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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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We've covered both of these stories here, whether it's the "too big to jail" corrupt HSBC, or the out of touch greedy AIG, which was considering suing the taxpayers after they'd bailed them out. This Wednesday evening, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart took his turn going after them.

AIG decided not to join their former CEO "Hank" Greenberg's lawsuit against the government after all. I guess they took a look at those booming sales of pitchforks and torches and decided it might not bode well for them to do so.

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As Steve Benen noted, on the heels of the $2 billion loss by JPMorgan Chase, here was the RNC Chairman Reince Priebus' reaction on Meet the Press this Sunday -- RNC Chief: Leave Wall Street alone:

JPMorgan's reckless, $2 billion fiasco appears to have a silver lining of sorts: the bank's bad bets help demonstrate the need for safeguards in the system. In his new column, Paul Krugman thanks JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon for offering "an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated."

And yet, somehow, some still don't see it that way. On NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus, common sense be damned, argued that the JPMorgan mess changes nothing.

Host David Gregory asked a straightforward question: "In light of the losses on Wall Street this week, you think we need less financial regulation rather than more?" In Preibus' mind, it's not even a close call: "I think we need less." The RNC chief added that Democrats have "made things worse" by approving new safeguards and adding new layers of accountability to the financial system.

It reminded me of an Upton Sinclair line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

This really isn't that complicated. In 2008, Wall Street, left to its own devises, nearly collapsed the global financial system. Four years later, institutions like JPMorgan are still taking enormous risks in reckless schemes. It's hard to even conceive of a straight-face argument against sensible regulations in light of recent developments, but the chairman of the Republican National Committee was on national television anyway, arguing that policymakers should be doing less. Read on...

As Steve pointed out, this is Mitt Romney's position as well and they're counting on the public hating regulation as much or more than they hate Wall Street. That's the talking point they've been hammering home regardless of how reckless Wall Street and the bankers have been in the aftermath of the crash and ever since President Obama took office, so I don't expect them to change now. Forget about the fact that Wall Street took our economy down, regulations are terrible. I suspect our media doing a terrible job of explaining why their views are wrong and why we ought to keep the gambling separate from the banking industry has a lot to do with why Republicans have not suffered more greatly when it comes to public opinion on the matter. Interviews like this one with David Gregory sure aren't helping any.

Transcript below the fold.

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Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi appeared on CNN's Parker Spitzer and talked about how these TeaPublicans are out there voting against their own interests out of sheer frustration with our ailing economy are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the investment banks with the help of these astroturf groups and the Koch brothers.

And as Matt points out, we've got a bipartisan problem when it comes to Wall Street's grip on our politicians. All the more reason to be pushing hard to get some campaign finance laws passed.

SPITZER: Few people have used language and metaphor to capture the public's anger over the financial crisis and those who bear the blame better than Matt Taibbi. His articles for "Rolling Stone" magazine have become legend on TV and in print.

PARKER: Matt Taibbi is our headliner, a contributing editor for "Rolling Stone" and the editor of the new book "Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids and a Long Con that is Breaking America." it's a scathing and often hilarious account of the financial crisis.

Matt, thanks for joining us tonight.

TAIBBI: Thanks for having me on.

PARKER: And to say it's hard to make the financial crisis funny, but you did that successfully.

TAIBBI: It is a very difficult job.

PARKER: And vampire squids, I'm just happy I got to say that on television. I want to read you a description that you wrote of Sarah Palin. You called her a "narcissistic money-grubbing hack." Don't you love being quoted?

TAIBBI: Yeah.

PARKER: Anyway. So Sarah Palin obviously has a lot of followers. She's got the Republican establishment scared to death, so there must be something more to Sarah than just that, huh?

TAIBBI: Well, absolutely. I think one of the things that happened in the wake of this financial crisis, there was this enormous amount of anger and frustration in the population and people were looking for someone to offer them a simple solution, a simple answer for what happened and I think Sarah Palin and the Tea Party perfectly captured that anger. They found a way to crystallize all that frustration and aim it in a direction. You know, I would quarrel with the direction that they've aimed it in, but they've done a very good job at that.

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From 60 Minutes. The entire segment can be seen here. More results from Dick Cheney's secret energy task force? Or just more proof that businesses will behave badly when left unregulated? I hope we have some adult supervision return with the swearing in of Obama. Time will tell.

About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market.

So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.

[....]

It's impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation. And in 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps, as well as electronic trading on private exchanges.

"Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger.

"You'd have to say Enron," he replied. "This was something they desperately wanted, and they got."

Greenberger, who wanted more regulation while he was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not less, says it all happened when Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the United States. "This was when Enron was riding high. And what Enron wanted, Enron got."

Full transcript to follow.

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