On the day President Obama made his push for Congress to deal with student loan interest, Republican representatives took to the airwaves to sell the public on the House version of the "fix", which is no fix at all.

However, to listen to Indiana Representative Luke Messer, you'd think a crap sandwich was really crab and it's all in how you sell it. Here's what he told Luke Russert on Friday:

When "Daily Rundown" host Luke Russert asked Messer how he would reconcile the fact that Republicans are in favor of letting student loan rates rise up to 8.5 percent while it appears the president wants to keep rates between 3 and 4 percent, Messer said the GOP has a communication problem.

“Republicans have to do a better job of explaining how our ideas apply to young people," Messer said. "Sometimes it sounds like he is selling ice cream and we’re selling spinach. I think personal responsibility is pretty cool. There is nothing out of date about freedom, and we have the policies that get this budget back in line, stop the explosive growth of spending. Spending that will be paid for by this generation. We’ve got to do a better job of explaining that.”

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I sure hope Jack Lew got the message loud and clear. Senator Elizabeth Warren is not going to allow him to mollycoddle banks the way Tim Geithner did. In Wednesday's Senate hearing, she asked him a few pointed questions intended to send a very straightforward message.

Warren began by speaking about a string of scandals that emerged as a result of the continued existence of "too big to fail banks." Despite this evidence and the fact that many officials have admitted the dangers to the economic system posed by big banks, Warren noted that various members of President Barack Obama's administration have appeared unwilling to prescribe concrete measures to address them. She then pointed specifically to a quote from a Treasury official during former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's tenure that suggested the department had been instrumental in scuttling an earlier bipartisan amendment that would have enacted restrictions on "too big to fail."

About those banks considered "too big to fail"? Warren put Lew on the hot seat.

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In my 33-year-and-counting career in politics, I have done my share of both candidate campaigning and issue campaigning. In the last 15 years or so, frankly, I have been more inclined to spend most of my time on the latter, because just fighting the candidate battles doesn’t necessarily move the ball forward in terms of making our country better. I got into politics to fight for the working class and poor families I grew up with in the Midwest, and I have found it far more satisfying to help them through issue fights than in helping candidates who may or may not help them someday. The last several months since the last election are a reminder that even when Democrats win elections, it is no guarantee that good things will happen for regular folks.

Having said that, I do get reminded how important it is to elect people who will actually fight for working families- not just part of the time, not just when it is convenient, but fighting for those families every day with all their heart and all their soul. Senators like Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown remind me every week why it was a great use of my time to have been involved in helping them in last year’s elections.

Brown’s recently filed bill to put pressure on the Too Big To Fail banks is a shot across the bow that has the biggest banks on the defensive; Warren’s perfectly framed bill to let students pay back their college loans at the same rate of interest that the banks get from the Federal Reserve discount window has the bankers and their allies like Third Way screaming bloody murder; and it seems like every time there is a Banking Committee hearing and Warren starts asking someone questions, important issues that desperately needed attention get raised. Warren and Brown are making a huge difference, showing us that if we get a real live two-fisted fighter for working families in the ring on our behalf, it matters.

That’s why I spent most of my time in the 2012 election cycle, where I was working on behalf of Warren and Brown. I knew they would fight hard for the same people I was fighting for, and I knew they would make a difference. And that is why I decided early in this cycle to get involved in helping Rick Weiland run for Senate in South Dakota.

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When I think of Elizabeth Warren, I think of her as a fiery warrior on behalf of consumers and the 99%, fearlessly taking on the biggest and baddest of all the special interests, Wall Street. But she is also the senior Senator from the great state Massachusetts, and her first speech on the floor of the Senate was not on any economic issue, but on the terrorism at the Boston Marathon. It was a beautiful speech, well worth taking the time to read or view below. While on one level, it was the classic kind of post-tragedy speech you would expect from a politician who represents the place the terrible events happened, full of praise for the courage and resolve of her home state’s people, she did something more with the speech which reminded me of why I love her:

She talked about the value of community, about our responsibility for each other. She used one of my all-time favorite quotes, from early Pilgrim John Winthrop. Winthrop is most famous for his “City on a Hill” speech, which has inspired many Americans with its idea of American exceptionalism. But for Winthrop, this new land would only be exceptional, would only be blessed by God, if we looked out for each other, if we were our brothers and sisters’ keepers.

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What would the US Senate be without Elizabeth Warren? She's a national treasure.

WARREN: If we started in 1960 and we said that, as productivity goes up -- that is, as workers are producing more -- then the minium wage was going to go up the same. And if that were the case, the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour. So my question, Mr. Dube, if the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn't go to the worker.

No, it didn't. But the best part is when she very coolly schools a business owner, David Rutigliano, who walks right into her trap.

WARREN: During my Senate campaign, I ate a number 11 at McDonald’s many, many times a week. I know the price on that. $7.19. According to the data on the analysis of what would happen if we raised the minimum wage to $10.10 over three years, the price increase on that item would be about four cents. So instead of being $7.19 it would be $7.23. Are you telling me that’s unsustainable?

BUSINESS OWNER DAVID RUTIGLIANO: Senator Warren, not all restaurants are created equal. I’m in a full service restaurant business. McDonalds has efficiencies and they operate completely differently than I do. I have many jobs, many jobs that pay well above minimum wage. We have a retirement plan. We offer health insurance to our salaried employees. So my business is a little different. I can’t raise a four cent price. I mean I don’t have, I don’t operate like a fast food restaurant. I would hope you appreciate the distinction.

WARREN: I do appreciate the distinction and I’m not going to be in the business of being a McDonald’s representatives but they would talk about having some higher paid jobs and some opportunities for management and advancement as well. But I get your point, maybe it’s only four cents on $7.19. But if your entrees are $14.40 we’ll see how fast I can do the math — are you telling me you can’t raise your prices by eight cents?

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Their outrage was triggered by the lack of indictments against bankers at HSBC. The bank's executives earned big bonuses after their bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels and criminally violated sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. As "punishment," the banks' shareholders will pay a $1.9 billion fine. The lawbreakers themselves will not be charged, and will be allowed to keep their own ill-gotten income.

As Sen. Warren noted:

"If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you're going to jail. Evidently, if you launder nearly $1 billion for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night."

Warren and several of her colleagues continued to lambast these public servants at length for their indifferent attitude toward Wall Street felonies. Apparently nobody told them: In Washington, that sort of thing just isn't done.

After all, the word has come down from Attorney General Eric Holder himself: We don't punish too-big-to-fail banks.  "(I)f we do bring a criminal charge," said Holder, "it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy."

This is presumably why Wells Fargo, like HSBC, was never indicted for feloniously aiding and abetting Mexican drug lords. That group is made up of people like "El Loco" - "The Madman" - who run gangs like "Los Zetas." They've murdered more than sixty thousand people, often by cutting off their heads and tossing them into nightclubs and town squares. "El Loco" himself was indicted for beheading 49 people and dumping their heads in the town square.

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Thank you, Attorney General Holder, for finally being so blunt and definitive about DOJ’s unwillingness to prosecute the biggest banks:

But I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if we do prosecute — if we do bring a criminal charge — it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Again, I'm not talking about HSBC, this is more of a general comment. I think it has an inhibiting influence, impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate.

I rarely agree with Chuck Grassley, but when he calls this “stunning”, he couldn’t be more right. This is the ultimate Big F’ing Deal: the nation’s top prosecutor openly admitting that some people and institutions are so big, wealthy, and powerful that it is the policy of the United States to hesitate to prosecute them no matter how terrible their crime. And it isn’t just American banks, either: HSBC, while operating here, is a foreign based bank.

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Right wing forces in this country are obsessed with the size of government, but the fundamental debate we should be having is not about size but what the goal of government should be. What is government’s central mission?

There are four major views on this question in modern American politics, two in each political party.

The first Republican view is boiled down to the central organizing principle that government should be as small as possible. That’s it.

Size (the small variety) not only matters, but is the only thing that matters. Any mission or goal that government has is overridden and overwhelmed by the urgent desire to make it smaller. Whether cuts in the size of government are rationally planned doesn’t matter, as their rhetoric on the sequester makes clear. Whether cuts in the size of government hurt people or hurt the economy as a whole doesn’t matter either. I've heard heart-breaking stories, for example, of parents with disabled kids lobbying against the cuts that will devastate the programs that help their children, with Republican congressmen telling them it doesn’t matter, we just have to cut the size of government. Grover Norquist famously said that he wants to make government so small that he can drown it in a bathtub, and his Tea Party comrades are clearly trying to do exactly that at the cost of everything else.

While all Republicans talk about wanting to make government smaller, the other Republican view on what the mission of government should be is less focused on size, and more focused on this central thing: serving the needs of big business. This idea was most famously (or infamously) articulated by the former Republican chair of the House Committee on Financial Services in 2011 when he said “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

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I am really excited that the long overdue battle over immigration reform and a path to citizenship has finally begun in earnest. While I am heartsick at the reason, it is good news that common sense gun safety laws are once again being discussed in this country almost two decades after we finally passed the Brady Bill. And the on-going, never ending budget fights remain urgently important in terms of stopping more damage to middle class and poor people in America. I know I will be engaging daily in the vitally important battles over all these issues, and I expect my progressive allies all over the country will be as well.

But I remain troubled, profoundly troubled, by the fact that fundamental economic issues seem to be the last thing on anybody’s minds in DC. Our economy may be slowly getting better, but we still have a very serious jobs crisis in this country- nowhere near to full employment and not on a path to get there for many years to come. Our manufacturing sector is still only limping along and our trade deficit remains catastrophically high. Our infrastructure is still badly in need of repair. Wages for most workers are still stuck in neutral or slipping compared to inflation, and a third of those who found new jobs after losing them in the great recession are being paid less than in the old job. Our housing market is getting stronger in some metro areas, but is still very weak overall in terms of prices, homeowners under water, and numbers of foreclosures and empty homes.

And looming over these economic problems is quite literally the elephant in the room: these gargantuan Too Big To Fail, and apparently Too Big To Jail, Wall Street financial conglomerates.

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The news from the world of finance has been incredibly depressing of late, as the big Wall Street banks keep winning round after round in their battles with regulators. The flurry of deals, which in part were closed pre-Jan 1st to allow the banks to clean up their books before the end of the year, were just one big win for the banks after another: the $10 billion Bank of America deal with Fannie Mae; the deal between 2 regulatory agencies and 10 major banks to come up with $3.3 billion dollars for 3.8 million homeowners; the international Basel 3 capitulation caving into everything the big international banks were asking for on regulation. Compared with the size of the crimes, the number of people who got badly hurt, and the amount of money these banks made off the fraudulent deals they committed, this money is pocket change, an insult to the millions of hard working families who have had their lives ripped apart by bank fraud.

Now even the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the one agency which has been rightly lauded for fighting for consumers on other issues since it got created due to Elizabeth’s Warren’s work, has caved into Wall Street demands on a new rule they just issued relating to mortgages and given the big banks a major edge against homeowners in legal issues going forward. People at Americans for Financial Reform and the other groups working on these issues tell me they are appalled by these new rules.

The best hope for investigating and prosecuting fraudulent bankers has been in the inter-agency task force co-chaired by NY AG Eric Schneiderman, but the DOJ has refused to give the task force the staff that it needed, and as a result things have been moving slower than molasses, and it is not at all clear at this point whether anything is going to come of it.

Media figures enamored of Wall Street think all this is a swell thing. WP writer Neil Irwin thinks it’s terrific because “every dollar a bank holds as part of its liquidity buffer is a dollar they are not lending out…as a loan to build a factory.” This was Obama’s argument in his first State Of The Union speech, where he talked about how he hated to bail out the banks but only by helping them would they be able to start making loans again so that the economy would recover. It has pretty much been Geithner’s entire philosophy while at Treasury: anything that gets in the way of the big banks’ ability to make money will hurt the economy. The problem is that while the big banks have been swimming in money most of the last 4 years, making record profits and handing out record bonuses to execs in some years, the rest of the economy is flat. Small businesses are still having trouble getting loans, factory start-ups have been slow, housing remains weak even with its recent uptick, and in case nobody has noticed in a DC obsessed by deficits, unemployment is still appallingly high.

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