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Who needs Fox when you've got CNN treating their audience to god-awful programming like Fareed Zakaria's Memo to the President: Road Map for Second Term? It's been airing on their network over the weekend, and it's nothing more than one more long infomercial for group No Labels, advocating for every item on the right's wishlist, from economics to foreign policy.

What was missing? Even token representation from anyone in the progressive or labor movements. Instead, there was interview after interview with Republicans, neo-liberals, DLC Third Way "centrists" and advice from some of the last people we should be listening to -- because their very bad policies are what got us into the economic mess we're in now.

In a portion of the program which focused on economic policy, the audience was treated to former Reagan and Bush adviser James Baker -- which makes sense, because who better to talk about what President Obama needs to do to fix the economy than a leading member of the same administration that blew a mile-wide hole in the deficit with tax cuts and a couple of wars they left off the books?

For "balance," he follows up with Robert Rubin. The same Robert Rubin who helped Bill Clinton deregulate the derivatives market and then went on to work for Citigroup while the rest of the country was left with the economic time bomb of deregulation and "too big to fail" he helped to put in place.

Zakaria also decided we needed some sage advice from Mitch McConnell's wife Elaine Chao, who served, as Jim Hightower put it, as George Bush's anti-Labor Secretary, and who helped our most "anti-labor president of modern times" to degrade our protections and rights in the workplace and that wages were kept as low as possible. How could we possibly have a discussion on what to do to improve our economy for the American working class without her input?

And for more "balance" yet, we were treated to Peter Orszag, who left the Obama administration to go work for Citigroup just as Rubin did, and who has been out there pushing for "reforms" -- in other words, cuts to our social safety nets and reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

And there's more where that came from with the entire guest list and their conflicts of interest. You can read the entire transcript here and the full transcript for the segment above below the fold.

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MSNBC's Cenk Uygur talked to Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi about his new article on Wall Street and the revolving door preventing any of them from being prosecuted -- Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?:

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

"Everything's f**ked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's f**ked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

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Unlike Chris Matthews who wants to pretend this is not what goes on daily in D.C., Cenk Uygur goes through what is pretty much standard operating procedure in Washington; lobbyists influencing legislation, the revolving door between holding office and working for corporate America and the influence campaign donations have on our politicians.

And the end result, we have the TSA using useless scanners that violate our privacy and don't detect explosives or putting up with overly intrusive pat-downs.