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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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From this Saturday's Up With Chris Hayes, panel member and Hayes' fellow contributor at The Nation brought up a topic at the end of the show that we unfortunately don't hear too often on MSNBC, which is the fact that the "Fix the Debt" campaign is not really interested in "fixing" anything. They're funded by a bunch of billionaires that are pushing for austerity measures and who are really just interested in lowering their taxes.

Sadly I don't expect we'll be seeing any disclaimers from the network every time they have one of these lobbyists from Pete Peterson's group on any time soon though, especially considering they've got one of them on their payroll. The more we complain, the more the so-called "liberal" network puts Ed Rendell on the air without disclosing his conflict of interests on the matter and he's just the tip of the iceberg when you look at the entire list of their leadership.

As Nichols informed the viewers here, there is a new web site that's been launched by The Center for Media and Democracy called PRWatch which has a lot more information on "Fix the Debt." You can check out the site here: PRWatch.

And here is more from one of their recent posts: Pete Peterson’s “Fix the Debt” Astroturf Supergroup Detailed in New Online Resource at PetersonPyramid.org:

Madison, WI -- One of the most hypocritical corporate PR campaigns in decades is advancing inside the beltway, attempting to convince the White House, Congress, and the American people that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner that will destroy our economy unless urgent action is taken. Soon this astroturf supergroup may be coming to a state near you.

“We would not be here if it wasn’t for the Peterson Foundation and Pete Peterson. They laid the groundwork and we stand here on their shoulders.” – Fix the Debt Co-Founder Erskine Bowles

Today the Center for Media and Democracy launches a new wiki resources on the funding, leaders, partner groups and lobbyists of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, see it here at PetersonPyramid.org.

Move over David Koch and George Soros! The effort is being bankrolled by one of the wealthiest men in the nation. Peter G. Peterson made a fortune at the Blackstone Group on Wall Street. He conveniently cashed out with $2 billion shortly before the 2008 financial meltdown and now has pledged to spend $1 billion of that payout to convince Americans -- who overwhelmingly want to keep and strengthen Social Security and Medicare -- that these programs threaten our very existence as a nation.

His task is a tough one. [...]

Key to the strategy is ginning up a crisis. In lockstep, the CEOs, politicians, and partner organizations stormed the media last fall warning of the looming disaster of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” Breaching the fiscal cliff “will lead to chaos,” warned Erskine Bowles; “derail the fragile recovery,” said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein; generate a "shock to the financial markets and a painful return to the recession,” said the CEO of Morgan Stanley.

But this chorus of calamity was pure hype. One Fix the Debt steering committee member, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, let slip that the strategy was to create an “artificial crisis” that would force Congress to act.

Their goal is to achieve a Simpson-Bowles style “grand bargain” on an austerity agenda for the United States by the nation’s 237th birthday on July 4, 2013. [...]

Many Fix the Debt firms pay a very low or even a negative average tax rate, contributing to the nation's deficit. Fix the Debt is secretly pushing for a major tax break that would exempt profits earned overseas by U.S. firms from taxation and encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs. While the Fix the Debt CEOs call for cuts to Social Security, many of the publicly-traded Fix the Debt firms underfund their employee pension plans -- making their workers even more dependent on the popular social insurance plan that American workers pay into with each paycheck.

And as Hayes mentioned during the segment as well, Nichols contributed to The Nation's article on Peterson's group here: Stacking the Deck: The Phony 'Fix the Debt' Campaign.

I hope everyone checks out the entire article and the rest of the resources at PRWatch and I wanted to share just one more item from there. From their SourceWatch page: Fix the Debt Leaders and Conflicts of Interest:

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CNN's Ali Velshi continues to use his weekend program, Your Money, as one long free infomercial for the Peterson Group. This Saturday his weekly round of fearmongering over the "fiscal cliff" was with none other than Ayn Rand fan Alan Greenspan, who is apparently now the latest spokesman for the Peterson Group.

And as Stephanie Kelton at Wall Street Pit noted, he seemed to be having a bit of trouble remaining consistent with remarks he's made in the past about our debt and Social Security. I don't think it's a leap at all to assume that he's reading from the talking points of the group who wants to privatize Social Security in order to enrich Wall Street, while standing in front of a wall full of their logos.

Here's more on that from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism -- Greenspan’s Switch to Debt Scaremongering:

Stephanie Kelton provides two video clips to underscore the point that until quite recently, Greenspan made the point that MMT types do: that the US as a currency issuer, can always pay its debts (it might incur too much inflation, but with the economy having as much slack as it does, that’s far from a pressing worry).

What I found striking was the clip of Paul Ryan pressing the man formerly known as Maestro when he was still the Fed chairman to agree that private retirement accounts would be more stable than a government sponsored program. That’s such a Big Lie I’m amazed anyone can peddle it with a straight face. [...]

After 20 years of demonizing government debt and pushing for government in miniature, billionaire Pete Peterson and his allies have managed to get the public fixated on their message rather than their motives, and the Ryan con job serves as a useful reminder.

One long-standing effort has been to “privatize” Social Security, so that Wall Street could charge fees for managing the money. Note that some countries, like Australia, mandate that a big chunk of wage payments be invested in superannuation accounts (I’m not current on the law, but when I lived in Australia, it was 9% of pay, and I believe it has risen since then. The ATO’s pages on this are too layered to get a quick answer). And even if they don’t get a mandated contributions regime, merely reducing Social Security payments will force people to save and invest more, and will similarly enrich the brokerage and investment management industries.

But the other rationale is more basic: the rich want taxes lower, period. They want to roll the clock back to the 1890s. [...] This is our future unless ordinary people wake up and oppose it. Not surprisingly, Greenspan, who was never on the side of little people, has officially cast his lot in with it.

Full transcript below the fold.

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It seems that, as Susie formerly called him, Pete Peterson's pet dog, the smarmy David Walker, made his way back onto MSNBC this Friday and surprise, surprise, he's endorsing Mitt Romney. Color me not shocked, even though the media constantly tries to portray this guy as some bipartisan straight shooter.

Apparently Walker isn't too happy that he hasn't managed to get his "grand bargain" passed under President Obama and he twists himself in knots trying to defend Romney's fuzzy math on his budget numbers that simply don't add up without raising taxes on the middle class and resorts to more or less questioning what the definition of middle class is.

As Susie noted in the post linked above, regardless of what Walker says here, she went to one of his seminars and the people who were in attendance were not buying the snake oil the man and his group were selling. You can read more about Walker and Pete Peterson here: Peterson's Grand Bargain Campaign To Kick Off After Election and here: Meet Pete Peterson, Architect of Social Security and Medicare Cuts.

Rough transcript of Walker's interview below the fold.

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Former US Comptroller and Pete Peterson Austerity Pimp David Walker joined Andrea Mitchell's set on MSNBC to warn all of the peons that we'd better get ready to be paying more in taxes because heaven forbid we can't dare to ask the rich to do any more to reduce the deficit.

He also had some new snake oil to sell all of us with his description of privatizing Social Security; we need to make it "more savings oriented." I wonder if he's been talking to Frank Luntz? That just sounds so much nicer than saying let's turn it over to Wall Street, doesn't it? Maybe he's figured out that calling it "a cancer" like his fellow deficit hawk Erskine Bowles wasn't such a good idea. What Susie wrote in that post deserves repeating in response to David Walker here.

As I keep saying, Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program which funds itself. All Social Security needs to stay 100% funded through the next 50 years is to remove the cap on earnings placed there under Ronald Reagan as a perk for the well-to-do, and raise the rate by one percent.

To say that Social Security is part of a "cancer" as Erskine Bowles does, is the same as saying that the United States cannot meet its own bond obligations -- which is decidedly not true. But the Very Serious People, contrary to the facts spelled out by economists like James Galbraith and Paul Krugman, have decided that the best way to deal with their own gnawing sense of economic uneasiness is to grind the boot heel into the backs of the lower classes -- just to show us who's boss!

Here's more of the same nonsense from Walker. These people are determined to raid that trust fund and pretend that the United States can't meet out debt obligations if we don't.

Mitchell: Look the fiscal commission doesn’t even have anything mandatory. It’s all advisory and all the muscle from that commission was taken out because of the disagreements on the hill. Doesn’t that forecast that you’re not going to have the kind of results from this commission that is going to make a real difference in terms of the deficit or the tax climate?

Walker: Well Andrea we’re hopeful that it can make some recommendations based on the super-majority requirement. I believe it’s very possible to re-impose tough statutory budget controls next year that don’t have trillions of dollars worth of exemptions. I believe that it’s possible to reform Social Security to make it solvent, sustainable and more savings oriented.

Realistically, the two tough things that we’re going to have to do, which is comprehensive tax reform and really taking a hard look at health care costs that are out of control. Those are probably not going to be ripe until around 2013, but we need to start getting some points on the board, start doing some things sooner rather than later before our foreign lenders lose confidence in our ability to do so.

Mitchell: Mr. Walker in your recommendation that we extend the tax cuts for the middle class for all the top earners, the 2 or 3% of the top earners, would you do it even if they’re not paid for?

Walker: I think it’s highly preferable if we pay for them quite frankly but it’s important to keep in mind this. If anything is done in that regard, it should be temporary. We should not deceive the American people by letting them believe that their taxes are not going go up once the economy has recovered.

President Obama made a commitment that he wasn’t going to raise taxes on people making over $200,000 or more. That was an unrealistic commitment. Our problem is primarily a spending problem and the resolution to our fiscal challenge is primarily spending, but we’re going to need more revenues and it’s going to have to be more broadly shared than just those that are wealthy.