Boehner. Tell the audience how that plays out.

Dana Milbank: Right. At first blush it sounds like take your children to work day up there on Capitol Hill with Eric Cantor being petulant. But there is a sense that he may be doing the bad cop thing so that Boehner can do the good cop thing.

Look, everybody knows what the deal involves. They have got these basic cuts that they want to do if the Republicans can yield on tax revenues. That doesn’t mean higher tax rates. It just means getting rid of these loopholes. Then Democrats will yield on entitlements, particularly Medicare. Then you have a deal. You can’t get a deal otherwise.

So the idea is this allows Eric Cantor to build up his credentials with the Tea Party crowd that he is very popular with. Let John Boehner go in there and take the hit for a deal that ultimately has some sort of tax revenue increases that it has to have.

Cenk Uygur: Yeah, and that’s the inside politics of it within the Republican party, too. But Michael, as you look at the actual budget negotiations, so you got the taking away of these loopholes, isn’t that the most reasonable thing in the world? Don’t we have got to look at the revenue side?

Michael Steele: Oh, yeah, I think we do down the road, and the question is at what point on that journey do you do that.

Cenk Uygur: But not right now—

Michael Steele: Well, that is where we always like to start and it is an easy place to start. The hard place to really start is with the cuts. How much are we willing to pare back on in terms of our spending. And what Dana laid out is good on the inside the politics side, I think. On the tax and spending, and what the American people perceive more broadly, the Republicans want that to be a serious part of the discussion.

Cenk, in a real sense, your problem is less with Republicans and more with the Democrats in terms of what they are willing to come to the table with and how firm they are prepared to stand so that we do have this very, I think, important discussion about the relative role of spending with respective to entitlements and all the other programs that are on the table right now.

Cenk Uygur: Well, you are mostly right, Michael. My problem is with the Democrats because they won’t kick the Republicans’ ass. You got the American people behind you. Why don’t you just go in and fight? It looks like their hearts are not into it.

Michael Steele: But Cenk, what are you kicking our ass with and over?

Cenk Uygur: Taxes. I want to raise taxes on the rich. The majority of Americans want to raise taxes on the rich. If you raise taxes on the rich, you create 23 million jobs under Clinton. If you lower taxes as Bush did, you lose 1 million jobs over 10 years. I got the facts, I got the American people, I’m going to fight.

Michael Steele: You are all loopy on the facts….

Cenk Uygur: What do you mean loopy? There they are.

Michael Steele: But you are not taking into account that under that period that you are talking about, and they are two good periods to contrast, look at the level of spending when you had Clinton and the Republicans working together to reduce spending and increase the revenue through lower taxes and you have more spending under the Bush terms while you are at the same time cutting taxes. You just can’t do it both that way.

Cenk Uygur: But, Michael, here is what everybody tells me on the Republican side. If we just cut taxes, the economy will magically grow. But we did. We cut taxes for ten (10) years and it tanked. You guys were wrong. I wish the Democrats would make that case. I got to go to Dana. Dana, when you look at the Democratic side, isn’t the real problem that they don’t believe any of this? I mean, they never take the fight to them. I mean, look at Mark Warner saying he wants to cut corporate taxes. Is that what we are going to get at the end? Is this all kabuki theatre, and at the end, all the Democrats and Republicans have made a secret deal anyway, and then they are going to come out and say, yeah, we are going to raise the debt ceiling, and by the way, we are going to lower corporate taxes?

Dana Milbank: The silliest part of all of this is that the Democrats don’t even have to be on this position of raising taxes for anybody. They can just say, look, we are just getting rid of all of these loopholes. If you do that, you can actually lower taxes for everybody.

But what I don’t understand here is that it seems that Obama is almost sticking it to the Left here, like it is some sort of humiliation here, and it has been going on with the budget talks, with tax cuts, it is going on with Libya, it is going on with Afghanistan. You can see that the Democratic members particularly in the House are just livid with what is going on, but they feel powerless, there is nothing that they can do, they cannot challenge him, they can scream and yell like Bernie Sanders did, but ultimately they are stuck and they really cannot persuade this White House.

Cenk Uygur: They are stuck with a Democratic President who is not really Progressive and as you said, he is almost rubbing it in their face. Alright, that is great. I love being stuck that way. By the way, I bet that really works out for him when he is looking for votes. Yeah, that is a great winning strategy.

Anyway, Dana Milbank and Michael Steele, we have got to leave it right there. We are out of time. I love you guys. We will talk again soon. Okay?

Michael Steele: You got it, buddy.

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Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

On his weekly segment on The Dylan Ratigan Show, The Young Turks/MSNBC host Cenk Uygur explains why corporations should not get a so-called ‘tax holiday’. Past history clearly shows that repatriation of corporate monies from overseas at very low tax rates does not translate into jobs but just bigger dividends to corporations and bigger salaries for CEOs.

Bernie Sanders: “What the Koch Brothers want to do is destroy Social Security because Social Security is a Federal government program that has been enormously successful.

The Koch Brothers are funding think tanks and other organizations which are spreading an enormous amount of disinformation about Social Security.

Raising the age of retirement, if they have people who are banging nails, or waitresses, or so many blue-collared jobs out there, that you gotta keep working until your seventy (70) years of age, that is just really unfair.

Second of all, we want to give the younger generation an opportunity to get out into the work force.

The Koch Brothers fund organizations. You have economists and political scientists working there. And they are very, very good in getting on television.

Andrew Biggs, Cato Institute: “raising the retirement age….”

Veronique de Rugy, Heritage Foundation: “I would increase the retirement age….”

Jose Pinera, Cato Institute: “we will probably have to increase the retirement age….”

David Johns, Heritage Foundation: “We’re probably going to have to raise the retirement age….”

And people will not know that they represent an organization which is heavily funded by corporate interests. They are very effective in getting their positions out into the media.

Lawrence Kudlow, the Kudlow Report: “Should Congress raise the retirement age?”

Britt Hume, Special Report, Fox News: “If you raise the retirement age….”

Guest on Hannity: “Raise the retirement age….”

Blonde on Fox Business: “Let’s consider the options. Let’s raise the age….”

Another blonde on Fox Business: “…raising the retirement age to 69.”

At the same time, the Koch Brothers are putting huge amounts of money into campaign contributions.

Paul Ryan: “…very modest increases in the retirement age….”

John Boehner: “…and eventually getting the retirement age to seventy (70) is a step that needs to be taken….”

Rand Paul: “…and the age on Social Security will have to go up….”

So you have an echo chamber which starts repeating a lot of misinformation.

The Koch Brothers are funding study after study which suggests to people that Social Security is going bankrupt. Social Security is not going broke. Social Security has a $2.6 trillion surplus.

Dan Mitchell, Cato Institute: “The program is actuarily bankrupt….”

Alison Fraser, Heritage Foundation: “Social Security and medicare….They are going to go broke….”

David Boaz, Cato Institute: “the real risk is social security running out of money….”

Neil Cavuto, Your World: “Social Security going bankrupt….”

Gretchen Carlson, Fox & Friends: “Social Security already bankrupt….”

Lawrence Kudlow, The Kudlow Report: “Social Security is going bankrupt….”

George Bush: “The system will be bankrupt.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry: “Bankrupt Federal programs like Social Security….”

Congressman Paul Ryan: “Social Security is going bankrupt.”

Michele Bachmann: “Social Security is already operating in the red….”

The Koch Brothers want to privatize Social Security to invest your retirement funds on Wall Street. And you may lose all of your retirement savings when you get old.

Dan Mitchell, Cato Institute: “Real security is based on personal accounts with real assets.”

Lawrence Kudlow, The Kudlow Report: “I like the idea of personal accounts.”

Congressman Paul Ryan: “The option of investing one-third of their social security payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts….”

Bernie Sanders: “The Koch Brothers job is to do everything they can to dismember government in general. And if you have destroyed Social Security, you have gone a long way forward in that effort.”

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Democratic California Congressman Xavier Becerra: “To once again, do what FDR did so well, and do what every Democratic President did so well in those years, and that is, to talk about strengthening Social Security, not privatizing Social Security.”

Cenk Uygur: That’s Congressman Xavier Becerra standing up against the Republicans and their ongoing war on Social Security. It’s a pleasure to at least see some Democrats fighting to protect our seniors. Republicans, of course, have been chomping at the bit to dismantle Social Security.

Just this year they proposed legislation to raise the retirement age, privatize Social Security, and cut benefits. They even argued to cut benefits and use the extra money to pay off the debt. Now let me be clear. Social Security hasn’t contributed one dime to the debt. In fact, it has a $1.5 trillion surplus. Now anyone who tells you otherwise is a flat out liar.

But, of course, they’re banking that you don’t know that, which is why they are pushing Social Security cuts to be part of those debt ceiling negotiations. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison said just last night, “I don’t think we can wait and I do think it should be part of the overall debate on raising the debt limit.”

Now that’s an absurd idea. But it turns out Hutchison and her Republican colleagues are getting paid by the Koch Brothers to push this nonsense. Check out this excellent clip explaining how from Brave New Films.

Bernie Sanders: “What the Koch Brothers want to do is destroy Social Security because Social Security is a Federal government program that has been enormously successful.

The Koch Brothers are funding think tanks and other organizations which are spreading an enormous amount of disinformation about Social Security.

They are very, very good on getting on television.”

Andrew Biggs, Cato Institute: “raising the retirement age….”

Veronique de Rugy, Heritage Foundation: “I would increase the retirement age….”

Jose Pinera, Cato Institute: “we will probably have to increase the retirement age….”

David Boaz, Cato Institute: “the real risk is social security running out of money….”

Neil Cavuto, Your World: “Social Security going bankrupt….”

Gretchen Carlson, Fox & Friends: “Social Security already bankrupt….”

Lawrence Kudlow, The Kudlow Report: “Social Security is going bankrupt….”

Lawrence Kudlow, The Kudlow Report: “I like the idea of personal accounts.”

Congressman Paul Ryan: “The option of investing one-third of their social security payroll taxes into personal retirement accounts….”

Bernie Sanders: “The Koch Brothers job is to do everything they can to dismember government in general. And if you have destroyed Social Security, you have gone a long way forward in that effort.”

Cenk Uygur: That was, of course, narrated by Senator Bernie Sanders.

Now understand if they privatize Social Security, Wall Street makes more money at your expense. If they cut your benefits, they give more tax breaks to the very rich, like the Koch Brothers. Don’t let anyone, Republican or Democrat, cut your Social Security. You paid into it your whole life. Raising the retirement age is an enormous cut to your benefits. You should throw every bum who suggests that right out of office. That’s my opinion.

Let’s get somebody else in here, actually the person who called them out in the first place, Emmy and Peabody award winning producer, Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films. He’s behind that clip you just saw there. Robert, that was excellent because it showed exactly where the money was coming from and exactly where it is going. So first break it down for me. Tell me about the think tanks, the media, and the politicians. How do they work in coordination to push out this message?

Robert Greenwald: Well it took us several months of research at Brave New Foundation to find all of these clips, Cenk. But what Jeff, and Joseph, and Laila did was, they really showed us how an echo chamber works.

We can talk about a conservative right-wing echo chamber all day long, but when you see in the video, it starts with ideas at a think tank, which they fund, then it goes to pundits, who they fund, then it goes to activists, who they fund, and then the exact same words come out of elected officials mouths, it’s quite brilliant and it’s quite strategic in terms of their funding and organizing right across the spectrum.

Cenk Uygur: Alright, I actually want to show audience a couple of graphs that really show what you are talking about. For example, when you go to the Koch Brothers campaign donations, you see that they have given just in 2010 $2.6 million to campaigns, and that’s the tip of the iceberg. They say that they are going to raise $88 million for the 2012 elections. And then when you go to the think tanks that they fund, look at all this money. They gave $13.6 million to Cato Institute. $9 million to Mercatus Center, $3.4 million to Heritage Foundation, $2.4 million to Reason Foundation, overall $28.4 million.

And then these guys come out and pretend like, golly gee willikers, they did some research and these are the independent ideas that they happen to have, and golly gee willikers, Fox News seems to love those ideas and pushes them out as well, and so do all the people who got the money from the Koch Brothers and our politicians. So you see all of that machine, and you guys laid it out brilliantly.

The problem is, who is on the other side? Right? Are the Democrats on the other side fighting back enough in your opinion?

Robert Greenwald: No, nobody’s fighting back nearly enough because you just said it before: this is a profound moral issue. It affects millions of people in our country. And they are trying to hide it: the Koch funded echo chamber with their think tanks, with their studies. For some reason the people in Washington have gotten caught up in some of this thinking, like they have on the war, of course.

But in this case we need to be very clear that it is money that people have worked for, it is money they have earned, and it is being taken away from them on a hypothetical idea while at the same time millionaires and billionaires like the Koch Brothers get more and more tax deductions.

Cenk Uygur: Now I want to show you a clip of Kay Bailey Hutchison. She was just on Hardball pushing the same talking points. Let’s watch it first.

Kay Bailey Hutchison: “I think that people realize that if we don’t do something, we are going to have drastic cuts and big tax increases, and people really don’t want that.”

Cenk Uygur: Now, one, is that true, and, two, what are the different talking points that they push out, Robert? What are they trying to get the country to believe?

Robert Greenwald: Well, they are trying to get the country to believe that we are bankrupt. And again, as you said before, it’s a total lie. It is a distortion. And the notion that maybe 25 years from today, possibly there might be a problem—I mean, we know how unpredictable the economy is—so it does not make any sense unless you go to motive.

And the motive is to destroy another important government program. And the Kochs have put phenomenal resources into that. And, again, they are very smart about where they invest and how they invest. And they don’t just put all of their money into a few ads for politicians. In fact, there was a great line in James Meyer’s article about the Kochs: they said, politicians read from a script. They want to write the script. And by funding ideas, and by funding activists, and by funding pundits, that is really what they are doing. They are controlling the dialogue. They are controlling the conversation. And I cannot stress strongly enough how important it is that we understand it and that we take action to reply to it.

Cenk Uygur: Alright. Robert Greenwald of Brave New films, who is definitely taking action, we really appreciate your time tonight.

Robert Greenwald: Thanks.

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Former Clinton Labor Secretary made an excellent, short video that summarizes why our wages have fallen since 1980 despite economic growth – where did the money go? Reich uses a Sharpee magic marker to explain the 2008 economic downturn in two minutes.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks and MSNBC host expands on it.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

2012 Republican presidential hopeful and Tea Party favorite MIchele Bachmann was a major supporter of pork barrel spending, earmarks and subsidies. MSNBC’s Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

Cenk Uygur MSNBC Video Transcript June 21, 2011. Author Jacob Hacker explains how the arrest of a 59-year-old man, who robbed a bank for just one dollar and hoped to be arrested, shows how divided the country is over taxes.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

O‘DONNELL: Coming up, the big Republican lie. Cutting taxes raises more money for the federal government. Bruce Bartlett is here to demolish that lie more powerfully than I ever could because Bruce Bartlett is a Republican who worked in the Reagan White House. Who better to kill an Republican lie than a Reagan Republican.

He‘s going to give you everything you will ever need to win the tax cut argument with your family, your friends, your co-workers—anyone else who buys that Republican lie. You need to see this. You and I are going to both learn a lot from Bruce Bartlett.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TIM PAWLENTY ®, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Once we unleash the energy of America‘s businesses and families and individuals, as we did in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a booming job market will reduce demand for government assistance and rising incomes will increase federal revenues. In the 1980s, revenues to the federal government increased by 99 percent.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O‘DONNELL: Tim Pawlenty, like all the other Republican presidential candidates, pushes the great Republican tax lie, that tax cuts actually increase the amount of money the government collects in taxes. Republicans say the federal government will get more by taxing less because lower tax rates will make everyone work harder, they‘ll want to work harder, they‘ll make more money than before, the economy will be stimulated, and there will be more money in the total economy, subject to taxation. This is now a Republican article of faith.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: You cut taxes, and the tax revenues increase.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN ®, ARIZONA: The fact is the tax cuts have dramatically increased revenues.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O‘DONNELL: Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has said, quote, “There‘s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.”

Much ignored by Republican politicians is what Republican economic experts actually think about this. Here is George W. Bush‘s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson during his confirmation hearing in 2006.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HANK PAULSON, FORMER TREASURY SECRETARY: The general rule, I don‘t believe that tax cuts pay for themselves.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O‘DONNELL: President Bush‘s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers was completely ignored when he said this in testimony to the Senate Budget Committee in 2006. Quote, “As a general rule, we do not think that tax cuts pay for themselves. Certainly, the data do not support this claim.”

And Alan Greenspan, who was first appointed to the Federal Reserve by President Reagan, said this David Gregory last year.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DAVID GREGORY, NBC NEWS: You don‘t agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?

ALAN GREENSPAN, FORMER FEDERAL RESERVE CHAIRMAN: I do not.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O‘DONNELL: Joining me now, returning from the show, is Bruce Bartlett, who served as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee as a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, and as a treasury, deputy assistant secretary for economic policy during the first Bush administration. He is now a columnist for the “Fiscal Times” and a contributor to “The New York Times.”

Bruce, thanks for joining me again tonight.

BRUCE BARTLETT, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Happy to be here.

O‘DONNELL: Tim Pawlenty recently told Dave Weigel, “Slate” reporter, he said, when Ronald Reagan cut taxes in a significant way, revenues actually increased by almost 100 percent during Reagan‘s eight years as president.

You were there. What happened during the eight years of the Reagan presidency after the Reagan tax cut? What happened to how much revenue we collected?

BARTLETT: Look, what Pawlenty said is just factually untrue. And anybody who wants to find out can just go to CBO.com and look up the data at the Congressional Budget Office Web site for themselves.

The fact is that between fiscal year 1981 and 1989, revenues increased in nominal dollar terms, only 65 percent. But almost a good chunk of that was inflation. If you simply took the 1981 numbers and inflated them to 1989 numbers, the increase was only about 25 percent. And, of course, the population increased so—on a per capita a basis, revenues were only up about 15 percent.

But, at the end of the day, what really matters is revenues as a share of GDP and they were down about a percentage point, which means revenues were about $66 billion lower than they would have been if they had simply stayed constant as share of GDP.

O‘DONNELL: Bruce, we searched and searched, couldn‘t find any anybody in the Reagan administration, couldn‘t find any videotape of anyone in the Reagan administration saying these tax cuts will increase revenue to the federal treasury.

BARTLETT: Well, that‘s because nobody in the administration ever said that.

O‘DONNELL: Oh, OK. We‘ll stop searching then.

BARTLETT: If you go back to the documents that the administration sent to Capitol Hill in February 1981 they showed massive revenue losses based on standard revenue-estimating methodology. And if you check the CBO reports that came out around the same time, you will find that the CEO, which was then under Democratic control, had almost the same identical estimates.

Now, it turned out that revenues came in much lower than anybody expected, but that was mainly because inflation came down much more quickly than anybody expected, and inflation increases the size of the tax base. So, lower inflation reduces federal revenues.

O‘DONNELL: We—the studies that you have pointed out in your writing and others have indicated show that there is an effect, there is a stimulative effect to a tax cut. So, if you say, if you do, say, $100 billion in a tax cut, it will not generate $100 billion in new tax revenue, but it might generate as much as $30 billion, maybe $15 billion. There will be some stimulative effect to it. But the net loss is overwhelming.

We just heard Mitch McConnell say about the 21st century Bush tax cuts, that that same magic trick occurred, that we—that Bush cut taxes and we increased revenue. Where would he get that idea?

BARTLETT: Well, that‘s just complete nonsense. I really have no idea of what basis he‘s making that claim. Look, some very special type of tax cuts such as a cut in the capital gains rate can come very close to paying for themselves because taxpayers essentially decide for themselves whether to realize income or not. And in across the board tax rate reduction, may only lose 70 percent or so of the revenue that a static estimate would show.

But there are lots and lots of tax cuts and there were plenty of them in the Bush tax cuts, refundable child credits and things of that sort that just lose dollar for dollar revenue and have no feedback effects whatsoever.

O‘DONNELL: Feedback effects or what economists call that effective stimulative return to the Treasury, very small. There‘s a huge difference between what Republicans are saying is there‘s 100 percent or more feedback effect and what we found is way, way, way down into tiny numbers and then in many, many cases zero.

Bruce Bartlett, I can go on and on about this. I cannot thank you enough for coming on tonight and ruining this Republican lie. I hope you can still find some Republican friends in Washington to have dinner with tonight.

BARTLETT: All right. I will.

O‘DONNELL: Thank you very much for joining me tonight, Bruce.

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The american people are begging for jobs with politicians on both sides of the aisle have been obsessed with spending cuts instead. this past weekend, finally good news. we finally heard the revenue side of the equation being mentioned in regard to budget talks.

>> no one on the republican side will vote to raise taxes but i think many of us would look at flattening the tax code, do away with deductions and exemptions and take that revenue to help pay off the debt.

>> finally, revenues are on the table. now remember why this is so important. the less revenue that they raise, the more they are going to take out in spending cuts from the middle class and the poor. the rich should have to pay their fair share if we’re going to have to balance the budget. that is why revenue is so important. even senator mark warner says his colleagues in the gang of five are committed to including revenue.

>> rifly $3 in cuts and a dollar of that cut will be savings to $1 in revenue. that’s the framework we’re looking at.

>> i’m not sure i agree about the equation but that’s a start, great. how do they bring in more revenue with taxes.

>> the way we deal with revenue says not raising taxes. we are going back to the reagan approach which is lowering tax rates, getting rid of tax skejss.

>> exemptions.

>> are you kidding me? their idea for the revenue side is to lower taxes. so look, they might take away home deductions which hits the middle class pretty hard and lower rate in tax brackets. i got to be honest, i think these guys are jokers. that is a democratic telling you how they plan to redistribute wealth back up to the top as more. that is enough to make you lose faith in the party entirely. the republicans are much, much worse. they say, yes, lower taxes on the rich, what a good idea. one guy thinks we should look to the people, not politicses for leadership.

>> there has been a lot of angest about whether all of the promises are kept. whether we have change we can believe in. we aught not to think about people in washington as responsible for the change that we can believe in. we are responsible for the change that we can believe in. change does not come from washington, d.c. change comes from the bottom up and we will make change in our own communities and it will spread out wards.

>> that was this past weekend. of course i couldn’t agree with that idea more. but let’s talk about how we fight back against that d.c. machine. joining me now, that man arguing for the change, howard dean. governor dean, thanks for being here tonight, we really do appreciate it.

>> thanks for having me on.

>> all right. look, you and i totally agree. you can’t rely on washington politicians and you got fight from the bottom up. i hear oup that. but here they are in washington. both republicans and democrats. telling us, you know, we will probably raise the retirement age. social security, medicare. take away exemptions, subsidies, et cetera. how do you fight back against that?

>> nothing wrong with a good primary. tea party shows that. we don’t see the specific proposals yet. proposing raising the retirement on social security has already been done, first of all. secondly, proposing raising the eligibility for medicare is insane. all this does is kick more people off health insurance in a country where we don’t have nearly enough people with health insure towns begin with. this pro disposes this is about the politicians in washington. the problem is not healthcare or medicare or medicaid. the problem is the system. it is all over every system whether it is medicare, medicaid or private insurance. there is a very interesting column this past week, by paul krugman, saying that the insurance industry cost went up faster than medicare costs did. there are some ideas kicked around washington that probably makes sense, but there are a lot that don’t make any sense at all and we need really clear about what those are. we have to see their ideas first. i’m not willing to poopoo the idea because they haven’t put their ideas on the table. this idea they will reduce corporate taxes, especially since some big caps don’t pay taxes whatsoever, that’s a big starter.

>> every single hint out of that gang of five is going in that direction. they are talking about tax holidays from money they bring in from abroad, et cetera. it is frustrating because those are democrats. those are primaries. if you are talking about primaries against guys giving away corporate tax cuts et cetera, more me, mark warner, everything he said to me sounded absolutely republican. it would be crazy for progresives t progressive to let him run again. if you ask, how about the top dog, president obama.

>> i’m not a fan of primary egg president obama. i’m supporting the president. look, he hasn’t done everything we would like on the progressive side of the aisle. but he has two great supreme court justice. he asked the government to conform with kioto. i forget the date. but that’s an extraordinary step forward. we don’t have the health plan we should have but it is a big step forward. there is not any question that this president is a — you know, has been a president who has done some of the things he said. i think we will get out of iraq bit end of the year. that’s another one. maybe we will see a by the end of the week a troop we ducks in afghanistan. that’s another one. these things won’t happen under romney or bachmann. i’m not a fan of primarying the president at all.

>> let me throw out a wild card here. i hear you and historically primaries heard the president. i have agreed with that up until this moment. of course, having a bachmann or romney would be an abs disaster. i agree with all of that. i now think if they go in this direction and the president signs off on it and these are very conservative positions, i think a primary might help the president. it would force him to the left where the real country is at. if the country isn’t in favor of cutting social security and medicare.

>> no.

>> they aren’t under favor of raising taxes on the rich. maybe it helps them and doesn’t hurt them.

>> i don’t think the democrats and senate and house will vote for these kinds of crazy proposals that we’re hearing about lowering taxes for the people who make a million dollars a year or getting rid of home mortgage deductions. if you ask me, am i in favor for the first $500,000, yes, or first $400,000. if that’s what they are talking about by getting rid of home mortgage deduction or houses worth 4 or $500,000. that’s different.

>> yes.

>> we don’t know exactly what they are proposing so we ought to find out what they are talking about before we talk about primarying people. there are people we won’t name on the show but you will see democracy for america primarying some people and i will support some of those candidates.

>> there is no question about it. it is all in the nuances and how they do it. but all of the signs have been bad so far thp. i’m trying to get in front of it before they say this is a brilliant idea that the republicans want to do. that’s part of the reason to have that conversation now.

>> absolutely. that’s right. draw the line. but let me say something else, that we disagree on a little bit. i think it is okay to repay tree ought the prove ilts stashed abroad if they invest in research and development. all of it. you bring it out and pay it back in shareholder dividends. you bring it back and put jobs in america, then i’m okay with it. there are different ram if i fications and we don’t know what they are.

>> right. jobs are important. mitch mccon sell trying to put it on the president. let me show you a video and let’s talk about it.

>> do republicans have any plans to do anything on the unemployment front or are you going to let things take their course?

>> no. i think what we are doing is encouraging the president to quit doing what he is doing. quit overspending. we are hoping with the debt ceiling discussions we can discuss deficit and debt.

>> he admits it, we’re not doing a damn thing, right? so on the other hand, is the president making a mistake but not coming out with a big jobs bill and say, i’m for creating jobs and they are against that.

>> i think we aught to be really clear we are going to support jobs. that’s what this campaign is about. we have spent too much time talking about spending and not enough time talking about jobs. we have once again let the republicans set the agenda. this is about jobs. the republicans may believe if can you reduce deficit spending can you get jobs. that’s fine. but there is about jobs, not about spending. we aught not let republicans spend that agenda. they have no agenda. mcconnell says he has one thing on his agenda. that’s fine for the republican party. it doesn’t help the country very well. republicans are interested in power so they are their corporate patrons and sponsors like the koch brothers get more for themselves and middle class has less and less. the republicans are destroying the american dream. to rekindle the american dream we need more jobs. push the hate moners out of the way. i think we need a jobs bill but it is hard to get that because the republicans won’t vote for that either.

>> all right, howard dean, thanks for being with us tonight and thanks for shedding a light on it.

>> thank you.

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Dan Pfeiffer, White House Communications Director: I know that there are levels of frustration with some of the decisions that have happened in this White House; frustation in the times that the pace of change has exceeded the level of expectation including our own….”

Cenk Uygur: Well, you got that right. There’s a lot of frustation in there. Now let’s bring in Sam Seder, the host of the Majority Host Report, and Ezra Klein, Washington Post Columnist and MSNBC Political Analyst to talk about it.

Sam, I don’t know if you saw the last segment, but I got a little worked up there because it looks like everybody in Washington now agrees that they are going to raise the retirement age on Social Security and Medicare. Am I the only one here that thinks that’s a disaster or do you think that’s going to make a lot of progressives angry?

Sam Seder: I think it’s going to make a lot of progressive angry. I think it’s going to make a lot of Americans angry. With all due respect to the Congressman [Earl Blumenhauer], the idea that the life expectancy is going to jump 10 to 20 years over the next 30 years. The bottom line is that the life expectancy used to be measured after the age of 65. And that has barely budged in the past 100 years, and particularly even less so for the people in the bottom half of the income distribution.

If you are going to raise the retirement age, you are cutting social security. And the idea that you are going to pretend that somehow we are going to be living to 140 years old, and everyone’s going to be doing this, and we are going to be able to work into our 70s, it’s simply not the case. And if you have to use those types of facts to justify it, then you have got a real problem with the argument.

Cenk Uygur: Ezra, what’s going on here. The country wants to know. People are watching the show. They want to know. How come 84% of the country says don’t cut social security benefits, and everybody in Washington, even the AARP that’s supposed to represent these people, now say, oh, yeah, we are going to raise the retirement age and cut benefits. What the hell is the matter with Washington?

Ezra Klein: It’s a popular argument here. I always think that what happens in Washington, if you look at a place like the Senate or if you look at the think tanks or other elements of the establishment, people like to work till about 75, 80, 85. You’ve got to take folks out of the Senate on a stretcher. So it sounds very reasonable to them that you would raise the retirement age above 65, and now it’s gone up to 67, and so maybe up to 68 or 69.

I’m not as opposed, I think, in all circumstances to benefit cuts as you are. But it is important to say that raising the retirement age is a particularly regressive way to do it. You could means test benefits so people who don’t need it so much get less from social security. You could even do a straight [across] the board benefits cut. At least you would more clearly the effects of the policy.

But essentially raising the retirement age essentially means that the people who have the worse jobs, the most menial jobs, the most physical labor, they are the ones who get hit hardest and that’s exactly what I think we should be worring about as we get near retirement age.

Cenk Uygur: Sam, that’s a great point by Ezra; it goes to the heart of the problem. It seems like they don’t look out for us. And you made the point that the people who are poorer don’t live as long as the people who are richer. So they get their benefits cut the most and they got to work the longest. As you look at it from up in your roost, tell me, is this feeling of frustration with people who are supposed to be on our side, the Democrats and the White House, is that palpable over there?

Sam Seder: I think my sense is that it’s been a little bit over reported that there is this type of frustration. Obviously it’s there. And I think people are starting to wonder what is it that we can do to fight this. And I think the idea is that we can’t look to our politicians.

And I think Ezra is absolutely right. Our establishment lives in a bubble; you can see over the past 30 years, I think a professor from Princeton has shown, regardless of who is in office, the policy preferences of the wealthy in this country have been more or less followed. And so we have a real problem.

This is just another aspect of a class war that’s being waged on the middle class. Really, we’re talking 60% of the country’s seniors rely on social security for over 50% of their income in retirement age.

And so when you are talking about social security, or when you are talking about Medicaid, because Ezra knows this, what happens to many elderly is they go into homes, they are on Medicare, and then they become too poor, and so they are on Medicaid for their homes. So this is a direct assault on nearly half, if not more, of the country.

Cenk Uygur: These are all great points. Ezra, when you go to taxes, you see where the problem is. We’ve got a massive redistribution of wealth. We’re at record low tax rates. And now the Republicans come along to Tim Pawlenty’s joke of a plan to reduce taxes to almost nothing for the rich. It costs us $11 trillion, the Pawlenty plan. Bachmann says that she’s pretty much in favor of it. Herman Cain, they all say they are in favor of it. So isn’t this a class war? Isn’t it the rich have declared war on the middle class and we just don’t know it?

Ezra Klein: Tim Pawlenty’s plan is sort of remarkable. I never thought that anyone would make George W. Bush look like Robin Hood. He’s pretty much managed that.

Is there a class war? There are competing preferences, and it is true, as it generally is, the rich have more sway in Washington.

That said, I think you do have an issue, where the Democrats in general have been terrified of the tax issue. And they have not been terrified just because the rich would spend against them, they’ve been terrified because they felt that they have lost on it and Barack Obama came right in and made this terrible promise never to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000. and if you are never going to do that, you are not going to retire much of the debt through taxes. That’s not really going to be a serious part of the solution.

And so you can’t just say it’s all the rich interests, it’s all us versus them. There’s sort of a bipartisan consensus in Washington right now that these vast majority of tax rates should not rise, and when you are not going to touch taxes, then you are going to have to hit things like Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid very hard. There are reforms that are need to happen in these programs anyway by the way, but you will have to hit them a lot harder if you are not willing to make revenues part of the solution.

Cenk Uygur: There is one line that I would disagree with. There is a bipartisan consensus but it is among the rich of Democrats and the rich Republicans who agree that the middle class shouldn’t have the money, the rich should.

Sam, last word.

Sam Seder: That’s exactly right. If there is a bipartisan consensus, that we can’t raise taxes on the rich, and that we should take it out of the hides of the middle class, then you are right, there is a class war.

Cenk Uygur: Sam Seder, Ezra Klein, you guys are great. Thanks for joining us tonight. We really appreciate it.

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Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

All right, fun Friday, so we will squeeze in an “of course” segment and a “con job” segment in the last seconds of the show tonight. Let’s start with the “of course” segment.

We have front and center for a photo op celebrating a stimulus project, New York Congressman Richard Hannah, who didn’t like the stimulus when he was on the campaign trail.

“Seems that everyday, Congress finds new ways to spend and tax. A failed stimulus plan.”

Failed stimulus, right? But Hannah was more than happy to show up for ribbon cutting after building was renovated with? Stimulus money. And he joins a group of Republicans who have nothing good to say about the stimulus unless there a giant check and huge pair of scissors involved back in their home districts. More republicans talking out of both sides of their mouths on stimulus? Say it with me. Of course.

Now our “con job”. Paul Ryan claims his budget plan would help the American people but what it really helps is his bank account. That’s our con job of the day. The Daily Beast is reporting that Ryan would make a pretty penny if his proposal becomes law. He and his wife own four businesses that lease land. Ryan’s plan includes $45 billion in energy tax breaks and subsidies. What a wonderful coincidence. It turns out this government welfare could be used by the very companies leasing Ryan’s land.

Ryan’s office says he wasn’t thinking about his business when he crafted those tax breaks. Of course not. No, no, no. Financial records show Ryan made up to $177,000 from these leasing properties last year. The year before, he made up to $60,000. Of course we know it is not about profit for Ryan. It is about serious decisions.

“We need to make responsible choices today so our children don’t have to make really painful choices tomorrow.”

What he really means is we need to make responsible choices so he and his friends can go about his business as usual. So he just has to take away Medicare from you. He has to slash spending on the poor and middle class so his family can make a ton for money. He had to do it. The only responsible thing to do. Ryan possibly padding his own pockets while devastating families across the country with cuts is our con job of the day.

Thank you.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

Cenk Uygur: No more excuses. Anthony Weiner is gone and it is time for Democrats to stand and fight on issues that really matter. That’s our lead story.

While Democrats were wringing their hands over Weiner-gate, Republican were charging ahead with their radical agenda to devastate the middle class and working poor. The House GOP just passed a spending bill that cuts food aid for women and kids, cuts funding for food safety, cripples efforts to stop oil spectators, and blocks efforts to create healthier school lunches. That is an unbelievable list. The GOP is actually pushing an agenda that is pro hunger, pro obesity, pro oil, and pro E. coli.

I want to ask the Democrats one important question. Are you going to let them get way it? The Republicans are fighting to dismantle the very essence of our social contract. Paul Ryan wants to end Medicare, as we know it. The Wall Street Journal says both parties expect Medicaid to be the biggest source of cuts in the Biden budget talks.

And now it looks like House Republicans may even be making headway in their war against social security. Today a crushing report from the Journal: the AARP is “dropping its long-standing opposition to cutting social security benefits.” That is disastrous and totally unnecessary. In my opinion, it is a great betrayal of the members of AARP.

Now the leaders of that group have furiously been pushing back on that all day. But in the end the group admitted it is open to raising the retirement age and cutting benefits for future retirees. So that means the story is right and they are going to join the rest of Washington in trying to rob you blind of the benefits that you paid into your whole life.

Now this would be a pretty good time for leadership, from perhaps the White House. Well, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer was at the Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis today when he was grilled on this very topic.

Dan Pfeiffer: “On social security, the president will do nothing that will slash benefits, privatize the program or change the nature of the program opinion. And on Medicaid. The same thing is true of Medicare.”

Question from someone: “So that means no raising the age limits?”

Dan Pfeiffer: “What it means is we are going to — we’re going to make sure that what however we strengthen it is done in way that does not change the final nature of the program.”

Question from someone: “So no raising age limits?”

Dan Pfeiffer: “I’m not going to have a negotiation with the Republicans here on the stage with you.”

Cenk Uygur: That’s a disaster. That was a great question. And you saw that he did not want to answer it. That is not a good sign.

Now let me ask you one more question. If the Democrats and the White House don’t fight for Medicaid, Medicare and social security, and more importantly for the people that voted for them, the people in the middle class that need to be fought for, when will they ever fight?

In a moment we will talk with Sam Seder, who is at Netroots Nation, along with Ezra Klein, who actually reports on all things budget related. But first let me bring in Congressman Earl Blumenhaur. He is a Democrat from Oregon, he serves on the Budget Committee and he is a member of the Progressive Caucus.

Congressman Blumenhauer, I have to be honest with you, what I’m hearing from the White House there, and what I am hearing from the AARP, and what I’m hearing about the Biden talks and how they are cutting Medicaid, that sounds terrible to me. Is that acceptable to the Democrats in Congress?

Congressman Blumenhauer: Well, it all depends on context, Cenk. I find it outrageous that there is a proposal here to pass the burden on, for example, in Medicaid to the poorest, most fragile elderly. What we are seeing in Medicare, as we have discussed before, is an effort that deals with the program that they don’t think government can afford, reduce it, in terms of its responsibility, and pass those on to seniors in the future.

I think we ought not to jump the gun in terms of what’s happening with AARP. You know, they have been put in the cross hairs by the Republicans because they have had the temerity to support some healthcare reform. I think that it is the notion that we are not ever going to make any changes, for example, in the age. I mean, I’m one of the baby boom generation that has known for 20 years, that there’s going to be a slight increase that’s — I think that that’s not something that everybody ought to reflectively just say no, never. But we want to look at the package that comes forward.

Cenk Uygur: Well, congressman –

Congressman Blumenhauer: Let’s be realistic about that.

Cenk Uygur: Congressman, I have to be honest with you. I have to respectively massively disagree. I will show you the statistics showing why. According to the Economic Policy Institute, if you raise the retirement age, for example from 65 to 70 years old, that’s a drop in benefits of 19%. The average American loses benefits of $63,573. Here is what I say to that proposal, hell no. I’m not going to come within a mile of considering it.

Congressman Blumenhauer: First of all, it’s already been raised. It is no longer retirement age of 65 starting with us baby boom generation and going forward. It has been raised to 67.

Cenk Uygur: I know, so do you want to raise it to 69 and take away another $10, $20, $30,000 from people?

Congressman Blumenhauer: Over the course of the next 40 years, when life expectancy may well increase another 10 or 20 years, that being part of something that includes being able to make adjustments in terms of the tax rate, the tax base. For in some cases maybe having a slightly different inflationary rate for the wealthier seniors—I’m not talking about all and having the progressive indexing— but for the top ten or 20%. You can put together a package that deals with the 25% shortfall that we’re going to be facing.

Cenk Uygur: No. No. No.

Congressman Blumenhauer: So we’re going to adjust that and I’m just saying if you’re looking at something that’s going to be phased in over the next 20 or 30 years, I’m not reflexively going to rule out increasing it, for example, another year. We did two years. The sky didn’t fall.

Cenk Uygur: This is a disaster. This is a disaster what I’m hearing from you. I’m not reflexively against reform. If you say hey, for example, we’ve got to increase the amount of people paying the payroll tax. So you go above $106,000. Okay, that makes perfect sense to me and there are reforms that you can do. But it is perfectly stable until 2037. It pays every single cent. And then above that it pays 75%. So why would you raise the retirement age. What I’m hearing from you, even a member of the progressive caucus is not going to fight for it. And these people are going to lose $10,000, $20,000.

Congressman Blumenhauer: No –

Cenk Uygur: Then I want you to tell me right now: no, no, no to raising the retirement age.

Congressman Blumenhauer: No, what I just said is that we are not going to have to do anything draconian for social security over the course of the next 25 years. But if the life expectancy goes up another 20 years, or ten years, raising the retirement age another year in 20 or 25 years from now, gradually, as part of a larger package, that includes other progressive reforms, I don’t think that’s crazy. And the majority of the American public doesn’t either.

Cenk Uygur: No, that’s not true at all. I’m sorry. Look, 84% of the American people, 84%, no question about it, say, do not cut the benefits. Don’t cut them. So what do you mean? 16% say cut them? 84% say don’t cut them.

Congressman Blumenhauer: As I can done, if you work with people and give them variables to put together a package, over the course of the next 25 years as a comprehensive package, having a slight increase in the retirement age is not something that freaks people out. We’ve done it before.

Cenk Uygur: It freaks me out.

Eric Blumenhaurer: Well, that’s fine.

Cenk Uygur: Congressman, here is another solution. Here is another solution. Right now our effective tax rate is at a mere record low: it’s at 14.4% –

Eric Blumenhauer: We don’t disagree on that.

Cenk Uygur: I know we don’t.

Eric Blumenhauer: We don’t disagree on that.

Cenk Uygur: So why don’t you insist on that. Why don’t you say, hey, listen, I am not going to cut a penny of social security until you get this to a reasonable level where the wealthy in this country stop robbing us blind. Where they take all the advantages. They take all the breaks, they take all the subsidies. And then they say, oh, but I have to cut your social security. Hell no.

Eric Blumenhauer: We’re obviously pushing and in terms of trying to — I’m not in favor of extending tax cuts for the wealthy. I’m working in terms of dealing with some of the unnecessary oil subsidies. But to sort of come unsprung and suggest you can’t have a comprehensive package over the next 25 years, you are going to rule everything out that you disagree with –

Cenk Uygur: Congressman, here is the guarantee I have for you. Whatever deal that you guys are going to make, Joe Biden, the White House, apparently Congressional Democrats, you’re not going to raise taxes on the rich. You’re not going to do it. And then you are going to tell me it is comprehensive when you touch Medicare, Medicare and social security. That ain’t comprehensive. You come back with Bush tax cuts. Take them away. Okay? We go back to the Clinton rates, okay, alright so now we are having a conversation. That’s comprehensive. Are you going to do that? You’re not going to do that, are you?

Eric Blumenhaurer: Well, what do you mean, am I going to do that? ? You know that I don’t have all of the power here. I am arguing for a position that does exactly what you’re saying in terms of many of those tax adjustments.

But the notion that that just because there are things that may be approached by Biden: you have copies of correspondence, letters, arguments we are making for the White House for things that we want to be on the table. Like making sure that we’re not surrendering on the tax cuts. Making sure that we are pushing in terms of the oil subsidies. But the notion that somehow we’re not pushing back, I think is wrong. But there are certain limitations in terms of what we can actually do.

I just disagree in terms of the notion that over the next 20 years, that we have to fight to never ever again make an adjustment to the age ruling it out before we get into dealing with a package. I don’t know that that’s the most appropriate way to go. We will just agree to disagree.

Cenk Uygur: Yes. We have a very healthy disagreement on that. Congressman Blumenhauer, we really do appreciate the conversation.

Eric Blumenhauer: That’s why it is fun to talk with you. And I always enjoy it.

Cenk Uygur: Yes, it is. And I agree with you on oil subsidies, by the way. And I agree with you on taxes. I wish we fight really hard for those. I know that you are in the progressive caucus and that you are trying to push them in the right direction. Thank you for joining us.

Eric Blumenhauer: My pleasure.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

UYGUR: Welcome to the show, everybody. Now to discuss some of today‘s biggest political stories, we bring in our Power Panel.

All right. With me now is MSNBC political analyst Michelle Bernard. Also joining the conversation, syndicated columnist Bob Franken. And Matt Lewis is our senior contributor from “The Daily Caller.” Good to have all of you here.

First up, is the GOP House about to cave in? Republicans and their right wing agenda are seeing a free-fall in our brand new NBC poll. I like that picture of Ryan. Sixty percent say that the Republicans in the House has brought little change, that‘s bad. Twenty three percent say, it‘s brought the wrong kind of change. And get this, only 13 percent say, it ushered in the right kind of change. That seems like a disastrous number. And the corner stone of the GOP agenda is getting crashed as well. The Ryan plan is more unpopular than ever before. It‘s negative rating has shot up nearly 10 points in the past two months. Matt, you‘re our conservative. Those numbers look terrible, don‘t they?

MATT LEWIS, “THE DAILY CALLER”: Yes. Well, look, it is tough to sell Paul Ryan‘s Medicare plan. Even though I think it‘s happen to be a good plan. It‘s easy—politically, it‘s easy to say, you‘re going to kill Medicare, and it‘s hard to explain well but the truth is it‘s going to—if we don‘t fix it—it becomes very nuance. But look, I would actually disagree with the premise which is that anybody is going to be thinking about a congressman from Wisconsin when the 2012 elections come around. I mean, just today the DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said, we own the economy. The truth is, in 2012, Barack Obama is going to be at the top of the ticket. And at the top of everybody‘s mind is going to be the question, are you better off today than you were four years ago. I think it‘s going to be about the economy and about the unemployment rate, not about Paul Ryan.

UYGUR: Bob?

BOB FRANKEN, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, you know, that overlooks the reelection of Bill Clinton that most people attribute to the fact that Newt Gingrich had been the speaker of the house. This Congress with approval ratings on another poll for the second month in a row are nine percent are the kind of thing that just might re-elect Barack Obama even though his presidency in the minds of many has started to slip a little bit. We‘ve gone from the good old days of do nothing Congress to a Congress that many people would say, do nothing, please.

UYGUR: Now, Michelle, look, when you look at those numbers, 13 percent say they are going in the right direction, that‘s a terrible, terrible number. Do you every look at that and go, hey, maybe we are headed into the right direction? Or do they think, fantastic, let‘s go get them.

MICHELLE BERNARD, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, you know, quite frankly, when I look at those numbers, I would imagine that the Republicans and truth be told, Cenk. Democrats as well are looking at their numbers and they are saying, I hope they are saying, what are we doing wrong? I think if you would go out and talk to people who are truly independents, people who are just right the center, and left the center, the numbers for Democrats are probably not that much higher either. The bottom line is, the country is on, you know, in free-fall. When we talk about the economy, people are, I think, absolutely dreadfully tired of both Republicans and Democrats. I think that‘s why we see so many people.

UYGUR: Yes, no, I think.

BERNARD: Let me finish. Numbers will show you that we have more and more people self identifying as independents. And the reason they are doing is because they are disgusted with both parties. These are clearly not good numbers for Republicans but nobody is helping us.

UYGUR: Look, look, look. If you watch this show at all, you know how angry I get the Democrats. You just see two segments ago how angry I get at them, right? And so, I‘m certainly not their fan, right? Having said that, it is false to say, hey, let‘s just equate the two. OK, I‘ve got terrible poll numbers on Republicans, and so there must be terrible poll numbers on Democrats. There isn‘t. We‘re going to talk about President Obama next whose poll numbers are actually pretty good. Look, Bob, I think there is two different problems here. One is the Republicans have bad plans. When you ask the American people, they hate those plans. The other problems that the Democrats have is, they would actually fight for their plans. They would actually fight for things that are incredibly popular.

FRANKEN: Well, quite frankly, the criticism of the Democrats could be that they don‘t really have any plans. It is sort of like that old saying, if your opponent is shooting himself in the foot, or wherever, stand back and let them do it. And I think that there‘s a belief in the White House that the Republicans are going to implode. The problem is, is that they didn‘t implode in the last election and I think that that‘s a dangerous, dangerous strategy.

UYGUR: All right. But Matt, look, I want to play your clip from the debate of all the different candidates supporting the Ryan plan which is also polling even worse as we go along. Then I‘m going to ask you about it. Let‘s watch it first.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We‘ve got to restructure those programs and the Paul Ryan approach I totally support.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Why can‘t we opt out of whole system?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It is not financially solvent. We have to fix it.

We have to reform it.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We have to deal with this problem now. And what Paul Ryan has suggested, which I wholeheartedly support, is to use a program that is identical to what seniors already have. It is called Medicare part D.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: So come on, Matt, getting on board for a sinking plan like this, how is that going to help the Republicans run in their presidential race?

LEWIS: Well, look, I think it‘s a matter of political courage. There is no easy way to cut $6 trillion out of the national debt. But Paul Ryan‘s plan if we do that, if we don‘t do that, Medicare is going to end as we know it. But look, let me make a point that I think is interesting. No one else is really bringing this up. But Barack Obama needs to be really careful. I wrote about this at “The Daily Caller” yesterday, if you chart when George W. Bush‘s popularity imploded, it wasn‘t Katrina, it wasn‘t Abu Ghraib. It‘s exactly correlates to when the democratic primaries began in April of 2003. When they had all of these debates. And you had Howard Dean and everybody bashing Bush. This could happen to Barack Obama.

UYGUR: Right.

LEWIS: And so, I think that these debates should not be overlooked by Obama. This actually could have real consequences to him.

UYGUR: Right. Well, that‘s an interesting theory. It actually going to relate to our next topic, which is how is this guy still this popular? Referring of course to President Obama. Unemployment is at 9.1 percent but President Obama is still polling really strong. He‘s got 49 percent approval rating. Forty six percent disapproval of the job that he is doing as president. Now, that‘s better than Reagan and Clinton where at this stage in their presidency. So, is it going to be something right? Or is it going to last? So, those are the questions I‘ve got. Look, Michelle, you look at that, we talk about it a little earlier, those are good poll numbers even with stunningly high unemployment. Obviously, the country likes him to some degree, to a large degree.

BERNARD: You will not get any argument from me there. I think that this shows that people fundamentally like Barack Obama. They like his presidency. They like him as a person but still, I think that it would be very unwise to say, that Barack Obama is a shoo-in for 2012. Here are two things that the Obama administration and Democrats really need to look at. Whether people like the Paul Ryan plan or not, Paul Ryan came out with a plan.

He has put something out there that has given rise to some discussion about what we do about the economy. The unemployment rate in this country is nine percent. The unemployment rate, Cenk, in clarities (ph) of color particularly for African-Americans is 16.2 percent. If you go, if you listen to discussions, political analysts and some political talks on urban radio stations, black Americans are very, very angry with the president. They feel slighted. And the worry for the president is not that that population is going to suddenly go and vote republican, but that they are not going to turn out at all. And in the south in particularly, that‘s a problem for the 2012.

UYGUR: Right. I hear you Michelle. Look, on the first part you‘re saying about, hey, he is an shoo-in, I actually totally agree with that. And Bob, I want to ask you about that. But I want to give you some polls here. Again, this is from the new NBC News poll. When matched up against Romney, President Obama is still winning by six points. When matched up against Pawlenty is crushing him by 13 points. Romney is polling away actually from the rest of the field. He‘s at 30 percent among the Republicans. Far above anyone else. Look, 49 percent approval rating is fantastic at this point with this economy. Can he keep it up? Or does he have structural problems here that if Romney wins he can expose.

FRANKEN: Well, I mean, you could say that that is an approval rating for Barack Obama. Or you could say that it is sort of a reflected disapproval rating for the opposition right now. And as far as Mitt Romney is concerned, I think that he is leading in the yes, whatever category when it comes to Republicans. He is certainly not somebody who makes the blood boil of his supporters. The problem with Barack Obama might be that the last time around, he created an army of people really enthusiastic to make history and all that type of thing. His problem may be that because he‘s had to make the kind of compromises that any president has to make, that the passion may be gone in his followers who may stay home and leave the passion to those on the right wing.

UYGUR: All right. For my purposes, I think he‘s got to really watch those numbers. The longer unemployment stays that high, the bigger trouble he‘s in. We‘ll see if the Republicans have anybody that could take advantage of they‘re or if they keep going further and further right wing.

All right. Michelle Bernard, Bob Franken, Matt Lewis, you guys were all great. Thank you so much for the discussion.

BERNARD: Thank you.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

UYGUR: Welcome back to the show, everybody. For today`s biggest news that does not involve Congressman Weiner, we are going to bring out our Power Panel. Jonathan Capehart, editorial writer for The Washington Post and MSNBC contributor. Also with us Jane Hamsher, founder and publisher of FireDogLake.com. And finally, Josh Trevino, vice president of Communications at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Think Tank.

First question for the panel. Do republicans have an authenticity problem? Today, Mitt Romney met with a group of unemployed people in Florida, when they finish talking about their situation, he said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MITT ROMNEY, 2012 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, you know, I should tell my story. I`m also unemployed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: Ha ha ha, so funny. I`m unemployed. He is worth, as you see there, between 109 to $250 million. I don`t think that`s funny. Josh, do you think that`s funny.

JOSHUA TREVINO, TEXAS PUBLIC POLICY FOUNDATION: It is certainly a category of jokes that multimillionaires shouldn`t be making. But what I do think is funny is that we actually got to see Debbie Wasserman-Schultz criticized somebody for a faux pas today, that`s funny.

UYGUR: All right. Nice deflection — OK. But Jane, come on. That has got to rub people in the wrong way, right? And that Mitt Romney`s problem. I mean, isn`t it like when he tries to come across as authentic, it comes off like ten times worse? How condescending did that sound?

JANE HAMSHER, FOUNDER, FIREDOGLAKE.COM: It sounded really condescending. It draws attention to the fact that Mitt Romney had been in capital made his money by selling off corporate assets and firing people. It is like Mitt Romney looks like the guy who fired your dad, no, Mitt Romney is the guy who fired your dad and it`s entirely ironic.

(CROSSTALK)

Exactly. And entirely ironic that the whole Tea Party movement came together to protests all over the bank bailouts and government being owned by the banks. And all now they are rallying behind Mitt Romney, the guy who ran the Hedge Fund.

TREVINO: The Tea Parties are rallying behind Mitt Romney?

HAMSHER: The polls have.

UYGUR: Josh, you got to see that poll. The last one that came out, Romney is at 30 percent. Way above everyone else.

TREVINO: Cenk, first of all, you and I both know the field is incomplete. And secondly, right now, the polls are measuring mostly name recognition. Mitt Romney is not a Tea Party choice. Nobody could.

UYGUR: All right. Fair enough. And look, the Tea Party has got issues with him. But Jonathan, let`s go to that point, right? So, here`s the guy who ran a Hedge Fund, basically, you know. Been in capitals, there is a lot of ways to categorize that. But he obviously worked with Wall Street. Here is a guy who is 47th in the country in creating jobs when he was in Massachusetts. And his main platform is creating jobs. Is it just that, you know, they are immune to facts or he is saying, I don`t know. I will turn my weakness into a strength by repeating it as many times as I can?

JONATHAN CAPEHART, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Oh, I don`t know if he is — well, look, he`s made the economy and jobs, you know, his number one issue. The number one focus of his campaign. Which politically speaking is the right thing to do. No matter if you agree — who the republican nominee is going to be. They have to go with the economy and jobs if they want to have any chance of hammering a weigh at President Obama and maybe taking the White House from him. But I think as the campaign goes along, the republican primaries go along, and we start seeing who his primary opponents will be.

I would be very surprised if you didn`t see one of his opponents come out there and start talking about his Wall Street connections and how committed he is to creating jobs when he was someone, you know, part of bank capital who got rid of jobs, who ended people`s jobs. And, you know, quite frankly, reading, I`m also unemployed, comes off differently than actually hearing the joke. I didn`t take it as condescending. But what I do take it as Mitt Romney being someone who is desperately trying to seem like an everyday regular guy and coming off as completely corny.

UYGUR: At least corny. By the way, I know why Jonathan pronounced the economy jonomy (ph). Because like Cenk, the C is pronounced like J in Turkish. So, I know you were just trying to be respectful. And I appreciate that. Right. Now, all right. I`m going to bring in another, you know, Republican into this mixed now. Huntsman came out with a video, for his campaign, where he is riding a bike across the desert and there is country music and he so super cool. Except we find out today, that wasn`t Huntsman. What is their problem? I mean, OK. I start again with you. Josh, I mean, that`s a bad idea, right? To put that out there like it`s him and then all of the sudden, we find out it`s not him?

TREVINO: Well, you know, the guy who made that video of course, is Fred Davis, who has a long and checkered history of making bizarre and sometimes, remember GOP campaign spots. Fred Davis, I`ve had many people who worked and described him as something like the Greek economy, he needs a strong outside hand to produce anything good. You know, those of us who were in California in 2010, remember the bizarre and crazy stuff that he did for the arena campaign.

UYGUR: Yes. The demon-ship.

TREVINO: Yes. Exactly, the demon-ship. He may be heading down that road with Huntsman. We`ll see.

UYGUR: OK. Look, there is the demon-ship with the crazy eyes. I love that ad.

TREVINO: An awful ad.

UYGUR: But Jonathan, we can`t just put this on Fred Davis. Huntsman obviously signed off on it. You know, it seems like when you go, when you turn over there, all you got is, you know, authentic.

CAPEHART: Well, look, Jon Huntsman, we`ll start seeing more and more of Jon Huntsman. He is supposed to announce on Tuesday at statue of liberty. And look, what our ads supposed to do, they`re supposed to create buzz, get you talking. And whether you like the commercial or not, we`re talking about the commercial, we`re talking about Jon Huntsman and insist another vehicle for Huntsman and his campaign to get his name out there and keep it out there. Because remember, I mean, we are talking about people who all share a stage in New Hampshire on Monday, he wasn`t there.

(CROSSTALK)

He`s isn`t as bad as you think, Cenk.

UYGUR: No, I hear you. And look, I get the value of that. At the same time, when we`re all talking about a what fake he is, I`m not sure that helps a lot. All right. But we have to move on to the next question.

CAPEHART: OK.

UYGUR: All right. Will Medicaid be the sacrificial lamb? Today, the Wall Street Journal`s both parties expects Medicaid to be the biggest source of cuts and budget negotiations. And democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller says, quote, “There has been an unsettling silence around Medicaid even from members of my own party. Medicaid suddenly looks like the sacrificial lamb.” And look, Medicaid`s cut, we`re kind of impact with that half. Do you know that Medicaid covers 68 million Americans? Coupled with the children`s health insurance program that is about one in four Americans. First, Jonathan, on the story itself. Do you get a sense that that is the direction that they are heading here in the Democrats are conceding to big Medicaid cuts?

CAPEHART: Well, look, I only know what I read in that Wall Street Journal article. In terms of politics and negotiating and what is happening with the Biden group and everyone trying to figure out what to do about the deficit, I`m not surprised in that regard. Look, I mean, as all of the shows on MSNBC and everyone`s talking about, you know, there are huge deficit, huge budget issues that have to be resolved. And, you know, kicking the can down the road and saying, no, you can`t cut mine, cut someplace else. That`s just going to have to end. It`s just a matter — things will have to be cut. It is just matter of how you cut. How responsibly you cut and right now, until someone produces a final document and shows where the cuts are coming from and how they`re being done, will we actually be able to know and talk intelligently, about whether those cuts are actually end up costing more money rather than saving.

UYGUR: Right. But let`s keep it real, Jane, right? They are cutting Medicaid, if the story is true and I believe it is. I think there`s good evidence. Senator Rockefeller wouldn`t say that if they, you know, if they weren`t cutting Medicaid and fairly deeply at that, right? And if they are, isn`t it an easy target? Aren`t they say, oh well, come on, you know, Medicare, Social Security, you`re going to, you know, anger older voters as a Senate. But with Medicaid, it is just the poor, you know? We can kick them any time we want.

HAMSHER: This was always the plan. Fully half of the expansion of coverage from the health care bill, came from the expansion of Medicaid. But they always knew that that was something to just get liberals to be able to support the bill. And that they would going to yank the carpet out from underneath them when it came time to deal with raising the debt limit and closing the deficit. So, basically, they were always planning to do this. And they are absolutely going to do it. And it means, what they are doing is calling the maintenance of efforts requirements that that states have to comply with in order to be able to get this money.

They have to guarantee certain enrollment and benefits within the state. But now they are saying, you can take the money, but all you have to do, but you don`t have to meet those any more. So, it means all of the old people who are currently in retirement, you know, in nursing homes, that that money is going to be cut. Dave Dayen today on FDL, called this the, you know, force your mother-in-law to move in with you act. And that really is what`s going to be.

UYGUR: Ezra Klein points this out all the time on the Washington Post about how Medicaid affects senior citizens a lot too. But Josh, one last thing here. You have to be ecstatic about this. So far, no tax cuts, I`m sorry, no tax increases, no revenues discussion yet, OK. But huge cuts in Medicaid. Republicans got to be ecstatic about it.

TREVINO: Well, it`s a good start and certainly I`m willing to sign on with Jane`s liberals always duped thesis. I`m happy to go with that. Look, one thing on the Medicaid though and one policy aspect that I think is driving it heavily that isn`t well reported, is that Medicaid, although it takes up, and correct me if I`m wrong in this. I think it takes up around seven percent-ish of the total federal budget with federal spending and matching addend. It takes over 20 percent of the average state budget. And of course, that goes a lot higher and a lot lower depending on the state. That is a major driver, what`s happening here. And we can`t ignore that when we talk about it.

UYGUR: I hear you. Well, we`re going to have to apparently talk a lot about it as they go to cut-in. So, Jonathan Capehart, Jane Hamsher, Josh Trevino, thanks for a great Power Panel, guys. We appreciate it.

TREVINO: Thanks.

CAPEHART: Thank you.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

In an article this morning, Eric Cantor was very praiseworthy of Joe Biden. That is a red flag waving. If Democrats were to come out and say that they would give everything that Eric Cantor wants except minus one thing, except that they would not give him a stick of bubble gum that he wanted as well, Eric Canter would say these Democrats are the worse, they have done nothing to create jobs, they have done nothing to reduce spending cuts, etc. Eric Cantor is very pleased with how the talks with Joe Biden are going? Massive trouble.

Then Joe Biden came out and said that they will have a deal on the budget cuts by the end of June? The end of June is not that far off. That means that they are pretty close to a deal. Now a deal is a good thing if, overall, it’s a good deal. The Republicans are ready to accept this and the Democrats are going in their direction.

The Republicans were asking for $2 trillion in spending cuts without any tax increases. So if they are pretty close to a deal without discussing any tax increase, that’s bad news: that means it’s all spending.

But in a new article today, the Republicans would like $2.4 trillion in spending cuts. How many times have we seen this movie. Do you think that they are going to stop at $2.4 trillion? Remember the original idea was $2 trillion and the Democrats said we should do a clean raising of the debt ceiling not tied to spending cuts: that’s a different issue. So the Democrats were originally at zero spending cuts in relation to raising the debt ceiling, which is what we are talking about here. And the Republicans were at $2 trillion.

The Democrats moved to $1 trillion: Joe Biden announced that a couple of weeks ago. And I told you then that they would move to $2 trillion. Now $1 trillion should have been the middle and the end of the negotiations. But that’s not how Washington works. Do you think that they are just going to go to $1.5 trillion? Go halfway and then go halfway again? Then you don’t know the Democrats. They are definitely going to $2 trillion. And that isn’t the end either though. Once they go to $2 trillion, the Republicans will move the goal posts. In fact, the goal posts just got moved this morning to $2.4 trillion.

Do you think that’s the last time the Republicans are going to move it? They can go all the way to $4 trillion. Because the more they move the goal posts, the more Biden and the White House say, okay, let’s go further to the right.

So Biden saying today that they are beginning to tackle the really hard stuff and that they are making real progress, meaning giving in on more spending cuts. Now how do we know that? Because the Republicans come out of the meeting and say, not only have we not touched taxes but we will never touch taxes. Now the rich will get to keep all of their tax cuts.

If they do that deal and there are really no tax increases whatsoever, nothing on the revenue side, and they do $2 trillion or how many trillion in spending cuts—we already know that the Democrats are hopeless and the Obama White House in negotiations in the past has been hopeless—that is beyond hopeless. But I am worried that they are going in that direction.

But today, also a sign of so-called strength, Senate Democrats came out and said, hey, we’re drawing a line in the sand. They keep drawing lines in the sand; we’re drawing one. Mitch McConnell said earlier that Medicare cuts must be involved in this package. Well, Schumer, Reed, and Patty Murray came out and said, there will be no Medicare cuts in this package. That’s our line in the sand. And then you read into the details; the devil’s in the details. So let me tell you what they are.

Schumer said, “No matter what we do in these budget talks, we must preserve the program in its current form and we will not allow cuts to seniors’ benefits.” Now that’s a small red flag. Because he said we would not allow cuts to benefits; we must preserve the program as it is. Now that’s a code word for, we will not accept Ryan’s plan to change the total way that Medicare has performed but we might accept other changes to it.

A second article written by Brian Beutler explains that Democrat leaders drew a clear line, and here’s the distinction: Medicare cuts can be on the table but not medicare benefit cuts. The second red flag.

Then third, a separate article said, Democrats said that any changes to Medicare would be in the form of delivery reform to avoid cutting benefits for seniors.

Now look, that could be okay. We have to see what the proposal is. But I don’t know what they mean by delivery reform. Is that a code word for we are going to cut the benefits but we are not going to call it cutting the benefits? You know the Democrats: entirely possible.

So a word of caution about the Democrats drawing a line. They are Democrats; they don’t mean it. And afterwards they tell you they don’t mean it.

So watch out for what Biden has got cooking there. The Republicans are excited about it: that is a very bad sign.

One more thing. There is a lot of false drama in Washington. The same thing with health care. Will it pass? Will it not pass? Will financial reform pass or not pass. And I said all along that they were all going to pass. The question was never that they were not going to pass. The question was what’s in it. Is it tough, is it not tough. I told you that from day one.

And I’m telling you with this raising the debt ceiling. Are you kidding me? Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce have already ruled on this. They said that they will definitely raise the debt ceiling, no matter what. The Republicans are a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. They’re going to raise the debt ceiling. That’s why the debt ceiling actually isn’t a real problem until August. They said that they are going to settle this by the end of June. Why? Because the Republicans are bluffing. They are definitely going to raise the debt ceiling. Their bosses told them to do it.

Are the Democrats going to raise it? Absolutely. False drama. Why? Because the Democrats and Republicans have to play this game where at the end they take all of the money from the middle class and say that there was nothing that they could do about it. We just had to do the cuts to the middle class and the poor, but golly gee willikers, we still haven’t gotten to the tax situation for the rich. Another day.

You watch, you see. That is exactly what’s going to happen.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

UYGUR: “It‘s the economy, stupid.” Remember, that was the phrase that helped Bill Clinton turn George H. W. Bush into a one-term president.

Now, two decades later, it‘s threatening to turn a Democrat into a one-termer. The latest polling shows that 47 percent of Americans think the economy is poor and 70 percent think it‘s getting worse. That is a very bad number.

Americans and the politicians who would like to keep their jobs desperately need a solution. So, Senator Chuck Schumer sat down with other Democrats last week to discuss doable job creation ideas, proposals they could pass with a GOP-controlled House.

The result, according to columnist E.J. Dionne, “The senators concluded that the only stimulative measures with any chance of getting Republican votes involve tax cuts.”

Are you kidding me? The only thing Democrats could come up with was tax cuts?

Tax cuts are not a Democratic solution. They‘re not even a solution at all.

Remember, President Clinton improved the economy and added 23 million jobs in the ‘90s when he raised taxes on the rich. But the Republican leadership knows they‘ve already won that conversation.

Mitch McConnell told “The National Journal,” “I can say pretty confidently, as the Speaker has, that we are not going to raise taxes in this agreement.”

Mitch even has a little advice for the president. “What the president
ought to say to his own political left is, ‘Those crazy Republicans won‘t let me raise taxes, but we need to do this for the country.‘”

That is so sad. You know why? Because it‘s true.

Watch. That is exactly what the Democrats and the president are going to say.

In my opinion, they are doing Mitch McConnell‘s bidding for him. Why are tax cuts the only option?

Hey here‘s an idea—create jobs for real Americans instead of giving more tax cuts to the rich.

But will Democrats really push for that?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (D-FL), DNC CHAIR: We own the economy. We own the beginning of the turnaround. And we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: I wouldn‘t have said we own the economy. Look, I would fight for job creation. That‘s the real way to go.

To play on only Republican ground is a bad idea. It‘s going to lead to a bad economy and it‘s going to lead to bad electoral results, if you ask me. But you know what? Shockingly enough, they haven‘t asked me yet.

All right. Let‘s talk about it with someone else.

Adam Green is joining me. He‘s the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He‘s live in Minneapolis, the site of the Netroots Nation convention this week, where, actually, I‘ll be speaking on Saturday night.

All right.

Adam, Democrats get together and they think their only option is tax cuts. I suspect you have a different idea.

ADAM GREEN, CO-FOUNDER, PCCC: Yes.

Well, first of all, welcome. Greetings from sunny Minneapolis, home of Paul Wellstone and, as you said, the Netroots Nation conference.

Look, Democrats have a consist pattern of essentially capitulating before the fight even begins. And it‘s a real problem. Here is kind of the mental process they go through.

It‘s like, well, do Republicans say they will vote for these progressive popular ideas? Oh, no, they won‘t. So let‘s just adopt Republican ideas. But that‘s an absurd way of legislating.

The best way for progressives to legislate is really a three-step process. One, say what is the right thing to do? In this case, as you said, it‘s massive government investment in jobs.

Step two, is this a popular idea? In this case, overwhelmingly. Republican, Independent and Democratic voters want investment in jobs.

And three I would call the Cenk Uygur step, which is, Democrats have to make the case, they have to rally the public. And if people like Mitch McConnell are against their own constituents, well, when they go back home, they need to face exactly what Paul Ryan and other Republicans faced a couple of months ago, which is angry people at town hall meetings.

That only happens if Democrats actually make the case first, and that‘s what we need them to do on jobs.

UYGUR: I feel like I stirred so many questions this week. What is wrong with them? How can they possibly have been in politics for decades and not understand that, hey, maybe you should make your own case, that maybe you should tell voters, here‘s what I‘m going to do—I‘m going to create jobs. I‘m going to create three or four million jobs.

But look at these Republicans. They‘re standing in our way.

And then you put pressure on the Republicans. And guess what? The Republicans might change instead of you caving in all the time.

Like, seriously, Adam, you work a lot in Washington. I‘m sure you tell the congressmen and the senators that. When you tell them that, what do they say? I mean, do they say, I don‘t know anything about politics? What the hell do they say?

GREEN: Look, honestly, there is kind of a culture clash between those who only play the inside game in Washington, D.C., and those who understand how to mobilize people outside of Washington.

So, look, here is the way I see negotiation. If 75 percent of the people are on my side, and 25 percent of the people are on the side of somebody across the table from me, and they‘re drawing a line in the sand in a way that puts them on the opposite side of their own constituents, I‘m not going to take that line in the sand. I‘m going to rally their constituents against them.

And politicians, most of whom are younger or a little bit more tech savvy, understand how to use the Internet to rally people quickly. But unfortunately, there‘s a culture in D.C. of making behind-the-scenes deals.

Now, the one fortunate thing—

(CROSSTALK)

UYGUR: I have a theory, Adam.

GREEN: OK. What‘s your theory?

UYGUR: My theory is, it‘s not that they‘re not tech savvy. It‘s not that they can‘t read a poll. They‘re politicians. They can read a poll. They know what 75 percent is.

No, it‘s that they take money from the same financial interests. So, they pretend like, oh, the Republicans made me do it! Mitch McConnell is rubbing their face in it saying, yes, you know that‘s the game you‘re playing. You‘re taking money from the same guys as we are.

Look, let me give you a sense of what the Republicans are up to.

They‘re going to take almost a billion dollars away from WIC, from CSFP, TEFAP. These are all programs that help the poor, the middle class, they help women and children. They are looking to kill Medicare and Medicaid if they can.

They want to spend $17 billion more on defense. They want to continue tax breaks for big oil. They want to demand $2.4 trillion in cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

All of these are enormously unpopular. Nobody wants these. These all polled terribly. And instead of fighting back, what do the Democrats do? They go, oh, OK, when you say jump, I say how high?

A party can‘t be that bad. They just can‘t be that bad.

GREEN: Look, I‘m not going to dispute your basic premise, which is that corporate money is absolutely corrupting politics. I really think it‘s a few things.

I think it‘s that. I think it‘s the failure to understand how to mobilize the public. And that comes along with the idea that some of these politicians would actually make more money for their campaigns if they rallied the public, as opposed to trying to get $500, $1,000, $2,000 contributions from Wall Street hacks.

But a third thing is honestly just the fear factor with Democrats. Many Democrats kind of imagine the worst-case scenario of, what will these big corporate ads that run against me look like?

And then they think to themselves, oh, there is no way I can possibly fight back, even when the polling clearly shows the public is on my side. And what we‘re trying to do is say to those people, the good people who feel trapped in a bad system, as opposed to the genuinely corrupt people, we‘re trying to say, we will get your back if you are willing to fight for massive government investment in jobs.

Let‘s wire America with the Internet. Let‘s rebuild crumbling schools. Let‘s put people to work.

UYGUR: And God bless. Let‘s do that.

GREEN: The one good piece of news today was in “The Huffington Post,” in response to our activism, Senator Chuck Schumer‘s office said that he is willing to fight for investment and infrastructure. We look forward to working with him if he is willing to do that.

(CROSSTALK)

UYGUR: I hope so. I really, really hope so. All right. Adam Green of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

Thanks for joining us. We appreciate it.

GREEN: Thanks, Cenk.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC.

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, located in Berlin, Connecticut, offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. William Brighenti is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor. For all of your accounting, auditing, bookkeeping, tax return preparation, tax planning, and QuickBooks services, please consider us: (860) 249-1323.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

A scathing new report reveals just how effective American banks and their lobbyists were in watering down regulations that helped fuel our mortgage meltdown. Two IMF economists just wrote a new article saying, “In the period from 2000 and 2006, a bill that was unfavorable to the financial industry was three times less likely to become law than one promoting deregulation.” So, of course, there was a great drive for deregulation. Well, let’s find out who caused that drive and what it resulted in.

The economists of the IMF determined that, “There was a clear association between the money affected financial firms spent on lobbying and the way legislators voted on the key bills considered before the crisis.” Shocking! It turns out the more money spent on lobbying, the more laws you can buy.

The IMF researchers also concluded that if a lobbyist had worked for a legislator in the past, the legislator was very likely to vote in favor of less regulation. That’s why the lobbyists buy the top staffers on the hill after they leave their government jobs.

Now what was the result of all of this? The report found, “Lenders that lobbied heavily between 2000 and 2006 tended to engage in risky lending practices more often than other institutions over the same period and suffered worse outcomes during the crisis.”

So, how did this work? They lobbied for deregulation, they bought the staffers, they bought the politicians, they got the deregulation, and then they crashed. But don’t worry, they shovel that cost onto the taxpayers anyway.

Our system of government is broken. The way we finance elections is broken. They buy our politicians, they get the results that they want, and to everyone’s detriment. It even hurt their own firms, and it certainly hurt all the taxpayers. We’ve got to find a new way. This is not helping our Democracy.

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Transcribed by Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

We’ve all heard the stories of Wall Street Greed but wait till you hear about how it affected one community in Alabama. We’re talking about Jefferson County, Alabama. Back in 1995 the local government planned to put a new sewer system in. The price tag was supposed to be $250 million.

But then the bankers came in. They paid off local politicians and businessmen to let them sell the County fancy synthetic swaps and other financial weapons of mass destruction. The eventual absurd price tage of the project became $3 billion.

JP Morgan Chase eventually charged $1.28 billion in just interest and fees. As the Rolling Stones Matt Taibbi reported, it was all a sham. Twenty local officials and so-called consultants were convicted of corruption in Federal court.

Now how many bankers got convicted? You guessed it: none. They paid a comically low fine of $25 million and restitution of $50 million, a fraction of what they made off the deal, and they were free to go.

And what happened to Jefferson County in the meanwhile? Well, they’re still saddled with the debt. So today 1,000 workers are being forced to take leave without pay. Sheriff Mike Hale said that his deputies will not be responding to traffic accidents because of budget problems.

And what about JP Morgan Chase? Well, they are living the high life, hauling in record profits. $17.4 billion last year, $5.6 billion in the first quarter alone of this year. That’s the biggest quarterly profit in its history. And just to put things into perspective, the $12 million saved by putting workers on leave is only 0.2% of JP Morgan’s first quarter profits.

Do you get it? This isn’t theoretical. They took this County for a ride. They got rich in the meanwhile and now all the residents have to pay the bills on their modest incomes.

And where the hell is our Justice Department? I thought they were supposed to be on top of things like this. The one thing Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on is that the banks must be protected at all costs no matter what they do. If Democrats were actually progressive, they would go down to Alabama and get those votes and actually help those people.

Can we get a party to finally represent us? Please.

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Transcribed by Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Republicans can always find cash for millionaires and military contractors but they say we cannot afford to defend poor women and kids. The GOP’s whole twisted set of priorities is our con job of today.

The House began debating a spending bill today that cuts $833 million from the WIC nutrition program which provides healthy food to low-income women and their children. Appropriations Chair Hal Rogers (Republican Representative from Kentucky) says, “This legislation reflects hard decisions to cut lower priority programs, reduce spending in programs that can be scaled back, and target funds where they are needed most….”

So programs for the hungry are not a high priority. Well, at least they are honest about their Republican priorities. Now what was it that Jesus said? Give me your poor and needy and I will go tell them to pound sand. [Please note that the Christian Fundamentalists, in hypocritical fashion, all vote for these Republican fat cats, who only care about money and Wall Street and don’t give a damn about the poor and the downtrodden.] At least that’s the Republican’s vision of Jesus.

The other GOP rationale for cutting WIC is that there’s more than enough aid already. Republican Representative Virginia Foxx from North Carolina: “We do not lack for programs to help take care of the hungry people in this country, Mr. Speaker. What we lack is efficiency in our programs.”

This isn’t about efficiency. This is about need: helping the hungry in the middle of a tough economy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the GOP cuts will mean up to 350,000 eligible women and children and babies won’t get those WIC benefits. What efficient about that unless your aim is to hurt the poor.

But the worst part is that the government is literally giving away money to offset these cuts. Bush era tax cuts provide millionaires with $860 million every week. That’s more than the total amount being cut from WIC for a year. Those priorities make me sick.

And if Republicans were serious about efficiency, they would take a look at military spending. Instead the House GOP is pushing for a $17 billion budget increase from the Pentagon. So we always have money for weapons and wars but not for the most needy in this country. They are low priorities.

Republicans say we have plenty of money for defense contractors and millionaires but not enough to help poor women and kids get the food they need and that heartless ridiculous reasoning is our con job of the day.

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Transcribed by Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

UYGUR: Welcome back to the show, everybody. Now to discuss some of the biggest political stories, we bring in our Power Panel. Alex Wagner, MSNBC‘s political analyst, reporter for the Huffington Post. Kiki McLean, a founding leader of the No Labels Group and former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential run. And finally, former New York republican Congressman Rick Lazio. Great to have all of you here with us tonight.

FMR. REP. RICK LAZIO ®, NEW YORK: Thank you.

KIKI MCLEAN, “NO LABELS” FOUNDING LEADER: Glad to be here.

ALEX WAGNER, THE HUFFINGTON POST: Thanks, Cenk.

UYGUR: First question for the panel. Democrats refuse to cave on Medicare, let‘s hope but with the Obama White House, Senate Democrats stood firm on the issue again today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HARRY REID (D), NEVADA: We‘re calling on Republicans to take away any cuts to Medicare benefits. Take them off the table, now.

SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: The Ryan plan to end Medicare as we know it must be taken off the table.

SEN. PATTY MURRAY (D), WASHINGTON: Today, we are here to say to the Republicans, we will not allow them to balance the budget on the backs of our seniors.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: Alex, first question is, it for real, you know? It‘s nice rhetoric, ecstatically here it. But do we think they‘ll really going to hold the line?

WAGNER: Look, it is heartening I think to see the Democrats A united and B playing hardball. I mean, a lot of times. The Obama White House is probably most guilty of this. They negotiate with themselves ahead of this. And, you know, strategically speaking, the Paul Ryan Medicare plan is the best tactic the Democrats have had since Obama ran for office. I mean, this is manna from heaven for the 2012 presidential campaign. This is something they can all unite behind and fundamentally, it in genders of rhetoric conversation about the American social compact. And what the Republicans are offering and what the Democrats are offering. I think for now we have to hope for the best.

UYGUR: Kiki, help me understand this. Apparently they‘re saying that Medicare cuts can be on the table, but not Medicare benefit cuts. What‘s the distinction?

MCLEAN: Well, first of all, step back and understand that from my point of view, as a democrat but as a leader of No Labels, I believe to get to a solution, we‘ll going to have a bipartisan solution, and so everything‘s got to be on the table for that conversation. What I hear Senate Democrats saying, some in different ways than others, which is you‘re not going to go to the Paul Ryan extreme. There are people who believe that the Ryan plan is the most extreme and therefore not really moving toward a conversation about what can really happen. That‘s the difference I think when you look for it. Everything has got beyond the table, but the point is if you start off from a point of hyper partisanship, that‘s not going to move the debate forward.

UYGUR: All right. That scares me. Because.

MCLEAN: Why does that scare you?

UYGUR: I‘ll tell you it scares me. I‘ll tell you exactly why it scares me, Kiki. Because look, when you say, well, we‘re not going to do the Ryan plan which is massively radical, but we‘ll do other things. That tells me. Yes, we‘re on the cut Medicare. And I don‘t want to cut Medicare, especially when the Republicans tell me that they‘ll be no tax increases under no circumstances.

MCLEAN: Exactly.

(CROSSTALK)

UYGUR: I‘m going to take Medicare off the table in a second.

MCLEAN: Cenk, that‘s just the point. You see, you want to do it as a tit for tat. What I‘m suggesting is that a bipartisan solution means everybody is at the table and we figure out what we‘re for. The goal is to fix our economy, to create more jobs, get this debt ceiling raised, and make sure that we can preserve Medicare, that it can work. I personally happen to believe that the Ryan plan is extreme, and wasn‘t really meant as a legitimate offering. I believe that it was actually put out there as a political tactic, so the point is you‘ve got to start with everything on the table, including what you‘re concerned won‘t be on the table. It‘s two parts, everything has to be there.

UYGUR: All right. Look, over the last ten years, every time in Washington said, bipartisan. The middle class got screwed and the rich got richer. That‘s part of my concern, but Rick, are you willing to put taxes on the table as a republican and say, yes, sure, maybe we should raise taxes?

LAZIO: Well, first of all, somebody is going to have to address Medicare. Whether Republicans and Democrats can do it before the debt ceiling vote, I don‘t know. But when a program like Medicare which is a huge program is growing at twice the rate of the economy, it is unsustainable and those reductions are going to come from somewhere. And let‘s face it. You know, Democrats already accepted a reduction in the rate of growth of over $400 billion in order to help finance the health care bill. So, they‘re already on record for having reduced the base.

UYGUR: That‘s true. Is that good enough?

(TALKING OVER EACH OTHER)

UYGUR: Is that good enough, Rick?

LAZIO: Pardon me?

UYGUR: Is that good enough, $400 billion?

LAZIO: Not when the program is growing at twice the rate of the economy. We‘re borrowing $4 billion a day, Cenk.

(TALKING OVER EACH OTHER)

UYGUR: So, Rick, I want to stay with you then. Rick, I want to stay with you. You say, OK, Medicare is growing too fast, we can‘t afford it. On the other hand, you‘ve got Republicans saying they want to do massive gigantic tax cuts for the rich? What happened? I thought we couldn‘t anything.

LAZIO: So, let me say this. First of all, you‘ve got to understand that the only way long term to address this huge fiscal dilemma that we have right now is through growth. The worst time to raise taxes is when you have a soft fragile recovery like we have right now.

UYGUR: That‘s what they say every time, every time. Oh, it‘s a terrible time to raise taxes. Let‘s give more to the rich. Alex? Alex?

WAGNER: I just think what we have to look at this strategically. This is playing politics. I mean, I think Democrats are not in the dark that, you know, entitling programs, there needs to be some reform. Does that mean we need to turn Medicare into a voucher program, I‘m not sure. The Republicans have gone far to the right. Look at the budget to pass the House. I mean, I think it‘s high time that the Democrats—at least have some ground to stand on and circle the wagons a little bit.

(TALKING OVER EACH OTHER)

MCLEAN: I want to take a moment.

LAZIO: — Because people like to say all the time that this is some type of voucher program. The Ryan plan has the subsidies flowing through Medicare, and it only is going to be paid to license regulated insurers. It also means test the monies, so that people who are the most needy and who are the sickest are going to get a disproportionate amount of money. So, I know that‘s a great talking point, and sound bite, to call a voucher program, but it‘s not accurate base on the way the architecture of that plan.

UYGUR: No, no. Rick, Rick. The last part right—hold on. Let me just say, Rick, you‘re right about the last part. But about the first part, you described exactly a voucher program. That‘s what it is. So that‘s why we call it that. But Kiki, go ahead.

MCLEAN: Well, here‘s the issue. And I‘m going to praise two people. I‘m going to praise Eric Cantor by saying that he stepped out yesterday and praised Vice President Biden for the work the bipartisan team is doing trying to get us to agreement. Because this can‘t be about any one issue in isolation. This is about the whole, and we have to be able to look at it as a whole. Rick doesn‘t want to admit that we have to address taxes. We have to address taxes. I also think that when you look at Newt Gingrich and what he said, even in the republican debate last night, was that Medicare can‘t be an either/or on the far extremes. That we have to be willing to look at what the options are but the…

UYGUR: Let me tell you my problem with that is. Let me tell you what

the problem is

MCLEAN: Let me tell you what—let me say this.

UYGUR: Hold on. Let me address it. OK.

MCLEAN: The greatest moment, Cenk.

UYGUR: Look, the political spectrum has moved massively to the right over the last 30 years. And certainly over the last ten years. Now you‘re saying split the difference. I‘m not interested in splitting that difference.

MCLEAN: No, no, no. I didn‘t say split the difference.

UYGUR: Our tax rates are at historic lows.

MCLEAN: Cenk, I didn‘t say.

UYGUR: Hey, you can raise a tiny bit if we cut Medicare. I say no, let‘s bring the spectrum back to the center.

MCLEAN: I didn‘t say split it down the middle. What I suggested to you is this, that these things are connected. And so they‘ve got to be looked at in the whole. And by the way, when you talk about bipartisan solutions that it always work against middle class, I just don‘t believe that‘s true. Because the greatest moments in America‘s history have been where there have been bipartisan solutions. You‘re talking to a Texan who would be proud to have Lyndon Johnson carry all the water and all the gratitude for civil rights, but there was a republican from Illinois name Everett Dirksen who went to work with him on it.

UYGUR: Ancient history?

MCLEAN: I don‘t think a lot of people who live under civil rights reform.

UYGUR: Right. That was before the corporations took over it. The corporate America is taking over everything, including the military contractors, which is our next question for the panel.

MCLEAN: Cenk, then you don‘t believe that there‘s any possibility at all, and you might as well give up. I do.

UYGUR: No, no, I believe the real thing to do is to throw all the bums out and fix the system, because our money—the money has corrupted our system entirely. I mean, look at Evan Bayh, that‘s a democrat? That‘s progressive? That‘s a corporate robot. And what did he do? He came out of the Senate and he immediately grabbed the money. He grabbed the corporate money, now he works for the Chamber of Commerce and FOX News. That‘s what partisanship? That‘s ripping the middle class off, and that‘s what‘s been happening for the last 30 years. You go beyond 30 years, then, I agree with you. Then, we have lovely bipartisanship.

MCLEAN: But you know what? Your yelling and screaming doesn‘t solve the problems though, Cenk.

UYGUR: I think it begins to solve it.

MCLEAN: I don‘t think it solved anything right now. To be honest with you, I don‘t think it did anything to further the conversation in America. I don‘t think as a democrat, you did anything to help my point of view as a progressive get us to a solution. Because here‘s the reality, in order to address the issues I care about, we‘ve got to make sure our country is economically secure, that people have a chance to feed their kids, that they‘re able to take care of their parents when they‘re old and sick. And that they have opportunity. That‘s not going to come from one side alone.

UYGUR: All right. We‘ve got to move on, on the next question, and that‘s about defense budget. Look, we spent 43 percent of all the defense spending in the world. What is it every going to be enough? Rick, can we touch the defense budget? Or is it simply, again, the Republicans, no way, we have to give all our money to defense contract.

LAZIO: I think it needs to come down more. The program of a size of our defense budget right now. It means, it‘s partly a reflection of engaging in two wars the same time. I mean, we‘re going to have to make hard choices and defense and accept as Secretary Gates have said that there‘s going to be some traders here. That you cannot have a two-theater war effectively, and at the same time reduce spending. But in my mind, having a strong economy, creating jobs, and not relying on foreign governments to finance our debt is as much a national security issue as buying another ballistic missile system. I think we can do both. I think that number has got to come down. And frankly, if you look at President Obama‘s budget in February, not the second one, the first one, Republicans are pretty competitive with the amount of financing. So, it‘s not just a republican allocation here, it‘s one that the administration is also signed off on.

UYGUR: Agreed. We have agreement on the panel. I‘m feeling good.

MCLEAN: Yes, yes, it‘s partisan.

UYGUR: Alex, hold on one quick second. Look, another story that came out, somewhat related to this, $6.6 billion lost in Iraq. Lost.

WAGNER: Sure.

UYGUR: I mean, how much pork is in the defense budget that we can lose $6.6 billion and they don‘t even notice.

WAGNER: Look, even if we took all of our troops out of Afghanistan, arming and equipping the Afghan army will be $12.8 billion. We have serious expenditures as far as defense, five percent of our wealth that we spend on the defense budget. But, look, Leon Panetta was Clinton‘s chair of the Office of Management Budget, he‘s a notorious number cruncher. And looks like he‘s going to get some firm. I think there is some bipartisan support for trimming the defense budget. So, he may be the man to do it.

UYGUR: Kiki, real quick? Agreement again? We can cut defense?

MCLEAN: Yes, I think there‘s some agreement. Here‘s the amazing thing. I‘m not sure how those numbers went out because I think what you see on this panel is probably what you really find on Capitol Hill when it comes to that issue.

UYGUR: Well, I hope it‘s true on Capitol Hill. I know it‘s true across the country. People get there‘s pork in the defense budget and it goes to the military contractors. I wish our congressmen would get that.

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Transcribed by Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

UYGUR: Since the day that they took over the House, Republicans have laid a bear trap for President Obama. They kept insisting that the deficit was the only issue and challenged the president to do more and more spending cuts. Eventually, the president took the bait, listened, and started playing their game.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I am absolutely confident that we can move forward on a plan that gets our debt until control, gets our deficit under control.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: But now that the Republicans have the president on their ground and, more importantly, got him to stop focusing in public on creating jobs for the American people, which is in reality, of course, the number one issue in the country, they turn around and hammer him on jobs.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BOEHNER: The American people are still asking the question, well, where are the jobs? Republicans have been focused on jobs creation since the beginning of this Congress.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: That, of course, is a joke since they have not put forward one proposal or one bill to create jobs. But they are the masters of spin. They get the president to focus on spending cuts and ignore jobs creation, and then blame him for ignoring job creation.

Now, how many times is the president going to fall for this?

But out of the dark clouds of this misinformation campaign comes riding a posse of progressives, a veritable caucus—the Progressive Caucus. They‘re here to set the record straight.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. JAN SCHAKOWSKY (D-IL), PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS: And the new Republican majority has not offered one bill, one proposal, one concrete idea that would put Americans back to work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: Now, will you look at that? Someone who actually cares about Americans who are out of work.

The Progressive Caucus announced today they‘re going on a listening tour this summer dubbed “Speak Out for Good Jobs Now.” The 12-city tour will give the unemployed and underemployed a chance to have their stories heard.

It started today in Washington with regular folks who desperately want jobs, folks who just happen to have some pretty astute observations.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The economy‘s just never going to recover if we get rid of the middle class. And that‘s essentially what‘s going on right now in the country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: She sounds like Robert Reich. And she‘s right. How do you get a healthy economy for anybody without a middle class that can buy all those products? You can‘t.

Now, luckily, some Democrats are ready to listen. But can they stop the White House from falling into that GOP trap and focusing only on spending cuts?

Let‘s find out. Joining me now, Congressman Raul Grijalva, a member of the Progressive Caucus.

Congressman, great to have you here tonight with us.

REP. RAUL GRIJALVA (D), ARIZONA: Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation.

UYGUR: No, no problem. Thank you.

So, when you talk about refocusing the conversation on to jobs, is the White House frankly an obstacle there? Because they seem like they‘re playing that Republican game of only focusing on spending cuts.

GRIJALVA: I think the whole discussion about jobs become so esoteric, so hypocritical, so full of spin, that nobody is listening to what the American people are saying, what working families are saying, what the middle class is saying. So, this 12-city, plus more in August, tour is about letting the American people talk about jobs, talk about their families, talk about their aspirations.

I think we‘re missing the boat as Democrats. If we don‘t embrace the idea that jobs are part of the cure for this recession, that good jobs are part of the cure for our economy, we‘re going to miss the boat.

The American people care about jobs. The Republicans have been hypocritical to talk about jobs and then cut anything that would stimulate job creation. And so, this tour is about listening to real people, on real time, with real ideas.

UYGUR: OK. You know, I want the audience to understand this.

Look, if you create more jobs, the government pays out less in unemployment, and they get more in revenue for the taxes of those people who have jobs. So it actually helps both things. It helps jobs and it helps the deficit.

And it seems like we have lost focus on that. Even David Brooks thinks the Republicans‘ strategy is a terrible idea.

Let me read you a quote from him. He wrote in “The New York Times” today, “The Republican growth agenda, tax cuts and nothing else, is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible, and politically impossible.”

So why are we having conversation on their ground? How do we fight on our ground? What would you propose? How do we create jobs as a member of the Progressive Caucus? What do you think is the right way to go?

GRIJALVA: I think the administration and Congress, and particularly the administration, has to get behind the public jobs bill that creates three to four million jobs for the American people, puts people to work on the things that need to be done for this country from our streets to our nursing homes, and puts these good people to work so they can take care of the family, circulate money in our economy, and begin to pull us out of the hole that we‘re in.

Franklin Roosevelt knew that. All his jobs bills were about circulating money and putting people to work, and giving the American people back the confidence that they need. That‘s what we need to do.

UYGUR: All right. You mentioned something really interesting there. I think most people watching go, hey, three to four million jobs, that would be great. Right?

How do you do that? What would you high them to do?

GRIJALVA: I would hire them to take care of America‘s needs—our roads, our buildings, our infrastructure, our nursing homes, to take care of the people that need to be taken care of, as my generation gets older and older. Also to take care of our schools, to make sure that we have all the infrastructure needs that the American economy is going to need to the future. Plan ahead.

We are not doing that. And as a consequence, we continue to fall behind in the global market because America is not prepared to compete in that global market, because we don‘t have the infrastructure to do that. Put American people, their ingenuity, their hard work, their dedication, put them to work to build us up again.

UYGUR: All right. Congressman Raul Grijalva, co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus, with a plan for actual jobs.

Thank you for your time tonight. We appreciate it.

GRIJALVA: Thank you.

UYGUR: All right.

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Transcribed by Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Joining us on tonight’s Power Panel are Michelle Cottle of Newsweek and the Daily Beast, Robert Borosage, Co-Director of Campaign for America’s Future and Contributing Editor of the Nation, and finally, Simon Rosenberg, President and founder of the New Democrat Network.

The question for you tonight: Wall Street, is it really worth it? These are the same bankers that contribute $71 million to the campaign in 2008 and that’s nearly 10 million more than to the Republicans in that election. Remember, Goldman, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan were among the top seven campaign contributors. Does it help or hurt the President’s re-election chances? On the one hand, he needs money. On the other hand, it is not good to go to the voters and say, look, I was trying to help the Wall Street guys.

I don’t think anyone would be surprised if he gets contributions from the Wall Street guys. he deserves them. he bailed out the banks. no one is prosecuted. bonuses are back up to record levels. the president earned their gratitude. he is not as shameless as republicans. they are trying to repeal even the small reforms we have had. but i think the president has a very good chance. you know, these are hedge fund operators. they will hedge their bets. they will put money on both parties. but i’m sure he will do quite well.

>> simon, is that too harsh? or is bob right?

>> that was a good one, bob. i think a year from now, if voters believe that the president is on their side and own the side of struggling communities, he will get a pass on things like this fund-raiser. but if he is seen as being too close to the banks and too close to economic interests, he can it can spell trouble in his reelection.

>> michelle, how do you thread this needle? unfortunately you need a ton of cash. who has it? the waup street bankers. on the other hand, the country hates the wall street bankers. rightfully so, in my opinion. how do you thread that needle?

>> on one hand you’ve got do it. the candidates intend to be a whiney bunch. pe want their hands held. obama calls them names and uses populous rhetoric. even if they like his policies, they don’t like that. so he has to do damage control from time to time. there was talk six months ago about kmarm offensity and probably six monthes before that. this is what he has to do to get things, you know, in line for election time.

>> it should be said in the president’s defense, this is a guy who has said to hedge fund operators, it is not a good thing that you pay a lower tax rate than your chauffeurs. you know, the other party, the republican candidate, thinks those tax rates are just dandy. so president has taken a bite out of these folks. but there’s no question, he saved their skins and i’m certain he can get some money out of them to run for president.

>> real quick, bob. i want to stay with you 07b that. look, you are doing the most criticism here. by the way, i don’t want anyone to be confused, i agree. but what do you do? you say you guys are fat cats and i don’t need your $71 million.

>> no. i assume he’s going to get get money for them. as said, i think he deserves it. what’s the country need in terms of getting finance shackled so the real economy can work again? and what we haven’t had are the investigations and the prosecutions and the accountability that we need to make certain that we don’t go explode a new bubble and drive the economy over the cliff again.

>> right.

>> that reform agenda has to get pursued no matter where you get your money from in the campaign.

>> look, our system is broken man. look at how terrible — the republicans and democrats both have to go begging wall street for money. gee, i wonder why we’re not tough on wall street. i wonder how that turned up. all right. but we got to move on to the next question. are republicans blind to their own hi pock ray racy?

>> it doesn’t pass the straight-face test from the chair of the party who, none of whose leaders called for senator vitter who actually broke the law, to resign.

>> senator vitter, that’s a five-year-old story. chris lee, how long did he last? about five seconds. senator ensign left within weeks. the fact of the matter is we have big issues here to tackle in this country.

>> michelle, is it a good strategy to counter weiner with vitter? did wren to a descent job to answer that? or there is no answer because i have thor is still in office?

>> there is no office. hypocrisy is a prerec kwi sit for being partisan but both sides need to tiptoe. this pops up on both sides. i think the difference here which is making it complicated for democrats, p is all about the visuals. vitter may have left him some hookers but they did not have those pictures popping up and embarrassing him all over the web. that is making it tough for people to come and let this go.

>> you’re right. there’s new pictures of weiner at the house. jim, i don’t know what this guy was thinking. look, i’ve defended him saying it is his private life bp but it was incredibly stupid. now the president spoke out on nbc news. let’s show you that and get your reaction.

>> obviously what he did was highly inappropriate. i think he’s embarrassed himself. he acknowledged that. he embarrassed his wife and his family. ultimately there will be a decision for him and his constituent. i can tell you, if it was me, i would resign.

>> simon, good answer or no?

>> i think we know how this is going to end. i think the problem for anthony weaner is he doesn’t come off as having a broken faith with his wife but he comes off looking a little crazy here. i think the way that these pictures were done, and pictures of himself sitting on the couch. i don’t really remember anything like this in all the years i’ve been in politics where it seeps to incredibly self-destructive over such a long period of time. i think he’s gone and however we get there at the end of the day we don’t know. but i think we know how the story’s going to end.

>> i think the house gym pictures are taking it another step.

>> i agree with that.

>> he brought it into the house gym. i mean his colleagues are going to be looking at him, going, dude, come on. this is going, i think –

>> i have a theory on this. i think that his problem was that he actually had a descent body. guys with guts, okay, nobody is taking pictures of my gut and sending it to anyone. so i think that was one of the problems. but last thing, bob, what do the democrats do? they are in a bind here, right? do you throw him under the bus? it is a personal matter. on ideology, on principle, i don’t think. but it is a distraction. what do you do?

>> he is already under the bus. he is gone as a national spokesman. whether he stay says up to his own constituents and his own conscious. i would figure out who will run and who will challenge him. i think he’s gone, the question is when. but democrats aren’t going to stand next to him. but whether you know, this is a private matter. or not so private. but whether he resigns or not, whether he resigns or not is up to him. this is really mud pit politics. the thing about the republican chairman, you pretend you’re on the high road. meanwhile you’re wallowing in this stuff. you can’t pretend you’re worried about the great issues facing the country when you are talking about anthony weiner.

>> all right. that’s the power panel for tonight. thank you all for the great discussion.

>> thanks.

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UYGUR: Today, there‘s a growing debate in Washington over whether job creation is more important than spending cuts. Finally, the debate we‘ve been waiting for. Before all we ever heard was about spending cuts and how desperately we need them. The GOP played that broken record again over the weekend.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I believe that we need to get our fiscal house in order.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: We have a big spending problem in Washington.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: But now, finally, the battle is joined. Folks on other side of the debate are chiming in over the last week. Economists have begun pushing a key piece of economic wisdom. Cuts won‘t solve the jobs crisis. Spending will. You have to actually higher people. Jarrod Bernstein, former Economic Adviser to Vice President Biden wrote about a recently and then talk about it with me on this show. Even Larry Summers, a former economic advisor to President Obama generally concerted a lot more conservative, agreed on a Washington Post editorial that concentrating on spending cuts is going in the wrong direction.

And Robert Kuttner of “The American Prospect” did an excellent job summarizing the perils of concentrating a spending cuts in an article out today. He said, quote, “but watch for the bipartisan gang of six and their conservative allies at Tim Geithner‘s Treasury Department, to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. In the most likely budgets compromise, that saves the country from defaulting on the national debt. The differences between the parties will collapsed in a largely conservative direction. It the current script is followed, the Republicans will be the big winners, they will win on gutting social spending, aborting a fragile recovery, humbling the president and undercutting his reelection chances.”

But the man who‘s going to settle all this of course is President Obama. He is on a two-day jobs tour. But will he listen to that progressive message that is now finally resounding throughout the country? That‘s what we really have to see.

Joining me now is one of those economists pushing the pro spending approach for job creation. That‘s Robert Reich, he‘s now professor at UC Berkeley and former labor secretary under President Clinton.

Secretary Reich, great to have you here. I want to start with a Kuttner quote, I know you bring about this topic as well, obviously, because I think he gets the hard of it. It looks like, you know, the Democrats have the Republicans on the run on Medicare, et cetera. If they come in and the gang of six that includes Democrats and it obviously come in. Tim Geithner‘s Treasury Department seems to be pushing for spending cuts. And they say, all right, great, let‘s do the spending cuts. Have they done great damage both of the economy and to the president chances of re-election?

ROBERT REICH, PROFESSOR, UC BERKELEY: Unfortunately, I think they will do damage, Cenk. I mean, the frame of reference right now in the capitol, and you‘re right, it is beginning to change. But the frame of references established by the Republicans is we‘ve got to cut spending. If you cut spending, we get the balance, the budget back towards balance, that‘s good for the economy, that‘s good for jobs, that‘s good for everybody. Well, that frame of reference is totally irrelevant right now given that consumers are holding back and businesses are holding back and we are flirting with a double-dip recession. We‘ve got to. I mean, the government has got to spend more. At least in the short term.

People are beginning to see that but that gang of six on the hill. There are a lot of conservatives still hanging around. Tim Geithner in the Treasury Department, there are many people who are whispering into Democrats ears including the president‘s ears. Saying, well, we really do have to worry most about cutting spending and getting an agreement on—getting the budget deficit capped. That is the total ceiling on the debts. Going upward. You see, we are right in a poise, the very, very difficult spot. The president has got to decide. And I hope he will decide that job creation is the number one issue, the number one goal and his number one responsibility.

UGYUR: I can‘t understand how he can‘t see it. He is supposed to be a good politician. I mean, I care about the economy. I care about creating jobs. I care about the American people. I hope the president cares about the same thing. But I know he also that has to care about getting re-elected. And at nine percent unemployment, how are you going to do that? I mean, have you heard of any economic theory that says, you do spending cuts and somehow magically when you already have inflation really low, it will create more jobs by time of November, 2012. Doesn‘t that seem crazy?

REICH: No, but it is a border line crazy, Cenk. We know, I mean, if there is one thing we‘ve learned over the past 75 years, is that when you have high unemployment, when you‘ve got a lot of people out of work. When you have such underutilized total capacity, the government has got to be the spender of last resort. Now, if you call it stimulus, it doesn‘t matter. Call it liver worst. I don‘t care what you call it. I mean, government has got to make up the difference somehow and has got to do something. I mean, a WPA, you know, like we had during the depression, to give jobs to so many of the long-term unemployed or civilian conservation corps. To give jobs to so many of young people who are sitting around doing nothing.

UYGUR: You know, I‘ve been saying this for so long. And finally, Bursy (ph) is start writing about it this week as well. Saying, hey, how is this for an idea? Why don‘t we hire people? Why doesn‘t the government actually say, I‘m going to hire extra number of people. And that could be a gigantic number. So, the Republicans will fight it. OK. Good. They are against job creation. I mean, I don‘t get it. So, but it looks like, common sense, economic wisdom, all of the progresses in the world, combined are not as strong as Tim Geithner. I mean.

(CROSSTALK)

REICH: Well, I don‘t—I‘m not going to play personality here. I mean, the issue is, and you put your finger on it just now, it‘s common sense. And the question is, will common sense and political pressure prevail? I mean, most Americans are in very, very tough shape right now. This is not just a matter of politics. It‘s a matter of pain. The degree of public pain, of suffering, of anxiety out there in the country should not be underestimated. Now, Washington is a little bit of an echo chamber as we know, so is New York. A lot of this pain does not get through. But if these people, including the president, want to be re-elected, they have got to come up with a very bold jobs plan. And they got to come up with it soon. Because if you were the vacuum there, if there is nothing there, if the Democrats and the president are not putting out anything specific, anything bold to stimulate and boost demand, what are you going to have? That vacuum is going to be filled by Republicans who say cut taxes, cut spending, the old republican play book, which has nothing whatever to do with creating job cuts.

UYGUR: Secretary Reich, I know, you say, (INAUDIBLE), so leave that to me. Tim Geithner is the worst. He is a former republican. All he has is republican ideas. He‘s never been a democrat, never claimed to be a democrat and he is pushing all these incredibly conservative ideas to the great detrimental of the president and of the country. I think that‘s a huge part of the problem. I think the president‘s biggest mistake as we‘re listening to Tim Geithner all along on every front. But my views on that are clear. You have the more professorial.

REICH: Look, I‘m not—I don‘t mean to duck from any individual criticism. I‘m just saying, look, the issues are very, very clear. And I think that the president would be very wise, just get out there, use the bullet pulpit and says to Republicans, here is my job plan, if you don‘t like it, I‘m going to fight for it. I‘m going to fight for it.

UYGUR: That would be good. We got to live it right there. Secretary Reich, thank you so much. We‘ll be right back.

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On ABC’s ”This Week” broadcasted this Sunday, June 12, 2011, Robert Reich and Senator Shelby debated about the way to create jobs in the United States.  Reich argued that a massive jobs bill, comparable to that of the Great Depression’s WPA, is needed to haul us out of this jobless economy; while Republican Senator Shelby dismissed any stimulus plan and advocated further tax reductions on the rich and corporations. Voodoo trickle-down economics appears to be the only solution for Republicans on everything that ails America: that is, if we give cake to the rich, crumbs will trickle down to everyone else in our country.

But American corporations already are sitting on $1.9 trillion of cash, not investing in our country and creating jobs.  What makes Shelby think that if Congress gives these mammoth corporations even more trillions of tax cuts that they will create jobs here in the US?  Are the campaign contributions that these corporations are giving to Republican and Democratic members of Congress overtaking the economic reasoning of these legislators? 

Even if Congress does lower the corporate tax rate, if the Multinational Corporations do, in fact, create more jobs, they are unlikely to create them here in the United States but rather in countries where labor is paid as little as 22.5 cents per hour. Why would they create jobs here, where the costs of labor are so much higher? That defies the laws of economics.  Multinational Corporations are efficient profit machines, the economic terminators of today, without any sense of patriotism, and acting in accordance with the laws of economics, will continue to offshore work overseas because lower labor costs result in more profits for their shareholders.

Of course, the problem with America’s democracy lies in the open door policy of campaign contributions to members of Congress, the Presidency, and every other political office held in America.  These very same corporations are also funding all of these 527 organizations that have been established to promulgate this voodoo trickle-down nonsense of how tax cuts for the rich and themselves would create jobs here in the USA, when, in fact, these exorbitant tax cuts would only result in even more deficits and more cuts in social security, medicare, medicaid, pell grants, and other social net programs.

Reich is right. The only way out of this jobless recovery is a dramatic and bold move: a massive government jobs program, comparable to the WPA during the 1930s.

Shelby erred in saying that the WPA and massive government spending did not take us out of the depression, claiming World War II did. But Shelby overlooked the fact that World War II entailed massive government spending of 120% of GDP. This led to huge tax increases on the rich and corporations, resulting in the greatest transfer of wealth from the rich to the middle class America.  With this wealth, middle class America bought homes, cars, appliances, etc., and stimulated growth in our economy.  Such is needed now for our country to recover economically.

Why would a similar transfer of wealth be justifiable morally today? Because over the last 30 years America has witnessed the greatest upward transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1% of our economic society. In essence, it would represent an undoing of a disastrous tax policy that led to the economic downfall of America:  a tax policy initiated under President Ronald Reagan and perpetuated by Presidents Bush, Sr., Clinton, Bush, Jr., and Obama.

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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: We still face some tough times. We still face some challenges. We’re going to pass through some rough terrain. There are still some headwinds that are coming at us.

STEWART: No (bleep). All right. A little rough terrain, a little headwinds still coming at us. Fine, we’re Americans, we’re strong.

OBAMA: It’s just like, if you had a bad illness, if you got hit by a truck, you know, it’s going to take a while for you to mend. And that’s what’s happened to our economy.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: How — how do we go from “There’s a little bit of headwind” to “We got hit by a truck”?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: If Jon Stewart doesn’t seem convinced, none of my guests here do, either. They think that that was funny, and he is not alone, because a new ABC News-Washington Post poll shows that 90 percent of Americans describe the state of the economy as not so good or poor. What’s more, 57 percent believe the economy has not even started to recover.

No surprise. Look at this. You can see here how long it took the jobs picture to improve after previous recessions over the past 36 years. Now, fast-forward to the current crisis, job losses being deeper and longer lasting. If job growth continues at this pace, it could take until 2016 to return to pre-recession levels of employment.

So how do we jump-start this process? Joining me now, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, Robert Reich, the former Clinton administration labor secretary and current professor at the University of California at Berkeley. And once again, ABC’s Jon Karl.

So that comedic set-up had you all laughing. What is the reality? Has one been hit by a truck? Is it a headwind? Let me ask you first. You’ve dealt with labor and — and the job market. Is this cyclical? Or is this a real structural hole?

REICH: Christiane, the central problem is on the demand side. Seventy percent of the U.S. economy is consumers, and consumers are hit with the equivalent of a truck. I mean, their housing prices are dropping like mad. Their wages, adjusted for inflation, are dropping. Their jobs are disappearing, and almost everybody knows somebody or has somebody in their own family or themselves are worried about losing a job.

Under these circumstance, consumers are pulling in. They are not spending. And if they’re not spending, then jobs are not going to be created. There has got to be — in fact, the jobs program we need is a way of putting money back in people’s pockets and creating jobs even directly (inaudible)

AMANPOUR: So we sort of know, but is there a plan — is there a plan to get Americans back to work, not long term, but now?

SHELBY: Well, I believe that stimulus basically doesn’t work, for the most part. We’ve tried that. I think what we’ve got to do is create the conditions, tax reform, which we could do and we haven’t, incentives for manufacturing. We’ve lost millions of jobs in manufacturing. And say this a new day. We’ve got to do it. We’ve got to be buoyant about where we’re going. We’ve got to grow this economy. The market grows the economy. Government — we’ve grown the government, but we haven’t grown the economy, and we better be mindful of that.

AMANPOUR: You’re shaking your head. You know, obviously, the debate right now is about how much government intervention. Even people who don’t want to see government intervene say that sometimes that’s what a government has to do in an emergency.

REICH: Look, Christiane, I really — I deeply respect the senator and the senator’s position, but it’s just sheer logic. When consumers and private-sector investors are pulling in because there is not enough economic activity, because consumers are scared, because consumers are 70 percent of the economy, then government has got to fill the gap. I mean, we’ve done this for the last 75 years.

KARL: But look what we’ve tried. I mean, look what the administration’s tried. We’ve done $800-plus billion in economic stimulus. We’ve done tax cuts, the big, you know, tax cuts passed in December. And the Fed has kept interest rates at virtually nothing.

REICH: Yes, but there’s…

KARL: And there aren’t many tools left.

REICH: Look it, the scale of the crisis was much larger than anybody anticipated. This was the worst since the Great Depression. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes for the next year. Redo the bankruptcy code so people can declare bankruptcy on their primary residence and, therefore, have enormous bargaining leverage with their lenders if they are trouble. Have a WPA, a direct employment program.

KARL: But do you really think a new spending plan is going to pass muster in Congress? I mean…

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: It won’t politically, will it?

SHELBY: First of all, no — I don’t believe any new stimulus is going to pass in Congress. I don’t think it has any credibility. We have seen what the past stimulus did, for the most part. What we need to do is create some certainty, some conditions for people to invest, to grow, to have some confidence. There’s not a lot of confidence in the economy right now all over America.

AMANPOUR: Can I just talk about this idea of jobs, which is the all-important one? You just heard Donna Brazile and Peggy Noonan arguing about whether there had been economic growth and whether jobs were being created. And Donna was saying for the last 15 months there has been. And I asked Austan Goolsbee on this program last week about the jobless recovery that some economists are talking about, and he got very angry. This is what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOOLSBEE: It is not a jobless recovery. That is an incorrect phrase. After the last recession, in this comparable period, post-recession, we had lost 100,000 jobs. We’ve added more than 2 million jobs. There’s a major difference between a jobless recovery and a very deep hole that we’re climbing our way out of. And that is what — the position we’re in.

AMANPOUR: Deep hole? Jobless recovery? Is he right? They have added jobs.

REICH: Look, 2 million jobs have been added, Christiane, but so many jobs have been lost that we still have 13.5 million Americans without work and another million who are too discouraged even to look for work. This is not business as usual. The president has got to come up with a jobs plan. Even if it doesn’t get through a Republican Congress, he’s going to be fighting for it and fighting for Americans. You can’t go into an election year with this kind of unemployment…

AMANPOUR: Are you surprised that he’s not…

REICH: … and not have something substantial.

AMANPOUR: … more sort of passionate on — out in public about this?

REICH: I tell you, I am surprised about the silence coming out of Washington, deafening silence. Republicans talk about, again, with due respect, Senator, I mean, the same, old, cut taxes on the corporations. Corporations have $1.9 trillion dollars they are sitting on right now that they are not spending.

AMANPOUR: Why is that? Why are they not spending? This is something that…

(CROSSTALK)

SHELBY: People — people are not spending because they’re concerned, they’re scared, whether they’re a small medium-sized business or whether it’s an individual. They see the real numbers out there, not numbers that people are hyping on either side of the aisle, but the real numbers.

They see anemic growth. And they see maybe problems in the future for their children. So that’s why they’re not spending and why — and, also, a lot of uncertainty in America. There’s a lot of money that’s been on the sidelines right now that could have been invested, but we need certainty for investment. We need regulations that we know that are going to be there, or fewer of them. And we need a tax policy that means something.

KARL: I mean, a lot of uncertainty is coming from Congress and from the White House. I mean, there’s uncertainty about, are we going to default on our debt? Where’s the debt ceiling coming (ph)? There’s all-consuming right now. There’s uncertainty about taxes. Are the tax cuts going to be renewed? Or are we going to have to see tax increases to pay for all this debt? There’s even uncertainty on the health care bill. I mean, is the Supreme Court going to overturn it?

REICH: Yes, there is that uncertainty. But, look it, the deficit fight, the deficit is important over the long term. But, right now, the issue is not the deficit. The issue is not the debt ceiling. The issue is jobs. And they’re not the same.

Senator, what’s wrong, if I may ask, what’s wrong with a new WPA program or a Civilian Conservation Corps for the 6 million unemployed who’ve been unemployed for more than six months? Why not put them to work?

SHELBY: Well, first of all, I think we should do that, but we should do — work it in the private sector. WPA did not bring us out of the depression. The war did. We look back at the stimulus, nearly a trillion dollars gone down the drain. We’ve got to create the conditions of certainty to get people to have confidence to create jobs.

AMANPOUR: Can I ask you…

REICH: But the war brought us out of the Great Depression because of that spending; 120 percent of the national economy was spending.

AMANPOUR: You’ve also got an issue, obviously, that those who are producing and manufacturing are doing so not necessarily having to hire more workers because of the increasing technologization of the workforce. A, is that going to be structural problem going forward? And, B, is this 8 percent or 9 percent the new normal of unemployment in this country?

REICH: Christiane, there is a deeper structural problem. Even if you did all of the necessary stimulus, and spending, and had an exemption program for the first $20,000 of income from the payroll tax, did the WPA, you still have a deep structural issue, and that is, when so much of the nation’s income and wealth now go to the top 1 percent, the vast middle class doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going. And we can’t rely only on exports.

Now, that’s going to take time to do something about. I hope Republicans are as concerned about inequality of income as some of the rest of us. But we’re not going to get it by lowering tax — marginal taxes on the rich. We have to do the opposite.

SHELBY: We’re talking about real income tax reform to give people incentives to create jobs and give them confidence to create jobs. But if you look at history, it’s the free markets that’s going to create and turn this economy around. The government stimulus will never turn the economy around.

KARL: Well, there’s a political reality on the tax reform, which is — you know it’s not going to happen before the next election. I mean, the White House — you know, what I’m hearing is we will see a white paper come out with this plan for corporate tax reform, lowering rates, cutting loopholes, reducing loopholes. But, you know, even the people most enthusiastically pushing this say there’s just no way in this political environment it gets down.

AMANPOUR: All right. I’m afraid that’s the last word.

SHELBY: Thank you.

AMANPOUR: We’ll continue this conversation, because it is number one on America’s agenda.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

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Chris Murphy:  Hi, I’m Chris Murphy.

A little over a week ago, I lost a vote on the House floor by a razor-thin margin of 212 to 208.  It’s an amendment that’s been a long time in the making.  It would have finally, for the first time ever, given preference to US contractors, US manufacturers, when bidding on work from the Department of Defense.

You know that I have been working on this agenda for a long time.  The idea is simple:  without spending any more money, we can just use the money that we are already spending to buy things for the US military to grow jobs here in this country. 

This is a big fight because on the other side of it are major international defense contractors who want to offshore the work that they get from the Federal government.

We came really close.  We came within four votes of getting this bill passed….

This is a winnable fight:  we’re this close.  And by joining us,…you can make it perfectly clear that we are not going to let these powerful special interests beat us again, that we are going to make sure that when we send our taxpayer dollars to Washington, that they are spent right here at home on US jobs.

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UYGUR:  But let`s go to the next question. What`s the debt got to do with it? Republicans manage to turn everything, including talk on creating jobs into a lecture on the country`s debt. What House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said today after meeting with Vice President Biden? Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. ERIC CANTOR (R), VIRGINIA: We believe that much of the problem surrounding the lack of job creation and growth in this country has to do with the fact that there isn`t a credible plan to manage down the debt deficit in this country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

UYGUR: All right. OK. Heidi, do people really believe this? I mean, do Republicans really believe this? That if we cut spending, it will somehow magically jobs will grow?

HARRIS: Well, we have to cut spending because people won`t hire anyone if they`re not — know what the future is going to be for the country. That`s the problem. The biggest problem is confidence. It`s not that all these companies in America don`t have any money. They are just scared to death to spend it just like a lot of average American citizens like me are not spending money that we`re not sure we need to spend. Because we don`t know what`s coming around the corner. So, I think he`s right about that.

PRESS: All of us recognize, we have a serious debt problem, we`ve got a serious deficit problem. But there is a serious plan out there which is the president`s budget plan. And there is a crazy plan which is the Paul Ryan plan. I think the — here is where they are failing. They are making the big mistake, number one, thinking Americans think this is the number one issue. It`s not. Jobs and the economy are the number one issue. And two, they talk fiscal responsibility but they don`t want to get rid of subsidies, for the oil companies, the tax cuts for the wealthy, they don`t want to cut the Pentagon, they don`t want to do anything about the war in Afghanistan. They are hypocrites on this issue.

HARRIS: Oh, come on.

(CROSSTALK)

UYGUR: Hold on. I want Christina in here. Christina, is it credible — is it credible Christina to say, hey, if we cut spending somehow that will create jobs? Especially between now and the election, which is, you know, next year and a half. Is that even feasible? How would that work?

BELLANTONI: I am not an economist. I will point out that we have cut spending. And that is a question that I think the Obama White House is tossing back at the majority leader of looking at, you know, we have made a lot of significant changes and we are working on the economy. But I think it`s also important to throw this question back to Cantor of, look at some of the people in your caucus are saying that it would be OK to default on the nation`s debt if they don`t increase the debt ceiling. I mean, that is a bigger question and that certainly would not create much certainty for businesses who are going to be hiring. So, there is a lot of rhetoric that`s going around. I mean, it`s all politics. And everyone is worried about keeping their own job in the next election.

UYGUR: Now, one more thing about this. You know, when you look at the polls, about half the country trusts President Obama on Medicare. Only 35 percent for the Republicans, but now we are looking at the White House putting Medicare apparently on the table. Bill, is that a terrible idea? Why go down that road with the Republicans?

PRESS: You know, look, it came up today at the briefing, Cenk. And let`s be careful, the president is not putting Medicare on the table to kill it the way Paul Ryan is, the way the Republicans who adopted the Paul Ryan plan are. What the president is saying is there is significant savings and how you deliver Medicare over the next ten years that can save money. And that is reform it, don`t kill it. There is a big difference there. And the American people understand it.

HARRIS: Here`s the problem though.

(CROSSTALK)

PRESS: Heidi, let me finish. I think the Republicans committed political suicide by adopting the Ryan plan. They voted for it. It`s their baby.

HARRIS: Yes. But the problem is your version of saving Medicare, reforming Medicare is to pay doctors less money. I`ve got news for you buddy, a lot of doctors are not going to take Medicare patients. Do you know that doctors don`t have to — doctors don`t have to take Medicare patients?

PRESS: Heidi, that is not part of the plan. You`re behind the curve there, Heidi. You don`t know your facts. That`s behind the curve.

(CROSSTALK)

UYGUR: Heidi, let me ask you a different question. If the White House comes in and says, look, we cut Medicare but are not calling it “Cutting it” we`re calling it “reforming it,” does that let you guys off the hook? Do you feel like, hey, oh thank God, man, we were getting killed on this issue? Now, here comes the Democrats and the rest.

HARRIS: I don`t think we are getting killed on the issue on the right.

UYGUR: Really?

HARRIS: People on the right don`t want to kill grandma. We want grandma to have Medicare. Here is the difference. The Democrats who say that Medicare is not in trouble are lying to you. And if you want to believe their lies, you can. I want grandma to have that. I don`t want grandma to die.

PRESS: Heidi, I got two words for you.

HARRIS: Yes.

PRESS: New York 26. You tried that argument in the most conservative district in New York State and you lost your shirt on it.

BELLANTONI: That is one special election.

UYGUR: Christina, put aside whether you agree or disagree on the Medicare cuts, et cetera. It does seem objectively that Republicans are not in good shape on it. Poll numbers, 26th district, et cetera. Am I seeing that wrong?

BELLANTONI: That was one special election I think it`s not a predictor of what will happen in 2012. And there`s going to a million factors that go into that election including the presidential race. But it is also important to really look at the fact that Republicans are campaigning on this, as well. So, they are looking at certain polling. They are looking at the American people. And they think that this is a winning issue for them. So, it`s not a real clear-cut one person wins and one person loses.

PRESS: All right. I think it is. I really disagree.

UYGUR: Go ahead.

PRESS: I think on this issue, I think this issue Republicans have put the House of Representatives in play on this one issue.

UYGUR: Well, then Bill, OK, if they have, I mean, no matter how you spin it and you say, it`s reform or not reform, if the White House says, yes, we`ll going to help them cut it a little bit, don`t you lose at least the rhetorical advantage much less the policy which I don`t necessarily agree with?

PRESS: No, I think if you look at the president`s plan. You see what the reality is, Cenk. I mean, the president is not going to go out and say, we are just not going to touch Medicare because it`s peachy keen, it`s rosy. There are some problems with Medicare and with Social Security and with the whole…

UYGUR: They would not have acknowledged if the Republicans didn`t force them to, Bill. You know that`s true.

PRESS: But again, the answer is not to kill them. And that`s what the Republicans.

(CROSSTALK)

HARRIS: Oh, yes, the answer is to kick it down the road six more years. I know. It always is. Four more years to kick it down the road.

UYGUR: All right. So, Christian, one last thing. Christina, look, you know, there is a conflicting things here. In Washington, they say you`ve got to show people you`re serious. On the other hand, the Democrats seem to be winning on the Medicare issue. So, politically, how does that split? How does that work? Is the White House convinced, well, even though we are winning on Medicare, and I think they are, convinced that they are doing that, we`ve still got to bite the bullet because the deficit issue is what? More important to the country? More important to Washington? How does the play out?

BELLANTONI: I mean, I think they recognize the deficit is important. That`s why the president has said that that`s what he wants to focus on this year. But consider what Obama has done in many cases. He`s compromised on tax breaks for the wealthy, which he said, he campaigns about taking those away. And he signed a plan that continued extending them. That`s because he is working with the Republicans. And I think that he is under a little bit of pressure. If they come to him with some legitimate plan that can cut this, he`s going to have to take a serious look at that, in part because of his re-election hopes. But in part because people do want to actually get something done in Washington. He`ll have to face that question if it`s just politics or if he wants to get something done.

HARRIS: That`s absolutely right. He only has to deal with the right because he is forced to now. Remember, he didn`t talk to the right, until he lost the House.

UYGUR: Right.

PRESS: Obama is not that dumb.

UYGUR: I will get things done in a different way. But I hear you guys. All right. We`ll going to leave it right there. Bill Press, Heidi Harris, Christina Bellantoni, thank you so much, all of you.

PRESS: Thanks, Cenk.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

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On June 23rd, Van Jones, MoveOn.Org, and the Roots will be kicking off a movement to “Rebuild the [American] Dream” in New York City. Its purpose is to promote the creation of jobs, affordable education, affordability of home ownership, retirement with dignity, and a secure future for our children and communities.

Cenk Uygur: Unemployment is about 9%. America need jobs. We all know it, and Republicans know it, too. So they made it their rallying cry during the 2010 campaign.

Video:

Mike Pence: “We are determined to fight for the future of the American people, to create jobs….”

John Boehner: “Where are the jobs?”

John Boehner: “Where are the jobs?”

John Boehner: “Americans are still asking the question, where are the jobs?”

Cenk Uygur: But then they got elected and they changed their tune. They didn’t propose a single jobs bill. Instead they started talking about something entirely different.

Video:

Cynthia Lummis: “We will continue to fight for the deepest spending cuts that we can get….”

Mike Pence: “We voted to cut spending….”

Eric Cantor: “We are about accomplishing major spending cuts….”

Cenk Uygur: So just spending cuts. It’s all they care about anymore. Yesterday John Kyl called for $2.5 trillion in cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. But while spending cuts may be dominating the national conversation about our economy, they simply don’t create jobs. In fact, they usually cost us jobs. But don’t worry, President Obama says job creation is his top concern:

President Obama: “There are too many people out there who are still out of work…That’s unacceptable to me. It’s unacceptable to all of you. So we’ve got to do everything we can, everything in our power, to strengthen and rebuild the middle class.”

Cenk Uygur: But just last night, the White House rejected the Senate Democrats new jobs bill, complaining that it was too expensive. It was $200 million more than the White House wanted…not billion: million. That’s nothing compared to the cuts that they are making, but even that was too much for the White House. I honestly don’t know what they are thinking there.

But some progressives in the country do get it. The folks at MoveOn.Org are trying to bring the conversation back to jobs. They just announced their “Rebuild the Dream” rally to push the message that we don’t need cuts as much as we need jobs for the middle class.

Now here’s a crazy political idea in the middle of a horrible economy. Ignore what the Republicans want you to do and propose a massive jobs bill instead. I know, people in Washington will lose their minds. Here’s my question. So what? Remember you want to appeal to the American people. Who cares what Washington thinks.

Alright, joining me now is Jared Bernstein, he’s a former Chief Economist for Vice President Biden. He’s now senior fellow with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Now Jared, I read your pieces, I know that you think jobs is the right way to go, and we’ll talk about that in a second, but you were inside the White House. I got to ask you. Why isn’t this as clear to them seemingly as it is to us from the outside?

Jared Bernstein: I think it is clear to them. I think that they are stuck in a box where one side is saying cut spending this much and the other side is saying, oh, that’s too much, let’s cut spending less than that. I think that the kind of pivot to deficit reduction has really taken hold in this town and there are a lot of people who think that the message of the 2010 loss for the Democrats in the midterm was a message to cut spending. But, in fact, as you heard the President say, there is a very strong belief within the White House still that we’ve got to do everything we can still on the jobs front while we’re walking and chewing gum at the same time, while we’re planning a path to deficit reduction.

Cenk Uygur: But the thing is, Jared, should we concentrate on jobs, the fact that they kind of understand that…of course, of course, you’ve got 9% unemployment. My God, of course you should concentrate on that. But it seems like from your description and from their descriptions so often, it’s as if they’re powerless. Oh, they’re caught in this Washing bubble. What are we going to do? We can’t get out. Right? He’s the President of the United States of America. They control the White House. So can’t they do something?

Jared Bernstein: Cenk, you have a great point, and these things are dynamic. And what may have been a reasonable position a month ago strikes me as morphing into a much less reasonable position now. So I’m with you and I’m with MoveOn.Org on this point. But I’d like to take it a little further.

You know there are 20 million people out there who are un- or under-employed and I guarantee you they are not all liberal Democrats. Why is it just a MoveOn.Org rally to create jobs? Why not instead of a Tea Party, a jobs party, a movement across political interests that really has jobs at the heart of what they are about right now. I guarantee you a deficit spending cut kind of agenda in the short run, aggressive cuts to spending, getting rid of Medicare, the whole Republican agenda right now, can’t be resonating with the American people, who really believe that jobs are the biggest problem out there. So I’d like to see this go way beyond MoveOn.Org.

Cenk Uygur: Of course. The Republicans won the 2010 election by pretending that they were going to create jobs. So obviously conservative voters, Independent voters, we all care about jobs. Now you’ve got a proposal of your own. Let me just summarize for the folks at home real quick.

· You’ve got fiscal relief for the states.
· You’ve got infrastructure investments.
· Protecting entitlements.
· And balancing between revenues and spending cuts in budget negotiations.

Right? Now that seems like a very reasonable proposal. Again, why doesn’t it get a hearing at the White House? You were just at the White House.

Jared Bernstein: It’s very possible that that kind of an agenda starts to get more of a hearing now. Now you just had this one month of a very tough jobs report. But I look at it, average it into the past few months and maybe it isn’t as bad as it looked in May but we’re still growing much too slowly. So I think that we’ve really got to press for this agenda, for the White House and the Congress, because it’s got to happen together, to really pivot towards this focus and target on the budget deficit to the jobs deficit now. That doesn’t mean that you abandon your path to budget sustainability. It means that you look at the kind of issues that you just listed off. I think those are all on the list of coulds, things that we actually could do if we put our political shoulder to the wheel on it.

Cenk Uygur: Alright, Jared Bernstein, thank you for your time tonight. And we hope that your former employers are listening.

Transcribed by the Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC

Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC offers quality accounting, auditing, tax, bookkeeping, and QuickBooks consulting services at fees of one-third of those of our competitors to individuals and businesses across a wide spectrum of industries throughout the entire United States. Call us now at (860) 249-1323.