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From Charlie Rose on PBS, Andrew Ross Sorkin discusses his new book Too Big to Fail. I highly recommend watching the entire interview if you've got an hour to spare. Wall Street has not learned their lessons even after as Sorkin puts it "they saw the world was about to fall off of its axis".

Watch the full interview here. Transcript here.

ANDREW SORKIN: And part of the thing that’s so interesting about them is they really were thinking ahead. It’s remarkable, at least to me, a board meeting in
Moscow in June -- not in September, in June -- where they are talking...

CHARLIE ROSE: Goldman Sachs.

ANDREW SORKIN: A Goldman Sachs board meeting where they were talking about whether they need to become a bank holding company. Do they need deposits?

At one point they talk about whether they should buy -- are you ready for this -- AIG for the deposits, because they’re thinking if the future keeps going this direction where you need deposits and you need to be the equivalent of a bank holding company, maybe we should buy a company like that. Obviously it doesn’t go anywhere.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is there anything wrong with the fact that when AIG got all that TARP money they had to -- they paid out about $12, $13 billion to Goldman Sachs as a counterpart.

ANDREW SORKIN: I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time asking that question and tracing those two days. And I hope when you read it you really get to feel like you’re there and understand and appreciate what was going on.

And just to give it a little perspective, it really had happened now 24 hours after Lehman and Merrill had gone down, or Merrill had been sold to Bank of America.

The decision to give AIG $85 billion happened in the course of -- the first meeting was 8:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and by noon they decided to do it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Why did they do it?

ANDREW SORKIN: I think they saw the world was about to fall off of its axis. And, in fact, probably -- we were really quite close. And that would have been a very difficult decision.

Now, what they didn’t do was sit around the table, the conversation that we’ve had since then and say "Do you really need to pay out the full amounts to these banks? Could we give them a hair cut?"

CHARLIE ROSE: It was what, $40, $50 million?

ANDREW SORKIN: An extraordinary amount of money to banks throughout the world. And what if we’d gone into restructuring and said we’re not going to give you all this money? They didn’t have time to do that. They never really thought through that process. That never came up.

I mean, the funny and sad part about this entire book is many of the conversations -- the time, the amount of time that they are talking and thinking about these issues are much shorter than the amount of time we’ve been sitting and talking around this table now.

CHARLIE ROSE: How do you explain? Because they didn’t have time?

ANDREW SORKIN: There was no time. They were moving from meeting to meeting. They were running. They were racing. It really is -- it’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint. And they’re running out of their minds.

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The cast of Morning Joe while fear mongering about the EFCA can't manage to name a single successful unionized company, even though they work for one. Media Matters and TPM are already all over this one. Jamison Foser at Media Matters:

The Morning Joe crew was on an anti-union tear this morning, claiming the union label on a company means "sell." Mika Brzezinski went so far as to say of unions: "They cripple the system that makes a company work." Collectively, the journalists on Morning Joe couldn't name a single "successful" unionized company.

.....

Oh, what the heck, let's take one more example. GE is one of the world's largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations. The company made more than $18 billion in 2008 -- again, billion with a b, and again, those are profits, not revenue. All that despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fact that 13 different unions represent GE workers.

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This week thank goodness Bill Maher went back to his regular format of bringing all of the guests in together unlike last week's stinker of a show. Thank you Bill. The panel of Andrew Ross Sorkin, Kerry Washington, Bernie Sanders and Keith Olbermann discussed the hatred and outright craziness that's coming out of the likes of Glenn Beck and others on the right and the danger of whipping up some of the fringe elements of our society with their rhetoric.

Maher: Listening to people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck these days, I cannot figure out whether these right wingers are more dangerous when they're in power or when they're out of power, because when they're out of power, you know their paranoid, their paranoia goes off the charts. This Glenn Beck guy, I wouldn't even give him the time of day except he's a big star now on Fox and a lot of people believe, and he's talking about FEMA concentration camps.

Olbermann: Yeah...

Maher: He says we are headed toward socialism, totalitarianism...

Olbermann: Yeah...

Maher:...beyond your wildest imagination, but apparently not beyond his wildest imagination.

Washington: Right, right.

Sorkin: Did you see what he said about that? He said I can't prove these FEMA concentration camps, but let me tell you about them anyway.

Washington: Yeah, yeah.

Sorkin: You'd think it would be the opposite.

Olbermann: Can I quote Madeleine Albright?

Maher: Please.

Olbermann: He's nuts.

Maher: You know I would never be the person who says that you have to watch what you say because some borderline nut...no really...I'm not for that. No, no, that's an argument that's given a lot. You can't say this because a borderline might take it and then do this. I'm sorry but that's the price of living in a free speech country and I do want to live in one because I make my living at it. Okay. But you know I must say Tim McVeigh in 1995 if you recall, this was the same kind of talking that made him blow up that building.

Olbermann: The guy who walked into the church in Tennessee said in his statement to the police that he did this because he could not shoot the liberals who were on the lists from Bernie Goldberg, and Bernie Goldberg has proceeded to come out with another list of liberals and this time I'm on the list so this is even more vivid in my mind now. So yeah you're absolutely right about that. I think what you're seeing with, I mean I have been accused occasionally of sort of bordering on Howard Beale. Hey I got nothing on this guy for Howard Beale.

This is, you know in the last major economic crisis of this nation we spewed forth Father Coughlin. Well this is Father Coughlin with a crew cut. This is Father Coughlin on TV. This is, he's, who knows what he's going to say next week because if we can't understand what he's saying now he also has that same threshold. He doesn't know what he's saying now. It just sounds great. It's wonderful. It is a manic depressive high.

They go on to discuss how irresponsible Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes are and just how much of what comes out of their mouths some of these right wing yappers even believe, and how much is them just being willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder.

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Chris Matthews frames his question for this week's panel around the GOP talking point that President Obama is letting Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel run the show and that he's ceding his power to "tax and spend" liberal Democrats. Our favorite little concern troll Erin Burnett tries to say that this is going to hurt Obama because Congress' ratings are so bad. Even Tweety gets forced to call her out for it and reminds her that their ratings are actually going up, not down. Her lame response is that their poll numbers are still lower than Obama's.

Andrew Ross Sorkin tries to say that President Obama has been on the road campaigning for his ideas so much that he isn't actually making any decisions and letting Rahm Emanuel make them for him.

There are a ton of other things that could be picked apart from this segment but here's what gets my goat after watching it. When did we ever hear any criticism of Bush and just who his "brain trust" was? When did we hear any criticism of how the Republicans spent money when they were in charge?

We just went from a guy who spent the first two months of his presidency on vacation and clearing brush at the ranch to one who could potentially be one of the most intelligent and hands-on presidents in the history of the country. As an outside observer, what I see is a President who is highly involved in the decisions that are being made and who knows how to bring in all parties, listen to what they have to say and then makes a decision.

So what do we get from the Villagers? Obama is taking orders from Nancy Pelosi and he's not running anything. Really?

The other thing is I wonder is if any of these people would ever care to remind viewers of something they should have learned in a third grade civics class. We have three co-equal branches of government. President Obama is not ceding anything. He does not write the laws. The Congress does. He can sign them or veto them but he alone cannot get anything done. What in the hell do they think he's supposed to do?

I know we had a President who thought he was some sort of dictator and a compliant Congress willing to rubber stamp anything he wanted, but that's not the case now. We've got a hair-slim majority in the Senate and if President Obama does not work with them, absolutely nothing will get done. Tweety and his panel need to lay off the Republican Kool-Aid.

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Keith takes on a trifecta of idiocracy in his Worst Persons segment from Nov. 26, 2008. First up is LaDonna Hale Curzon from wsRadio.com for offering Sarah Palin radio all the time and instead letting listeners find John McCain radio.

Next up Keith takes on Glenn Beck for his statement that maybe some states should secede from America to protest the bailouts.

And finally Keith takes on the myth of the $70 an hour autoworker and Andrew Ross Sorkin from the New York Times who gave the right wing their talking points on this B.S. Media Matters has more on Andrew Ross Sorkin.