Here's some stuff we aren't hearing on Meet the Press:

Correcting the spin of "Fix The Debt" shills, economist, professor, and author of "Capitalism Hits The Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It", Dr. Richard Wolff, who was fresh off his debut appearance on Bill Moyers, sits down with me for a quick talk about the sequester in the context of our ailing economic system. In this, the first of a four-part series, he breaks down the sequester and discusses what he calls a 'hustle' being perpetrated by the Obama Administration on the American people.

Stay tuned here on Crooks and Liars for Part 2, or subscribe to Absurdity Today's Youtube Channel here.

We've written many, many times about Fix the Debt's backers and the billionaires who created it along with the false flag over the debt, and now The Nation has dedicated an entire issue to this astroturf organization.

Mary Bottari's exposé names the 'puppet populists':

Behind this strategy are no fewer than 127 CEOs and even more “statesmen” pushing for a “grand bargain” to draw up an austerity budget by July 4. With many firms kicking in
 $1 million each on top of Peterson’s $5 million in seed money, this latest incarnation of the Peterson message machine must be taken seriously.

Fix the Debt has hired such powerful PR firms and lobby shops as the DCI Group, the Glover Park Group, the Dewey Square Group and Proof Integrated Communications, a unit of the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, which was the go-to firm for Big Tobacco. In the run-up to the “fiscal cliff,” these firms launched a flashy $3 million media campaign, blanketing Capitol Hill with TV, Internet, Metro and newspaper ads featuring slogans like “Got Debt?” and “Just Fix It.”

Fix the Debt’s stable of CEOs are a PR flack’s dream. Not only are they able to get meetings with everyone from John Boehner to President Obama; they can flood cable news with laughable messages of “shared sacrifice” and be treated with fawning respect. Fix the Debt’s David Cote, CEO of Honeywell, “brings serious financial muscle to the table” when he pushes “market credible solutions,” chirps The Wall Street Journal. There is no mention that Cote is a tax-dodging, pension-skimping hypocrite: Honeywell has a negative average tax rate of -0.7 percent and underfunds its employee pensions by -$2.8 billion, making Cote’s workers even more reliant on Social Security.

Creating a crisis is key. “America is more than $16 trillion in debt,” Fix the Debt’s website warns, calling it “a catastrophic threat to our security and economy.” The CEOs echo this warning, writing to Congress of the “serious threat to the economic well-being and security of the United States.”

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Let's not kid ourselves: MSNBC is only the "liberal" network because the executives thought it was a good market niche. But if they're going to sell themselves as such, it's time that viewers got a little more demanding about what the cable network actually delivers.

So I was thinking about this: When Ed Rendell appears on MSNBC to shill for Fix The Debt, he gets paid -- as an MSNBC contributor. Let's presume he's also getting paid by the Pete Peterson front (either directly or through other career-related benefits) and the Greenhill & Co. investment bank, while also serving as special counsel to Ballard Spahr, a law firm specializing in public/private partnerships (i.e. privatization of public assets).

Ed loves to present himself as just an "aw shucks", down-to-earth kinda guy, but he's not. He's not even a real Democrat anymore, let alone a liberal. He's nothing but a member of the 1%, and that's whose interests he serves.

Now, I'm not going to go after Ed for selling out. We always knew he would, it's not a surprise. It's MSNBC who muddies the ethical lines here, by bringing on a salesman and then paying him as if he's an honest broker! Why, hello there, massive conflicts of journalistic interest!

Look, we know the corporate ownership of NBC/Kabletown is actually in full agreement with the agenda pushed by Fast Eddie. But we can at least make them follow the rules.

And the next time he appears on Hardball, or Rachel Maddow, you might want to let MSNBC know that you're not happy about it.

(h/t Video Cafe for the vid) The corporatist elites have been relentless in their attacks on earned benefits for Americans and are trying to seize upon Disaster Capitalism tactics to try and swindle the 98% out of needed entitlements using the mask of bipartisanship. The loathsome Ed Rendell was back on MSNBC and continued his assault on working-class Americans. He even went as far as to throw support for the election of more Republicans like Steve Latourette, who wanted to cut government spending tremendously.

RENDELL: The people want us to get together and do something. That's why I was sad to see Steve not run for re-election because we need Republicans, we need more Republicans who are going to stand in there and say, spending is the issue, but we gotta have reasonable revenue to come in into the mix and we got to look at everything when it comes to spending. Defense cannot be a sacred cow, we've got to look at everything and we've got to have legitimate entitlement reform. .

And on our side Mike, we've gotta do this. I was on The Cycle, one of MSNBC's shows and I suggested that raising the age in Medicare, given the fact that we're living longer, isn't a necessarily bad idea. The three progressive hosts, you would have thought that I'd proposed treason to the American government.

It is evil for a political hack to demand retirement ages go up and fewer benefits be paid to the many, many millions of people who need them to survive while he collects a fat check to sit on TV and spew bought-and-paid-for propaganda. In my last post, I labeled him a traitor -- so he obviously took it to heart.

RENDELL: And he has to also deliver a message to Democrats that we're going to have to compromise. Now give the President credit, he said he would consider chained CPI, he said back in 2011 that he would raise the age limit on Medicare with carve-outs. Those are things he's going to have to deliver if we're going to get Republicans to go along with more increased revenue and doing something finally on the debt. But only one person can take this on his shoulders and cross the finish line and that's the President of the United States. He has to lead.

No ifs ands or buts about it. He has to lead. And boy, I’d love the whole Congress, this new Congress and the President, they should all go see a screening of Lincoln together, because Abraham Lincoln led on the 13th Amendment when everybody on both sides told him he was crazy.

My God, he even used a slavery fight analogy from the movie Lincoln to justify his wickedness.
MSNBC's Steve Kornacki was so shocked by what he heard by this supposed lefty that he forced him to clarify his remarks.

KORNACKI: Well, Governor is... I heard you right there, are you saying you would be okay with raising the Medicare eligibility age?

RENDELL: With proper carve-outs for people who are, you know, have health challenges, absolutely

WTF does he mean by carve-outs and health challenges? Geeze, I couldn't transcribe any more from this Benedict Arnold traitor in a suit.

Latourette's ego is so big that he says Rendell and himself would solve all our problems in a week and a half if he was allowed to. Rendell goes on to support the idea that it's fine if more reasonable and conservative Republicans are elected to Congress. Did it ever cross his mind to maybe mention that electing many more progressive Democratic politicians would be the best solution to the crisis?

Rendell: Look, even if it means there are a few more Republicans in the Senate and the Congress, if they're reasonable Republicans who are moderate-conservative then that's a good prescription for America.

Republicans holding the House hostage isn't enough for Rendell, he wants a few more, just in case their majority isn't strong enough -- and wants to add a couple more in the Senate, which would give R's one-party rule. Ed Rendell, a major league embarrassment!

As billionaires go, Pete Peterson is certainly not one of the wingnut billionaires by any stretch. But if our criteria for evaluating philanthropy is wingnuttery, we're surely lost in a vortex of our own making. Start with this: Peter G. Peterson was a Republican, just like his pal Mike Bloomberg. Not just any Republican, either. A Republican who served under Richard Nixon. And now he is a deficit hawk, which means his efforts support the right wing effort to undermine social insurance while lifting up corporate interests.

Take the latest Peterson PR campaign, Fix the Debt. The Institute for Policy Studies released a report last month about the billionaire CEO coalition standing behind the effort, showing it to be a Trojan Horse created to serve corporate interests. Among their findings:

• The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.” Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
• The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
• Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

So you see, the "Fix the Debt" effort isn't quite as non/bi-partisan as you might think, nor is it intended to serve progressive interests. But wait, there's more:

The hypocrisy was stunning. We documented, for example, how many of the campaign’s leaders had contributed massively to the national debt through tax-dodging tricks. Twenty-four of them had even paid their CEOs more in 2011 than their firms paid in corporate income taxes. We also calculated that the average Fix the Debt CEO calling for cuts to Social Security themselves had pension assets of $12 million, enough to garner a $65,000 monthly retirement check starting at age 65.

So this is the group who is calling for Social Security checks to be reduced and Medicare eligibility age to be moved up to age 67. A group of people who think our national debt is so serious, so utterly doom-ridden, they're fearmongering even while they set up their fat pensions and healthcare plans for themselves.

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Here at C&L, I and a few others been bashing MSNBC and demanding that Ed Rendell be kicked off for impersonating a Democrat. He shouldn't be allowed to go on the air since he joined up with a gang of rich, arrogant scumbags, fronting for a group called Fix The Debt. They are demanding that working class Americans and seniors pay for the federal deficit that the wealthy elites on Wall Street created by having their social safety nets gutted. So when Susie says Rendell is no liberal, she's absolutely right!

Apparently, MSNBC hasn't heeded our message and put this vacuous fool back on the teevee. Listen to his moronic rant on what the President should be doing about the federal debt so conservatives can screw most of the people in America because they refuse to deal in reality.

RENDELL: And he has to also deliver a message to Democrats that we're going to have to compromise. Now give the President credit, he said he would consider chained CPI, he said back in 2011 that he would raise the age limit on Medicare with carve-outs. Those are things he's going to have to deliver if we're going to get Republicans to go along with more increased revenue and doing something finally on the debt. But only one person can take this on his shoulders and cross the finish line and that's the President of the United States. He has to lead.

Which does Rendell sound more like? A) Liberal; B) Democrat or C) Fox News Republican from the House of Representatives? C is the correct answer.

Rendell: No ifs ands or buts about it. He has to lead. And boy, I’d love the whole Congress, this new Congress and the President, they should all go see a screening of Lincoln together, because Abraham Lincoln led on the 13th Amendment when everybody on both sides told him he was crazy.

My God, he even used a slavery fight analogy from the movie Lincoln to justify his wickedness.
MSNBC's Steve Kornacki was so shocked by what he heard by this supposed lefty that he forced him to clarify his remarks.

Kornacki: Well, Governor is I heard you right there, are you saying you would be okay with raising the Medicare eligibility age?

Rendell: With proper carve-outs for people who are, you know, have health challenges, absolutely.

He mumbles this response because he knows he's shillin' for the billionaires and sounds like a Larry Kudlow wannabe to people of the left. WTF does he mean by carve-outs and health challenges? Geez, I couldn't transcribe any more from this Benedict Arnold traitor in a suit.

Wendell Potter explained why the "raise the age" solution really isn't with this great piece. Dean Baker describes the chained CPI for you as well.

Dylan Matthews writes this about the con game being played on Social Security with chained CPI.

All told, chained CPI raises average taxes by about 0.19 percent of income. So, taken all together, it’s basically a big (5 percent over 12 years; more, if you take a longer view) across-the-board cut in Social Security benefits paired with a 0.19 percent income surtax. You don’t hear a lot of politicians calling for the drastic slashing of Social Security benefits and an across-the-board tax increase that disproportionately hits low earners. But that’s what they’re sneakily doing when they talk about chained CPI.

That’s why watchdog groups like the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities argue that the only fair way to do chained CPI would be to pair it with an increase in Social Security benefits, and to exempt Supplemental Security Income, which provides support for impoverished elderly, disabled and blind people. Otherwise, it’s just a typical “raise taxes, cut benefits” plan, and an arguably regressive one at that.

Most of us fought for President Obama to get his second term, but none of us fought for cuts to the social safety net programs as part of the bargain. Ed Rendell gets paid to shill against all of us of the working class who fought for Obama to get reelected.

We need a lot more actions like this to remind our elite politicians exactly who has the real power, and what they need to do if they want to get reelected:

Ohio Senator Rob Portman (R) was one of a handful of Washington, D.C lawmakers and policy experts invited to participate in a panel discussion on the fiscal cliff on Tuesday morning, but his prepared remarks were temporarily derailed by about a dozen protesters who stood up, one at a time, to confront Portman over his support for the Republican plan to cut billions from social programs and entitlements that millions of low-income and middle class Americans rely on.

For five minutes, individuals scattered throughout the audience interrupted Portman to ask him not to cut programs like Medicare and Social Security or spending on teachers and other public employees. Several of them identified themselves as his constituents, to which Portman responded by promising them an audience following his remarks. The confrontations, though coordinated, harkened back to last spring, when Republicans returned home to their districts only to find themselves face to face with angry voters who voiced their displeasure at the Republicans’ budget plan of deep cuts and no increases in revenue.

Portman was invited to speak by a group calling itself “Fix The Debt,” a collection of corporate CEOs who are advocating cuts to entitlement programs while simultaneously pushing for more than $100 billion in tax breaks for themselves and their companies.

Things only got more tense once the protestors were escorted from the room. The cameraman captured Ed Haislmaier, a senior research fellow from the Heritage Foundation, shouting angrily at the crowd, and it appears that another individual tried to grab the camera before the footage cuts off.

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.

No wonder conservatives hate public education. It makes it so damn easy to see what they're up to when you know how to do simple arithmetic. Imagine having the audacity to say Social Security is too generous when you're pillaging your own employee pension fund. They're pretty consistent that way! With Pete Peterson behind them, all they have to do is show up and say their lines, and in exchange, Peterson will fund ALEC's legislative wish list. Corporate synergy!

WASHINGTON -- A group of high-profile corporate CEOs are lobbying Capitol Hill this week to put Social Security and Medicare cuts at the forefront of deficit reduction negotiations. Their own retirement funds, however, are secure: The coalition includes 54 CEOs who have amassed combined pension assets of more than $649 million from their companies' executive retirement plans, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, titled "A Pension Deficit Disorder: The Massive CEO Retirement Funds and Underfunded Worker Pensions at Firms Pushing Social Security Cuts."

The CEOs' employees are much less secure in their retirement than the CEOs. According to the report, less than 60 percent of the 71 public companies offer pension plans for their employees. Of the 41 companies that do, 39 of them haven't contributed enough to their workers' pension funds to enable the plans to pay out their anticipated obligations. Among the companies with employee pension funds in the red, these deficits exceed $100 billion.

The CEOs are among 71 chief executives of publicly traded companies who belong to the Fiscal Leadership Council of the influential Campaign to Fix the Debt, a group which has raised more than $60 million to lobby for a debt deal driven by cuts to "entitlements." The coalition will meet Wednesday morning with congressional leaders, according to sources familiar with the group's lobbying activities. The group, funded in part by former private equity magnate Peter G. Peterson's foundation, has pledged to push for austerity during the lame duck congressional session, and beyond. Peterson has spent nearly half a billion dollars in recent years pushing his austerity agenda.

As the debate heats up over whether to cut Medicare, Social Security or Medicaid in order to maintain federal spending and corporate tax breaks, companies with well-compensated CEOs who preside over underfunded employee pension funds invite a new round of questions about the motives, and methods, of the CEOs pressuring Congress and the White House to cut programs for the middle class.

Yes, I think you could question their motives!

The companies in arrears on their pension funds include defense giant Boeing, which paid CEO Jim McNerney $23 million last year; Honeywell, where CEO Dave Cote earned more than $55 million in compensation in 2011; and AT&T, which docked CEO Randall Stephenson's pay by $2 million last year after he orchestrated a failed takeover of T-Mobile. The $2 million penalty meant that Stephenson made only $22 million total that year, as opposed to the $24 million he would otherwise have been paid.

Boeing, Honeywell, and AT&T represent just three of the dozen companies who are cited in the IPS report as having CEOs with individual retirement assets totaling more than $20 million each, despite the fact that their companies have underfunded pension funds for their employees.

If each of these 12 CEOs were to convert his retirement accounts into annuities at age 65, the report shows each would receive a monthly check for at least $110,000 for life. By contrast, the average montly Social Security payment was $1,237 in October. Still, the CEOs argue that Social Security benefits are too generous.

As economists Jared Bernstein and Chuck Marr explain, tax repatriation isn't a good deal for anyone except the greedy CEOs whose companies don't have to pay the taxes.

As our friend at Scrutiny Hooligans points out, scratch a fervent austerian and find an opportunistic S.O.B.! How deliciously ironic that the Fix The Debt gang are pushing austerity policies that will translate into millions, even billions of dollars for themselves in tax breaks!

Austerity. Just what you wanted for Christmas. From McClatchy:

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A group co-founded by Charlottean Erskine Bowles brings its campaign to reduce the federal debt to North Carolina next week, making the state the latest front in the battle to avert the “fiscal cliff.”

Two former governors – Democrat Jim Hunt and Republican Jim Holshouser – will launch Fix the Debt’s N.C. chapter at a news conference Tuesday in Raleigh.

[...]

Fix the Debt was founded by Bowles and Alan Simpson, a former U.S. senator from Wyoming. They chaired the so-called Bowles-Simpson commission that two years ago proposed a package of spending cuts and tax hikes to begin reducing the federal debt, now estimated at over $16 trillion.

If you didn’t see Lloyd Blankfein’s CBS interview a few days ago, it gets better. From Huffington Post, “CEO Council Demands Cuts To Poor, Elderly While Reaping Billions In Government Contracts, Tax Breaks”:

WASHINGTON — The corporate CEOs who have made a high-profile foray into deficit negotiations have themselves been substantially responsible for the size of the deficit they now want closed.

The companies represented by executives working with the Campaign To Fix The Debt have received trillions in federal war contracts, subsidies and bailouts, as well as specialized tax breaks and loopholes that virtually eliminate the companies’ tax bills.

The CEOs are part of a campaign run by the Peter Peterson-backed Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, which plans to spend at least $30 million pushing for a deficit reduction deal in the lame-duck session and beyond.

During the past few days, CEOs belonging to what the campaign calls its CEO Fiscal Leadership Council — most visibly, Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and Honeywell’s David Cote — have barnstormed the media, making the case that the only way to cut the deficit is to severely scale back social safety-net programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — which would disproportionately impact the poor and the elderly.

But not them or their firms. The HuffPost’s Christina Wilkie and Ryan Grim point to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies that calls Fix the Debt “a Trojan horse for massive corporate tax breaks,” and provides these findings:

• The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.” Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
• The CEOs backing Fix the Debt personally received a combined total of $41 million in savings last year thanks to the Bush-era tax cuts. The top CEO beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts in 2011, Leon Black of Apollo Global Management, saved $9.9 million on the Bush tax cuts. The private equity fund leader reaped $215 million in taxable income last year just from vested stock.
• Of the 63 Fix the Debt CEOs at publicly held firms, 24 received more in compensation last year than their corporations paid in federal corporate income taxes. All but six of these firms reported U.S. profits last year.

So the one-time-only Bush repatriation tax holiday (2004) is back again, again. A year ago, NC Democrat Sen. Kay Hagan partnered with Sen. John McCain in an attempt to resurrect the one-time-only scheme one more time. It went nowhere. But their corporate sponsors are persistent little devils. So now repatriation is back re-branded as Fix the Debt’s “territorial tax system.” In addition to the profits mentioned above, the territorial tax system “give companies additional incentives to disguise U.S. profits as income earned in tax havens in order to avoid paying U.S. income taxes.”

Not to mention a permanent incentive for moving jobs offshore. Chuck Marr, Director of Federal Tax Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Jared Bernstein last year, “a dog could figure this out.” [timestamp 4:10]

Isn't that nice. Show this to your relatives who still think this whole austerity "crisis" is real.