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I guess PBS decided that "Fix the Debt" campaign's Steve Rattner wasn't getting quite enough air time, what with his near daily appearances on MSNBC's Morning Joe, because Charlie Rose and his producers gave him some unfettered air time Monday evening.

Rose asks why President Obama should care about the "Democratic wing of the Democratic party" thinks about his policies, and whether he's willing to go after our social safety nets. I'd love to know the last time Rose asked whether a Republican president should just ignore the base of his party and suggested that what they think doesn't matter all that much. To his credit, Rattner did admit that President Obama has good reason to pay attention to those that just reelected him, and that they should not be ignored.

He also briefly alluded to the conversation he had during the panel segment on This Week, where his fellow guest Steve Brill rightfully pointed out that lowering the Medicare age would actually save money, but rather than getting into the weeds on that discussion, Rattner only admitted that maybe raising the age might not be "such a good idea." Heaven forbid anyone might actually discuss the heart of Brill's arguments, because it runs counter to the Villager narrative that we must raise the Medicare eligibility age in order to control our health care costs.

Instead, the conversation turned to whether President Obama is entitled to change his mind on the issue or not and with Rattner again pushing for "significant changes to entitlements" as long as there "was a reasonable response from the Republicans on revenues." The idea that Republicans are ever going to come around on taxes seems pretty ridiculous, and as Karoli noted here on our health care costs, the problem is not with the cost to administer Medicare or with the consumers out there, it's with the providers Congress refuses to reign in.

Rose and Rattner were also extremely dismissive of Paul Krugman, who has written extensively about the fact that the debt and the deficit are not urgent issues now and not what we should be focusing on, with Rose calling him "a Nobel Prize winner, but also a minority opinion."

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While discussing Chris Matthews' documentary on Hardball and some of the extreme rhetoric coming from the Tea Party, Ohio Gubernatorial candidate and former Congressman John Kasich tells Matthews that although there some people you could paint as extreme in the movement, "it's not the thrust of the movement" and describes them as "blue collar Democrats", people who are worried about the government's debt, their economic future and their children. Kasich points to the elections of Chris Christie and Scott Brown and says that no one could call them extremists.

Joan Walsh reminds Kasich that Scott Brown is now running away from the Tea Party and lays waste to the talking point that the Tea Party or Republicans are representing the working class. She got Kasich a bit riled up by daring to point out that he went from being a member of Congress to working for Lehman Brothers and how those sorts of issues are being ignored because we're focused on the craziness coming from the likes of the birthers instead.

WALSH: I think -- you know, Scott Brown has run away from the Tea Party.

KASICH: He hasn’t run away from anything.

WALSH: He refused to go to their rally; he refused to go to their Tea Party day. Congressman Kasich, you know, you sound like a wonderful guy compared to a lot of republicans. You are a moderate, but, you know, I think this is garbage that they represent the Underdog. They represent the Overdog, and you know in your own race, you went to work for Lehman Brothers, God bless you, that was your right. That’s become an issue. You know, how do you get to be the champion of the little guy when you went to work for the firm that helped bring about the collapse of the economy? These are the issues that we’re not talking about because we’re talking about where the president was born.

KASICH: First of all.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Well, equal time here. Go ahead.

KASICH: I mean, look, my father was a postman, I ran a two-man office in Columbus, Ohio, OK?

WALSH: Great.

KASICH: And one thing that people in this country want to recognize is if you work hard you ought to be able to get ahead. You play by the rules, you can be successful. This is what the Tea Party wants, not some left wing rhetoric from you. That’s not what they are interested in.

WALSH: That’s not left wing record rhetoric.

KASICH: Yes, it is.

WALSH: I’m talking about fairness.

KASICH: It’s smear.

(CROSSTALK)

KASICH: I didn’t pick on you. I didn’t pick on you, ma'am. If you want to punish success, that’s the opposite of what the Tea Party wants.

WALSH: That’s not the point.

KASICH: They want to reward success and that may be a little bit difficult but I would recommend to you to read every other Monday, so that you don’t start picking on people.

WALSH: Thank you, sir.

So pointing out that someone went from Congress to working for Lehman Brothers is a "smear" now huh? Tweety made sure Joan Walsh never got another word in and and spent the rest of the segment kissing Kasich's butt and telling him how much he looks forward to reading his book. Heaven forbid Matthews could allow the mean liberal woman to "smear" Kasich by pointing out the revolving door between Congress and big business without soothing the poor, horribly injured man a bit after his feelings were hurt so badly. We couldn't have that, now could we?

From The Daily Show March 16, 2010:

Chris Dodd introduces financial reform legislation, and Jon pretends he has the same rights as a corporation.

As Digby noted, hopefully this will speed up the Congress doing something about financial reform. Dylan Ratigan talks to Eliot Spitzer about the release of a 2200 page report detailing a potential criminal case against Lehman Brothers.

In Lehman’s Demise, Some Shades of Enron:

The bankruptcy examiner’s report filed by Anton R. Valukas on the 2008 demise of Lehman Brothers discusses some accounting gimmicks that are eerily reminiscent of how Enron tried to prop up its balance sheet back in 2001 before it collapsed.

Both companies appear to have played right along the edge of properly accounting for transactions designed to make them appear much stronger than they turned out to be, becoming steadily more aggressive as they teetered on the brink of ruin.

The examiner’s report discusses potential claims that the bankruptcy trustee can bring against Lehman’s former officers and outside advisers and does not mention potential government law enforcement action. Reading his report, however, gives strong indications that at a minimum the Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to pursue civil charges for securities fraud, and that criminal charges are certainly possible against Lehman’s former top executives.

Read on...

From The Thom Hartman Show Oct. 30, 2009. Thom and Matt Taibbi discuss Matt's latest article at Rolling Stone--Wall Street's Naked Swindle

A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits.

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bi**h ever or…

Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn't help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I would hope that you're looking at this," Dodd said. "This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors."

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From CNN's Your Money, it looks like the S.E.C. is as feckless as ever with reigning in these crooks. Matt Taibbi has much more over at his blog True/Slant.

ROMANS: All right. This is the ticker where each week we take you beyond the headlines. Shawn Tully is editor at large at Fortune and Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor with Rolling Stone. Let's be blunt, Matt is not a beloved figure on Wall Street these days which stems from articles like the one out in this week's Rolling Stone entitled "Wall Street's Naked Swindle." You can pick it up for all the details.

But let's examine a few of the overall themes. You say Wall Street is designed to rip off the middle class and you make the case that our economy is currently so screwed up, actually that's not the word you use, imagine a word by mistake on "SNL" and that is the word you meant. Screwed up that the rich are running out of things to steal. What's worse is that Matt argues that no one, not the S.E.C., the Federal Reserve, or the Treasury Department is making any real effort to punish the culprits.

For starters, who specifically are the culprits and why aren't they being punished?

MATT TAIBBI, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, ROLLING STONE: Well in the story that I looked specifically at two cases, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and what happened in those companies and what I found is that there was a kind of bear raid that had been happening to smaller firms in years previous to the Bear and Lehman episodes where there was sort of a pattern of credit default swaps.

People who were buying, naked short selling of these stocks, rumors being spread in the media. This was always happening in the smaller companies and hedge funds and predatory, you know, sellers were doing this to small companies.

In this instance, they did it to Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. There was a massive amount of undelivered shares and obvious evidence of naked short selling and manipulation in these instances. It was clear that they had run out of smaller companies to do this to.

ROMANS: So who did it?

TAIBBI: Well that's the problem. We don't know. This data is available to the S.E.C., it is a relatively simple matter to find out who was doing all this naked short selling but they haven't released the data and a year and a half later, they haven't made any progress in an investigation at all.

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Michael Moore joined the set of the Larry King Live for the full hour. Here's part of the first segment where Michael talks about how much richer the upper one percent have gotten, how much Wall Street loves corporate welfare when they get into trouble and why Wall Street and large corporations are happy when they lay off workers in the United States.

KING: Are you saying capitalism is a failure?

MOORE: Yes. Capitalism. Yes. Well, I don't have to say it. Capitalism, in the last year, has proven that it's failed. All the basic tenets of what we've talked about the free market, about free enterprise and competition just completely fell apart. As soon as they lost, essentially, our money, they came running to the federal government for a bailout -- for welfare, for socialism. And it -- it -- I thought the basic principle of capitalism was that it's about a -- it's a sink or swim situation. And those who do well, the cream rises to the top and, you know, those who invest their money wrongly or, you know, don't run their business the right way, then they don't do well.

And if you run your business the wrong way, where does it say that you or I or anybody watching this has to bail them out?

I understand -- I understand why everybody seemed to get behind it, because a lot of people were afraid, because these people down on Wall Street had taken our money and made bets with it. I mean, they essentially created this invisible virtual casino with people's money -- people's pension funds, people's 401(k)s. They took this money and they made bets. And then they made bets on the bets. And then they took out insurance policies on the bets. And then they took out insurance against the insurance -- the credit default swaps.

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From The Daily Show:

President Obama takes a soft pedal approach to reform when addressing a humbled Wall Street.

I agree with Stewart. A year later and we're still talking about reform in the future tense instead of the past tense? Shameful.