The Crimes of CNBC

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 11 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Amid all the hilarity and Pulitzer-level journalism involved in Jon Stewart's takedown of Jim Cramer yesterday is this key takeaway.

It was a feature, not a bug.

I chose this, the third part of the interview, because here Stewart gets to the heart of the matter. He mentions his 75 year old mother. She believed in what CNBC was covering up, what Wall Street was selling, what the Republican Party largely created. She lost a lot of money, and then a-wipes like Rick Santelli call these people "losers" while the guys around them are getting bailed out with trillions in taxpayer money and cheering him on.

What happened? Phil Gramm got a law changed allowing the creation of Confederate Money. He and other Republicans destroyed the wall between the casino of investment banking and the government-protected world of commercial banking. Hank Paulson and others leveraged 35-1 on this Madoff Money, and when they were finally caught last year they bailed themselves out on our dime.

All while CNBC cheered them on.

The difference between what Bernie Madoff did and what Hank Paulson did at Goldman Sachs, what John Thain did at Merrill Lynch or what Jamie Dimon (left) did at J.P. Morgan is that Madoff was more cost-efficient. Madoff just pretended to invest for his Ponzi scheme. Paulson and Thain and Dimon used the government to pretend their scheme was real.

When Dimon goes on TV and claims the problems of Main Street will end when Washington stops the "vilification" of Wall Street it's literally Osama bin Laden telling us to let bygones be bygones over 9-11. Until we understand this we can't get anywhere.

These people created the system that robbed you, they gamed that system to suit themselves, and now they expect us to re-fill their vaults and let them go back to business, maybe with a few new regulations they can get around at the margins?

The people who got us into this have no place in the new financial system.

This includes not just those who got us into this hole, but all those who enabled them — Cramer, Santelli, Kudlow, even Erin Burnett. This is what happens everywhere else there is scandal. It's what happens in Washington, it's what happens in journalism, it's what happens in corporate America. You get fired. There is nothing so special about the "talent" of Jamie Dimon that can't be replaced, easily, in a properly regulated financial market system.

Dimon and the rest of the scamsters pretending to be banksters need to be in Leavenworth, not in Greenwich. They still don't understand this fact. You can't build an honest business until the crooks are behind bars, and until those who enabled them are broken on the market wheel.

This is what Stewart was trying to tell Cramer. Not that Cramer was a bad boy, although he proved conclusively he was, telling "insiders" one thing and spouting a completely different story on the air. But CNBC should be standing for integrity, not fast money. ESPN had a much better record at covering the steroid era in baseball than CNBC did the financial scandals of this decade — much better — yet ESPN has been flagellating its own coverage of that era quite regularly.

Self-criticism is one thing. Cleaning house is something else. Wall Street needs to be cleaned out, as does the so-called "financial media" which covers it. Unfortunately — and I say this as someone who has been part of the financial press for 30 years — that's a lot easier said than done.

It's not something the media will do itself. It's something only you can do.

What we need is a market of readers and viewers who will not take this crap anymore, investors who will demand that their publications and cable hosts talk straight with them, and not let sources lead them down a primrose path as CNBC, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and the other lapdogs of the financial press did throughout this decade.

We need to stop identifying with the crooks and concentrate on bringing them to justice. We need to start replacing people like Dimon with honest men and women who will not go to the casino with our money, and who understand what the term "fiduciary responsibility" actually means.

There are such people, highly effective people. For Dimon and others to pretend that if they're gone the whole financial system will collapse is to point a gun at their own head, like Cleavon Little  in "Blazing Saddles," and threaten to "shoot the nigger" unless they're allowed to get away.