On this Monday's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough spent a better part of the morning ranting and raving about how Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital isn't going to hurt him in the general election should he win the Republican primary race. He really was at his most obnoxious during the latter part of this segment when guests Suze Orman and Jeffrey Sachs dared to suggest that Elizabeth Warren's arguments about how the financial sector has led to the destruction of our economy and the amount of debt most households are carrying now.
As Sachs pointed out, what has most people upset is the level of fraud we've seen from the big banks and the subsequent bailouts after making incredible amounts of money and it's the fraud that has most Americans very angry right now. That led Scarborough to go into this rant, which Mediate took note of this morning as well -- Joe Scarborough To Suze Orman: Debt Growth ‘Not Just About Big Business; It’s About Big Government’:
You know, I keep hearing about all of the problems being big businesses and big banks. And yes, there has been fraud. But we’re sitting here ignoring what is going on all around us. We have historical trends that are exploding in our faces. You look this past weekend, look what happened on Friday. France downgraded because of massive debt. Eight other countries in Europe, downgraded because of debt. Our federal government keeps getting bigger by the year, and we keep sitting here scratching our heads going, “well, what are we doing? Why are more and more people going into poverty? It must be big business’s fault.”
The federal government keeps growing by the year. The debt keeps growing. When Democrats are in power, the federal government gets bigger, and debt gets bigger. When Republicans are in, when Democrats are in, it gets bigger. And I hear Dr. Sachs saying all morning about Mitt Romney’s “right-wing radical plan.” That’s a bunch of bunk! It is bunk. Mitt Romney doesn’t have a conservative plan. If he did, I would already be on board with him. But he’s going to be a big-government Republican who is going to follow a big-government Democrat who followed a big-government Republican in George W. Bush. I mean, come on, we have to break this trend. And it’s been going on for 30, 40 years. The government just keeps getting bigger. And our debt keeps getting bigger. Crowding out takes place, and we just sit here trying to blame big business. That’s not going to sell with middle Americans moving forward.
What they failed to note over there was Sach's response, or the fact that Scarborough's rant is completely hypocritical given just which party is responsible for the debt we're seeing right now.
SACHS: Joe, there was a really interesting map yesterday in The New York Times about who the one percent are and the one percent are the CEO's. The one percent are the doctors who are making absolutely a fortune. The one percent are the financiers. They're the ones who have gamed the government. You know Medicare and health care are so expansive because we have the most expensive private health insurance in the whole world and the doctors that make millions on their specialties are the recipients of that. That's what the map shows.
So we have a lot of powerful interests that have gamed the federal government and the middle class and the working class and the poor don't want to pay for that. They want to end the games. And I think that's where this talk about free markets is going to fall absolutely flat. No one believes the free markets right now. People believe it's a rigged market and that's why the debate on the free market is not going to work.
That didn't stop Scarborough from going off on another rant about Europe and the problem with their financial markets, calling Sachs a demagogue for daring to point out that Mitt Romney has embraced Paul Ryan's plan to privatize Medicare and more fear mongering about how “we're going to go bankrupt if we don't slow down the rate of growth” of the government.
Sadly no one got a chance to respond to Scarborough's aggressive filibustering to remind him about which party exploded the debt and the deficit, but then as I've already noted here, that probably wouldn't make much difference because Scarborough's got a pretty selective memory when it comes to past Republican malfeasance. He's been pretty desperate to do his best to excuse Mitt Romney's now as well.
In the era of Occupy Wall Street with people finally taking to the streets because they're tired of what the financial sector and people like Mitt Romney have done to the country, I'd say good luck with that. We're going to see the Villagers in the corporate media do their best to do what Scarborough did here though, which is paint these simple black and white scenarios of "government bad" and "capitalism good" and if you dare to look at any of the nuances, why you just hate America and the free markets. As Sachs rightfully noted at one point during the show, the attacks on Bain may not mean much during a Republican primary race, but they're going to resonate during the general election.
