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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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Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday said that presumptive GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's plan would "preserve Medicare," and insisted that President Barack Obama was the one with "blood on his hands" for stealing money from the program.

NBC host David Gregory reminded Priebus that Ryan had proposed to "change Medicare as we know it" into a voucher system.

"That would hurt the social safety net," Gregory noted. "All of those are facts, are they not?"

"Medicare is going broke," Priebus remarked. "This president stole -- he didn't cut Medicare -- he stole $700 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare."

"If any person in this entire debate has blood on their hands in regard to Medicare, it's Barack Obama," he continued. "He's the one that's destroying Medicare."

"We are the ones that are offering solutions as to how to -- number one -- preserve Medicare for seniors that are at or near retirement, and -- number two -- figure out a way to make sure that for future generations -- we're talking about if you're 54 or younger -- how to save Medicare and Social Security."

Priebus added that Romney "appreciates and admires the work that Paul Ryan has done."

"They're going to share a lot of ideas to get this country back on track," the RNC chairman explained, but "Mitt Romney has his own plan."

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Republicans just can't seem to help themselves with this brain-dead analogy because this is how they really think, from Rush Limbaugh right on down. Here Minnesota State Rep Mary Franson uses the same offensive analogy of dependence that is currently so fashionable among republicans. This being an election year though the video was quickly pulled from YouTube but not before some enterprising souls captured it for posterity.

Eric at MN Progressive Project notices that Franson now joins the not so illustrious ranks of Nebraska AG and GOP US Senate candidate Jon Bruning who compared poor people to raccoons eating cockroaches, and South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer who compared them to stray animals that breed too much when fed by children.

Mary Franson this is your moment to shine on the national stage. You can send your love at the link or at twitter.

Last week, we worked on some welfare reform bills.

And here, it's kind of ironic, I'll read you this little funny clipped that we got from a friend. It says, 'Is't it ironic that the food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever.

Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to please not feed the animals, because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.

Our reform bills are meant to bring people up out of the clutches of poverty. We want to provide a safety net, no longer a safety hammock. In one of the bills Representative Kurt Daudt authored would reduce the amount of time that you could stay on welfare from five years to three years.

In three years I believe that we can get Minnesota's poorest of the poor back up on their feet and moving more toward a prosperous future.

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You've just got to love what passes for "straight news" over at the Fox/Republican cable channel. During one of their "breaking news" segments after the news that Standard and Poor's decided to downgrade the AAA credit rating of the Unites States, who did they bring in to do some "objective" analysis? The American Spectator and Wall Street Journal's resident hack, John Fund.

And what was Fund's reaction to the downgrade? More austerity measures naturally.

And what did Fund completely ignore? This tidbit from the report issued by Standard and Poor's on their decision for making the downgrade.

(h/t Jamie)

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Fund naturally thinks we should be taking it out on the hides of everyday working Americans to do something about our budget deficit. Ignoring completely that the Republicans have been the ones being absolutely rigid in their position that there will be no tax increases since they're all afraid their Uncle Grover will primary them.

I think we just got a preview here of what we're going to see from Fox 24/7 over the next week as they try to explain what happened with this downgrade. No questioning of whether we should even trust the ratings agency that got it all so wrong before the meltdown of the financial industries and more demands that we go after Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid or these vultures will never be satisfied.

UPDATE: And right on cue, one of our newly elected TeaBircher Republicans in the Senate, Mike Lee was chiming some of the same talking points in another "breaking news" segment following the one with Fund. Not only was he calling for austerity measures, but he was also still touting their ridiculous balanced budget amendment as well. And of course the problem in Lee's mind with protecting his rich campaign donors is that Washington is spending too much (code for they're doing things to help out working people and not corporate welfare or funding our military industrial complex) and they're borrowing too much. And of course with him also ignoring that the wealthiest 1% are being taxed at the lowest rates in ages and that we have a revenue problem they refuse to fix. I'm just wondering how much worse things have to get in the United States before the majority of the public starts to get wise to these liars because they actually start paying attention to what's going on and how ridiculous these talking points from the GOP are that do not match up to reality in any way, shape or form.

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We've had way too few voices calling out this kabuki theater on the debt ceiling for what it is, a manufactured political crisis, when the real crisis is the lack of jobs in the United States. Katrina Vanden Heuvel did just that on Reliable Sources today.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Yes. So I think in the last weeks, we've seen more attention paid for the fact you no longer have a Republican Party Richard Nixon would recognize.

This is an extremist Republican Party willing to blow up the global economy by tethering draconian, cruel deficit cuts to the debt ceiling -- a debt ceiling, by the way, Republicans seven times voted for to lift under George W. Bush. But I think the largest crisis the media -- the media malpractice, Howard, is the fact that you have the idea, the concept that America is bankrupt. It is not bankrupt. What is bankrupt is the inside the Beltway consensus that the real crisis in this country is about deficits and debt. When you look at the front pages in the last days, the last few years, Howard, what is it? It is a jobs crisis.

So, when you listen to Bill Daley on "Meet the Press" this morning and he said President Obama came to Washington to do something big, what we need is coverage of what a grand bargain on jobs could be, and the consequences of what we're seeing inside the beltway for millions of Americans.

Naturally no progressive can come on CNN without a conservative being put on as well for "balance", so we got treated to Tony Blankley giving the usual Republican talking points on their refusal to raise taxes when we've got some of the greatest income disparity since the Gilded Age and painting Democrats who don't like this deal as being unreasonable for not wanting to see our social safety nets cut instead of raising taxes on the rich.

Full transcript below the fold.

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I've heard some really crass assessments on what game the Republicans should be playing with on whether they're going to raise the debt ceiling or not, but this one by Pat Buchanan on PBS's The McLaughlin Group has to take the cake. He apparently thinks that Republicans should continue to do their hostage taking on the debt ceiling to force cuts to our social safety nets for years to come as a means for political gain and that somehow voters might not eventually decide that's a bad thing.

I guess if you're some relic like Buchanan who is receiving his wingnut welfare and having anyone from MSNBC to PBS to right wing sites employ you where you don't have to worry about whether you'll be starving on the streets when you get old, this world view somehow makes sense. If you're someone who believes in taking care of the least among us and that we should be our brother's keepers instead of saying I've got mine and F-U, this sounds pretty crass and frankly pretty disgusting as far as political games go.

I'm also sure you won't hear one peep out of Buchanan or any other Republican if the debt ceiling needs to be raised once a Republican regains the White House, just as you never heard about this from them under Bush while he was breaking the bank with tax cuts for the rich and waging invasions of other countries that he kept off our books.

Someone needs to be asking not just MSNBC, but PBS as well why they feel the need to continue employing this racist, fearmongering liar at both networks.

MCLAUGHLIN: Question. Why has the debt ceiling caused a political impasse, Pat Buchanan?

BUCHANAN: A couple reasons. One is the Democrat's really don't want to give up on their entitlement programs and take the cuts in things like Medicare. Secondly and probably more important, Republicans aren't going to give them a dime in tax hikes John.

But I'll tell you who's going to win this. Boehner you see has more confidence. You see the president talking in panic. What Republicans are going to do, is they're going to wait until July 20th, and then they're going to take the Biden cuts, all the Biden cuts in social programs, they're going to tie them to the debt ceiling and pass them in the House and send them over to the Senate. So you've got your debt ceiling raise for one year, with the Biden cuts.

I think that Democrats, the President of the United States, will have to sign that. Republicans have an enormous weapon here and they've got the whip hand. By just sending over these debt ceiling increases with cuts on them again, and again, and again. That's how it's going to play out.

MCLAUGHLIN: Are you saying that the Senate's going to become part of the annual budget?

BUCHANAN: I think the debt ceiling battle could, it could be a six month thing. It could be a one year thing every year. Republicans have the whip in here John to force cuts in social spending, year after year after year if they play the game right.

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Congressman Paul Ryan gave the Republican response to the President's weekly address this weekend and I don't have much to add that our own Nicole Belle didn't already mention at C&L in her post on his Sunday show appearance on Meet the Press, but the Republican Party apparently wants us to take his budget proposal seriously enough that he was chosen to be their voice to respond to the President this week.

So here we go with the same old "up is down, tax cuts create jobs, let's destroy our social safety nets in order to save them and let's send the have-mores some more money because god knows they all aren't doing well enough already" business. Oh yeah -- and the country is supposedly broke, unless you look at the hordes of cash the upper 1 percent are holding onto and not being taxed on. Ryan wants us all to be scared to death about this "crushing debt" we're facing, but it's funny he didn't seem to have those same concerns when Bush was breaking the bank.

Transcript via the LA Times:

Hello. I’m Congressman Paul Ryan from Janesville, Wisconsin – and Chairman here at the House Budget Committee. It’s no secret our government has a spending problem –- and the problem has gotten so bad it’s threatening our future and hurting our nation’s ability to create jobs.

Republicans made a pledge that we would work to change this if given the opportunity to lead. Since January, we’ve been urging President Obama to listen to the people and work with us to reduce spending. The president started this year by proposing a freeze that would make no cuts at all.

But now bipartisan legislation is in sight to enact the largest spending cut in American history.

This is good news for job creators in America –- but much more has to be done to put....
... our nation on a true path to prosperity. Earlier this week, the House Budget Committee advanced a new budget for the United States government that will move the debate in Washington from billions in spending cuts to trillions.

We did so because it is unconscionable to leave the next generation with a crushing burden of debt and a nation in decline. Washington’s obsession with the next election has come at the expense of the next generation.

We are calling this budget The Path to Prosperity, because it is more than just a budget.

It is a commitment to honor the American legacy of leaving the next generation a more prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

More prosperous -- but only for that 1 percent.

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You know, I used to have some respect for Jack Cafferty even though I knew back then that we were on primarily opposite ends of the political spectrum because he spoke out against the Bush administration when that wasn't necessarily the most popular thing for a conservative to be doing, but he just lost me completely here. Calling Social Security a "welfare program" is just shameless.

The widows and orphans who receive those benefits do so after a spouse or a parent paid into the system and seniors receive the benefit after paying into it for their entire lives. And unemployment insurance is just that, insurance. It's not welfare. And does Jack really think we should just leave our elderly, the disabled and young mothers and children with no help to pay their medical bills at all? What cost does he think it would be to our society to just leave those people to rot on the streets?

Painting people who receive these benefits as "welfare" recipients paints a picture of a bunch of lazy unemployed people who don't want to work, and just want to sit on their duffs and collect government benefits. Does he think that most of the people receiving these benefits now haven't worked for a living most of their lives and paid into the system? At a time when we've got record unemployment and underemployment and a lot of good, decent, hard working Americans who would like to find jobs and can't, asking a question with this frame is doing nothing but trying to pit one middle or lower class individual in the United States against another and get them to resent each other. It's divide and conquer bulls**t to distract from us from those who have caused our economic problems and they are NOT the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, widows, orphans and young mothers and their children who don't have any health insurance. Shame on you Jack.

Here's his post at The Cafferty File. Thankfully a lot of the answers if you go read his entire comments section were a whole lot better than his question, but sadly a lot of the comments there were from individuals who've bought into the kind of resentment that Cafferty is peddling here.

What does it mean if social welfare benefits make up 1/3 of wages, salaries in U.S.?:

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