My Occupy Wall Street Experience at Times Square

POSTED BY NOWHERE MAN

With the continuation of the two longest and unnecessary wars in our nation's history, our jobs being shipped overseas, the so called Democratic Party becoming the Republican Light Party, the obvious evidence that the banks and Wall Street own our government and with the corporate media refusing to either do it's job or in some cases even understand what it's job is, I was angry and frustrated because the people seemed powerless or unwilling to rise up like we saw in the Arab Spring. But then came "Occupy Wall Street."

I felt so inspired by their guts and determination that last Saturday I went down to lend my voice and support. I didn't see nor was I offered any of the free sex and drugs that Fox News had reported was available, nor did I find any of the anti-semites Rush Limbaugh had said organized the whole thing. What I did find were groups with different agendas ranging from Bronx doctors who wanted health care for all, to Filipinos demanding an end to US imperialism in their country. However, the great majority were there protesting the corporate strangle hold Wall Street and the banks have on our government and the awful consequences being felt by families across the country.

Zucotti Park was filled with people of all ages and backgrounds. Most of the organizers are college age twenty somethings. I was impressed with how organized the park was - a cleaning crew section, a first aid station, a food section and a large blackboard detailing what the schedule was for the week.

We were to march to Washington Square Park and then uptown to Times Square. We were told that this was a non violent protest and that we were to obey the police orders at all times who for the most part were courteous. As we marched up Broadway we chanted different slogans over and over:

"BANKS GOT BAILED OUT, WE GOT SOLD OUT!"


"MONEY FOR JOBS AND EDUCATION NOT FOR WAR AND OCCUPATION!"


"TELL ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, THIS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!"





"HOW DO WE FIX THE DEFICIT, END THE WAR AND TAX THE RICH!"


"WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT! YOU ARE THE 99 PERCENT!"


"THE PEOPLE UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED!"

A lot of people on the streets along with tourists from double decker buses gave us a thumbs up as we chanted "JOIN US! JOIN US!" while others looked confused, wondering what all the fuss was about as the police escorted us along the entire route.

When we got to the park we gathered near the fountain and were told that 23 of had just gotten arrested at a Citicorp Bank on LaGuardia Place for allegedly occupying the bank. Some of us went there chanting "LET THEM GO!" of course to no avail. Before we continued on to Times Square we were given the phone number to the National Lawyers Guild in case we were arrested.

As we continued on to Times Square I felt as empowered as I was in the late 60s when I marched against the Vietnam War. I could overhear conversations of strangers from different parts of the country talking about the mess our country is in and the overwhelming consensus that Eric Cantor is the biggest asshole in Congress. I then received a text from Broadway Carl knowing I was attending the event, who told me to be careful because he had just seen a video* of a white shirted NYPD supervisor punching a woman in the face, knocking her to the ground! I didn't see the incident and the media didn't report it the next day. You would think a video of a police supervisor punching out a woman would be a front page photo and or story, but I digress.

There was no further incident until we got to West 46th Street and Broadway, which is where we were supposed to enter. I was about 200 feet from Broadway when there was a confrontation with police. I later learned that the police had positioned the barricades so that only a trickle of us could get in which produced a bottle neck. Human nature took over so some us pushed the barricade back so we could enter which of course gave the police the provocation they wanted and created, resulting in 45 of us getting arrested and the police picking up the metal barricades and using it to push us back.

Now they had cut off access to Broadway. Then, about 200 cops came up behind us and told us to get off the street for no apparent reason since the street had already been closed to traffic. They told us to get on the sidewalk which we did. They then told us not to block the pedestrians which was a joke since WE WERE THE PEDESTRIANS! Finally they told us to clear the sidewalk so pedstrians could get by which we did by moving to one side of the sidewalk. But that wasn't good enough so they ordered us back to 6th Avenue when all they had to do was just give us access to Broadway which they had deliberately closed off to try create the confrontation they wanted.

So we made our way back to 6th Avenue hoping to get to Broadway via 42nd Street since they had closed access to West 43rd, 44th and 45th. By the time I got there the crowd had dwindled probably recognizing the police were trying to start trouble. Adding to the frustration was the fact that the organizers were not allowed to have loudspeakers or microphones of any kind making it difficult to make speeches or to communicate with one another.

I started for home thinking what jerks the NYPD is failing to realize we were marching for them as well. Maybe they will figure it all out when NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg starts laying them off as well.

*Editor's Note: It seems the initial report of a woman being punched by a Police Supervisor was actually the story of Felix Rivera-Pitre. The NYPD is defending the action by accusing Rivera-Pitre of attempting to elbow Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona in the face, but multiple angles of the incident reveal no such attempt.

More Photos of the day's events from Nowhere Man (clicking on any photo in this post will give you access to original size):









And of course, after the 46th Street confrontation, there was this:

Picture of the Day

At the Occupy Wall Street protest.

Blame Yourself

Outsourcing doesn't matter. The greatest recession since the Great Depression doesn't matter. The Too Big To Fail Banks who played Las Vegas with our money and lost it all, than had to be bailed out with taxpayer money doesn't matter. Herman Cain, who is running for President of the United States, thinks if you lost your job, and can't get ahead, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Herman Cain: "I don’t have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! [...] It is not a person’s fault if they succeeded, it is a person’s fault if they failed."

A word of advice to Herman Cain: if you don't have facts to back something up, then keep your mouth shut.

He Can Do No Right

Look, I know that if you're a Republican, to agree with anything that President Obama has to offer is a political risk. I know that everyone in the GOP has pretty much taken the Mitch McConnell tact of making President Obama a one-term president as its main and major goal, even at the risk of US economic collapse. I know that the Republican Party likes to tout itself as the party of national security. But these latest comments from Republican Senator John McCain and his personal Renfield, Senator Lindsey Graham are absolutely laughable.

"Americans can be proud of the role our country has played in helping to defeat Qaddafi," their statement reads, "but we regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our airpower."

This statement comes from the same two Senators that were part of a delegation that considered selling nonlethal defense equipment to Gaddafi's Libya (with a little McCain bow to boot in his meeting with Gaddafi).

McCain wanted the US's "full weight" of the military airpower, and yet his own members of Congress were losing their shit just a few weeks ago, stomping their feet with a House vote to admonish the President for continuing America's role in the NATO operation and claiming a violation of the War Powers Act, and threatened to cut off funding for the operation. Does that mean that McCain and Graham would have been fine with a unilateral US strike against Libya with the "full weight" of our airpower had it only taken 89 days?

The bottom line is that the Republican Party has lost their "strong on defense" moniker and they don't like it.

The Obama administration was successful in taking out the Somali pirates that captured Captain Richard Phillips and held him hostage, but immediately afterward came the email smear campaign that the President was hesitant in authorizing lethal force.

President Obama made capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden a top priority as soon as he was sworn into  office and said so during the campaign. This was something George W. "Wanted Dead Or Alive" Bush couldn't bother with just six months after 9/11. Yet again, right wingers went to the Internet and created another smear email to claim something about which they knew nothing.

And now, with a war in Afghanistan and in the process of a methodical withdrawal from Iraq, and the President deciding to honor the US's obligation to NATO and the UN in the Libya conflict, and here are the Republicans making sure to criticize the widest range possible just to confirm they cover everything, from acting without Congressional authority, or berating Obama for letting France and England take the lead in the action, to now McCain and Graham whining about not acting quickly enough and that it took six months to ouster a dictator who held power for 42 years. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page is praising the efforts while criticizing the the naysaying GOP.

The fighting continues in Tripoli, and Moammar Gadhafi still hasn't been captured, but the triumph of the U.S.-backed Libyan rebels seems to be only a matter of time. Though you wouldn't know it from the reaction at the Council on Foreign Relations or among some GOP Presidential candidates, this is a victory for freedom and U.S. national interests.

A dictator with American blood on his hands is about to be overthrown by a popular revolt invoking democratic principles. Not a single American has died in the effort, and the victory would not have been possible without U.S. air power, intelligence and targeting as part of NATO. A long-oppressed people now has a chance to chart a freer future, a fact that is clear from the rejoicing in Benghazi.

What would we prefer: That Gadhafi stay in power?

...Yet some of the same people who said we shouldn't help the rebels now want the U.N. to send "boots on the ground," including U.S. troops. It's not clear that the Libyans want or even need such help, especially from Americans, which could complicate their own nascent attempts at self-government.

...President Obama was right yesterday to urge the rebels to pursue "reconciliation." But America's foreign policy elites have also so far misjudged the rebels, who have shown impressive persistence and coordination in maintaining a six-month military campaign.

...One disappointment is the reluctance among Republicans to praise the rebel success, perhaps for fear it will somehow help Mr. Obama.

...U.S. intervention has succeeded in preventing a bloodbath in Benghazi and soon in deposing a long-time U.S. enemy who could have re-emerged as a terrorist sponsor.

Michele Bachmann, who played the al Qaeda tune, now looks partisan to a fault.

...The U.S. military is stretched at the current moment and we can't take sides in every civil war. But the Libyan intervention shows that when the cause is just and the means are available, the U.S. can make a moral and strategic difference.

U.S. support for the rebels won't be lost on a Middle East still undergoing its own upheavals, not least on the people and governments of Syria and Iran. NATO showed it will finish a military task it started, and soon Gadhafi will take his place with Saddam in the ranks of Arab despots who will terrorize their people no more.

I believe everyone has forgotten (including Michael Steele and the Morning Joe pundits this morning) that the initial intervention is Libya was a humanitarian one, with NATO acting on the information that Gaddafi was about to unleash hell on his own people in Benghazi.

And yet, President Obama can do no right. He doesn't even read the right books on vacation. I suppose he would have gotten a reprieve on the reading list criticism if he'd included Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED and Rick Perry's FED UP!, both also works of fiction, by the way.

President Obama's Weekly Address - May 15, 2010

Wall Street Reform & Main Street

Make Them Vote NO - UPDATED

Yesterday, the Senate brought the financial reform cloture vote to the floor again, and for the second straight day, Republicans voted against moving forward on financial reform debate. For the second straight day, Republicans voted to protect Wall Street while claiming to be looking out for Main Street.

We didn't hear about that vote because the mainstream media was too engrossed in the Goldman Sachs Senate hearing. You know, the one where Senators were saying naughty words. We didn't hear about the second vote because the MSM likes drama and the GOP blocking the financial bill a second time was "old" news. Twenty four hours old.

However, I am beginning to enjoy the Democratic strategy of making the GOP vote against cloture over and over and over again. Someone is going to notice and say, "Hey, what's with the Republicans opposing financial reform?" Maybe they'll be saying that today on the news with a story of the impending block for a third straight day. Just like the Goldman Sachs executives claiming they did nothing wrong, Republicans will eventually be exposed for their bullshit excuses on why they're on their knees for the fat cats soon enough.

UPDATE (2:55pm): Republicans vote 'No' for a third straight day. But the fun is just beginning.

TPM: Frustrated by an ongoing campaign by the GOP to block debate on financial reform legislation, Democrats plan to hold the Senate floor open all night, potentially holding repeated votes to break the filibuster, or forcing Republicans to publicly object to debating their bill. But the move comes just as Republicans appear closer than ever to throwing in the towel.

Could it be that staying on the floor all night put a crimp in Sen. Mitch McConnell's beach plans to lay his eggs and bury them?

Liar

Why did Nebraska Democratic Senator Ben Nelson vote with Republicans to block the financial reform bill?

...Nelson said he was worried the "legislation will adversely impact Main Street when the focus needs to be on Wall Street. ... I don't think everyone is aware of the unintended consequences."

Oh really?

The removal of a provision that would have dramatically benefited financial tycoon and Nebraska native Warren Buffett, it was said, played a role in the Senator's flip.

"He was on board until today and the only thing that changed was the removal of that provision," said one Democratic aide, who definitively said Nelson changed his vote because the Buffett carveout was removed.

Ben Nelson sold out the American people for a short while for $8 billion, the money Warren Buffett's company would have to set aside to cover potential losses on derivatives contracts.

Ben Nelson sold out the country for Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men if not the wealthiest, in the world.

Republicans Protect Wall Street As Expected

Senate Republicans followed through on their threat today to block debate on a financial regulatory reform bill authored by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT)...

The move ratchets up a political food fight between Democrats and Republicans, with Dems on the offense, charging that the GOP's decision to block progress on the legislation puts them on the side of Wall Street.

...Speaking on the Senate floor hours before the vote, Majority Leader Harry Reid said the vote "reveal[s] who believes we need to strengthen oversight of Wall Street, and who does not [and] force[s] each Senator to publicly proclaim whether party unity is more important than economic security."

So how do you think Tea Party members are feeling about their hero, populist Scott Brown, right about now siding with the big banks? And what is Olympia Snowe's excuse? She insisted that Reid include Senator Blanche Lincoln's amendment into the bill - which he did - and then voted against it anyway. And there's Ben Nelson being all dickish again.  Maybe the weight of his Fred Flintstone haircut is affecting his brain.  Or perhaps he wants his "Cornhusker Kickback" returned. The one that he says he never asked for.

Now let's see if all this Tea Party mania and rhetoric is actually about what they say it's about. Or if it's about a black man in the White House. I mean, hey, when you have David Duke on your side...

UPDATE (8pm): Why did Nelson vote with the GOP? Maybe this is the answer.

President Obama's Weekly Address - April 24, 2010

Good News from the Auto Industry

Cartoon of the Day

President Obama's Weekly Address - April 17, 2010

Holding Wall Street Accountable

President Obama's Weekly Address - January 16, 2010

Getting Our Money Back from Wall Street



ADDING... What will the Republican spin be in support of the banks? After hearing for almost a year now that TARP was Obama Socialism even though it was started before he took office, everyone should be on board with trying to get bailout money back from the "too big to fail" criminals. How many right wing pundits and wingnuts are going to agrue the opposite now?

President Obama's Weekly Address - December 12, 2009

Learning from History to Reform Wall Street



Read the transcript here.

Frank Rich Agrees (sort of)

by Armadillo Joe

Frank Rich in today's NYTimes:

EVEN among pitchfork-bearing populists, there was scant satisfaction when the White House sent the C.E.O. of General Motors to the guillotine.

Sure, Rick Wagoner deserved his fate. He did too little too late to save an iconic American institution

[...]

Yet few disputed [...] that Wagoner was a “sacrificial lamb,” a symbolic concession to public rage ordered by a president who had to look tough after being blindsided by the A.I.G. bonuses. Detroit’s chief executive had to be beheaded so that the masters of the universe at the top of Wall Street’s bailed-out behemoths might survive.

[...]

Those on Wall Street who took the money and ran are beyond the reach of the guillotine. Most of their successors are too new to their jobs to merit beheading

[...]

Change is hard. Change is traumatic. Sending a juicy C.E.O. — or six — to the gallows is at most a crowd-pleasing opening act to the heavy lifting of reform and rebuilding we still await.

To which I'd like to add: "No really, go ahead. Try to please us."

The Op-Ed also included this cartoon, further proof of the "pitchforks & torches" zeigeist these plutocratic cockroaches have no idea swirls around them. It could consume not only the Wall Street Masters of the Universe who drove our economy onto the rocks, but their enablers in the Obama Administration and perhaps the Administration itself, if this crowd doesn't get a little retribution:

A Modest Proposal

Institutional Memory

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

The proprietor -- Mr. The Broadway Carl -- and I had the following exchange in the comments to my previous post:

Broadway Carl said...

Hey Joe,

I'm not exactly sure why you're riled up about this considering that bailout based on a feasable restructuring plan was always on the table.

"...the UAW needs to swap equity in the companies for 50 percent of the companies' cash contributions into a union-run trust fund for retiree health care. GM owes roughly $20 billion to its trust, while Chrysler owes $10.6 billion."

I get the fact that this sounds like a raw deal, but if I'm reading this corectly, 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

March 30, 2009 7:09:00 PM EDT


Armadillo Hussein Joe said...

I understand that all of these things have been on the table from the beginning, and frankly, apart from seeing my union brothers and sisters taken care of in a way that strengthens the labor movement -- not vice versa -- my love for trains and a rail transportation network over cars makes me hope Obama forces them to invest their vast resources into a new passenger and freight rail system.

I guess it has more to do with the perceived double standard. I file this one under the "Punch a DFH in the Face" strategy for street cred with The Villagers. He should be going for the "Pitchforks & Torches" strategy, but The Villagers don't trust anyone who wants to punch a banker in the face.

I think Obama may be going for his "Sister Souljah" moment, which was ugly and despicable when Clinton did it and its ugly and despicable now.

March 30, 2009 9:46:00 PM EDT


Broadway Carl said...

Well, I'm wondering what the response would have been had the government handed yet another truck full of money to GM or Chrysler without adhering to the stipulations set forth a few months ago, or just let them go bankrupt.

I'm guessing it's more a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't moment.

March 30, 2009 11:13:00 PM EDT

I bring this exchange out into the open to highlight the fact that I wasn't terribly clear in writing the "Protected Class" post in what I meant in raising objections to the different treatment of the automakers versus Wall Street.

So let me be clear now.

Whole regions of our vast nation, and not insignificant chunks of our overall economy besides, all depend on automobile manufacturing. Some of it is unionized, U.S.-based and predominantly located in the so-called Rust Belt (the great-great-grandparents of whom remained collectively loyal to the United States) and some of it is non-union, Germany & Japan-based and located mostly in Dixie (the great-great-grandparents of whom committed treason against the United States in defense of human chattel slavery). We fought a couple of wars in the 1940's and the 1860's and the good guys supposedly won on both occasions, though it is curious to me that the losers of both conflicts collude now to undermine one of the pillars of strength that girded the American Experiment in the 20th Century: a healthy, unionized Middle Class.

Now, when we talk about manufacturing in the United States, we don't really do much of it anymore. In fact, as a nation, we don't make much of anything anymore except movies and otherwise just dream up new technology for people in other countries to go and build and sell back to us. But our large, complicated world requires technology to run and we have been steadily losing the ability to stay ahead of the curve not at the leading edge, where all the coffee-house-dwelling super-creative types dream up iPods and printable solar cells, but down in the boring, gut-level nuts-and-bolts where engineers with horn-rimmed glasses and pocket-protectors along with a skilled workforce with calloused hands really do the scut work of making things. It's boring and brain-deadening and at the end of the day not nearly as fun as sitting around in a Starbucks with your laptop riffing with friends about what kind of rendering to use in generating the texture-mapping for the skin on the monsters in the next level of your video game you hope to sell. Unfortunately, we can't become a nation of aspiring video-game programmers serving each other coffee and hamburgers in the meantime. This is the unsustainable tail end of the magical thinking embedded in the silly service economy we heard so much about in the 1990's: a strong economy must have some underlying manufacturing base, period.

Because, over time, the accumulating value of institutional memory is the most vaulable asset any collection of people have, whether a small company, a whole industry or an entire nation. Indeed, it is the thing that makes us human, the passing on of knowledge, and -- relatively speaking -- we have been getting stupider as a country for quite a long time. I point to the continued existence of the GOP as my Exhibit A. The reasons for this turn of events are complicated and not entirely the result of the natural evolution of people and institutions; I'd argue that it has been somewhat by design, though that is another blog post for another time. For now, I point to another industry where we've been getting collectively stupider and it will come back to bite us on the ass in next few decades: farming.

One of the many disastrous consequences of our petroleum-intensive energy regimen these last sixty years has been the rise of industrial farming. Write all the glowing paens to the alleviation of hunger you want about the vast yields of industrialized farming, the net result has been that fewer and fewer people in this country actually know how to farm anything. This is not necessarily a problem when you have fleets of fossil fuel-burning trucks whizzing back and forth across the continent delivering food into our sprawling metropolitan areas, but as petroleum gets more expensive and our food-delivery network grinds to a halt, eating locally will become less a boutique lifestyle choice and will instead be forced upon us by outside events. Who will grow our food? Who, apart from a few farmers in the Upper Midwest and perhaps in Pennsylvania, actually know how to grow food on the small and sustainable scale that will be demanded by a world struggling with more expensive fossil fuels?

Which brings me back around to Obama's treatment of the auto manufacturers. In a world where more expensive fossil fuels discourage a Happy Motoring lifestyle, cars will be less in demand. However, the mechanical and engineering know-how to manipulate metal and rubber and glass into functioning machines, and the bureaucratic integration required to keep it all together and running smoothly, takes years to pull together and make whole and it doesn't take very long for it all to dissipate once pulled apart, for the institutional know-how to simply evaporate. It is much easier to make an existing enterprise change course (GM-built tanks & Ford-built airplanes in World War 2 come to mind) than to try to resurrect them or start from scratch.

What I am advocating here is not the survival of General Motors and Chrysler as car makers, but as machine-making entities that can become the kernel of a new industrial concern in the United States -- trains: light & heavy, passenger & freight, street-level omnibus & inter-regional bullet train. Thus far, Obama's rhetoric and the proposed policies of his administration seem to treat them and their Wall Street counterparts as co-equal intitutions, simply as widget-making financial entities that employ some people who do things, which is fine for an economic theory-class in business school but is disastrous as a basis for erecting public policy. Because the folks employed by one are collectively less politically connected, they get all the tough-love rhetoric and the other, more-connected group gets the kid-glove wrist-slap. It is a double-standard, but worse than that it signals to everyone from the highest-flying investor in lower Manhattan to the lowliest bolt-sorter on an assembly line in Michigan where the government's priorties lie.

My problem with all of it is that the rhetoric coming from the Obama Administration signals that the money of the already wealthy is more important and more worthy of protection than the livelihood of a whole sector of the nation's economy, one that I believe is indespenible in the coming years as we try to fix what is fundmentally broken in our economy.

I hope that makes it clearer. Thoughts?

Protected Class

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

So, I'm just a bitter, dim-witted populist who don't much cotton to all that high-finance tomfoolery too good, but it seems to me that Obama's push to squeeze the automakers (who are keeping blue-collar union jobs and manufacturing of actual tangible goods alive in these United States) and NOT the Wall Street Masters of the Universe (who spin money castles in the air and drive up real estate prices for the rest of us) is a move to once more protect the interests of the wealthy ruling elite at the expense of the rest of us. Obama seems to be choosing sides in the on-going class war in this country, and it isn't the one a majority of Americans voted for when they pulled a lever for Barack Obama.

A direct quote from our president today:

"If they're not willing to make the changes and the restructurings that are necessary, then I'm not willing to have taxpayer money chase after bad money."

Yeah, he's talking about GM and Chrysler, not AIG and Citigroup. Thanks for the tough love, Big O, but that ship has already sailed. A few billion to help hundreds of thousands of financially struggling working class Americans involved in the last large-scale manufacturing concern in the United States versus hundreds of billions to keep a few hundred already wealthy, sociopathic, self-styled cowboys rolling in it (not all of them U.S. citizens, BTW) is an insult to the people who put you in office.

We know who really runs this country, and it sure ain't the people who voted for Obama. He reveals himself to be fully at the mercy of the monied class -- societal changes will only go as far as they allow and they are already getting nervous -- however much we may not want him to be or wish he wasn't. A revolution is coming and the ruling class is doing everything exactly wrong in trying to prevent it.

Like I said a couple of days ago, our ruling class should be more afraid of us. The overlords are so insulated in their gated communities and have been for such a long time that they see this kind of treatment as their birthright. They really do think this country, all of it -- this country's government, its Treasury, its natural resources, its people -- all belongs to them.

They should be more afraid of us.

(H/T Susie Madrak, C&L)

The Obama Economic Surge?

The Dow Jones has rebounded 623 points in the last three days, a 9.5% gain. I'm waiting with bated breath for all the "Obama Recession" bastards to give him credit for having the foresight to throw money at the problem and stem the tide.

The Obama economic "surge" worked! Why can't they admit that? Say it. SAY IT!

ADDING... Of course, I'm kidding. My point is that one has nothing to do with the other. It's all speculation based on insider news and confidence.

It's just very interesting and obvious that while the markets are doing poorly, President Obama's face is plastered all over the DJIA ticker, but when the markets are rallying, rags like Andrea Mitchell are trying to say the White House is taking credit for it while the MSM remains mum. Oh, they'll tell you the Dow is up, but the very next line isn't, "Is President Obama doing too much?" That's only reserved when the numbers are in the red. And please show me a quote where the White House taking credit that isn't intended as a joke, Andrea. And while you're at it kick your husband, Alan Greenspan in the scrotum. That scumbag was part of the problem.

Stewart vs. Cramer: Brawl Street

I watched the edited version on Comedy Central last night and thought Stewart said his piece and Cramer took it like a man. Watching the unedited (and in my opinion, much better) version, there was more of a dialogue that I wish they had time to air on the show. That being said, maybe it'll make Cramer rethink the hype, give a fairer assessment on his program and get rid of the "Booyah!" plastic sledgehammer.

I used to watch these CNBC shows and initially thought that they were working for the interest of the viewer. But the events of the past year, especially the last two months, the tone seemingly changed to a "Blame Obama" mentality (maybe I'm biased) when this crisis was years in the making and Obama had been in office for two months, culminating with the Santelli rant that has the appearance of having been planned far in advance, I have to wonder what dubious or perhaps nefarious factors are at work here.

Jon Stewart may work at Comedy Central, but his style and crackerajck team has been at the forefront of exposing hypocrisy without the need to pull punches like so many "journalists" who fear losing access.

My prediction is that CNBC will suffer reduced viewership, will need an intense overhaul and if not, possibly cease to exist - and as far as the Cramer show, if he doesn't get rid of his big, red buttons and plastic cows and shed his sound effects for some more nuanced, serious financial discussion, he'll be gone by the end of the season. But what do I know?

This is an excellent interview, but my favorite part (with a guilty smile on my face) is when Stewart refers to Joe Scarborough as "Doucheborough."
Enjoy.



We are capitalizing your adventure



It's not a fucking game

Jon Stewart Bitchslaps Jim Cramer - UPDATED

Stewart continued his rampage against CNBC, specifically Jim Cramer, who decided to write an article on how his advice was mischaracterized by The Daily Show. ...Bad move, Jim.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

In Cramer We Trust

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Economic Crisis

UPDATE (2:18pm): Cramer fights back with an appearance on The Today Show, claiming he stuck his neck out when he told everyone to sell by October 2008. Well fuck, Jim, by October '08 even I knew that! I didn't need a talking head financial guru slapping red buttons like a maniac to tell me the market was tanking when it had been happening for a year. He also refers to himself as "the little guy." Poor multi-millionaire Jim Cramer.

Maybe you should just go on The Daily Show and hash it out. I'd like to see that.