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Matt Taibbi sat down with Current TV's Eliot Spitzer to discuss the bipartisan debacle just passed by the Congress and signed by President Obama last week called the JOBS Act and the potential political fallout if this is made into an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign.

Our own Jon Perr has been writing about what a terrible bill this was from the time it was introduced, when Eric Cantor was first pushing it on Fox News. Sadly, as Taibbi and Spitzer pointed out in the segment above, the law is going to effectively repeal about half of the meaningful rules that were put in place to prevent another bubble and all this did was take away what competitive advantage the stock market had in the United States because investors felt they could trust they were being told the truth about the companies they were investing in and their accounting methods.

Matt has more in his recent article at Rolling Stone here -- Why Obama's JOBS Act Couldn't Suck Worse:

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Apparently Dylan Ratigan inserting himself into the Occupy Wall Street has got the folks over at TeaNN terribly upset, since Howard Kurtz decided to spend a segment carping about it on his show that claims to report on media bias, Reliable Sources. And apparently Kurtz believes someone who was a former Trent Lott staffer and now an anchor on Glenn Beck's GBTV, Amy Holmes, qualifies as some sort of objective "journalist" to weigh in on Ratigan's advocacy of the #OWS protests.

Kurtz's panel also included The Washington Post's Dana Milbank and PBS' Terence Smith, who like Holmes thought it was just awful that someone who appears on a "news network" like Ratigan would openly show support for the Wall Street protesters, also defended the firing of Lisa Simeone from NPR for openly advocating for the protesters as well. So much for free speech. James Fallows at The Atlantic has more on that here as well.

They also discussed the AstroTurf "tea party" being openly supported by pundits over at Fox "News", but what was missing here was any mention whatsoever of the fact that CNN was every bit as big of a cheerleader for that "movement" as anyone at Fox was. They sent their reporters to be embedded on their buses and if you had twenty of these people showing up anywhere, there were CNN reporters there to cover it and make sure those protests or town hall meetings made it into the national spotlight.

And what other network besides CNN has allowed the "tea party" to co-host their presidential primary debates? None. But they're going to talk about Fox supporting them as though that happened in a vacuum and their network wasn't participating in propping up that Koch brothers, FreedomWorks, Dick Armey, and friends corporate sponsored fiasco of that as well.

Matt Taibbi responded to the recent dust-up over the hacked emails from himself, Ratigan and others at his Rolling Stone blog here -- Why Rush Limbaugh Is Freaking Out About Occupy Wall Street.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Matt Taibbi joined the set of Countdown with Keith Olbermann to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. After weighing in on whether Mayor Michael Bloomberg might be playing right into the movement's hands with the upcoming move to try to clear Zuccoti Park, Taibbi discussed his recent article at Rolling Stone where he had some advice for those out there protesting.

My Advice to the Occupy Wall Street Protesters:

No matter what, I'll be supporting Occupy Wall Street. And I think the movement's basic strategy – to build numbers and stay in the fight, rather than tying itself to any particular set of principles – makes a lot of sense early on. But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I'd suggest focusing on five:

1. Break up the monopolies. The so-called "Too Big to Fail" financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term "Systemically Dangerous Institutions" – are a direct threat to national security. They are above the law and above market consequence, making them more dangerous and unaccountable than a thousand mafias combined. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled; a good start would be to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and mandate the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

2. Pay for your own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay us back for the bailouts, and still have plenty left over to fight the deficits the banks claim to be so worried about. It would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.

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Keith Olbermann talked to Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi about another really horrible idea that's apparently gaining bipartisan support with our politicians -- another one of these repatriation tax holidays where corporations are rewarded for offshoring their profits by being allowed to bring them back to America for rates as low as just over 5%.

As Matt pointed out here, this does nothing to create jobs as we saw from the last time they did this. They just pocketed their money and laid off their workers anyway. And it's counterproductive because allowing this to go on just encourages more of it. If they actually tied this to job creation, in the United States, and penalized them if they did not use the money to hire Americans, I might be able go get on board for them having their rates lowered to some extent, but I suspect the chances of that happening are somewhere between slim and none.

As Keith noted, maybe everyone should ask our members of Congress to read Matt's articles on the topic at Rolling Stone. They're going to be taking the next month off campaigning and fundraising, so I'm sure there will be plenty of time for their constituents to ask them about this at their town hall meetings.

Here's the latest from Matt at Rolling Stone -- Evil Corporate Tax Holiday Gains Bipartisan Support:

The madness that is the proposed tax repatriation holiday is continuing and gathering steam. More and more members of congress are coming out of the woodwork, scratching their chins in contemplative consideration as it were, pretending that they’ve just realized what a great day a corporate tax holiday would be – not that they’ve taken gazillions of dollars from the firms lobbying for it or anything.

The latest convert seems to be Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley. Berkley’s plan is to offer a pseudo-holiday – not the full-fledged happy-ending massage the companies wanted (i.e. a reduction from 35 percent+ to 5.25 percent) but a mere ten-point shave... Read on...

Corporate Tax Holiday in Debt Ceiling Deal: Where's the Uproar?:

Have been meaning to write about this, but I’m increasingly amazed at the overall lack of an uproar about the possibility of the government approving another corporate tax repatriation holiday.

I’ve been in and out of DC a few times in recent weeks and one thing I keep hearing is that there is a growing, and real, possibility that a second “one-time tax holiday” will be approved for corporations as part of whatever sordid deal emerges from the debt-ceiling negotiations.

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Keith Olbermann sat down with Matt Taibbi to discuss his latest article at Rolling Stone, Michele Bachmann's Holy War. As he noted in the article, a lot of people might be inclined to be dismissive of Bachmann because we view her as a "goofball" who no one should take seriously, but we do so at our peril.

As Matt discussed with Keith, unlike Sarah Palin, Bachmann actually loves and understands retail politics and likes getting out there and doing the hard work of campaigning, she's got a pretty formidable fundraising operation going, has hired the right campaign staff and she's moving up in the polls among a pretty large field of potential candidates right now.

I sincerely hope he's wrong, but this is a country that allowed George W. Bush to steal two elections, so I don't think anyone should dismiss Taibbi's warnings on Bachmann. As terrible as the current GOP field is, with the economy in the shape it is now and the fact that it doesn't look like it might be improving any time soon and with our complicit corporate media that won't tell voters the truth about much of anything, we take any of them too lightly at our peril.

You can read part of Matt's article here -- Michele Bachmann's Holy War:

The Tea Party contender may seem like a goofball, but be warned: Her presidential campaign is no laughing matter

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard." Read on...

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Matt Taibbi has a new article on Rolling Stone on the recent hearings in the U.S. Senate and whether or not Goldman Sachs executives should be facing criminal trials or not in the wake of ongoing investigations into their part in the financial meltdown we went through a few years ago. CNN decided to bring in the Atlantic Monthly's Wall Street apologist Megan McArdle to debate Taibbi on Your Money.

I'm no financial expert and a lot of this stuff is over my head, but McArdle's arguments to me here seemed to be that all of these laws are just too terribly difficult to understand, therefore it's too difficult to figure out if they did anything wrong and to prosecute them, but the people they were selling these toxic assets to should have known better and understood what they were buying. Looks like a classic case of blame the victim to me.

FDL's TBogg weighed in on the segment here -- McBambi vs. Taibbzilla (Updated).

Mark Ames at AlterNet took her apart in this article -- Anti-Government Ideologue Megan McArdle's Amnesia About Her Privileged, Govt.-Funded Upbringing.

AlterNet's Chris Lehmann was critical of her glib dismissal of Taibbi's earlier reporting on Goldman Sachs here -- Matt Taibbi's Great Squid Hunt.

And Eric Salzman went into some specifics on why he disagreed with that same article of McArdle's -- Matt Taibbi Gets His Sarah Palin On in his post here -- Taking Megan McArdle Apart - Part II.

So for any of you wonks on the financial industry out there, if you take issue with any of the articles I posted here, I welcome the input, because I'm not an expert on the financial industry and don't claim to be. That said, from a layman's perspective, what she did during this interview sure looked like a whole lot of apologizing for Goldman Sachs' behavior to me and exactly what CNN expected to get from her by bringing her on to counter Taibbi.

Transcript via CNN 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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Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi discusses Wall Street's recent whining about how terribly the Obama administration is supposedly treating them that John wrote about here -- Wall Street Masters still Whining about Obama's words even after the bail out. It's all GOP for them now.

Since the story is as mutually beneficial to the administration as it is to the thieves on Wall Street, Taibbi thinks it easily could have been either of them that decided to plant the story with the hacks at Politico.

Time for your weekly podcast from two of my favorite "liberal elitists", our own Driftglass and Bluegal.

You can listen to past editions or make a donation to help keep these going at http://professionalleft.blogspot.com/. And the links for this week which were mentioned in the podcast are:

Rachel Maddow's Lecture at Harvard's Kennedy School

Susie Bright: How will the mid-term Tea Party Triumph affect your sex life?

Rolling Stone Roundtable with Gergen and Taibbi

Have a great weekend everybody and I know Fran and Driftglass enjoy getting your feedback on the podcasts, so visit their site and drop them a line if you'd like to weigh in.

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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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