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Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to be one of the stand-up guys in the Senate with telling it straight when it comes to the fact that Social Security does not add a dime to our deficit and that if President Obama wants to do something about the deficit, he needs to be cutting that corporate welfare, instead of talking about balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable in our society and our veterans.

Sanders joined Ed Schultz on MSNBC this Friday evening. After Schultz took the viewers through some of the goading by Republicans who are trying to get President Obama to do their dirty work for them and go after our New Deal social safety nets, and a clip of Ronald Reagan explaining that Social Security does not contribute to the deficit, he asked Sanders if he trusted President Obama not to cave into their demands.

Sanders said no, but if enough of us make our voices heard along with the slew of progressive groups who are pushing back hard against these potential cuts, he feels he will be responsive to the voters. All I can say is I hope he's right about the President listening, and I know he's right about the need for everyone who doesn't want to see these programs cut to make their voices heard and get on the phone, email, write letters, call and make sure that both President Obama and your members of Congress know to how you feel.

They need to be hearing from someone besides the Ed Rendell and Pete Petersons of the world. I'm grateful that we've got Ed Schultz giving us a break from the otherwise constant drumbeat on his network, calling going after our social safety nets adult, serious and balanced in exchange for Republican hostage taking. on raising the debt ceiling after their party spent like drunken sailors and now don't want to pay their credit card bill.

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Bernie was still pushing for one item that would help with our deficit that sadly has gone nowhere with those looking out for the 1 percent since it was introduced over a year ago, a tax on Wall Street speculation:

Legislation was introduced on Wednesday to impose a financial transaction tax on the trading of stocks, bonds and derivatives. The measure would reduce gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy, and significantly reduce the deficit without harming average Americans. "This bill offers us a clear choice. We can balance the budget on the backs of working Americans and senior citizens on fixed incomes or we can ask the gamblers on Wall Street to pay a little bit more in taxes," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, a cosponsor of the bill.

Under the proposal, there would be a speculation fee of 0.03 percent on credit default swaps, derivatives, stocks, bonds, and other financial transactions. It would yield about $200 billion in new revenue over the coming decade. The lead sponsor in the Senate is Tom Harkin. Rep. Peter DeFazio filed companion legislation in the House.

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Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Wednesday suggested that President Franklin Roosevelt actually made the Great Depression worse with "class warfare politics" that "stopped creativity" and "drove businessmen away."

The former Pennsylvania senator delivered red meat to attendees of the Republican National Convention on Tuesday in a speech where he said "hands" over 20 times and made the false claim that President Barack Obama had waived the work requirements for welfare.

Santorum continued the theme of attacking the president during an appearance on Fox News the next morning.

"This president is the most hostile president to the private sector since Franklin Roosevelt," he asserted. "Look what happened under Roosevelt. Years after years of playing the class warfare politics, which Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, and he drove businessmen away. He stopped creativity, he stopped innovation, he stopped people who were willing to risk and invest, and that's what's happening."

"So, one of the reasons these welfare rolls are going up is because of this president and his hostility toward the private sector in America. And it's a place to get money to then redistribute it to those who will hopefully vote for him."

Santorum added: "This is a -- this is what happened in the Great Depression and if we keep this up, we're going to experience even more economic problems."

But UC-Berkeley political scientist Eric Schickler told The Monkey Cage's John Sides that the view of FDR as anti-business does not square with the historical record.

"While FDR’s inaugural did include salvos against the 'unscrupulous money changers,' his actual policies in his first term relied heavily on cooperation with the business community," Schickler explained. "The [National Recovery Administration] -- which FDR hailed as the most important recovery measure -- essentially allowed businesses to form cartels, under the friendly supervision of the pro-business Hugh Johnson."

"Indeed, during FDR’s first three years in office, his version of the New Deal faced more serious challenges from populists and insurgents on the left than from Republicans."

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Our friends over at Media Matters have been following this line of attack by George Will for some time now, so this is nothing new. Here's Will on this Sunday's This Week with Christiane Amanpour continuing to trash the New Deal:

AMANPOUR: You talked about what the government should be doing. So let me ask you, one of the big issues obviously that we have been debating all year is election. This election is jobs, the jobs crisis. There are something like nearly 23 million people who are either unemployed, underemployed or out of the work force. And of course during the Great Depression the government created big programs to get people back to work. Why shouldn't they do right now? Why shouldn't they be that kind of...

WILL: First of all, because it didn't work during the depression. The cardinal aim of the New Deal was to put the country back to work. Unemployment never came below 14 percent until we geared up to be the arsenal of democracy in the Second World War. We have had a remarkably clear test under the Obama administration. They said, pass the stimulus and by 2011, the economy would be growing at 4% and unemployment would be 7.1 percent and falling.

I don't fault the president for having his economic projections wrong. This is a complicated society. John Kenneth Galbraith, one of your liberal friends was once said, that the purpose of economic projections is to make astrology to look respectable.

I don't fault the president for this. I fault the president for thinking that society is transparent and easy to regulate. Just as I don't fault the president for making a slew of horrible investments in green energy and all the rest -- Solyndra and other companies. I don't fault him for that, because no one expects the political class to be good at disposing money in the most productive ways.

Here's more from Media Matters on Will's prior remarks:

Will repeats tired myth that the New Deal failed

George Will Continues His Campaign To Repeal The 20th Century

Asserting FDR "waged ... a jihad against private enterprise," Hume falsely claimed "everybody agrees ... that the New Deal failed"

Conservatives cherry-pick 1930s unemployment figures in continued assault on New Deal

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Alan Grayson joined the Ed Schultz show to talk about the Financial Regulation bill that President Obama hopes to sign into law by July 4th. As Ed noted and as I agree with “a lot of people think it’s not tough enough”. Ed blamed the Republicans for watering down the bill, but there’s no way you can blame just the Republicans since there are quite a few too many Democrats beholden to Wall Street along with Obama’s advisors who we know aren’t going to want to harm them too badly as well. That said as Grayson noted here, there are some good things in the legislation. The biggest problem in his opinion is the failure to make sure these banks are no longer too big to fail. As an article at AlterNet noted, we can at least consider this a good first step.

Members of Congress finished ironing out their differences on Wall Street reform last night, and the resulting bill deserves unequivocal support from progressives and conservatives alike. But while the final package is a necessary first step to overhauling the nation’s out-of-control financial sector, it will do very little to change the destructive status quo on Wall Street. The bill is a good first step. The public deserves too see stronger reforms from Congress next year.

As a matter of history, sweeping financial change takes several years to secure. It took Franklin Delano Roosevelt seven years to enact all of his New Deal banking regulations, and President Barack Obama appropriately sees the 1930s crisis as the historical analog to today’s meltdown-and-reform process. Obama is correct to state that the legislation approved by Congress late last night is the most significant since the Depression—but it is a hollow truth. The U.S. government has been steadily deregulating the banking industry ever since Roosevelt, and the mere act of moving policy in the opposite direction is enough to claim the mantle of dramatic reform. Actually living up to the precedent set by Roosevelt will take several years of serious work, and major legislative action during the next electoral cycle. Read on…

Dave Dayden has more details on what made it through the conference committee.

FinReg Passes Conference: Details on Volcker Rule, Section 716 Provisions:

Lawmakers worked into the night and came up with an oddly unsatisfying compromise on the two most contentious issues left in financial reform, with the final package voted upon at 5:30 this morning (ET). But hey, that was on C-SPAN, so eight people did probably get to see it. Transparency!

This bill has officially been renamed Dodd-Frank. So let’s see what they’ve done:

• Volcker rule: the contours of the Dodd counteroffer survived, with both a crisper Volcker rule that regulators will have little discretion but to implement, and also a carve-out created basically for Scott Brown, which allows banks to continue to invest up to 3 percent of common capital in hedge funds or private equity funds. While speculative trading on the bank’s account will be prohibited, depositor money could flow through that loophole into those investments. McClatchy has more. • Section 716: This is a classic Washington compromise. Reformers wanted the mega-banks to have to spin off their entire swaps trading desks into separately capitalized subsidiaries. Banks argued that it would be too costly and would drive that trading into the shadows. So what have they done? Put half of the trades, the riskiest ones including credit default swaps, onto the separate subsidiaries, while allowing the bank to still trade interest rate and currency swaps as before. This makes almost no sense to me. It bifurcates the market in derivatives and allows plenty of risky trading to still accrue in the bank. Or does it?

Much more there so go read the rest of it.

As Dave noted the AP article has more on the bill as well.

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Wolf Blitzer asked David Gergen for his perspective on Wall Street reform and apparently Gergen wants the American public to think that a series of booms and busts is normal.

BLITZER: Our senior political analyst David Gergen for some perspective.

David, can we now simply assume that there will be Wall Street reform?

GERGEN: I think so, Wolf. There are a couple of contentious issues still to resolve. Consumer protection and derivative, both very important. But this bipartisan agreement today will end the filibuster.

CNN has learned that Republican Senator Susan Collins will now vote to end the filibuster. I'm sure other Republicans will join her. That will really pave the way not only to a debate, but final passage of a bill, and the biggest -- the biggest reform of the financial industry since the Great Depression.

BLITZER: Can they clean up their act, if you will, and do the kinds of things that will prevent what happened a year and a half, two years ago?

GERGEN: That's a very important question. Nobody knows the answer, Wolf. What we do know, Hank Paulson when he was treasury secretary said we'll have disruptions in the financial markets about every four or five years. That's just the nature of capitalism. The question is are they now putting the safeguards in place to prevent the next disruption or the one after from turning into a great recession and throwing so many people out of work. The hopes are that they will and that they've done a lot of good things and this is a very dynamic, capitalistic system and things, you do have sort of these eruptions, periodically and you can't be absolutely certain, but the country backs us, Wolf. Notably some banks. We've learned now that Citigroup as well as UBS and Morgan Stanley backed these financial reform and most economists say that it will make us safer.

BLITZER: We are told, by the way, that the vote on the Senate floor to move forward and allow this debate to actually begin on the Senate floor will happen within the next hour. We'll of course, watch that closely, David. So the Obama administration and the Democrats get health care reform. They're probably going to get some sort of financial reform right now, but when you look towards November and the midterm elections, doesn't the economy and jobs, don't that really represent the top priorities that the Democrats need to make sure they don't do as bad as some expect?

GERGEN: Absolutely, on that issue, the jury is still out. We still have a very stubbornly high unemployment rate. We'll be watching those numbers very closely in the months ahead.

BLITZER: David Gergen will be watching with us every step of the way. David, thanks very much.

Sorry David, but there's someone who's not a Villager hack named Thom Hartmann who would disagree with you.

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After discussing some of the Republican's problems with the RNC and their recent financial disclosures, the panel on this week talks about the problems for incumbents in both parties and what that might mean at the ballot box come the mid-term elections. Despite admitting that the Republicans have a huge problem with their ever dwindling base and that they don't have any actual strategy, Matt Dowd touts how many seats they're going to pick up because people are angry right now and the Democrats "own the levers of power". He neglects to mention that they haven't had their hands on that lever for very long and as Robert Reich points out they're not offering any alternatives except for negativity. George Will disagrees.

TAPPER: ... you're shaking your head that the Republican Party -- you don't buy that they are perceived as negative about everything?

WILL: I would set up Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin's roadmap for tax reform, job growth, and entitlement reform...

TAPPER: You embrace that more than John Boehner does, though...

WILL: Well, that -- that could well be. I'm right, and he's wrong. But...

(CROSSTALK)

WILL: ... against all the so-called ideas, these recycled Great Society, New Deal ideas, of which my friend, Bob, is so enamored

Yeah, that's the winning ticket George. Follow Paul Ryan's plan and turn Social Security over to Wall Street and more tax cuts for the rich. I guess George Will doesn't remember how well that Social Security tour worked out for George Bush a few years back. By all means, please encourage all of the Republicans to go out there and take that same message back to the people but they need to quit lying about what they want to do and dressing it up with phony names. It's not "entitlement reform". It's Social Security privatization. I'd love to see the GOP take George Will and Paul Ryan's advice.

Full transcript below the fold via ABC News.

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