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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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As Current TV's John Fugelsang, filling in for Eliot Spitzer this week reminded us, when average citizens break the law we have to pay fines that might actually act as a deterrent or face jail time and when these bankers and Wall Street commit crimes, they get a slap on the wrist compared to the profit they already extracted and give up their bonuses.

As John noted, you don't go to prison for Wall Street crimes, but you can't say the same for those protesting Wall Street. And he's right, if they cracked down on these bankers stealing the same way they have park zoning laws, there would be no need for an Occupy Wall Street movement.

Barclays to pay more than $450 million in interest-rate settlement:

Barclays Bank PLC has agreed to pay more than $450 million to settle charges it attempted to manipulate key interest rates.

The London-based investment bank announced settlements with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the British Financial Services Authority.

Investigators found the bank manipulated the London InterBank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate, or EURIBOR, benchmark interest rates used in the world's financial markets. [...]

Under the settlements, Barclays would pay the Justice Department a $160-million penalty and cooperate with its ongoing investigation to avoid prosecution. The bank would pay the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission $200 million, with the rest going to the British Financial Services Authority.

In a statement, Barclays Chief Executive Bob Diamond said he and other top executives would forgo bonuses this year.

“The events which gave rise to today’s resolutions relate to past actions which fell well short of the standards to which Barclays aspires in the conduct of its business," Diamond said. "When we identified those issues, we took prompt action to fix them and cooperated extensively and proactively with the authorities. Nothing is more important to me than having a strong culture at Barclays; I am sorry that some people acted in a manner not consistent with our culture and values."

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After the news that JP Morgan Chase lost $2 billion on high-risk credit derivatives this week, as usual, Sen. Bernie Sanders was one of our few voices of reason out there about what to do with these still too-big-to-fail institutions -- break them up.

From the Senator's press releases: Break Up Big Banks:

J.P. Morgan Chase revealed that its in-house trading operation lost $2 billion in the past six weeks. "The debacle at J.P. Morgan Chase reaffirms my view that the largest six banks in this country, including J.P. Morgan Chase, which have assets equivalent to two-thirds of our GDP, must be broken up. This is important in order to bring more competition into the financial marketplace and to prevent another ‘too-big-to-fail' bailout," Sen. Bernie Sanders said. "At a time when 23 million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed, huge financial institutions should not be involved in ‘making wagers or high-stake bets.' They should be investing in the productive economy creating jobs and improving our standard of living."

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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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Rick Sanchez seems shocked to learn that Wall Street's lobbyists out numbered the poor unpaid lobbyists working on the side of financial reform 1800 to 60. No big shock here. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi talked to Sanchez about that and the problems with the financial regulation reform bill that would be expected after that amount of intense lobbying on the Congress, such as not addressing to too big to fail and the derivatives market.

SANCHEZ: Now to this. You know how I feel as we have these conversations every day, and we talk about a lot of different things, you and I. But you know how I feel about conventional wisdom. As far as I'm concerned more often than not, you know, a quarter will buy you a blow pop. Conventional wisdom often will get you very little. More often than not it's more like conventional idiocy, as a matter of fact.

I want to bring in somebody who often tackles conventional wisdom as well. As you know, he works for the "Rolling Stone," Matt Taibbi. And he's writing now about this new financial reform that all of us have been reading and writing about that most have believed is the right thing to do that will salvage the situation on Wall Street and never let us have to go through what we've been through before, meaning what happened two and a half years ago.

He joins us now, and let me start -- let me start with this -- general question to you, Matt. If what they're doing is undoing the problem that led us to the meltdown itself, you know, putting back in the regulations that we needed, putting back in some of the laws we've gotten rid of, isn't that a good thing?

TAIBBI: It is, but they just didn't do enough of that. They really address add few things. There are some good things in this bill, but the really, really key thing, the big problems they left unaddressed or they did a half-measures or quarter measures, and they didn't really tackle the problems head-on.

The key things are too big to fail, they didn't really fix that problem, and they didn't really solve the derivatives issue very well.

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After telling Norah O'Donnell how terrible it would be if we regulated the derivatives market, Judd Gregg and Pat Buchanan perform the exact exercise that Paul Krugman describes here:

Lately, financial news has been dominated by reports from Greece and other nations on the European periphery. And rightly so.But I’ve been troubled by reporting that focuses almost exclusively on European debts and deficits, conveying the impression that it’s all about government profligacy — and feeding into the narrative of our own deficit hawks, who want to slash spending even in the face of mass unemployment, and hold Greece up as an object lesson of what will happen if we don’t.

For the truth is that lack of fiscal discipline isn’t the whole, or even the main, source of Europe’s troubles — not even in Greece, whose government was indeed irresponsible (and hid its irresponsibility with creative accounting).

No, the real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment. Read on...

Of course Gregg isn't going to talk about how the derivatives market is partially responsible for the mess Greece is in now.

Wall St. Helped to Mask Debt Fueling Europe’s Crisis:

Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts.

...Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

...As in the American subprime crisis and the implosion of the American International Group, financial derivatives played a role in the run-up of Greek debt. Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere.

Heaven forbid we might get any real reform that reigns these markets in. No, he'd rather tell us we need to cut social programs instead of regulating the financial institutions that almost took down our entire economy and helped put Greece in the mess they are now.

Here's Megan Carpenter from The Washington Independent on Russia Today explaining what Goldman Sachs did.

Goldman Sachs tricky derivatives trades may have masked the Greek debt just long enough to hurt all of us again. Goldman Sachs made up an exchange rate that allowed the Greeks to look as though they were only engaging in a currency swap when, in effect, they were getting more than a billion more than they should have from the trades in credit. Its likely that Goldman made a killing on the commissions for the swaps, and then sold the swaps to a Greek bank for even higher profits.

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Rick Sanchez talked to CNN's Ali Velshi and Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi about the Senate hearings in Carl Levin's subcommittee on the Goldman Sachs fraud case brought by the SEC. Matt made this great point on why the derivatives market needs to be regulated:

TAIBBI: No, I was just saying, with the derivatives, at the very least, I think we have to have a system where all of these things are traded and cleared on regulated, open exchanges.

Imagine what the stock market would look like if nobody knew what the price of any of the stocks were? And that's kind of exactly where we are with derivatives right now.

...This stuff is all traded in the dark and the big whales in the ocean, like Goldman Sachs, are the ones that make all the money because they have more information than everybody else.

And that's a situation that we really need to correct here. And that's what this bill hopefully is going to address.

I hope so too but I'm not holding my breath. The Republicans and their buddy Ben Nelson seemed determined to slow walk this just like they did the health care bill.

Taibbi has a new article at Rolling Stone -- The Feds vs. Goldman which Sanchez mentioned during the interview.

On the day the Securities and Exchange Commission filed suit against Goldman Sachs for securities fraud, shares in the company plunged 12.8 percent, closing at $160.70. The market, it seemed, was finally passing judgment on a decade of high-stakes Wall Street scammery that left America threatening Nigeria, Indonesia and Belarus on the list of the world's most corrupt economies.

A few days later, Goldman announced its first-quarter numbers. Profits were up 91 percent, to a staggering $3.4 billion.

Compensation and bonuses soared to $5.5 billion, up from $4.7 billion in the first quarter of 2009. Battered in the press, Goldman was raking up on the bottom line. So investors once again leapt into Goldman's arms, pushing the stock as high as $166.50, not far from where it was even before news of the SEC suit broke.

Goldman isn't dead – far from it. But this new SEC suit officially places it at the center of a raging national discussion about the hopelessly f**ked state of American business ethics. As a halting, first-step attempt at financial regulatory reform makes its way toward a vote in the Senate, the government has finally thrown open the door and let a few of the rottener skeletons tumble out. Read on...

Transcript of the CNN interview below the fold.

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More "too big to fail" double-speak from Sen. Keating Five McCain. This man has absolutely credibility whatsoever talking about financial reform given his history on the topic as I pointed out after Fox had him on again for the Sunday bobble head show.

McCain doesn't want these industries to be "too big to fail", and now he's claiming we should have a wall between "traditional banking and investment". He also thinks there should be some "oversight" but never says who should be doing it and he says if "taxpayers dollars are not at risk we should let them do what they want". So in other words, he still doesn't want any regulation and if these financial institutions come crashing down again, just let the entire economy explode. When he tells us how he plans to get them unscrambled from the funds in those traditional banks without regulating them, I hope he lets us know. I'm not holding my breath since he helped tear down the walls in the first place he now says should be put back up.

Greta asks him if he thinks we're "using our criminal code enough". McCain agrees and says "there should be more criminal enforcement of some of these things that we have seen take place". Of course McCain doesn't say which things that have taken place should be prosecuted. I'm sure McCain knows all too well that far too many of the activities that took down our financial markets unfortunately are not illegal because they were deregulated and they let the financial markets turn into the Wild West with his help. I do hope they prosecute or sue over the activities that were illegal, but so far we've seen little of that.

He then gets asked to comment on whether he agrees with Blanche Lincoln's proposal for more transparency of the derivatives market and he doesn't answer and says we need more transparency from the Fed. Well, that's true, but I doubt he'll supporting Lincoln's amendment.

It really gets old seeing this man be allowed to come on the television and talk out of both sides of his mouth so badly and never get called on it.

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Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE) appeared on C-SPAN's Washington Journal April 15th and discussed the financial reform bill which has reached an impasse due to Mitch McConnell's latest stunt. As Pat Garofalo at Think Progress' Wonk Room noted, this is the same guy who was saying this back in January -- Sen. Johanns: Consumer Protection Agency Constitutes A ‘Power Grab Over The Nation’s Economy’:

I noted earlier in the week that the Chamber of Commerce was ginning up opposition to the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) by conducting a “fly-in” of small business owners, who were then led to pre-arranged anti-CFPA meetings. The false premise of the Chamber’s theatrics was that the CFPA would be harmful to small businesses.

One of the events that the Chamber organized was a discussion with Sen. Mike Johanns (R-NE), who made it clear that he doesn’t think much of the CFPA:

Johanns outlined his opposition to the CFPA proposal, arguing it would drive up costs on consumers and create an agency with a “potential power grab over the nation’s economy.”

Johanns is vastly overstating what the CFPA will be able to do, but he is right in the sense that the CFPA is meant to grab a bit of power for consumers away from the financial services industry and the regulators which it dominates. Right now, all the power in the regulatory structure lies with the banks, whose fees the regulators count on in order to survive. Giving some power back to consumers and protecting them from predatory practices is an okay shift in my book. Read on...

Every single caller on C-SPAN's Washington Journal was not happy about what's happened with the banks and he actually was asked a lot of really good questions (which is unusual because Washington Journal normally has a lot of callers that sound like they've been watching way too much Fox News). I know that politicians have the art of double speak down pat, but the Senator really took the cake with the responses he gave on the need for some regulation of the financial markets. He talked out of both sides of his mouth so badly it was pretty astounding, but then that seems to be the norm these days for Republicans.

You can watch the second half of the call-in segment below the fold.

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Sadly, Bill Moyers Journal is going off the air at the end of the month. This was one of Moyers' better segments to finish off his return to PBS after some time in exile, which started with his documentary that is a must see from back in April of 2007, Buying the War. If you've never seen it, go watch it on line at Moyers' site here.

Bill sat down with Simon Johnson and James Kwak to talk about Wall Street and their dirty dealings that have yet to be reformed, why we need to get rid of "too big to fail", whether the reforms being considered by the Congress now are strong enough and what we need to do to keep from having another collapse of our financial system.

Sadly there's a huge hole that is about to be left in what's left of real journalism in our country with Moyers leaving the airways. Mr. Moyers, you will be missed. He did say that he's not going away all together thankfully.

The JOURNAL on-air will be coming to an end on April 30th but the conversation continues online and on our blog. We'll be posting commentary, features and selections from the Moyers Digital Archive. Stay in touch even after we're off the air at this address and through RSS feeds, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our newsletter. Sign up below. We look forward to hearing from you.

In the mean time, Bill was still taking on the establishment here and talking about solutions for some meaningful reform to our financial systems. The panel agreed that what the Democrats are doing now is watered down, but better than nothing. Of course the Republicans just want to obstruct for political gain. I think this is one issue that as Bill noted in the beginning of the segment that there should be some agreement on from all sides of the aisle.

I really don't understand and this is not just from watching this segment, why more businesses aren't yelling bloody murder about Wall Street's tactics since they really seem to have no one's best interest at heart besides their own and the short term gain of a few who are placing their bets against the American dream, the American people, and American businesses. These people are nothing but leaches drawing blood from the rest of society, and something needs to be done to stop them and yesterday would not be too soon.

You can read the transcript of the entire segment here and watch the entire video here.

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