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Frank Rich writes well in yesterday's New York Times:
Last week Jon Stewart whipped up a well-earned frenzy with an eight-minute “Daily Show” takedown of the stars of CNBC, the business network that venerated our financial gods, plugged their stocks and hyped the bubble’s reckless delusions. (Just as it had in the dot-com bubble.) Stewart’s horrifying clip reel featured Jim Cramer reassuring viewers that Bear Stearns was “not in trouble” just six days before its March 2008 collapse; Charlie Gasparino lip-syncing A.I.G.’s claim that its subprime losses were “very manageable” in December 2007; and Larry Kudlow declaring last April that “the worst of this subprime business is over.” The coup de grâce was a CNBC interviewer fawning over the lordly Robert Allen Stanford. Stewart spoke for many when he concluded, “Between the two of them I can’t decide which one of those guys I’d rather see in jail.”
Led by Cramer and Kudlow, the CNBC carnival barkers are now, without any irony whatsoever, assailing the president as a radical saboteur of capitalism. It’s particularly rich to hear Cramer tar Obama (or anyone else) for “wealth destruction” when he followed up his bum steer to viewers on Bear Stearns with oleaginous on-camera salesmanship for Wachovia and its brilliant chief executive, a Cramer friend and former boss, just two weeks before it, too, collapsed. What should really terrify the White House is that Cramer last month gave a big thumbs-up to Timothy Geithner’s bank-rescue plan.
In one way, though, the remaining vestiges of the past decade’s excesses, whether they live on in the shouted sophistry of CNBC or in the ashes of Stanford’s castle, are useful. Seen in the cold light of our long hangover, they remind us that it was the America of the bubble that was aberrant and perverse, creating a new normal that wasn’t normal at all.
The Cable Gamer isn't particularly a fan of Frank Rich's politics, but when Rich writes about theater he is always compelling, and when he connects theater to politics, he can be positively illuminating. And so I felt enlightened after Rich connected Our Town," the great play by Thornton Wilder (pictured above), to the current financial/economic debacle:
The true American faith endures in “Our Town.” The key word in its title is the collective “our,” just as “united” is the resonant note hit by the new president when saying the full name of the country. The notion that Americans must all rise and fall together is the ideal we still yearn to reclaim, and that a majority voted for in November. But how we get there from this economic graveyard is a challenge rapidly rivaling the one that faced Wilder’s audience in that dark late winter of 1938.
This is a great country, Rich, Stewart, and Wilder agree--it's just that we have our share of knaves and thieves to deal with. And CNBC seems to have been part of the problem.
A point underscored, here, by Gawker:
CNBC personalities like Rick Santelli and Charles Gasparino have done their loudmouthed best to hone the financial network's laissez-faire bonafides. Good luck holding that stance if CNBC's troubled parent company seeks a bailout.
In his column this weekend on General Electric, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera never actually uses the word "bailout." He doesn't have to.
CNBC owner GE just cut its dividend for the first time since the Great Depression after denying it would do so. The company's stock price was cut in half in less than a month and by nearly two-thirds over two months.In April the company missed earnings by $700 million two weeks after assuring investors it would meet its numbers.
Now in fairness to Santelli, he opposed the bailout last year. Not sure about Gasparino.
