I saw this video from 2012 over at Digby's and it's worth re-posting.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was reacting to Loyd Blankfein's comments about how we must cut our safety nets because we can't afford them in his words. This is coming from another wealthy CEO-type that has racked in hundreds of millions of dollars of his own while accepting big bailouts from the federal government.

Here's what he said to CBS:

An interview with Lloyd Blankfein is as rare as a look inside the Goldman Sachs money machine. He showed us one of seven trading floors at his Manhattan headquarters. Goldman is one of America's most successful investment banks. It had net earnings of $4.4 billion dollars last year. When we asked Blankfein how to reduce the federal budget deficit, he went straight for the subject politicians don't want to talk about.

BLANKFEIN: You're going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people's expectations -- the entitlements and what people think that they're going to get, because it's not going to -- they're not going to get it.

PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. ... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

Here's how Bernie reacted:

Sanders: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein came to Capitol Hill this week to call for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As Congress and the White House are negotiating a year-end deficit deal, Blankfein sought to “lower people’s expectations” about their retirement and health care. He spoke with all the sympathy for someone struggling to get by on $14,000-a-year retirement that you’d expect from a Wall Street banker paid $16 million last year.

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I met Ed Rendell during the DNC in Denver back in 2008. He was very likeable and you knew after spending a few moments with him that he knows how to politic. So it's very sad to see him on MSNBC pathetically hawking the phony rich man's front group calling themselves Fix The Debt.

Rendell was on teevee yesterday pimping his take. It's very sad to think that most of the year he says he speaks for Democrats, but when our entire elderly population's well-being is at risk, he's siding with the robber baron CEOs.

In addition to his current duties as professional-liberal-even-Joe-Sixpack-can-love on MSNBC, Ballard Spahr court jester, and corporate consigliere atGreenhill & Co investment bank, Rendell is currently co-chairing the steering committee of something called The CEO Campaign to Fix the Debt—a blue-chip cabal of 130-plus plutocrats who have anted up a $43 million kitty to fund a multimedia stealth campaign/public relations offensive to convince the turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving.

Fix the Debt is pushing for radical alterations to the tax code to legalize a hundred-plus billion dollar corporate tax dodge and pass the buck onto the middle/working/underclass in the form of deep cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, all the while masquerading as a selfless crusade to save the nation from going over the [cue thunder and lightning] financial cliff. Bless their blackened hearts.

Ed is slapping the backs of all his liberal TV pals, hoping they'll come over to his side of reverse-engineered Robin Hoods.

So at this point you might be asking yourself: If the likes of GE and Honeywell are paying zero in taxes, where is Fix the Debt going to get the money to pay down the national debt? Simple. They take it from old people. On Monday, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, a Fix the Debt signatory, told CBS News:

“[Social Security] wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career … You’re going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people’s expectations of what they’re going to get, the entitlements, and what people think they’re going to get, because you’re not going to get it.”

Last year, Blankfein earned $16 million. His net worth is $450 million. Seventy-one Fix the Debt CEO signatories have at least $9 million in retirement funds, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. A dozen have in excess of $20 million to retire on. Honeywell CEO David Cote is sitting on a $78 million nest egg, which is the equivalent of a $428,000 Social Security check every month after he turns 65.

It’s Robin Hood in reverse: rolling old ladies to give to the rich. And who’s steering this pirate ship? Edward G. Rendell, a man who, when you get right down to it, isn’t really a Democrat. He just plays one on television.

Rendell has been harping on the deficit for a long time, but now he's gone too far. I have a request for all of my lefty TV hosts. The next time he goes on your show, please ask him how it feels to be playing a Democrat, and if Hollywood has been calling.

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Dee Dee Benkie, a former Bush campaign aide, was on Fox News' America Live with Heather Childers, fearmongering about their favorite topic of the holiday season: the dread Fiscal Cliff. She was demanding that President Obama actually be president instead of the "mac-daddy candidate" and lead on the fiscal issues. She was quite adamant that the Republicans needed new leadership in the House and Senate, which means that Boehner and McConnell must go. She wants Marco Rubio the earth expert to be the minority leader.

Benkie was also all over Grover Norquist, who has become the favored scapegoat for some right-wingers as they look to pass the blame around.

BENKIE: I think Grover is over too. I mean, what is the deal with this guy? He should not be running Washington. He is part of the problem and we do need to find a way to work together.

Jehmu Greene, a lefty Fox Newsie who apologized to Tucker Carlson for calling him a bow-tie wearing white boy, agreed also that we need to take away Grover Norquist's death grip on the GOP so a deal can be made. Then Dee Dee got to talk about what she really wanted to discuss: spending in Washington.

BENKIE: What we have to stop to is the spending, the spending is so terrible in D.C. The waste is unbelievable when we have so much debt. We have to address that right away.

CHILDERS: What spending cuts?

BENKIE: We've got to cut across the board. I mean, Washington D.C. is so bloated, such terrible waste, and we're broke right now as a country. We need to make sure we can take care of Americans and I don't mean in a way (inaudible) as far as all the entitlements. I mean, we take care of the people who need to be -- we need to take care of the job creators so we don't have a stranglehold on them as far as taxing them to death, and then we've got to adjust Obamacare because it's really, a lot of the businesses right now are struggling. There's so much to be worked on.

CHILDERS) John Boehner said Obamacare needs to be on the table.

GREENE: Obamacare is the law of the land ladies and let's not forget it.

CHILDERS: We'll see.

Dee Dee just throws in a sentence or two about how we have to support the middle class, but then retreats to the republican familiar position of cutting taxes for businesses. Nothing about how we should save Medicare and Medicaid from cruel and unjust cuts just to appease the business owners.

Nope, it's the non-job-creating peons who need to shoulder the sacrifice. As always.

And thus, the Republican candidate for US Senate from the great state of Florida, Ron McNeal, becomes the latest in a very long line of wingnuts to compare children who receive food stamps to hungry animals. Way to keep it classy, Ron.

It's just amazing how much contempt Republicans have for their fellow Americans.

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This is the world we live in now, folks. One where conservatives think students borrowing money from the government is an "entitlement." Back in the days when people were sane, we used to believe paying for our young people to be educated was an obligation of a healthy democracy. Now, it's all up to kids who are expected not only to pay for their college educations, but to bury themselves deep in debt to do it. Listen to George Will's arrogant pronouncement:

TAPPER: And, George, you and I were talking about this earlier. You think that we're witnessing the birth of a new entitlement, with the president's push on -- on student loans.

WILL: Well, look what happened. It's a slow-motion, almost absentminded creation of a new entitlement, exactly at the moment when the entitlement state is buckling under the weight of its already existing commitments. Five years ago, Congress says, well, let's cut in half the interest rate on certain student loans, from 6.8 to 3.4.

Wow, no brownie points to Jake Tapper for just repeating that nonsense without so much as a raised eyebrow. Entitlement? Really?

From the time our kids are in kindergarten, parents, teachers and society alike hammer home the value of their education. By the time they're freshmen in high school, they're expected to know what they want their career to be and forge a pathway to college. If they want to get into something other than a community college, they're told to stress out for the next four years, take all the AP or IB classes they can, volunteer in their communities, participate in extracurricular activities, work a part-time job, and make sure they maintain their straight As in the process.

Those who actually manage to do these things are then rewarded with acceptances to the colleges of their choice and immediately presented with a bill for anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 per year. If they're really lucky, they might win one of the few scholarships available to shave some of the pain off that bottom line, but there are no guarantees.

If they're not, they're told they can borrow around $5,000 per year from the government, and if their parents qualify, mom and dad can borrow about $25,000 from the government to send them to that school. Here's what happens: Those kids who we pushed to achieve and qualify for those public and sometimes private university educations land in community college for a couple of years while they try to save enough money to go to a 4-year university and not go broke in the process.

If they choose the 4-year university/tuition loan route, they leave school with debt, hazy job prospects, and the sense that everything they just worked toward was a farce. Which it will be, if Will has his way.

TAPPER: 6.8 to 3.4, yeah.

WILL: We'll do it, they said, temporarily. Well, now we're coming up against the expiration of that, and they're saying, well, let's temporarily move it on yet again.

TAPPER: But Romney supports that, as well.

WILL: I understand that. And that's why this is a bipartisan example of how entitlements -- because once you do this, once you extend it again, you'll never go back to 3.4 percent.

SMILEY: But when -- but when -- but when student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt, and we want to label that an entitlement, we don't call corporate welfare an entitlement. I just -- I don't see...

WILL: Of the two-thirds of the people who graduate from college with debt, the average debt is something under $30,000 total. That is just about the one-year difference in earnings between a college graduate and a high school graduate. We're talking about a pittance a month (ph).

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: But, George -- but if we give interest-free loans to bankers, why not interest-free loans to students, George?

WILL: Let's not give interest-free loans to anyone.

At last! Something I agree with George Will about. Truly, let's not give interest-free loans to the banks, and let's not make students and their struggling middle class parents break under the weight of student loans. Instead, let's recognize that this country has always believed that educating our children is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy, and start paying for it again the way we have in the past.

The reason Will and his ilk argue against student loan interest rate breaks is simple: They want to control which students have access to a college education. Their preferred flavor of student is a conservative one. They truly believe educating those librul ingrates who show up at Occupy protests or dare to question the status quo are unworthy of an education. If conservatives could choose which students got a college education, they'd be the very compliant sons and daughters of fine, upstanding, churchgoing types. The ones who qualify for Koch scholarships.

The ones like people in my family who protested the Vietnam war, went to college in the days when the University of California was tuition-free, and then dedicated themselves to public service for their entire career? They need not apply if their voter registration says "Democrat."

I'm completely serious about the need to return to the values that made this country great, and those values include assuming the costs for educating our young people and making sure they have the finest education possible in order to innovate, create, and shape a new, better, more equal world. Enough of the philosophy of educating only caretakers for the oligarchs.

Not only should there be no interest charged on student loans, there should be no student loans. It's as simple as that.

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In the election of 1928, the Republican Party of Herbert Hoover promised voters "a chicken in every pot and a car in every backyard." (We all know how that turned out.) Now, Mitt Romney is pledging that "If I'm President" every college graduate will be guaranteed a job, Iran will have no nuclear weapons and the United States will dominate the 21st century. And when Romney isn't making fantastic promises about what he'll do when he gets to the White House, he's slandering the current occupant, Barack Obama.

"I Won't Let Iran Get Nukes"

Governor Romney's guarantees start with Iran and its nuclear program. In a November 10, 2011 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Romney pledged, "I won't let Iran get nukes." Or as he put it 10 days earlier during a GOP national security debate:

"If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. If you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon."

As to how he'll ensure that outcome, Romney explained that "If you want peace, prepare for war." And despite occasionally acknowledging the complexity of a strike against Iran and even the questionable possibility of success, Romney told the Wall Street Journal this weekend how he would get it done:

So what would he do about it? "I do not have a top secret security clearance at this stage to be able to define precisely what kinds of actions we could take." But he adds that "the range includes something of a blockade nature, to something of a surgical strike nature, to something of a decapitate the regime nature, to eliminate the military threat of Iran altogether."

No U.S. Decline in Romney's "American Century"

Romney's promise to "eliminate the military threat of Iran altogether" is just part of his larger assurance that the 21st century will be another "American Century." Pretending that the rise of India, China and Brazil doesn't inevitably entail the relative loss of U.S. power and influence, Romney announced in his October address at The Citadel:

"This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world...As President of the United States, I will devote myself to an American Century. And I will never, ever apologize for America."

Not content to rest there, Romney accused President Obama of "waving the white flag of surrender":

"An eloquently justified surrender of world leadership is still surrender.

I will not surrender America's role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President.

You have that President today."

Two months later, Mitt Romney repackaged his promise and his slander at the December 15 Republican debate in Sioux City, Iowa:

"Our president thinks America is in decline. It is if he's president. It's not if I'm president. This is going to be an American century."

As for Romney's charge that President Obama "went around the world and apologized for America," the Washington Post Fact Checker deemed it a Four-Pinocchio lie.

A Job for Every College Graduate

At an event in New Hampshire last week, Governor Romney's pandering went from the sublime to the ridiculous. There, Mitt pledged President Romney would deliver full-employment for all American college graduates:

"What I can promise you is this -- when you get out of college, if I'm president you'll have a job. If President Obama is reelected, you will not be able to get a job. That's the reason I will hopefully get young people who are in college is to say, You know what, I understand what it takes to get jobs in America."

As the record shows, not so much. After all, as the Los Angeles Times recently documented, Romney's "Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers." That's why FactCheck.org, the Washington Post Fact Checker and Fortune all refused to vouch for Romney's claim that "In those hundreds of businesses we invested in, tens of thousands of jobs net-net were created."

Obama "Has Not Created Any New Jobs"

If Mitt Romney can't prove his boasts about his own job creation record, neither can he justify his blatant lie about President Obama's:

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Even before all the votes were counted and President Obama declared the winner Tuesday night, Bill O’Reilly sneered on Fox News that minorities who “want stuff” were President Obama’s base and therefore responsible for his re-election. It’s a meme that has been repeated all over Fox News lately. It also just happens to be reminiscent of Mitt Romney’s infamous 47% comments. This morning, without citing a single statistic to back it up, Fox & Friends suggested that people who voted for “Obama phones” are selfishly bankrupting the country. Gee, who might that be?

As he stood before a chart showing, “U.S. households getting gov’t benefits,” Steve Doocy said, “Today, nearly half of all American households receive some form of government welfare. That’s up from 30% in 1980 (when Saint You-Know-Who was elected president).”

Doocy asked, “So is our country in a cultural decline?” Any viewer in doubt would have been tipped off by the large banner reading: AMERICA IN DECLINE: WHAT GOV’T HANDOUTS SAY ABOUT THE COUNTRY.

For more “answers,” Doocy turned to Mark Steyn, the guy who smeared Virginia Tech shooting victims as being part of a “culture of passivity” and has a remarkable gift for making the wrong predictions.

Steyn said he emigrated to the U.S. to get “a piece of” The American Dream but that just as he arrived, those welfare queens stole it:

The U.S. “adopt(ed) the policies that have brought the rest of the western world to ruin. When the takers are able to outvote the makers, you are a nation in steep decline. In this case, it’s one thing to talk about redistribution of wealth but we’re actually redistributing from the future to the present. We are borrowing money that is yet to be earned by generations yet to be born, in order to bribe people with the Obama phones and all the rest right here and now in the present tense. That’s very immoral apart from anything else.

…There’s nothing compassionate and communitarian about saying, as they do in Greece, ‘I got mine and I don’t care if it bankrupts the state.’ Just keep the checks coming until I’m dead. And basically, on Tuesday, we had a U.S. electorate that voted for pretty much the same thing… In the end, you’ll pay for that Obamaphone, either by paying off (each person’s) share of the debt or by total societal collapse.”

Doocy was in complete agreement, murmuring, “right” and “sure,” as Steyn spoke. After showing another graphic that depicted how “gigantic” entitlement spending is now, Doocy, "wondered" if such growth is because people are gaming the system. He said, “There’s no doubt” that some people need Social Security and other programs. But, he added, “The number has just gotten so big, you gotta figure some of the people are simply gaming the system. And perhaps they could work but choose not to because many feel, ‘You know, why go out there and do a job for $45,000 a year when the government would essentially give me about the same. I can watch TV.”

Well, maybe Doocy has “gotta figure” that but he works for an outfit that calls itself a national news network and they've surely got the resources to uncover the facts before one of its hosts slimed a lot of needy Americans. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, however, did the math that Doocy didn’t. They found that Contrary to "Entitlement Society" Rhetoric, Over Nine-Tenths of Entitlement Benefits Go to Elderly, Disabled, or Working Households. So I’ve gotta figure that Doocy deliberately chose not to find the truth.

I’m gonna figure Steyn didn’t either. He said, “You can go to the local strip joint and pay for a lap dance with food stamps.”

“I’m going to have to just trust you on that,” Doocy said, only half joking.

It is a well-known fact that President Obama wants a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, a deal that would reduce future deficits both by raising tax revenues and cutting spending, including on the so-called “entitlement programs”. He has offered this idea up repeatedly to Speaker Boehner and other Republican leaders in the 2011 debt ceiling talks and in the 2012 fiscal cliff debate, and media reports suggest that he is discussing the idea again with Republicans in the lead-up to the next perils of Pauline budget crisis in that is only a few weeks off.

Democrats in the progressive wing of the party (of which, full disclosure, I am a card-carrying member) think the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicare, and/or Medicaid benefits is terrible public policy because senior citizens who can least afford it will be badly hurt, and we have been working hard to convince the President to back away from this offer. This may be difficult to do, though, as the President has some strong (wrong, in my judgment, but compelling to the President’s political and legislative team) political reasons for wanting to do this grand bargain. But the politics of this deal are very different for the rest of the party, and it may well be that progressives can win over a lot more of those Democrats than conventional wisdom currently expects.

The Obama team’s logic is that they are sick and tired, understandably, of Republicans wanting to make every single issue, every policy debate, about the deficit issue, and they don’t want our country to keep lurching from fiscal crisis to fiscal crisis as Republicans continue to look for “leverage” to force more cuts. And the White House, to their credit, is eager to move on to other issues that will move the country forward, such as immigration reform and gun safety issues. They believe that if they can finally close the deal and get the grand bargain they have been searching for, they will be on strong political ground to say, “Hey, we've already done something big on that, it’s time to move on.”

Now I happen to believe their logic is wrong on the politics of the issue, as Republicans’ strongest political issue by far is the deficit, and they will never give it up-- no matter what happens, they will keep demanding more and more cuts, and the deficit hawks in the media and well-funded groups like Fix The Debt will back them up. But even if you were to grant that the White House was right on the politics of this issue for them, for Democratic members of Congress the politics on this issue, the politics are completely different.

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