Scots Taffer on 16/3/2009 at 03:06
(
http://blog.indecisionforever.com/2009/03/13/jon-stewart-and-jim-cramer-the-extended-daily-show-interview/) The Interview
I don't know the backstory here and I don't understand 100% of the discussion, especially when they get too specific in their terminology and references, but I actually just wanted to latch onto a point that Jon made towards the end about
who is Wall Street responsible to?We've come out of the boom years backed by the 80s corporate excesses and the vulgarity of naked greed is good, but now are we going to try and turn the world's foremost "get rich quick" arena, packed with money hungry, zombie eyed, coke snorting wannabe Geckos willing to fuck the system to turn a huge paypack, into some heavily regulated morally responsible and fiscally conservative marketplace?
How can we overcome roughly three decades of complete greed and corrupt thinking?
AR Master on 16/3/2009 at 03:25
when the world becomes like the movie The Postman those people will be the first to be eaten by roving gangs of assless chap wearing marauders, so don't worry about it
doctorfrog on 16/3/2009 at 04:21
Quote:
Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.
Inline Image:
http://i42.tinypic.com/2011uzq.jpgI can't say that the interview/debate/horror show was entirely fair or a whole lot more than some dogged dog-kicking by Stewart, but what I will say is that Stewart is the first person I've seen on TV who has conveyed just how upsetting it is to hear the excuses, doe-eyed shrugging, and outright lying that's been passed around by high-level execs and grandstanding politicians in the glow of finanical fallout. Those in the know simply pumped up their investments and crossed their fingers until the whole thing blew up. It wasn't a conspiracy, but it sure wasn't a mystery either.
It's truly infuriating to know of the difficulties that many of use must face in the present and future, and simultaneously know that pretty much everyone who drove a BMW to work yesterday will be driving said BMW to work tomorrow.
I will say that Cramer was mainly a trapped dog here, not that he didn't deserve his position. The aim of CNBC as a for-profit station is to obtain ratings, play to its audience of Wall Street bankers and their dominion, not aggressively pursue journalistic truth. If Cramer "saved" himself by admitting he's only playing to a crowd that's pretty much in on the joke, it would completely undercut his parent network as a news station, and they'd kick him into a wall of spikes.
Muzman on 16/3/2009 at 05:17
(I haven't watched the interview yet, just ranting)
I wonder what sort of protest people can make about this stuff sometimes. It's weird to think of revolution in this context. Just as a cheap political thought experiment, you understand; since that's usually the measure in the West. We distributed rights and freedoms from the rich so the public wouldn't rise up and kill everyone. Yanks are terminally obsessed with their right to revolt etc (I said it was cheap, just go with it for a sec). Revolution is for overthrowing government or military authority. They're the bad guys of old. When they've sceded that authority to supposedly free economic systems with a shrug, who do we rise up and kill exactly. The idea of the public storming the banks or Wall street and instituting regime change is kinda weird. They're not the Aristos of old, to most people (even though they kinda are). The government would feel obliged to stop us and then they'd have to go as well, or do something about it. But it's odd to think of these old institutions being held to account like that, they've just been ...there for so long (unless you're fairly well educated in the history of these things). It's like railing at the air for carrying the vibrations of swear words you don't like hearing, or so economic systems appear to most people I'm sure.
(all of this, incidentally, is why socialism of some sort is something of an inevitable development from democracy that anyone who likes democracy tacitly approves of, sez I).
I don't know enough about share trading and so on, but it seems like a whole lot of bad stuff this century basically happened because all some company cared about was increasing value for their share holders, and a whole mess of people just gamed the rules like crazy for exactly that end. We think that kind of blinkered approach to employment is a good thing; just do your job and your job is.... Doesn't matter all that much about the larger picture.
Some reasonable way to curtail this would help. The free market types won't like it, but who cares what they think anymore. But they'd have a point in saying that investment would be scared off or whatever by restriction that's too peculiar.
RBJ once called a lot of that stuff religious and (although I don't see it every day, o' course) I suspect it's true. If the system of government and so on wasn't seen to be respectful of their beliefs (that investment and finance etc should take a certain libertarian shape) they would be scared off and not play ball as they once did and prove themselves right. Would they just be replaced by people willing to play ball gradually? Or would they use their accumulated money and influence to stymie any ideas but their own?
Cleaning house seems like a good idea when I think about these things. hypotetically speaking, of course.
Scots Taffer on 16/3/2009 at 05:33
Quote Posted by doctorfrog
It's truly infuriating to know of the difficulties that many of use must face in the present and future, and simultaneously know that pretty much everyone who drove a BMW to work yesterday will be driving said BMW to work tomorrow.
Hey, if you don't retain "the best and brightest" (who caused this monumental fuck-up in the first place) then how can we hope to get out of this horrific financial shithole? We can't have government who (rightly or wrongly) bailed us out then telling us how to spend our dollars, because after all, would you work for a company that wasn't doling out the big dolla bounties for doing your job well? And round and round we go. How do we stop it? Nobody knows.
Except maybe one man...
Quote Posted by Muzman
socialism of some sort is something of an inevitable development from democracy that anyone who likes democracy tacitly approves of, sez I
We've all been suckling at the teat of a cash cow with a black infected heart, just because you're a product of a system doesn't mean you have to support it.
Fafhrd on 16/3/2009 at 05:54
Wall Street is responsible to themselves, which isn't in and of itself wrong. The main drive of Stewart's argument (and the answer to your second question) was that the financial news networks (and news networks in general) are responsible to the Truth, not to Wall Street. So when they know that people are being exceedingly shady in their financial practices, they shouldn't be clapping those people on the back, and telling everybody else that everything is fine and continue giving your money to these people, please. Rather, they should be saying 'Company X is doing really well right now, but some of our research has shown that the recent activity that has spurred their stock is unsustainable over the long term, and we don't recommend them as a long term investment.'
The news media generating some level of transparency in the goings on at the big companies should, in the long run, force companies to be less shady in their practices. Because if it's known that they're being shady, people won't give them money, and they'll go under.
Scots Taffer on 16/3/2009 at 06:02
Okay, I get all the stuff regarding the news networks and that's fair enough, you have my complete agreement there. I'd like you to expand upon your initial statement though.
Fafhrd on 16/3/2009 at 07:15
By 'Wall Street is responsible to themselves' I mean 'Wall Street is responsible for running sustainably profitable businesses' as opposed to 'Wall Street is responsible for making as much money for themselves as possible in as short a time as possible, and fuck everybody else' which is the thinking that seems to be behind the current economic shitstorm.
Running businesses that are sustainably profitable is good for everyone, and that's the idea at the core of all the right-wing 'unrestrained capitalism can only be good for the economy' talk, I know. They're not completely wrong, they're just naive. Obviously the 'fuck everybody else' thinking has become the norm, and that's where a combination of government oversight and transparent business practices enforced by the news media comes in to ensure that everybody else is not getting fucked, and that it continues to be in the best interests of the people running the companies to not start fucking everybody else.
jay pettitt on 16/3/2009 at 10:48
Something that bugs the hell out of me is the somewhat uneasy feeling that there's a conversation or three that should be happening, but isn't. There's a kind of strange collective air of 'we don't talk about that'. Kind of quite profound conversations about humanity, living in a society, being part of an ecological system and such. But (I think) perhaps because I'm a product of the last 30 years of said greed and corruption I'm really just not very well equipped with the vocabulary to do it. In all seriousness I really only know memes like 'capitalism: it's a bad system, but it's better than the alternatives - so that's alright then' and then I can go and distract myself by reading what celebrities are wearing on their feet, talking about broom broom cars or cameras or sport or whatever it is I distract myself with. It's pitifully weakminded, which is quite frustrating.
I think part of Stewart's frustration is that journalists are kind of the pros at communicating and starting conversations and by reading and watching media it should equip me/us with the vocabulary that means we don't just roll over and get shafted every time someone asks us to look the other way.
Something seems wrong about the notion of sustainably profitable business. It contains the words sustainable, profit and business - none of which are bad words, so it should be alright, but it isn't. Surely we should be engaging ourselves in sustainable, useful enterprise. I'm not sure how you do that (I suspect it's got something to do with education, publishing, transparency and democracy and so on), but profit (for the person running the enterprise) doesn't seem to be an entirely satisfactory indicator of value or usefulness. You can run a highly profitable, lasting business that has harmful or at least non-beneficial effects on society, the environment and other businesses. Infact it almost seems encumbant on businesses to minimise their potential for benefitting society, the environment or other businesses in order to remain viable in the market place. When faced with a business decision we prioritise market realities ahead of reality realities.
Morte on 16/3/2009 at 11:16
I agree, the notion that businesses only have a responsibility to profit marigins has to go. Businesses can't exist in a vacuum, and at the very least have a responsibility to not engage in behaviour destructive to the communities that surround them.
