Dean Baker

Newt Gingrich’s ad campaign against front-runner Mitt Romney has been all about attacking his record at the private equity firm Bain Capital. Most recently, a pro-Gingrich super-PAC released a 28 minute film called "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" which portrays Romney as a "corporate raider" whose policies ran four companies into the ground for his own benefit. Given Republicans' long legacy of running on pro-business platforms and promoting laissez-faire legislation, this recent turn is highly ironic. But how the nominees are articulating these sentiments are decidedly different from their liberal counterparts.

E.J. McMahon senior fellow for Tax and Budgetary Studies at the Manhattan Institute and director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, and Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, discuss the public perception of public unions, and if they should be held in equal standing with private unions.

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The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the ensuing debate over the proper role of government in promoting home ownership raise questions about the involvement Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo may have had, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, in getting the bubble going.  Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Wayne Barrett, senior editor at The Village Voice, and Peter Wallison, Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, look at various aspects of the issue.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is holding hearings today to ascertain who's to blame for the sub-prime lending mess. Yesterday they heard Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve say it wasn't him. At the same time Goldman Sachs issued a statement that they weren't responsible for the financial crisis by betting against their clients. So how do we get to the bottom of this mess?