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Even though host Bob Schieffer admitted that he has not read conservative author and columnist Amity Shlaes' recent book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, he and his producers were more than willing to allow her to come on Face the Nation this Sunday and give their viewers a big heaping helping of the right-wing revisionist version of just what Coolidge's economic policies brought to the country.

It's shameful that someone like this right wing hack is still being allowed time on our airways, but not surprising, since I'm sure the bile she's spewing here, dressed up as an intellectual, high-minded conversation about political biographies, fits in perfectly with the economic policies favored by the 1 percent running the network she's appearing on. They don't seem to be concerned one iota if there's nothing but rich and poor left in America, and as long as their pockets continue to be lined.

Here's more on Coolidge that Shlaes and her ilk are doing their best to make sure never makes its way into the history books: What the right forgets about labor history:

Busting unions gave Calvin Coolidge the White House, but it gave America the Great Depression

For years, American workers’ wages have stagnated, even as they produced more. Since 2008, they have been socked with staggering new bills for bank bailouts and hammered by a Great Recession brought on by the very same banks. Now public sector workers are confronted by a new crop of Republican governors who want to put an end to unions. Union workers in Wisconsin have already conceded all of Governor Walker’s draconian demands. But they want to hold onto their right to bargain so that they won’t be at the mercy of the whims of political appointees or rogue school boards. Tens of thousands have swarmed Madison to show their support for the working people of Wisconsin.

Conservatives are tasked with coming up with a narrative that makes villains out of these working folks and heroes out of the powerful people who aim to squeeze them for what’s left of their economic security.

This is not easy. And you have to admire their ingenuity. Amity Shlaes, ever the eager revisionist, has whipped up a widely parroted narrative that contains just enough truth to give it the ring of plausibility.

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For all the fearmongering we hear out of our politicians on the right about how heaven forbid we're going to turn into Greece, the one country you never hear them talk about any more is Iceland. The reason they don't is, as Cenk Uygur explained on his show this Tuesday, they took a different path than the United States after their financial crisis and nationalized the banks, threw some the people responsible for the crash in jail and bailed out the homeowners instead of worrying about only bailing out the banks. And now they're coming back and their economy is growing again.

FDL's Dave Dayden has been writing about the financial crisis in depth for some time and he visited the set of The Young Turks to discuss whether the United States should be looking to Iceland as a model to emulate as he wrote about here: Iceland Provides Blueprint for How to Deal With the Financial Crisis:

I love this story. It’s one of those that calls to mind the old Margaret Mead dictum, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Icelanders who pelted parliament with rocks in 2009 demanding their leaders and bankers answer for the country’s economic and financial collapse are reaping the benefits of their anger.

Since the end of 2008, the island’s banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population, according to a report published this month by the Icelandic Financial Services Association.

So does the story end there? Did the people revolt and the banks give in, leading to a lower standard of living or some financial disaster or something? No. Debt deleveraging successfully brought back the Icelandic economy.

The island’s steps to resurrect itself since 2008, when its banks defaulted on $85 billion, are proving effective. Iceland’s economy will this year outgrow the euro area and the developed world on average, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates. It costs about the same to insure against an Icelandic default as it does to guard against a credit event in Belgium. Most polls now show Icelanders don’t want to join the European Union, where the debt crisis is in its third year.

The island’s households were helped by an agreement between the government and the banks, which are still partly controlled by the state, to forgive debt exceeding 110 percent of home values. On top of that, a Supreme Court ruling in June 2010 found loans indexed to foreign currencies were illegal, meaning households no longer need to cover krona losses.

We’ve heard in this country for the past several years of housing crisis that principal forgiveness rewards bad actors and causes moral hazard, and that we can’t do that to the poor, put-upon banks. Well guess what? Debt write-downs work. They generate a wealth effect among the population, and they help to end balance-sheet recessions and bring about economic growth. What’s more, Icelandic home values came back, just 3% off their September 2008 pre-crisis level. You can take the example of Iceland or you can take the example of the rest of Europe. It’s your choice. But the facts reveal that austerity is counter-productive, while debt forgiveness is extremely productive.

More there so go read the rest. Dave's interview with Cenk below the fold.

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Shortly after Jamie Dimon's appearance on Fox last month, PBS's Bill Moyers had former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and head of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Paul Volcker, whose namesake is the Volcker rule that Wall Street has been lobbying so hard to water down or get rid of, as his guest.

In light of the recent debacle at JPMorgan Chase where Dimon's company lost at least $2 billion on high risk derivatives trading, his advice for Dimon during this interview is downright prescient; If you want to participate in proprietary trading, give up your banking license.

Paul Volcker on the Volcker Rule:

You’d think after such a calamitous economic fall, there’d be a strong consensus on reinforcing the protections that keep us out of harm’s way. But in some powerful corners, the opposite is happening. Business and political forces, including hordes of lobbyists, are working hard to diminish or destroy these protections. One of the biggest bull’s-eyes is on the Volcker Rule, a section of the Dodd-Frank Act that aims to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling it on their own — sometimes risky — investments. [...]

Volcker contends the rule aims to curb conflicts of interest between bankers and their customers. He suggests that former investment companies like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which sought banking licenses during the economic crisis in order to access federal protection against failing, should now turn in those licenses if they want to do speculative trading.

“You shouldn’t run a financial system on the expectation of government support. We’re supposed to be a free enterprise system,” Volcker tells Moyers. “The problem of course is once they get rescued, does that lead to the conclusion they’ll get rescued in the future?”

Transcript of the clip below the fold and you can watch the entire interview at the link above.

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Apparently the moderators at the Fox South Carolina Republican presidential debate didn't think it was worth calling Mitt Romney out, or didn't do their homework, heaven forbid when they let him repeat his hypocrisy on whether the TARP bailouts were a "slush fund." Color me not shocked that the crack team of "reporters" over at Fox didn't catch this one.

From Think Progress from last June -- After Calling TARP A ‘Slush Fund,’ Romney Campaigns At Bank That Took TARP Funds:

At different times, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has both supported and derided the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), better known as the bank bailouts of 2008. Most recently, Romney called it a “slush fund” that “should be shut down.”

Today, however, Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign stopped at Lincoln Financial Group in Concord, New Hampshire, where hundreds of the company’s employees turned out to hear Romney talk about jobs and the economy. Lincoln Financial Group and its parent company, Lincoln National Corporation, took $950 million in TARP funds in 2008.

That’s not the worst of it, though. Originally, Lincoln Financial was eligible for much less in TARP funding because it did not qualify for money marked for thrift savings companies. To become eligible, it bought a small thrift savings company that, on its own, would have received only $350,000 in TARP funding. Because of how TARP funding was calculated, however, Lincoln Financial was eligible for the $950 million it received solely because it added the small thrift savings company. In 2010, the Special Inspector of TARP issued an oversight report about the program in which he detailed the way Lincoln Financial gamed the system to receive more funding: [...]

In 2009, Romney told the crowd at the Values Voters Summit that, when the government starts “bailing out banks…we have we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind.” That apparently wasn’t the case today. According to reports from the event, Romney never mentioned the bailouts even while standing inside of a company that benefited directly from them.

Apparently Romney still has no shame or remorse for the same level of hypocrisy, since he continued to tout those same lines during this week's debate.

Transcript below the fold.

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From Democracy Now -- Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz on Obama’s Stimulus Plan, Debt, Climate Change, and “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy”:

As President Obama defends the success of his one-year-old $787 billion stimulus package, we speak to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who says the stimulus was both not big enough and too focused on tax cuts. Stiglitz is the author of the new book Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, which analyzes the causes of the Great Recession of 2008 and calls for overcoming what he calls an “ersatz capitalism” that socializes losses but privatizes gains. Read on...

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From The PBS Newhour, more news on how Goldman Sachs is profiting from our tax dollars.

PAUL SOLMAN: Across from the construction site that was once the World Trade Center, Goldman Sachs' new world headquarters.

To help foot the $2-plus billion construction bill, Goldman got New York City and State to bless a $1.65 billion tax-free so-called liberty bond issue, plus another $66 million in job grants, tax exemptions, and energy discounts.

And, yet, the same firm just reported the most profitable year in Wall Street history, prompting protests when it channeled most of those profits to pay salaries and bonuses. It was a year of horrible P.R., which saw Goldman and its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, vilified...

LLOYD BLANKFEIN, CEO, Goldman Sachs: Everybody have that now?

PAUL SOLMAN: ... by everyone from passersby commenting on painter Geoffrey Raymond's portrait, to Glenn Beck on the right blasting Goldman's profits...

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I'm not sure why Rep. Garrett thinks that making sure the banks turn a profit is going to assure they'll lend to anyone. It hasn't worked so far. His solution seems to be just to let them fail and take the economy down again if they do rather than regulating them. The Wonk Room has more--GOP Criticizes Obama Plan Because It Would ‘Confine The Banks And Their Ability To Make Profits’:

In the wake of the Obama administration’s announcement yesterday that it will seek new bank regulations “in the spirit of Glass-Steagall,” one line of thought posited that Republicans had been placed into a box, as they wouldn’t want to give the administration a victory on regulatory reform, but they also wouldn’t want to seem too friendly towards the banks.

But mass opposition has been the staple of the Republican strategy towards Obama so far, and early indications are that they won’t be any more helpful with the plan to reform the banks.

[...]

Garrett’s statement, meanwhile, basically implies that a profit earned in any fashion — whether its by ripping of unknowing consumers or gambling with federally insured money — is alright by him. But it’s not really the level of profits that we’re talking about here at all — it’s the way in which they were earned. Profits of the sort Wall Street has been seeing in recent years are only achievable by amassing a huge amount of risk, which is backed by American taxpayers because the institutions involved are systemically important. It’s the merging off traditional deposit banking and commercial lending with a hedge fund mentality that is the problem Obama’s plan seeks to address.

Transcript via PBS below the fold.

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Thom Hartmann hits the corporate Democrats who are carping for the party to move even further to the right after the loss in Massachusetts and the choice President Obama faces now of whether to listen to them or not.

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Is it asking too much that if you're a cable news host and you bring someone on specifically to answer a question, that you try to get them to actually answer it before they leave the set? Rick Sanchez frames this interview as Cantor being willing to respond Sanchez's comments about the repeal of Glass-Steagall and passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which prevented the derivatives market from being regulated. Of course Cantor is never willing to say whether it was a bad idea to get rid of Glass-Steagall or deregulate derivatives even though he admits financial institutions should have never been leveraged the way they were.

He obviously thinks we need less regulation when he's still singing the praises of the "entrepreneurial spirit" and "free markets". I guess he thinks they should be free to take down the world's economy again when we have another bubble because they still haven't been regulated. As our commenter spicegal pointed out, Cantor's got some conflicts of interest with his wife as well. It would be nice if someone in the media would ask him about her business dealings but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon either. I'm quite sure Cantor's just one more name on a very long list of Congressmen with similar scenarios.

SANCHEZ: We have spoken on this show so many times about some of the things that went wrong that put us in the situation that we are in now with this crisis with Wall Street and our economy, the repeal of Glass-Steagall which eventually allowed investment banks to act and get in cahoots with regular banks. We talked about the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which essentially allowed those default-tax swaps which were really schemes, they were -- they were selling nothing but - well, certainly nothing for the American people, and a lot for themselves on Wall Street.

And we have also talked about regulators who never got anything done because they were too busy looking the other way while people were doing things, because they wanted a job on Wall Street one day. That is what has been told to us from people on the inside, by regulators who were there, by experts, by economists.

So with that on the table, yesterday I get this tweet from GOP Whip Eric Cantor, and he suggests in the tweet, and that is why I wanted to have him on, that not Washington overregulation. Overregulation? And I am just sitting here thinking, and I think a lot of you all are as well, overregulation, isn't the problem underregulation?

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Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales had a really terrific interview today with Eliot Spitzer on why Bernie Sanders is right and Ben Bernanke should not be confirmed for another term as Federal Reserve Chairman and that Tim Geithner should be replaced as Treasury Secretary. One question Amy Goodman asked I found particularly interesting was this one along with Spitzer's answer:

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think you were partly taken down by the very entities you were going after?

ELIOT SPITZER: I have been very careful in saying that I resigned because of what I did. And I have no doubt that there were many people whom I had—was on the—were opposed to me, very powerful forces, who were happy to see me go. Whether they participated, I’ll let others figure that out. I resigned because of what I did. And whatever they’re involved in doesn’t excuse what I did.

I'm sure a lot of others like myself were left wondering after the prostitution scandal broke if Spitzer was set up. He didn't say no.

Full transcript available here.

The interview is way too long to put on our servers, but way too good not to share all of it, so I'm using their embed player.