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If you want to understand the source of the world's problems, follow the Davos coverage by CNN and Bloomberg News for a few days. Not only will they tell you what the source is, they'll prove that your instincts are right about billionaires and those who present them as the arbiters of all things fair and right.

Davos is the annual billionaires' conclave where they network, get their message straight, gladhand hungry politicians, and try to determine our fate. Ladies and gentlemen, our problem isn't what the billionaires think it is. Our problem is the billionaires.

Last year, the billionaires were obsessing on income inequality. Following the Occupy protests, they saw it as a source of instability and actually, for a short moment, thought it might be something they should try to solve. At least, that's how our corporate media spun it for us. This year, nary a peep out of them about income inequality. No, this year was all fearmongering over the US budget deficit and the European debt crisis.

Donohue on deficits and cuts

Ali Velshi spoke to US Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue on Friday about his solutions to the deficit problem. After the requisite hand-wringing about unemployment rates in Europe which have come about largely because the billionaires forced austerity on Greece, Spain and Italy, Donohue turned to the United States budget deficit, where he drew a distinction between European austerity and American austerity measures.

Donohue explained that American austerity measures involve "the spending that is automatic and that is entitlements -- Social Security a little bit, but primarily Medicare -- and it goes up, up, up."

Is Donohue suggesting that on that basis, it's not really austerity because it's cuts to necessities, so people will pay with or without the social safety net. Really?

We all know better, and we also know that health care spending has decreased during this recession. Not because costs have decreased, but because people are foregoing health care in order to save money. So sure, billionaires, take aim at the two government programs reaching the most people and doing the most good. That makes a ton of sense, right?

Donohue insists that longer life expectancies require lawmakers to "turn the curve down." I will let you speculate on how cutting Medicare might affect life expectancies, and whether that's what Donohue means by turning the curve down.

Keep in mind, this comes from a guy who was paid nearly $5 million dollars in salary in 2010 from a trade organization that spends millions to elect wingnuts to Congress. What the heck does he know about what that "small" Social Security cut and larger Medicare cut would do to anyone?

Donohue: Fracking is our future

All is not lost, peasants. Tom Donohue has the answer to our economic woes. All we need to do, according to the God of Commerce, is open federal lands and frack the hell out of them. Really. Here is his claim, verbatim:

Fracking, for example, has created 1.75 million jobs in less than two years. There's billions and billions of dollars going to the states and the federal coffers. We have more energy than anybody in the world and, if we, in an environmentally friendly way, acquire it, go on the federal lands, do it in the right way, we'll get that extra piece of cash and bring manufacturing and jobs back to the United States or create them in the United States because of our energy.

In laymen's English, Donohue's constituents -- the Kochs, the Hunts, and other Texas oil barons -- see the answer to our economic woes as being pretty simple. Sell federal lands to them, let them frack the heck out of it (in an environmentally friendly way, of course -- cough), and there will be more jobs than the eye can see!

Speaking strictly for me, I'd prefer to leave my children and grandchildren with pristine, unpolluted, unmarred federal lands and find a different way to build the economy, but Donohue does reveal the center of the conflict between the Obama administration and the robber oil barons of the 21st century. Earlier in the interview, Donohue whined that the president was going to tackle climate change using his regulatory authority specifically with regard to the EPA and said the US Chamber was going to have to "work on that."

Oil oligarchs are struggling to remain relevant even as the rest of the world realizes oil dependency is a national security and economic danger we must mitigate, not celebrate. Donohue is simply the oligarchs' public relations mouthpiece.

Perhaps the Chamber minions in the House could pass a few more bills abolishing the EPA? That might work. Or not.

I trust that this year's billionaire boys' concerns will not be overlooked like last year's were. After all, income inequality is only a problem for as long as the minions cry out about it. Deficits and debt, on the other hand, are a real opportunity for wealth building at the expense of the peasants who were in the streets not that long before.

This is why I loathe Davos and all of the breathless celebrity reporting around it. The financial reporters practically scream like teenagers whenever a billionaire breathes, much less says anything substantive. Davos and the coverage surrounding it are meant to remind everyone that we serve at the pleasure of the oligarchs.

Transcript follows below the fold, courtesy of CNN:

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Lately, CNN's Ali Velshi has done a good job of pushing back at some of these Republican politicians when they come on his show and lie. This wasn't one of those times. While Velshi did do a good job of making clear that raising the debt ceiling is paying for spending which has already been approved by the Congress, and that it's not the same thing as a household running up the credit cards, he let Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson get away with a whole bunch of whoppers during this segment without much pushback.

He allowed Johnson to lay the blame for our deficits on the Obama administration, even though (as we've pointed out here time after time), most of that deficit is due to Bush policies and the recession and not because of Obama, as this article and its charts clearly point out. And even after Velshi pointed out that we can't just partially default on the deficit as a lot of Republicans have claimed, and that it would likely cause a great deal of economic havoc, he allowed Johnson to just flat-out disagree with him and didn't challenge him after that.

As long as we're allowing these politicians to pretend that Social Security contributes to the deficit when it doesn't, or pretending that raising the age for Medicare and throwing more seniors into the private health insurance market is a rational way to get our health care costs under control, they get to advocate for balancing the budget and paying for tax cuts and defense spending on the backs of the poor, elderly and middle class.

As Chris Hayes and Karoli pointed out here, the conversation we ought to be having is whether the Affordable Care Act is going to do enough to get our health care costs under control -- and if not, what steps we need to take to improve that? (None of our leaders want to talk about single-player, of course) We also need to talk about getting the United States back to full employment and quit allowing Republicans to just mindlessly repeat "job creators" and "tax cuts" in every conversation without rebuttal.

And of course, none of these guys are ever pushed on why we can't cut our bloated defense spending and get rid of the waste. They never seem to be too concerned about how starting another unnecessary war might destroy the future for their grandchildren. No, granny has to take a cut in her Social Security and Medicare benefits. The one word that never gets used here is privatization, because that's what they're advocating. These costs aren't going to go away. They just want to make sure the insurance companies and Wall Street gets their cut.

It would have been nice if Velshi asked Johnson if he really doesn't "want to play brinksmanship", why does he continue to do it? Why does he thinks it's acceptable to threaten our interest rates if that's something he's actually concerned about? Velshi also waited until the following segment when the Senator was off the air to point out the fact that President Obama's budget was never actually voted on, but sadly, even that wasn't done without some false equivalencies and "both sides do it" nonsense:

VELSHI: Why don't we have a budget? Gridlock, basically. In fact, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, says it was not worth trying to go through the process of passing the president's budget. That's why you hear that old Republican saw that Harry Reid won't even present a budge to the Senate. You may have also heard the of repeated claim that President Obama's budget was struck down in the House and the Senate, getting zero votes. Goose eggs from either party.

But those bills were not the budget. They were shell versions of the president's budget put forward by Republicans designed to fail. They were not budgets. They were just politics.

Republicans did put out their own budget plan in the form of Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity," but bipartisan bickering resulted in no progress there, either.

Sorry Ali, but it was more than just "bipartisan bickering" which prevented Ryan's budget from being passed. Most Americans hated it, Republicans were backing away from it and even Paul Ryan himself was doing some backtracking on that debacle he put forward. You can read more about Ryan's so-called "Path to Prosperity" here in Jon Perr's post, where Fox was pretending that it doesn't add trillions to the deficit.

Maybe someone can tell Velshi to give it a look before he starts blaming the Democrats for its failure.

Full transcript below the fold.

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CNN's Ali Velshi continues to use his weekend program, Your Money, as one long free infomercial for the Peterson Group. This Saturday his weekly round of fearmongering over the "fiscal cliff" was with none other than Ayn Rand fan Alan Greenspan, who is apparently now the latest spokesman for the Peterson Group.

And as Stephanie Kelton at Wall Street Pit noted, he seemed to be having a bit of trouble remaining consistent with remarks he's made in the past about our debt and Social Security. I don't think it's a leap at all to assume that he's reading from the talking points of the group who wants to privatize Social Security in order to enrich Wall Street, while standing in front of a wall full of their logos.

Here's more on that from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism -- Greenspan’s Switch to Debt Scaremongering:

Stephanie Kelton provides two video clips to underscore the point that until quite recently, Greenspan made the point that MMT types do: that the US as a currency issuer, can always pay its debts (it might incur too much inflation, but with the economy having as much slack as it does, that’s far from a pressing worry).

What I found striking was the clip of Paul Ryan pressing the man formerly known as Maestro when he was still the Fed chairman to agree that private retirement accounts would be more stable than a government sponsored program. That’s such a Big Lie I’m amazed anyone can peddle it with a straight face. [...]

After 20 years of demonizing government debt and pushing for government in miniature, billionaire Pete Peterson and his allies have managed to get the public fixated on their message rather than their motives, and the Ryan con job serves as a useful reminder.

One long-standing effort has been to “privatize” Social Security, so that Wall Street could charge fees for managing the money. Note that some countries, like Australia, mandate that a big chunk of wage payments be invested in superannuation accounts (I’m not current on the law, but when I lived in Australia, it was 9% of pay, and I believe it has risen since then. The ATO’s pages on this are too layered to get a quick answer). And even if they don’t get a mandated contributions regime, merely reducing Social Security payments will force people to save and invest more, and will similarly enrich the brokerage and investment management industries.

But the other rationale is more basic: the rich want taxes lower, period. They want to roll the clock back to the 1890s. [...] This is our future unless ordinary people wake up and oppose it. Not surprisingly, Greenspan, who was never on the side of little people, has officially cast his lot in with it.

Full transcript below the fold.

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(Chuck Todd: Republicans will give Democrats all the revenue they want, if they just agree to raise the retirement age. Trust them.)

I don't know about anyone else, but as someone who has actually worked at one of those jobs where you take a shower at the end of the work day and not before you go in, I'm sick to death of watching these overpaid television pundits and their counterparts in the Congress, nonchalantly discussing raising the retirement age. It may not matter much to them, but there are real economic hardships involved when you force the average wage earner out there to continue to work until they drop dead if the retirement age is raised any higher than it already is now.

If our beltway Villagers and politicians really believe that it's no big deal to raise the retirement age for the rest of America, how about we ask them to walk a mile in our shoes? I wonder if any of them would decide that maybe it's not such a great idea to be doing physical labor well into your late sixties if they were the ones actually having to do those jobs?

I wonder if Chuck Todd would be a little more worried about when he might be able to retire if he were say, some migrant worker picking berries and in need of daily visits to the chiropractor he can't afford because his back is screaming all day from being bent over?

Or how Mrs. Greenspan would feel if she were working at Mickey-D's flipping burgers and serving fries and standing on a ceramic floor, with her varicose veins getting worse by the minute?

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On CNN's Your Money, host Ali Velshi brought in the Wall Street Journal's resident hack, Stephen Moore so he could pollute not just one, but two segments in a row on his show, because heaven forbid the viewers could be allowed to hear what either of the other two guest had to say without someone like Moore talking over them, lying, obfuscating and muddying up the waters or filibustering when he had the chance so the other guest doesn't get a chance to talk.

CNN always seems to do this to liberals or anyone that even leans to the center-left and makes sure they've got a right-winger like Moore on there for "balance," especially if that person is going to talk about something they don't want to allow a clear message on. In this case, it was the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka talking about income disparity and the fact that we shouldn't be going after workers' pensions and benefits when those at the top are making hundreds of times more than their employees.

Trumka also did a good job talking about the record income disparity we've got in the United States and the fact that as union membership has declined, that disparity has gone up and for his part, he refused to allow Moore to dominate the conversation or for Velshi to get him off point by interrupting him when he wasn't done talking yet.

And then we had Norm Ornstein, who has a new book out talking about the fact that Republicans are the problem with the gridlock we're seeing in our government right now, which doesn't fit into CNN's game of "both sides" are equally terrible and to blame for not cooperating with each other. So heaven forbid he can't be allowed to speak without Moore hogging up the better portion of the entire interview.

Moore sadly is a regular guest on this show week after week and brings nothing but intellectual dishonesty week after week as he did here. His presence on this show is just another example of CNN doing their best to be Fox-lite. Stephen Moore, we let him lie, you decide.

Ornstein's segment below the fold.

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I don't know about anyone else, but I feel there's something rather disconcerting about about watching four extremely rich American immigrants who were all born on third base, discussing the reasons for lack of upward mobility in the United States, but that's exactly what we got here on CNN's weekend show, Your Money.

I guess they couldn't find anyone who actually grew up as a member of the working class or a union member or leader to potentially counter the likes of Mort Zuckerman, and statements such as this one that are inevitable when you allow him on the air:

ZUCKERMAN: Let me just say I really support what Arianna has just described. I think there are huge problems in this country and a lot of it, in my judgment, stems not from capitalism but from the government.

I'll focus on the first one, which is we have done a terrible job in providing enough education for the children of this country. There's a whole mismatch in terms of the number of people coming out looking for jobs and the qualifications that people need for jobs, particularly those who are educated, particularly in the world of science and technology.

There are shortages of people, there are literally millions of open jobs because we don't train --

VELSHI: But why does the free market not solve that problem?

ZUCKERMAN: Because the education is a government function. If there ever was a public function in this country from the days it started, it's public education and we've done a lousy job. Part of it is frankly because we have lousy teachers.

Part of the reason we have lousy teachers is we have teachers union that say won't deal with those issues. So there are lots of reasons why education is not being properly handled in this country.

But to me if I could think of one thing that would change it, it would be to change our system of education and make sure that our children were properly educated.

I can think of a lot of reasons as to why we are lacking upward mobility in the U.S., like outsourcing, a race to the bottom on wages (which is what Zuckerman is really advocating for here), union busting, corporate raiders and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney and his ilk, our terrible trade laws, lowering taxes on the rich, not regulating the financial sector, privatizing our commons, and some of the issues they did touch on during this segment. But not being able to fire enough of those terrible greedy overpaid teachers that have those damned unions representing them is not one of them that makes my list.

And Zakaria wasn't much better with basically saying we have to choose between our social safety nets or investing in infrastructure and education as though we can't do something about the unfairness in our tax structure and controlling the costs of providing medical benefits to Americans, like say, single-payer, and do both. I will give him credit though for admitting that austerity isn't going to solve our economic problems and at least bothering to mention that the people who are still employed are in the jobs you can't outsource. It would have been nice to hear the topic of the pure greed of a few and the race to the bottom that got us there though, which I don't expect from the likes of CNN. They play the same "fair and balanced" game Fox does. They're just not as blatant about it.

Full transcript below the fold.

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In yet another example of CNN allowing one of their guest to play the "both sides are obstructionists" and a lack of bipartisanship is what's wrong with our politics game, frequent contributor Prof. Peter Morici does his best to lie to their audience about who is actually making sure that nothing gets done in Washington D.C. -- as long as Republicans' primary goal is to make sure that President Obama is not reelected instead of allowing the economy to improve.

Here's Morici on Saturday's Your Money:

VELSHI: So the work needs to be done to fix this economy outside of Washington in the private sector. But the idea there is a road map, there is some destination and there are some agreement as to how to get there is the thing that is going to help businesses make those decisions to employ people.

So ultimately the gridlock you're saying, Diane, is a large part of the problem. Peter Morici, what's the logical fix to that? Do we have to wait for 14 months for an election to finally have the people somehow send the message that you guys have to get something done in Washington?

Are we still going to see this reactionary politics that plays its way all the way down to the voter who now is going to vote on choices that affect them personally?

MORICI: The fact of the matter is we're going to see marginal action on the president's plan. Even the Democrats in the Senate are putting it off. My feeling is there will be a package. It won't be nearly as comprehensive as the president likes.

But a basic problem we have is that when the Republicans win, they think they should get everything their way and the Democrats think they should obstruct. When the Democrats win, they think they should get everything their way and Republicans think they should obstruct.

The reality is folks do want government -- Americans are moderate. They want solutions in the middle. Until politicians are willing to do that, we're going to have this seesawing in elections. I mean, that's all there is to it and we're going to be a country divided.

But I think there are real solutions to getting the private sector going. We haven't had a clear vision from the White House how to do that beyond stimulus. And frankly on the Republican side, cutting taxes and deregulating doesn't warm me up.

Naturally what Morici fails to mention here is that Democrats have not been the ones unwilling to negotiate, to a fault I would say. It's been the Republicans and to the point that they're even refusing to vote for their own ideas if heaven forbid those ideas might somehow even marginally improve the economy.

We've already written about the level of GOP obstruction we've been watching over the last couple of years at Video Cafe. Steve Benen wrote a post on this earlier this year here -- Evil vs. Disgusting -- which did a really good job laying out just how craven the Republican's strategy has been that bears repeating here in the wake of Morici's remarks.

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It was nice to see CNN give some air time to someone besides the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore who is a regular guest on their weekend show, Your Money and give the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka some time to sound off on what we need to be doing to get Americans back to work and whether American workers can be competitive or not if we do something about the Chinese cheating on its currency and abusing child labor and prison labor laws.

Frankly, I found it pretty pitiful that Ali Velshi felt that he needed to turn to a labor leader to make the points that Trumka did here, rather than do his job as a so-called journalist and do some research into something other than how many potentially completely misinformed voters might think that unions somehow have too much influence over our politicians these days, as was the topic he chose to lead this interview with.

Regardless of Velshi's ridiculous framing of this segment, Trumka did a good job of pointing out that it was the labor movement that built the middle class in America to begin with and that we should look to a country like Germany if we want an example of a country that is looking out for the interest of their labor force, and that we should be looking to emulate what they are doing rather than the aversion that the right wing of America seems to have these days towards any type of protections in America's trade laws which right now reward shipping jobs overseas.

Trumka had some recommendations for what the White House could be doing to create jobs, but sadly due to primarily GOP obstruction in the House, most of what he recommended here will never be passed until we get this right wing House and their majority out of office and a few less DINO's in the Senate.

Transcript via CNN:

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Ali Velshi grilled anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist about his responsibility for Republicans being completely inflexible on raising taxes today on CNN's Your Money, and you can read the transcript of that back and forth here, but it was the segments preceding and following that interview and David Gergen's comments that had me irked after watching this.

Norquist was painted as an extremist and a rigid ideologue, but what did we get for analysis surrounding that? David Gergen repeating one right-wing talking point after another on the "bloated welfare state" and how wonderful austerity measures will be for our economy and making excuses for these House Republicans playing hostage with raising the debt ceiling even as he admits he's not quite sure if they're insane enough to wreck our economy on purpose.

David Gergen can always be counted on for some right-wing turd polishing and for helping to move that Overton window to the right. We need to be having some honest discussions about how to get our economy back on track and Americans back to work, but in our corporate media those discussions never include fixing our trade laws or not rewarding companies for shipping jobs overseas and instead we're being told that these politicians are somehow "principled" because they believe in myths and trickle-down economics. Sorry Gergen but I think it's perfectly fair to villainize them when they're doing things that harm Americans and our economy and doing them on purpose.

VELSHI: David, you have been in the White House. You understand how people think. Why are some people so concerned, particularly those who are concerned with scoring political points -- why is it this fealty to lower taxes overtaking the idea that this actually could have broader and more devastating effect, to not raise this credit limit?

GERGEN: Well, I think, ultimately, the Republicans -- at least I hope -- will agree to go and lift the debt ceiling. Certainly, Speaker McConnell (SIC) has agreed to that. Certainly -- I mean, Speaker Boehner has certainly. Mitch McConnell has over on the Senate side.

But there is a strong sentiment among Republicans that the cuts that are on the table now are illusory, that there are some gimmicks in there, that just as we saw at the end of last year, we had this announcement about great, big budget cuts -- when you really broke it right down, it didn't turn out to be very much.

VELSHI: Right.

GERGEN: You remember that. Turned out to be peanuts. There's a strong feeling that what they're being asked to do is to agree to cuts that are not actually -- that are actually quite modest, and then increase taxes, and in effect, to pay for the welfare state, a bloated welfare state. And they would like to shrink the size of the welfare state.

This is ultimately a conversation, a debate, a debate, you know, a food fight over how big the American government should be. And you know, that's why they're not -- that's why they're not doing it.

But I -- the question becomes -- I cannot believe, at the end of the day, House Republicans will be so recalcitrant that they'll take us into default. It just -- I -- I -- that would be so much beyond what I think we've ever experienced, Ali, knowing we're on the edge of Niagara Falls, knowing we're on the edge of a precipice, I can't believe they'll take us over.

VELSHI: You would think so and you would hope so. I don't know.

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Matt Taibbi has a new article on Rolling Stone on the recent hearings in the U.S. Senate and whether or not Goldman Sachs executives should be facing criminal trials or not in the wake of ongoing investigations into their part in the financial meltdown we went through a few years ago. CNN decided to bring in the Atlantic Monthly's Wall Street apologist Megan McArdle to debate Taibbi on Your Money.

I'm no financial expert and a lot of this stuff is over my head, but McArdle's arguments to me here seemed to be that all of these laws are just too terribly difficult to understand, therefore it's too difficult to figure out if they did anything wrong and to prosecute them, but the people they were selling these toxic assets to should have known better and understood what they were buying. Looks like a classic case of blame the victim to me.

FDL's TBogg weighed in on the segment here -- McBambi vs. Taibbzilla (Updated).

Mark Ames at AlterNet took her apart in this article -- Anti-Government Ideologue Megan McArdle's Amnesia About Her Privileged, Govt.-Funded Upbringing.

AlterNet's Chris Lehmann was critical of her glib dismissal of Taibbi's earlier reporting on Goldman Sachs here -- Matt Taibbi's Great Squid Hunt.

And Eric Salzman went into some specifics on why he disagreed with that same article of McArdle's -- Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On in his post here -- Taking Megan McArdle Apart - Part II.

So for any of you wonks on the financial industry out there, if you take issue with any of the articles I posted here, I welcome the input, because I'm not an expert on the financial industry and don't claim to be. That said, from a layman's perspective, what she did during this interview sure looked like a whole lot of apologizing for Goldman Sachs' behavior to me and exactly what CNN expected to get from her by bringing her on to counter Taibbi.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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