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Who needs Fox when you've got CNN treating their audience to god-awful programming like Fareed Zakaria's Memo to the President: Road Map for Second Term? It's been airing on their network over the weekend, and it's nothing more than one more long infomercial for group No Labels, advocating for every item on the right's wishlist, from economics to foreign policy.

What was missing? Even token representation from anyone in the progressive or labor movements. Instead, there was interview after interview with Republicans, neo-liberals, DLC Third Way "centrists" and advice from some of the last people we should be listening to -- because their very bad policies are what got us into the economic mess we're in now.

In a portion of the program which focused on economic policy, the audience was treated to former Reagan and Bush adviser James Baker -- which makes sense, because who better to talk about what President Obama needs to do to fix the economy than a leading member of the same administration that blew a mile-wide hole in the deficit with tax cuts and a couple of wars they left off the books?

For "balance," he follows up with Robert Rubin. The same Robert Rubin who helped Bill Clinton deregulate the derivatives market and then went on to work for Citigroup while the rest of the country was left with the economic time bomb of deregulation and "too big to fail" he helped to put in place.

Zakaria also decided we needed some sage advice from Mitch McConnell's wife Elaine Chao, who served, as Jim Hightower put it, as George Bush's anti-Labor Secretary, and who helped our most "anti-labor president of modern times" to degrade our protections and rights in the workplace and that wages were kept as low as possible. How could we possibly have a discussion on what to do to improve our economy for the American working class without her input?

And for more "balance" yet, we were treated to Peter Orszag, who left the Obama administration to go work for Citigroup just as Rubin did, and who has been out there pushing for "reforms" -- in other words, cuts to our social safety nets and reductions in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

And there's more where that came from with the entire guest list and their conflicts of interest. You can read the entire transcript here and the full transcript for the segment above below the fold.

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This looks like it's going to be one hell of a read from Robert Sheer. Democracy Now's Amy Goodman interviewed Sheer about his new book, The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street. I wish Obama would take some of Sheer's advice here and put a floor on housing foreclosures so people can stay in their homes and appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the consumer protection agency.

I'd like to see him get rid of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as well. If he wants some enthusiasm from his base this mid-term election, looking out for main street instead of Wall Street would go a long way. I already know the Republicans are horrible. I'm tired of Democrats just saying we're not as bad as they are while they're protecting the bankers instead of the home owners. I'm not quite as down on him as Sheer is since I don't think you can discount all of the things President Obama has managed to get done in the face of unprecedented Republican obstruction, but on this matter, I agree with Sheer.

They haven't fixed the problems with the financial institutions. The bill they got passed was weak tea and they haven't done nearly enough to keep people in their homes and he's surrounded himself with the wrong people. And he was right about what needed to be done when he said the problems with our economy were due to reckless deregulation when he was on the campaign trail. I want to see that Obama come back, not in words, but in his actions. He gave a really great speech on Labor Day. President Obama, I hope you decide to back up that speech with some action. Talk is cheap if you don't back it up with some action.

Robert Scheer on The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street:

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our discussion on the state of the economy, we’re joined in Los Angeles by veteran journalist and Truthdig.com editor Robert Scheer. His book is out today; it’s called The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.

Bob, welcome to Democracy Now!

ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: What is wrong with the economy today? And how did we get here? 

ROBERT SCHEER: Well, you know, you say a longtime journalist. I worked for the Los Angeles Times as a national reporter, and I covered these hearings in Washington when the Clinton Administration in the '90s basically fulfilled the promise of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan was not able to reverse the sensible regulations of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt designed to prevent us from getting into another depression. And those regulations of Glass-Steagall, which Feingold was against—was for keeping and against reversing, said that investment banks playing with supposedly rich people's money should not be allowed to merge with commercial banks that were using the deposits of people that were insured by the taxpayers and that these were different activities. And Reagan could never pull off that kind of deregulation. In fact, because of the savings and loan scandal at the end of his term, he actually had to sign off on increased financial regulation. But when Clinton came in, he brought in one of the big players on Wall Street, Robert Rubin, who has been head of Goldman Sachs, and basically turned to him and said, "You know, what do I need to do to get Wall Street on my side?" And they said, reverse what they considered to be onerous financial regulation. And Clinton delivered on that. He brought in Rubin then to be his Treasury secretary, who was followed by Lawrence Summers, who’s now the top economics adviser in the Obama White House.

And in addition to the Gramm bill that reversed Glass-Steagall, he did something even more significant for our current crisis. He—after Summers had pushed it through, Congress signed off on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. He was already a lame duck president. It was in the closing weeks of his administration. And this is the source of our whole problem, really, in terms of the housing meltdown, because we had these suspect derivatives that sensible people in the administration, like Brooksley Born, had warned against. No one knew what these toxic investments all about, the bundling of mortgages, which is what encouraged all of the wild subprime and Alt-A financing, because they were then going to be packaged together, made into securities, and then backed by credit default swaps, and all of this stuff that really didn’t exist. It certainly didn’t exist in Adam Smith’s capitalism, but it didn’t really exist even in Ronald Reagan’s capitalism. This newfangled—these gimmicks that were developed and spiraled wildly out of control were made possible because of that Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Clinton signed and which said in Titles III and IV, no existing government regulation, no existing government regulatory body, will be allowed to supervise these credit default swaps, these collateralized debt obligations that were there. Read on...

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From Morning Meeting Nov. 25, 2009, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and the Financial Times' Chrystia Freeland discuss Matt's recent article at Rolling Stone and the divide between the recoveries on Wall Street and Main Street. Their analysis about what's wrong with the economic team Obama has surrounded himself with is spot on and until he starts listening to some different voices on how to fix our economy, Matt Taibbi is correct, the cycles of bailouts are going to continue to repeat themselves.

Ratigan: But Matt’s ultimate point is that we have all these people that are still perpetuating a policy that is supportive of the banking system for sure, regardless of who’s in there and an economy that is, has small business lending off a cliff, profits back at a record on Wall Street, one in four, one in seven mortgages delinquent; you know I could go on and on with these statistics but basically the economy was torpedoed and the financial markets were supported and the reality Matt is that it’s far more profitable not to lend money In this country. The fact of the matter is we’re giving banks money at a time when the government has rules that say you can make more money if we give you money if you don’t lend it.

Taibbi: Right…right…

Ratigan: And that is the inherent insanity of the entire situation. It’s like giving the banks money, legalizing the banks to make money without having to lend it is like letting the cops create a military state. They’re the custodians of wealth, the custodians of security have been completely compromised—you think it’s the people around the President that are largely responsible for that, correct?

Taibbi: I think so. I mean you have to remember that probably, if you were going to have a Nuremberg for the financial crisis, Bob Rubin would be one of the first people on the dock.

Ratigan: Yeah.

Taibbi: I mean he has a unique responsibility for what went wrong because he was not only responsible for the bad policy, the deregulatory policy under Clinton but he also helped destroy one of the biggest companies in the world in CitiGroup. And yet he was the guy who was put in charge and his people of being the architect of Clinton’s economic policies.

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From Democracy Now, Robert Sheer weighs in on how difficult it is to cover Wall Street during a discussion about Wall Street's massive profits and bonuses while the economy for most Americans continues to deteriorate. The one bright spot here is that tonight the House Financial Services Committee approved Ron Paul and Alan Grayson's amendment to audit the Fed.

Robert Sheer's latest article at Truthdig is Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Community Organizer We Elected President?

AMY GOODMAN: What about this new government report that’s found Goldman Sachs could have suffered dramatic losses if the federal government hadn’t intervened to bail out AIG, American International Group, the report by the special inspector general for the government bailout program raising doubts about Goldman’s previous claims that it was hedged against potential AIG losses?

ROBERT SCHEER: Yes, well, first of all, this has been—

AMY GOODMAN: What does all that mean?

ROBERT SCHEER: This is the big lie from Goldman, is that, you know, we didn’t—look, look what happened. Lehman was Goldman’s competitor, was allowed to go belly up, OK? The Secretary of the Treasury was a former head of Goldman Sachs. I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories here, but Robert Rubin was a head of Goldman Sachs, OK? And Paulson was a head of Goldman Sachs. They decide not to—you know, and Rubin was involved in these discussions, Lawrence Summers, Paulson and so forth. Timothy Geithner, who is our Secretary of Treasury, was head of the New York Fed for five years while all this was going on. So they say, “Let Lehman go, you know, down the tubes,” which is great for Goldman Sachs, because now you have basically two investment houses that are getting all the business. “But on the other hand, we’ll put all this money into AIG,” which was backing these junkie derivatives, these mysterious packages, “and it will be a pass through. People won’t notice, because we’re giving it to AIG.” $180 billion of our taxpayer money, we taxpayers get nothing in return, AIG is still in the toilet, but Goldman got its money. You know, it got upwards of $20 billion, that they don’t have to pay back. They make a big thing about “We’re going to pay back some of the TARP funds” and everything. And by the way, they were allowed to become a bank. No hearings, no judicial proceedings and so forth. You know, the very thing Lehman was asking for—“Let us become a bank so we can get some of this TARP funds and everything”—that was granted to Goldman Sachs.

You know, Ron Paul, by the way, who has been trying to go after the Fed, and he has an accountability piece of legislation that the Democrats have gutted, and said, “Let’s have an audit of the Fed. Let’s find out what does the Federal Reserve do. What are the deals they made? Where did the money go?” We don’t have that. And the inspector general of the Treasury Department, the inspector general, you know, Elizabeth Warren, all of these people have pointed—from the Congressional Oversight Panel—all of these people point out, “We don’t have the facts. We don’t know where the trillions are going.” We know trillions have been committed. We know all of these huge pools—Bank of America’s $300 billion of toxic assets have been backed up. But there’s no accountability.

I have covered the CIA, I’ve covered national security, and I’ve covered banking. I did it for the LA Times in one way or another for thirty years, OK? It is more difficult to cover Wall Street, in terms of secrecy and classification and their protection, than it is to cover the CIA and the Pentagon. That much I’ll tell you. You know, you get greater claim on the truth covering the Pentagon, as I did in my last book, than I’m having in my current book called The Great American Stick-Up that Nation Books is publishing. And, you know, these people go, “No, it’s proprietary. It’s our business. It has nothing to do with you.” And that goes for the Fed, which is supposed to be a government agency.

And so, for Chris Dodd to say, “No, we have to take power away from the Fed. We have to create a new independent agency to supervise these too big to fail institutions to make sure that they don’t go belly up and we taxpayers pay for them again,” he’s absolutely right. And people watching this, if there’s one thing they should demand from the Obama administration, is get behind the Dodd bill on taking power from the Fed and creating a new publicly accountable agency. That’s absolutely critical. Without that, we’re not going to get out of this mess, and we’re not going to prevent a future one.

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Frontline Oct. 20, 2009. The Warning:

In the midst of the 1990's bull market, one lone regulator warned about derivatives' dangers--and overnight became the enemy of some of the most powerful people in Washington.

You can watch the entire program on line here as well as additional invertiews with Brooksley Born, Gary Gensler, Michael Greenberger, Arthur Levitt and Joseph Stiglitz.

From Frontline's interview with Brooksley Born:

Q: What's the message that you're trying to spread now in the ashes of what happened in 2008 and '09?

BORN: I think we have to close the regulatory gap. ... We cannot afford as a society to go forward with an enormous unregulated market that poses this kind of danger because it’ll happen again if we don't take the appropriate steps. ... We need to take a lesson from the existing futures markets where exchange trading has been safe. As much as possible of the over-the-counter derivatives market should be traded on a regulated derivatives exchange. The transaction should be cleared on a regulated clearinghouse. There should be robust federal regulation of any remaining OTC derivatives market. And personally, I think that remaining market should be limited as much as possible to no more than the customized contracts that are needed for specific businesses to hedge particular business risks. ...

Q: If this moment passes again, the consequences are what from your perspective?

BORN: I think we will have continuing danger from these markets and that we will have repeats of the financial crisis. It may differ in details, but there will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.

Frontline also put together a video timeline of the events starting in 1987-today.

I highly recommend watching the entire hour at PBS's site, but here's one more portion I wanted to share here.

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