Jon Stewart's Epiphany. Has a Comedian Just Saved America?

[leftchick]

http://counterpunch.com/


By PAM MARTENS

As testimony to how Orwellian life has become under the outrages of Wall Street hubris, last week saw a comedian, who poses as an anchor on a fake news show, grab the reins of the Wall Street investigation from the actual investigators in Congress.

Either Jon Stewart is the smartest man in America or he has incredible instincts. In a week’s time, he has zeroed in, like a heat-seeking missile, on the core of Wall Street’s malady. How insightful of Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” to rationalize that the core of Wall Street’s corruption might well be the same core that it has drawn the darkest curtain around: trading.

Stewart is the son of an educational consultant mother (Marion Leibowitz), physicist father (Donald Leibowitz) and trading technology guru brother (Larry Leibowitz) an executive at the New York Stock Exchange. He’s got a smart family and he’s equally smart, advancing the national debate on a comedy channel.

After a week of explosive commentary and video clips of questionable reporting at the cable business network, CNBC, Stewart interviewed Jim Cramer on Thursday, March 12. Cramer hosts CNBC’s “Mad Money” show which promotes itself as an advocate for the small investor while, at the same time, suggesting lots of buying and selling of specific stocks. Stewart used the highly anticipated interview to show a devastating clip revealing Cramer to be the embodiment of the market manipulators that he rails against on his show. Acknowledging on the clip that he would never say something like this on TV, Cramer states:

“You know, a lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund and I was positioned short, meaning I needed it down, I would create a level of activity beforehand that could drive the futures. It doesn’t take much money.”

Allow me to translate:

You know, a lot of times when I was making a large bet that prices would decline in a specific stock or bond or derivative when I worked in the largely unregulated world of private money called hedge funds, and I needed to give that decline a little unseen assistance to make my bets profitable, I would go into the futures market to trade. That’s because I could put down as little as 4 to 10 percent of the money I needed for the trade and borrow the balance in what is called a margin account.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

1. In the unedited interview, Stewart revealed that his mother had lost her 401k

[ihavenobias]

2. I only watched the unedited interview.

Now I'm curious what the edited interview is like.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

3. Most of what they cut was from the first section of interview.

The second and third parts were left largely intact. I don't know why they chose to cut the scene where Stewart talks about his mother. I thought it was one of the most powerful scenes in the interview. Maybe they thought it was too personal.

[BrklynLiberal]

4. Great article..and I am even more impressed with Jon Stewart than I was before!!!!

[harun]

5. They need to make borrowing money to buy stock illegal and

to make it illegal for a corporation to borrow money to buy their own stock or anyone else's and illegal for them to borrow money to pay dividends.

Stops all sorts of issues by doing this.

[Larkspur]

6. FDR made it illegal in the wake of the Great Depression but

thanks to the Republicans and the Clintonistas, those regulations were either repealed or totally ignored.

[Life Long Dem]

7. Still people before Cramer who are not yet being held accountable.

I don't know what anyone can do for the senile old man. He probably wouldn't even understand why.