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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, panel member and Hayes' fellow contributor at The Nation brought up a topic at the end of the show that we unfortunately don't hear too often on MSNBC, which is the fact that the "Fix the Debt" campaign is not really interested in "fixing" anything. They're funded by a bunch of billionaires that are pushing for austerity measures and who are really just interested in lowering their taxes.

Sadly I don't expect we'll be seeing any disclaimers from the network every time they have one of these lobbyists from Pete Peterson's group on any time soon though, especially considering they've got one of them on their payroll. The more we complain, the more the so-called "liberal" network puts Ed Rendell on the air without disclosing his conflict of interests on the matter and he's just the tip of the iceberg when you look at the entire list of their leadership.

As Nichols informed the viewers here, there is a new web site that's been launched by The Center for Media and Democracy called PRWatch which has a lot more information on "Fix the Debt." You can check out the site here: PRWatch.

And here is more from one of their recent posts: Pete Peterson’s “Fix the Debt” Astroturf Supergroup Detailed in New Online Resource at PetersonPyramid.org:

Madison, WI -- One of the most hypocritical corporate PR campaigns in decades is advancing inside the beltway, attempting to convince the White House, Congress, and the American people that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner that will destroy our economy unless urgent action is taken. Soon this astroturf supergroup may be coming to a state near you.

“We would not be here if it wasn’t for the Peterson Foundation and Pete Peterson. They laid the groundwork and we stand here on their shoulders.” – Fix the Debt Co-Founder Erskine Bowles

Today the Center for Media and Democracy launches a new wiki resources on the funding, leaders, partner groups and lobbyists of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, see it here at PetersonPyramid.org.

Move over David Koch and George Soros! The effort is being bankrolled by one of the wealthiest men in the nation. Peter G. Peterson made a fortune at the Blackstone Group on Wall Street. He conveniently cashed out with $2 billion shortly before the 2008 financial meltdown and now has pledged to spend $1 billion of that payout to convince Americans -- who overwhelmingly want to keep and strengthen Social Security and Medicare -- that these programs threaten our very existence as a nation.

His task is a tough one. [...]

Key to the strategy is ginning up a crisis. In lockstep, the CEOs, politicians, and partner organizations stormed the media last fall warning of the looming disaster of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” Breaching the fiscal cliff “will lead to chaos,” warned Erskine Bowles; “derail the fragile recovery,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein; generate a "shock to the financial markets and a painful return to the recession,” said the CEO of Morgan Stanley.

But this chorus of calamity was pure hype. One Fix the Debt steering committee member, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, let slip that the strategy was to create an “artificial crisis” that would force Congress to act.

Their goal is to achieve a Simpson-Bowles style “grand bargain” on an austerity agenda for the United States by the nation’s 237th birthday on July 4, 2013. [...]

Many Fix the Debt firms pay a very low or even a negative average tax rate, contributing to the nation's deficit. Fix the Debt is secretly pushing for a major tax break that would exempt profits earned overseas by U.S. firms from taxation and encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs. While the Fix the Debt CEOs call for cuts to Social Security, many of the publicly-traded Fix the Debt firms underfund their employee pension plans -- making their workers even more dependent on the popular social insurance plan that American workers pay into with each paycheck.

And as Hayes mentioned during the segment as well, Nichols contributed to The Nation's article on Peterson's group here: Stacking the Deck: The Phony 'Fix the Debt' Campaign.

I hope everyone checks out the entire article and the rest of the resources at PRWatch and I wanted to share just one more item from there. From their SourceWatch page: Fix the Debt Leaders and Conflicts of Interest:

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As Digby rightfully noted after taking a look at some of the reporting on this new Simpson-Bowles plan, "we see the folly of asking for a "balanced approach" when you are negotiating with partisan thugs." Once again, we see that Overton window continually being shoved to the right when there are other alternatives out there, like the package offered by the Progressive Caucus in the House. That, of course, will be ignored, because the Villagers don't seem to consider anyone Serious unless they're talking about austerity and inflicting pain on the working class.

Here's more from Greg Sargent at The Plum Line: Simpson-Bowles and the mythical, arbitrary “center”:

Like a pair of aging crooners hoping to recapture past glory with a long-awaited reunion tour, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson released a new version of their deficit reduction plan today. Ezra Klein ferrets out the real news in the plan: It asks for far less in new revenues, and more in spending cuts, than the previous Simpson-Bowles plan did.

Whereas the previous Simpson-Bowles plan contained a roughly even split of revenues and cuts, the new one reduces the revenue “ask” dramatically, with the result that the overall plan is lopsidedly tilted towards cuts. The reason pinpointed by Klein is particularly striking:

This isn’t meant to be an update to Simpson-Bowles 1.0. Rather, it’s meant to be an outline for a new grand bargain. To that end, Simpson and Bowles began with Obama and Boehner’s final offers from the fiscal cliff deal. That helps explain why their tax ask has fallen so far: Obama’s final tax ask was far lower than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles plan, while Boehner’s tilt towards spending cuts was far greater than what was in the original Simpson-Bowles.

In other words, the plan roughly represents the ideological midpoint between the Obama and Boehner fiscal cliff blueprints — which is why the plan is so heavily tilted towards cuts. As Kevin Drum notes, this is particularly odd, given that spending cuts have already been “75 percent of the deficit reduction we’ve done so far.” Drum adds: “this sure makes it hard to take Simpson-Bowles 2.0 seriously as a plan.” Read on ...

And here's more on that from Steve Benen: Meet the new Simpson-Bowles plan:

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For anyone that missed it, former Sen. Alan Simpson, one of the co-chairs of the President's now defunct deficit commission, appeared on The Daily Show earlier this month and as Sam Seder rightfully pointed out in the clip above, the interview was just awful. Stewart allowed Simpson to get away with a ton of lies on everything from who owns our debt, to whether we're in danger of becoming like Greece where no one wants to loan us money any more, to the Peterson Foundations' lies about Social Security.

Sam's exactly right here and if Stewart was going to allow Simpson on his show, he should have done a better job doing his homework first. It's really just unacceptable that he allowed his audience to listen to this much garbage out of Simpson without more of it being debunked right on the spot.

It's a little long, but well worth the time if you have it to watch it and I'd highly recommend passing it along to anyone you know who might not realize what a load of garbage Simpson and his fellow fearmongers over the so-called bond vigilantes are peddling. Seder also took Simpson to task for his ridiculous “Gangnam Style” ad he's got out there trying to convince kids to buy into this "The Can Kicks Back" campaign of theirs.

Salon's Alex Pareene did a similar take down of Stewart shortly after his appearance which you can read here: Alan Simpson spins Jon Stewart and they've got the full interview posted as well for anyone that might want to watch it.

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It seems this ongoing feud between former Sen. Alan Simpson and anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist isn't going to end any time soon. Simpson went after Norquist again on Hardball this Tuesday while doing his usual fearmongering over the "fiscal cliff."

Alan Simpson on fiscal cliff: ‘Go big or go home’:

Piecemeal measures won’t save us from the fiscal cliff, former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), told Hardball’s Chris Matthews on Tuesday. His advice for his former colleagues: “Go big or go home.”

“On Dec. 31st there’s a mess floating around right now, about $7.2 trillion bucks worth of stuff…[we’ve] got to do something,” Simpson said. [...]

Simpson said some lawmakers “love their party more than they love their country,” and that they would wait until the last minute to strike a deal. “They’re going to react right down to the last point when there’s going to be blood and hair and eyeballs all over the floor and they’re going to come up with something, but let me tell you, if it’s just kicking the can down the road, the can is now a 55 gallon drum filled with explosives. You can’t play that game anymore,” said Simpson.

If there’s no real deal, he said, “the markets are going to chop us up and it will be an unknown day.”

The former lawmaker also took a hit at conservative activist Grover Norquist’s crusade to get members of Congress to vow never to raise taxes.

“So how do you deal with guys who came to stop government, or Grover wandering the Earth in his white robe saying you want to drown government in the bathtub. I hope he slips in there with it,” Simpson said.

Of course Matthews let him get away with the typical false equivalency game they've been playing, where they pretend that the likes of Norquist is the equivalent of those on the left who don't want to see our social safety nets destroyed and calls everyone "loons." There's nothing "looney" about wanting to protect the poor, the elderly and the middle class and allowing people to retire with dignity, instead of having to work until they drop dead.

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I don't know why these Sunday talking heads show anchors like David Gregory even bother asking politicians questions if they're not going to push them for some actual answers. On this Sunday's Meet the Press, first Gregory had to hide behind the now defunct deficit commission co-chairs to point out the fact that Mitt Romney's math on his economic plan doesn't add up.

And when he asked Romney surrogate Rob Portman to give him specifics to counter their arguments, he got exactly none. All the audience got instead from Portman was carping about how the plan had been mischaracterized, without any explanation as to how. But rest assured, Mitt Romney's going to talk about in the debates. Never mind that the economy was supposed to be the topic of the first debate and we weren't offered any specifics then.

Gregory also managed to feign ignorance about Mitt Romney's six non-existent "studies" that are supposed to support his fuzzy math and trickle down economics. Maybe he was too busy getting ready for his next speaking engagement or learning some more dance moves to take some time to, you know... read. I don't think anyone had any high expectations for Karl Rove's dance partner when he was offered this job. Gregory continues to do his best to keep them right where they belong week after week.

Transcript below the fold.

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After discussing the Democrats' plan to finally free Republicans from their pledge to anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist and the possibility that they might take America off of the fiscal cliff in the beginning of the year for that to finally happen, Stephen Colbert found himself still haunted by "the Norquist."

In order to "appease him," Colbert ended up having to sacrifice a human baby to Grover, who he assured us all would be just fine once this was all over.

All of which was almost as frightening as the fact that this man has the actual stranglehold he does over our members of Congress these days.

From Majority FM, Sam Seder reads from some of a recent LA Times article which challenged anti-Social Security crusader and crotchety old man, former Sen. Alan Simpson over his many lies about the program.

Alan Simpson shows his cards to The Times:

Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming), perhaps our leading avatar of misinformation about Social Security, sent us a lengthy email on Friday responding to our series of posts criticizing his error-rich take on the nation’s preeminent social insurance program.

You can read his entire email here. Be forewarned: It’s a dizzying compendium of ignorance, myths, irrelevancies, and historical revisionism, leavened with a healthy dollop of defensiveness. (Simpson also seems at the outset to have confused columnist Michael Hiltzik, who has been writing about him, with editorial page editor and columnist Jim Newton, who hasn't. But leave that aside.)

Responding to all Simpson's assertions would take a tome, so we’ll simply address two of his main points: That Social Security was never designed as a “retirement system,” and that the original bill’s drafters deliberately set the retirement age at 65 because life expectancy in 1935, at the time of enactment, was 63. In other words, Simpson says it was designed from inception as a rip-off.

You can go read the rest at the link or just listen to Sam read it in the video clip above.

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Here we go again with former Sen. Alan Simpson slamming his fists on the table, demanding that our politicians agree to make some form of "grand bargain" later this year and berating Republicans for their fear of Grover Norquist coming after them if they aren't loyal to his anti-tax pledge.

As Ross Eisenbrey reminds us this week, Simpson is no hero when it comes to his plans for our social safety nets: Alan Simpson isn’t ‘saving Social Security’:

Alan Simpson is at it again. Launching another off-color attack on people who oppose the Bowles-Simpson plan to bomb Social Security in order to save it, Simpson claims he is saving it for young people who would otherwise be “gutted.” In fact, Simpson’s overarching desire to protect rich Americans from paying their fair share of Social Security taxes (if wealthy earners paid FICA taxes on all of their income, most of Social Security’s solvency problems would be solved) leads him to propose cuts in Social Security almost as large as the automatic benefit reductions that will occur in 2033 under current assumptions.

According to an analysis of the Bowles-Simpson plan by Social Security’s chief actuary, middle-class workers with average earnings over the course of their careers (around $43,084 in 2010) would see a 22 percent cut in benefits by 2080, not significantly different from the 23.5 percent cut in benefits these workers would face if nothing were done to shore up Social Security’s finances. Our children and grandchildren will lose critical benefits under Simpson’s plan, while seniors like him are mostly protected.

Notwithstanding Simpson’s crocodile tears for young people, under the Bowles-Simpson plan, if someone who is born in 2015 retires at age 65 with a middle-class income in 2080, Social Security will replace only 28 percent of their pre-retirement earnings. By contrast, a 65-year old who retired in 1980 replaced 49 percent of pre-retirement earnings. It is Simpson himself who wants to gut the Social Security of coming generations.

That didn't stop CNN's Fareed Zakaria from treating Alan Simpson and his fellow commission head Erskine Bowles as some sort of heroes during his interview with them this Sunday. If they really wanted to make sure Social Security remains solvent, as Ross noted, they'd lift the income cap instead of using the hole they blew in the budget with the Bush tax cuts and two wars they refused to pay for as an excuse to gut our social safety nets.

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When caught just the latter part of this interview on Fox News before I had a chance to go back and watch all of it, I thought maybe it was just Neil Cavuto who had lost his mind, but apparently the brilliant idea of having former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson drafted to run for president originated with The Mustache of Misunderstanding, Thomas Friedman.

From Tim Murphy at MoJo -- The Alan Simpson For President Movement Comes of Age:

When we last heard from Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming Senator and GOP co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles Debt Commission was railing against today's disrespectful youths, "walking on their pants with their caps on backwards listening to the Enema Man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dog." All of which make the calls for him to run for president as inevitable as they are inexplicable.

It began over the summer, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival that "If Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles want to run as president and vice president, I will vote for them." Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer reprised the idea in an interview with Simpson on CNN a few days later. For folks like Friedman, who pride themselves on the boldness of their ideas in the face of a crippling status quo (accurate or not), Simpson is a tantalizing choice. And now, with Republicans still freaking out about their choices for President and Friedman still pining for some sort of third-party savior capable of making tough choices and magically transcending checks and balances, the calls for a Simpson candidacy have picked up again (even though he's not running). [...]

Simpson is a pro-choice Republican who opposed Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and doesn't actually seem to understand how Social Security works—despite making it a signature issue. He is also, reportedly, old. But maybe this is his year.

To his credit, when Cavuto asked Simpson if there "was any situation under which he would consider running for president," Simpson laughed and told him "God, that's absurd. I mean, that really can't be... you're a bright guy." To which Cavuto responded, "Not really." Hey, Neil said something on the air I agree with for once!

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How pitiful is this? PBS's Tavis Smiley allowed Alan Simpson to come on the air and fearmonger about how Social Security is in dire straights without mentioning that raising the cap would keep it solvent for years to come. He also pretended that there is not solid information on how long Social Security will remain solvent and that there is some question yet to be resolved as to what that number is.

SMILEY: When you talk about Social Security, what are the American people to believe, because in this debate about the solvency of Social Security and how long it will be solvent, you can get any number you want to find from any source because there's so many axes being grind in on this issue, I'm not sure I know, as informed as I think I am about these issues with hosting this show every night that I know what to believe because you get so many different numbers on the solvency into the future of SSI.

Shame on you Tavis Smiley. There's one place to get info on that solvency. That's the Office of the Chief Actuary.. If you can't take the time to read through their publications, don't have fearmongers like Alan Simpson on your show in the first place.

Social Security is not broke. The politicians in this country are looking for reasons not to pay the debt that's been borrowed against that surplus back. Any lack of funds for Social Security has many, many years before it has to be addressed and raising the payroll taxes and making it a less regressive tax would fix that now if they really want to make sure the fund stays solvent for decades to come.

If you want to consider yourself a journalist or an advocate for the working class in America, you just proved you're not with this interview. Journalists check their facts before they go on the air and discuss a topic they know they're going to be talking about. Please don't pretend to your audience that there's no way to verify facts on Social Security. What you should be doing is making your viewers aware of where to get the information themselves, rather than telling them there's no way to get to the truth because of some conflicting talking points being pushed by the pundits and politicians who do not have Americans' best interest at heart.

Anyone that has done as many interviews and panel segments as you have who has put themselves out there as some sort of advocate for the working class in America should not be allowing the likes of Simpson to come on your show for some damage control and to pretend he's just looking out for the working class with his defunct deficit commission's recommendations.