Hollywood on Uncle Sam’s terrorism fight? Don’t even ask.

But now that it’s Uncle Obama on the warpath against the most diabolical villain in the populist panoply, Hollywood is back to showing its anti-Axis resolve against this most indefensible of enemies.

That enemy (for now anyway) is the army of the overpaid — those individuals who represent an unholy axis of unsupervised greed with incomes that evoke envy in the psyche of the ordinary workin’ mench at the mercy of The Man. And why not? According to human resources expert Patrick R. Dailey, top corporate salaries are now 411 times the amount of  the lowest paid worker. In 1980, that ratio was 42 to one. By comparison, star actors are often paid more than 1,000 times the amount of the lowest salary on the set.  No matter.

To hear Hollywood  multi-millionaires like Oscar winner Michael Moore and Emmy winner Lawrence O’Donnell myopically channel Huey Long’s populism, highly paid financial industry execs and Wall Street traders are the only serpents in the suites, the only rapacious rich for making more than the $500,000 annual salary Obama deemed reasonable earlier this year for bank CEOs that received federal tax bailout bucks. But that’s bound for change.

Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg says the upper limit will be more like $200,000 for AIG’s top people and possibly the others at rescued companies if he has his way.  Feinberg’s notion is to expand the list of the capped and that has members of the chattering class like CBS Early Show host Harry Smith openly talking about the next logical step:  “Why wouldn’t we make this law across the board and put a governor on compensation for everybody in private enterprise?”

Keeping in mind that members of said chattering class do not consider themselves part of “private enterprise,”  its members in good standing undoubtedly see their multi-million dollar incomes as exempt from limitations.  So today, it’s pay limits only for companies that directly received taxpayer cash.  But tomorrow, could it be any company or industry that benefits from special federal legislation — like tax breaks…

Like the tax break Hollywood gets?

Some states give considerable financial help for filming within their borders, but Uncle Sam helps the cameras roll too. Films that begin production by December 31st qualify for special tax treatments and that would be more than enough of an opening for Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts to exploit: “We are trying on every front to increase the role of government.”

Moore and O’Donnell and their many movie-biz supporters would be fine with that for everybody else, but what if that means Uncle Sam also gets to cap Hollywood’s gigantic paychecks?

Could Disney’s Bob Iger (30 million in 2008), CBS’ Les Moonves (36 million in 2008), Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes (19 million in 2008) or DreamWork’s Jeffrey Katzenberg (11 million in 2007) or Lion’s Gate’s Jon Felheimer (6 million in 2007) get by on a paltry 200 grand? Or what about Cameron Diaz and her reported 50 million income or Simon Cowell’s 72 million or Will Smith’s 20 million plus per picture or …

They’d all still be “rich” with an income of 200 large, according to Uncle Obama’s current rationale, but the gap between above and below the line would definitely be compressed, possibly to the point of adopting a new compensation model.

While it is true that quite a few of the huge executive pay packages in public corporations can be traced to boardroom cronyism which shareholders are all but powerless to fight, those maligned bonuses are usually paid to people like Wall Street traders or salespeople who have to show bottom line results. How would that work here in Hollywood?

Hollywood is now the land of schmooze, off-book arrangements and any number of other “things” that most here would not want to tell a Congressional investigation committee or the Securities and Exchange Commission. But let’s try one measure of pure performance for people that may be paid 15 to 20 million or more for a few month’s work.

According to Forbes, The Bourne Ultimatum grossed $29 for every dollar star Matt Damon was paid.  Jennifer Aniston’s last three starring films earned $17 to every dollar she was paid. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and Will Smith bring in about $12 per every dollar they are paid. And Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Jim Carrey bring in about $9 for each buck they get. Unfortunately, that’s where the simplicity stops.

How many saw The Bourne Ultimatum just because it starred Matt Damon? How many saw it because it was a well-written, compelling story that was superbly directed and had a terrific actor ensemble ? Would just as many have seen it had the film starred somebody else? How much of the credit and compensation a star gets is due to other’s work that makes him look good? The Wall Street traders now in the class warfare crosshairs have no such variables. They either made money or they didn’t. Whether that trading helps or hurts people is a subject for another discussion, except for one point that appears to be getting ginned up as a Hollywood defense against any attempt at exerting Washington control here.

That argument is that what financial industry types do affects the well being of individuals and the economy at large, while Hollywood doesn’t do either. Good luck with that reasoning to those who think it’ll keep them away from the Frank ‘n Feinberg fingers if they start to roam. On the other hand, running a riff on that Huey Long legacy might do the trick.

During the 1930s, Louisiana’s Democratic populist Governor Huey Long was so dictatorial about wages and most everything else, that Congress started to investigate whether his state was still a republican form of government as the Constitution required. Long was murdered before committee hearings started, but its question about the limits of legitimate government control is worth considering.

At what point would Barney Frank’s forewarned government micro-managing of America disqualify it as a republican form of government? Wherever that point is, it doesn’t necessarily have to crimp Hollywood.

Huey Long has been resurrected as Michael Moore, Hollywood’s anti-capitalist Kingfish of compensation, and he’s supported by Lawrence O’Donnell and his 99% socialist Writer’s Guild garrison. Together, this formidable semantics’ force could clear the way for Frank and presumably Feinberg while protecting its own.

How? By doing two things Hollywood does best: using film and television to alter a contract –in this case the people’s contract with its government — thus creating a false perception that eventually becomes a public opinion reality.

In scripts, Moore and O’Donnell could re-write the Constitution’s Guarantee Clause to depict pay czar control and other Washington dictates to have have always been an integral part of a republican form of government. Then they could exempt themselves by turning the Equal Protection Clause into a dramatized PETA approved “Napoleon” doctrine of  Tinseltown exceptionalism reading that all animals are equal but that Hollywood animals are indeed more equal than others.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch, but flyover land has been influenced by our scripted propaganda for over a century now, so why not again if it saves our bacon?

Oink.

Don’t get me wrong. Moore came up with a clever shtick that can be amusing, but he doesn’t make real documentaries. He makes sophomoric  agitprop that violates the Oscar’s rule against fiction in that form which other documentary makers must apparently follow — a double standard point I’ve made to the Academy awarders twice. Only the first of those letters is listed below because of space limitations, but a key point made in that second note is that there should be a separate category for Moore’s type of fabricated political schlock if such stuff is going to be receiving awards .  Sans that, “anything goes with documentary film … there are no standards … it’s all a game,” as University of Texas film professor and indie producer John Pierson put it.

The Academy’s silence was and remains deafening. Disquieting as that is, the worst silence is that of the news media that has known about Moore’s lies and kept mum. Such has been the case ever since this baseball capped faux populist schlub allegedly chased General Motors Chairman Roger Smith around for an interview to no avail in “Roger & Me.”

The entire premise of that Warner Brothers distributed film was that Smith would not meet with Moore to explain why the cruel GM capitalists annihilated Michael’s Flint, Michigan home town with plant closings and loyal employee firings. But according to the makers of two separate real documentary films who researched Moore’s methods and fidelity to his socialist political message, it’s all baloney.

Roger Smith never did an interview with Moore?

Kevin Leffler, a Flint CPA who grew up with Moore and made “Shooting Michael Moore” confirmed to me that a member of the “Roger & Me” crew told him he was present when Moore did interviews with Smith. Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, makers of “Manufacturing Dissent,” corroborated that in their film research.  “Anyone who says that is a fucking liar,” responded Moore.

Michael doth protest too much.

How about those fired General Motors workers Moore shows?

According to Leffler, two of the film’s main characters, Flint locals Rhonda Britton and James Bond, are presented as fired GM employees when, in fact, neither worked for GM. They told Leffler that Moore coached them on what to say, how to say it with the most drama, edited their comments out of context and even promised money to the illiterate Britton if she’d sign a paper Moore gave her. The paper was a trick forfeiting any right to money from the film.

How about Fred Ross, the Flint hard heart presented as evicting fired
GM employees from their homes?

Ross told Leffler those he was evicting were not GM employees either.

The bottom line is that there are no limits to the outright lies Moore has embraced in all his his films to create false realities that can be exploited for leftist political causes, including the fabrication of quotes. That’s what he did to the late Charlton Heston by editing two speeches he made a year apart in order to make him say something on screen he never said in person. He hid the cut with a cut-away shot. Notice that Heston is wearing different suits, but the viewer doesn’t catch the deception in real time and Moore wants to keep it that way.

Kevin Leffler’s well-researched film has so upset Moore that he is trying to block it from being shown. Leffler told me Moore intimidated Carmike Cinema, the fourth largest movie house chain, into pulling it from its Traverse City, Michigan theater, a bully he may try elsewhere. One reason among many Moore probably does not want “Shooting Michael Moore” seen is that Leffler snuck into Fidel’s Cuban hospitals with a hidden camera to show what socialized Castro care is really like and it ain’t pretty.

That’s a sharp contrast to the Cuban hospital Moore showed in “Sicko” which was exclusively for rich foreigners and top communist party officials in Fidel’s regime.  But Moore never mentioned that and neither have government health care advocates here who have shamelessly used that Cuban hospital as an example of the utopian system Americans are being denied.

Leffler says he does have a distribution deals in Europe and America and that “Shooting Michael Moore” is likely to be on its way to a screen near you.

***

April 21, 2003

Bruce Davis
Executive Director
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
8949 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

RE:  “BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE” INVESTIGATION REQUEST

Dear Mr. Davis:

This is a letter I had hoped not to write. However, the disturbing amount of credible evidence published in reputable venues such as “The Wall Street Journal” and “Forbes” that “Bowling for Columbine” violates the Academy rules which define a documentary feature can no longer be ignored.

Therefore, as a prior Academy Award nominee who is concerned about the integrity of the Oscar, I hereby respectfully request a fair and complete formal Academy investigation as to the eligibility of this year’s winner.

Should that investigation determine that “Bowling for Columbine” contains, as claimed, fabricated scenes and video of real people that has been edited to manufacture a fictional reality intended to mislead viewers, then the director and producer of this film should be stripped of their award.  That Oscar should then be awarded to the runner up.

Failure to conduct such an investigation and act according to its findings will diminish the stature of the Oscar, establish an exploitable precedent for future rule violators and be grossly unfair to the other nominees who did follow the rules. That unfairness will be particularly bitter to those whose film would have been nominated in place of “Bowling for Columbine.”

Even the accusation of such rule violations taints the Academy Award with implications of politics and favoritism that are most damaging. So, I again respectfully ask that you not delay your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Dan Gifford
Producer, “Waco: The Rules of Engagement”

That’s why my blood went to full boil a couple of days before he died when I glanced at the TV in a rural Bates motel — been staying in a lot of those lately — and saw Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz laud the youngest Camelotian as the greatest Senator and humanitarian of all time from the deck of Geraldo Rivera’s berthed yacht in Martha’s Vineyard. Dershowitz went on to tell the FOX mustachioed-one how he had rushed to Teddy’s aid with expert legal skills “in his hour of need” after Kennedy had left his date, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die in a Chappaquiddick Island tidal pond during the summer of 1969. Dershowitz’ considerable skills aside, the fact that full media attention was diverted from Kennedy by the coming Moon landing and walk to take place two days later probably helped the Kennedy fixers regroup and save his political hide.

I don’t say that based on the accounts of others. Since I was working at WSAR radio in Fall River, a town about 30 miles from the demi isle de riche crime scene on Martha’s Vineyard, I saw the Kennedy fixers do their work personally. To save space, I’m going to assume everyone reading this knows the Chappaquiddick narrative by heart — click here if you don’t — since it is so well known and what implausible parts of Kennedy’s story the fixers needed to fix. To say they succeeded is an understatement.

While America’s eyeballs and attention were diverted to Neil Armstrong’s step onto the Moon, the fixers hustled the five remaining unmarried women from that initial gathering of six married men away from investigators and reporters and then started throwing the weight of the Kennedy political machine around.

Despite the testimony of the diver that pulled Mary Joe Kopechne’s body from Kennedy’s car that it appeared to him she died of asphyxiation while gasping for oxygen in an air pocket, the local coroner refused to perform an autopsy, ruled her death an accidental drowning and released her corpse for burial in another state. Later attempts to exhume Kopechne’s remains for autopsy were successfully fought by the Kopechne family which had received about $150,000 dollars from Kennedy that we know of.

The official inquest into Kopechne’s death was done in secret one year after the incident on orders from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Was Kopechne’s death really a tragic accident? Was it a murder? Did Kennedy have a motive to kill her? We’ll  never know for sure now, but based on what I and WSAR News Director Mike Cabral learned at the time about Kennedy goon threats, payoffs and political favor swapping, put me down as a believer that Kopechne was pregnant with a child of Teddy’s she did not want to abort and that he had to do something drastic to make that situation go away for the sake of his political career and that was all that mattered. It’s all that ever mattered, which is why Ted Kennedy was willing to engage in treason for political gain.

In a stunning Forbes article, Peter Robinson, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, quotes from a Soviet memorandum discovered by London Times reporter Tim Sebastian. The note was written by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, and was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year, Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney [Kennedy's law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California] was in Moscow. The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Robinson writes:

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.

Bad as that is, Kennedy’s actions prior to approaching Andropov indicate Teddy knew he was engaging in treason writes James Simpson:

What is not generally known is that Kennedy collaborated with the Soviets well before Reagan was elected, and had a direct hand in crafting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As a result of his efforts — which appear in retrospect to have been crafted to prevent detection of his seditious activities — the FBI was prevented from accessing critical intelligence that could have warned of 9-11. This story has been brought to light in an article, Treason and Ted Kennedy: The Story the Media Won’t Tell by Herb Romerstein, a veteran investigator for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers. First, he offered to visit Moscow notes Robinson:

The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.

Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Kennedy then offered to grease the skids for Andropov to be favorably interviewed on American television:

A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.

“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”

Is the word treason ringing in your head too? How about the phrase “honest journalism?” But Robinson notes more:

In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian’s story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. “The media,” Kengor says, “ignored the revelation.”

Teddy Kennedy offered to collude with America’s arch enemy and our media ignored the revelation? Can’t claim a Moon walk diversion for slacking that story.

Does that make you wonder how many other treasonous Washington Teddys our constitutionally protected Fourth Estate may be ignoring?

Me too.

Cronkite should be the poster boy for full disclosure of a reporter’s politics — something I strongly advocate. Instead, he continues to be lauded as “Uncle Walter,” the journalist who was totally unbiased in his reportage at a time when there were only three networks and the size of his news audience and personal influence on politics and national policy was far beyond anything that can be imagined by those who did not experience it. That meant Cronkite was the national oracle of fact and truth during his time as Anchor and Managing Editor of CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981. But was he really unbiased? Well, that’s not quite the way it was.

Cronkite was accused of political prejudice by Republicans and conservatives as soon as he became CBS’ big kahuna. The bias they claimed was not so much in the words he said, it was in the way he said those words in combination with his story selection, pictures and facial expressions following comments made by non-liberals.

The first time I really noticed Cronkite’s tricks was while watching his TV newscasts during the 1964 presidential campaign between Arizona’s Republican Senator Barry Goldwater and incumbent Texas Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. What most caught my attention was that Cronkite’s favoring of Johnson was different than the overt fawning over JFK four years earlier by Cronkite and the general news establishment. This was a subtle, sub-textual skewing which presented benign accurate facts about Goldwater in a way that demonized and marginalized him.

Every actor, director and script writer, among others, knows what I’m talking about and how to accomplish the same thing. When I was a TV reporter, I would often make the point during speaking gigs that people should be careful what conclusions they draw from a TV news story because accurate facts can be juxtaposed and presented in such a way that the viewer can be left believing the opposite. It’s all a matter of using the camera, voice and expression to exploit known fears, biases and commonly believed “truths” which may not be true at all.

To cut to the chase, Goldwater was not just a US Senator, he was also an Air Force General who spoke bluntly about his anti-communist views and his belief that we should take a harder military stance against hegemonic Marxism, especially in Vietnam. He was equally blunt about his opposition to the civil rights bills and Johnson’s proposed “Great Society” welfare state then being argued in Congress because of constitutional issues like equality before the law, the right of association and other individual rights against the sort of all powerful state Cronkite wanted. So Goldwater’s views were twisted by Cronkite within a media favoring Johnson and became the stuff of Stewart/Colbert type ridicule by wags of the day to the effect that Goldwater was a racist and real-life General Jack Ripper, the fictional Dr. Strangelove character who goes crazy and starts a nuclear war. It was not the Goldwater I discerned from his writings and speeches, but it was the image of him I noticed being embellished on the Cronkite newscasts.

Cronkite gave the false Goldwater characterizations full credibility before taking them to another level. Instead of simply focusing on Goldwater’s message during his run for the presidency, I started noticing that CBS reports often sidetracked into stories that made Goldwater’s win of the Republican nomination at the convention (that’s how it was done then, not via the primaries) seem like some malevolent scheme.

There were stories about Goldwater’s use of secret communication devices and other electronic wizardry that sounded downright nefarious. There were other stories that implied Goldwater may not be right in the head because he rested at the bottom of his home swimming pool while breathing through an air hose. Others referenced Goldwater’s Jewish ancestry in ways I recognized as targeted the anti-Semitism buttons buried within Americans who would never admit they disliked Jews in their heart of hearts. But even that was overt compared to the really subtle stuff in Cronkite’s delivery subtext achieved through tone shifts in his wonderful voice and those facial expressions that sent a decidedly anti-Goldwater message.

I am not claiming that Cronkite alone caused Goldwater to lose the presidential election. But I am saying that Cronkite was not the unbiased arbiter of truth he is being made out to be. The way that he delivered the news generally told me and many others how he felt about most any given story, and his expressed opinions, starting with his undercutting of the US Vietnam War effort after American and Republic of Vietnam forces had annihilated the North Vietnamese during the Tet Offensive, told me I was right.

For those who don’t know, Communist forces in Vietnam were near defeat but decided to throw everything they had left at US and Republic of Vietnam soldiers in the form of huge suicidal attacks that intentionally  targeted civilians for wanton murder during the Chinese New Year called Tet. It was crushed and the loss broke the back of the Marxists. Despite that fact, Cronkite told America that Vietnam was a “stalemate”  and ”unwinnable.” That emboldened both the Communists there and anti Vietnam protesters here — many of whom were communists or sympathizers — and turned a massive Marxist battlefield defeat into a political win that sustained Communist morale by confirming America’s Achilles heel, according to former North Vietnamese Colonel Bùi Tín:

“[The American anti-war movement] was essential to our strategy. Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable … America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.”

That will to win was undermined every afternoon by Cronkite and his CBS News ensemble.

Only after retirement did Cronkite actually admit the liberal newsroom influences that are still denied today by those in them in addition to the personal beliefs his critics had said all along were skewing his reporting.

1996: “Everybody knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents,” Cronkite told those at a Radio and TV Correspondents Association dinner.

1999: During an awards ceremony at the United Nations, Cronkite admitted that “half a century ago” he was offered “a job as spokesman and Washington lobbyist for the World Federalist organization” that advocates a one-world government. “I chose instead to continue in the world of journalism.” Then he riffed: “[W]e must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government … We must change the basic structure of our global community to a new system governed by a democratic UN federation … Today the notion of unlimited national sovereignty means international anarchy. We must replace the anarchic law of force with a civilized force of law … [we must ratify the] “Treaty for a Permanent International Criminal Court” … [and we must have a] revision of the [U.S. power of] Veto in the Security Council. Cronkite then praised international billionaire financier George Soros as one of the best thinkers on this topic.

2004: On CNN’s Larry King show: “I have a feeling that [Osama bin Laden's newly released videotape] could tilt the [presidential] election a bit. In fact, I’m a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, that he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.”

Karl Rove set-up Bin Laden?

That’s as wacky a bit of conspiracy dementia as Bill Moyers’ claim on the Charlie Rose Show that, “if [John] Kerry were to win [the presidency] in a — in a tight race, I think there’d be an effort to mount a coup,  quite frankly.”

A coup d’etat orchestrated by Karl Rove, no doubt.

“For many years, I did my best to report on the issues of the day in as objective a manner as possible. When I had my own strong opinions, as I often did, I tried not to communicate them to my audience,” said Cronkite.

But he did.

And that’s the way I recall it really was.

I spent 92 long minutes in Woody Allen’s cinematic wayback machine yesterday, reliving almost all the 60’s pseudo-psychoanalytic cultural neuroses, nihilism and negative leftist judgmental-stereotypes he popularized then that still have us on the couch and at each other’s throats.

Allen wrote the script more than 30 years ago with Zero Mostel in mind as the obvious, self-involved, Allen alter-ego lead character living in a psychobabble New York City hell of his own creation. But a not so funny thing happened on Zero’s way to the Forum years ago, leaving Allen to look for an actor who could convincingly play the part of a brilliant Jewish string theory former professor in his sixties who manages to schtup and then marry a vulnerable, naive teenager. The familiar ring of that scenario is integral to the theme of “Whatever,” which is that there is no God, everything that happens is just random cosmic kaka, and so we should all do whatever gets us our jollies.

Yahweh may not agree, but He did create a person unbalanced enough — at least from what I read — to play the lead: Larry David of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm (mine was curbed shortly after the fade from black).

In scenes that must have been twenty or more pages long, David’s Boris Yellnikoff –emphasis on “yell” — alternately kvetched and sneered in gawd awful-long soliloquy to the fourth wall about sophomoric penis envy, vaginal snapper fear, Oedipal lust, suppressed homosexuality, atheism, NRA hating, fly-over land cretin bashing, inner-selves yearning to be free and other urban elitist Nietzsche-Kant-Sartre politically liberal arrogance that used to be such great co-ed thigh openers at frat house mixers or the White Horse Tavern while channeling and analyzing Dylan Thomas’ inner Freudianism Jungism.

Do not go gentle into that good theater darkness for this one, my friend, unless you can stand the past life regression to “Oooh, so what were Freud and Jung really saying?” by the keg.

Well, Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar while Jung thought that a woman was a woman but a cigar was a smoke. But lemme play it out for ya …

My name is Sigund Freud outa Vienna, and I bring youuuu … a VIRUS for the Jung !!!

You make me feel so Jung
You make me feel my head has sprung
And every time I look at you
I feel so very, psychological.

The Moment that you speak
I wanna hold my head and freak …

“That’s sooo clever and deep. And just where is your room in this great big house?”

Heh, heh…

Wouldn’t every aging man like to live the Lolita fantasy of a nubile bed-mate who swallows every cockeyed pessimistic rant about life and love and God without challenge while offering a Viagra? Sure you would. And I’ll bet Woody likes it too, which is why his Yellnikoff seems an awful lot like the Max Von Sydow misanthrope of “Hannah and Her Sisters.” It’s on his mind. It’s in his life. Woody may look mellow, but there’s a raging river of recurring themes that cannot find resolution behind those horn rims — emphasis on horn.  Maybe that’s why he’s gone to a shrink every day for the past 50 years.

How Allen managed to inject his own psycho-neuroses, political and social views on the American culture, I don’t know. Was his wimpy, over-therapied, pseudo-intellectual image something America wanted to imitate? Or were those who most identified with Allen already that way? Whatever, the unvarnished anger and snobbery of the urban chattering class toward those who lead traditional lives (married, kids, religious, employed at non artsy jobs — particularly those who lead those traditional lives in “flyover land”) is on display in this film for all us artistic elites to wallow in.

Guys who like football are hiding their lust for guys by watching guys in tight pants. Guys who own a gun are compensating for the inadequate size of their penis. Belief in God is a form of arrested mental development. All of which reduces to Allen tellin’ those schmucks who think they’re happy with their routine lives that they aren’t.

Some of Allen’s solutions?

Admit you’re really gay and live the lifestyle. Throw away that Bible that’s causing sexual repression and discover the new Jesus of a bisexual menage a trois. Take advantage of teenage girls. Try and commit suicide — twice — as Yellnikoff does.

Try? I’d have been willing to kill that sob for sure, especially after finding a $55 parking ticket on my car after the movie.

Whatever.

A number of my ancestors served in the Continental Army, mostly with New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey units. One of those wrote the letter below which is now kept in the Revolutionary Era Documents section of the New Jersey Historical Society.  The letter was written by Captain William Gifford of the Third New Jersey Regiment to his best friend, Colonel Benjamin Holme of the New Jersey Militia. I thought this 4th of July weekend would be a good time to read it again…

Camp at Valley Forge Jan. 24, 1778

D. Col.

I should have wrote you before now, had it not been for our Expectations of going to Jersey for Winter Quarters, — but I fancy we may give up our notions of Jersey & Content ourselves in these Wigwams this winter, — We are encamped about Twenty Miles from Philad. at a place called the valley Forge, along the Schuylkill. The Army is divided into Two lines front & Rear, besides Corps de Reserve, and possess very
Commanding and defensible ground, we are fortifying the Camp as fast as possible, tho’ we are under no apprehensions of a visit from the Enemy, (Tho’ such a report is current in Camp) but I am very sensible they know  better things, if they shou’d come I trust in God we shall be able to give them a warm reception, perhaps a total defeat, We have a large Army in every respect fit for Action, Tho’ some are very bare for clothes, I wish with all my heart our State wou’d make better provision for out Brigade, respecting Clothing & other necessaries than they do, if they had any Idea of the hardships we have & do undergo, they Certainly wou’d do more us, [sic] than they do, I assure you Sir we have had a very Severe Campaign of it, Since we came in this State,– our Men are in huts 16 by 18, Covered with Oak Shingles, and now are pretty Comfortable — since they have got to live in ‘em, we lay in Tents until the 20 instant; an instance of the kind hardly ever known in any Country whatever, but what ca’t brave Americans endure, Nobly fighting for the rights of their injured country. –

I Congratulate you on the arrival of 8 ships from France under Convoy of a 40 Gun Frigate at a port in Maryland, their Lading is uncertain but supposed to have necessaries for the Army. –

As you are acquainted with Captain Lee of Horse, I will mention Some thing that happened [to] him a few Nights past. On the 19 ins about day break, 200 of the enemies Horse surrounded his quarters, with the intent to take him by Surprise, — but Captain Lee’s vigilance baffled their designs by industriously posting his men in their Quarters, although he had not a sufficient number to allow one for each Window, he Obligated them disgracefully to retreat after Repeated & fruitless attempts to force their way into the House, leaving Two killed and four wounded, their Wounded they took off. –

We received no other damage than a Small patrole of Horse, Consisting of four fell unfortunately in their hands, as they were returning from their post, & Lieu. Lindsay Slightly wounded in the wrist. — The
Commander in Chief has returned Cap. Lee, his officers & Soldiers of his Troop, his warmest thanks in general orders for their good Conduct and Superior bravery. — Captain Lee had in House but a Corporal and 4 privates. –

Perhaps you will think I have forgot you, in not writing to you oftner than I do, I must confess I have been careless about writing, but I assure you Sir it’s owing to my not having time or Paper to write on, I
shou’d be ungrateful to the last Degree, if ever I forget you my best friend. — I wrote you immediately after the Action of Short Hills, and likewise after the Battle of Brandywine, in the first I mentioned the
Person at Morris-Town, which I think wou’d be agreeable in every respect. –

When I shall have the Pleasure of seeing you is uncertain — if you have a Safe opportunity send me warm[est] breeches & Stockings [take] great care of the Linen as that article is very dear and hard to be purchased,  Colonels Ogden and Martin, with a number of other inferior officers of this Brigade have Resigned. –

I Shall be very fond of hearing from you when an opportunity offers, my best respects to Col. Jn. Holm Cap. Sayre, Jenny, Geo[rge] and your family & remain D. Col. your assured friend to serve you if in me lay. –

“A revolution principle certainly is, and certainly should be taught as a principle of the Constitution of the United States, and of every State in the Union.” — James Wilson, Scottish lawyer, signer of the Declaration of Independence, a major force in the drafting of the Constitution, a leading legal theoretician and one of the six original justices appointed by George Washington to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Each time July 4th rolls around, whoever lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue makes speeches celebrating American freedom and some other stuff like baseball and apple pie. But the guy at that address never gets down to lauding what the 4th of July is really all about: It’s a celebration of violence to achieve what most would agree was a just political end.

Yes, that political end was the achievement of independence from what America’s mostly British-born founders considered English tyranny by its German king and Parliament. But let’s have an honesty moment: I seriously doubt many today would consider the British rule that so angered our Founding Fathers anything to fight about. I mean, didn’t Screen Actors Guild members recently vote some fellow thespians onto the SAG Board of Directors who believe in taxation without representation?

That was a platform plank Marcia Wallace, Bob Newhart’s TV-shrink office receptionist, pitched to me on the Director’s Guild steps when she was running for a SAG Hollywood board slot. Her idea and that of some others who got elected last go ’round is to bar actors who don’t make a certain amount of money from voting in SAG elections and on union issues while, at the same time, forcing them to pay dues and be SAG members if they want to work. Is there any real difference between that scheme and the plight of the colonists who had to pay taxes levied in London even though they had no representation in Parliament? Maybe Wallace and those who voted for her should share some time on Bob’s cognitive dissonance couch with Mr. Carlin.

Talk about violence.

Anyway, when violence is used for the reason George Washington and Baron von Gekko used it, violence, for lack of a better word, is good. Violence is right, violence works. Violence clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

But the man in the White House right now doesn’t believe in violence for just cause. He gave the order for the Navy SEALS to shoot the Somali pirates to save the American ship captain they were holding hostage, you say? No. My military sources say he equivocated and the SEALS took the initiative themselves just as they are trained to do. He boldly sent the USS John McCain to intercept that North Korean ship believed to be carrying ballistic missiles for Iran? No, my military sources say top Pentagon brass leaned on him behind closed doors until he acted. Against that record, his deployment of additional troops in Afghanistan appears to be an aberration.

I believe the real view of the man currently living in our presidential mansion was stated quite clearly last month while positioned in his classic Mussoliniesque uplifted chin, quarter shot pose: “Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.” The Borg could not have said it better. But why stop there? Our president then compounded the intellectual insult: “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”

Those ideals embodied as rights in the American Constitution include equality before the law, rights of due process against the power of the state and the right to be left alone by the minions of government. But the paramount right is at all times the right to use violence against a government that violates those and other fundamental portions of its contract with the people — aka: the Constitution — when all lawful and peaceable remedies have failed. To say “it was not violence that won full and equal rights” may be literally true in the sense they were not won at the point of a gun, but the statement perpetuates a highly misleading myth about passive resistance in general.

The non-violence of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are shibboleths among the urban elite and academic classes for the only moral way to challenge oppression and injustice. Fortunately, George Orwell understood the brutal reality of that game even if his fellow intellectuals didn’t: “Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”

Gandhi’s and King’s non-violence only worked because they were not facing a Stalin or a Saddam or a Hitler or a Mao or a … Peaceful protest against those and like regimes is a guarantee of becoming worm food. Fact is, Gandhi and King protested the unjustness they saw within a fundamentally just system constructed by those aforementioned dead guys from Britain, and they didn’t just pull those principles out of their rear ends.

Those principles we take for granted that permit a balance between the sovereignty of the individual and that of the state we take are the accrued wisdom of centuries within an Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Viking alloy of cultures that valued personal freedom and its legitimate limits within the group that protected that freedom. Ya know, “The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack,” as Rudyard Kipling put it. There are other ways of being akin to the beehive, but if individuals want to remain individuals, the occasional sting of violence or its threat is the only thing that prevents it.

Thomas “Big Tommy” D’Alesandro is sworn in as Mayor of Baltimore in 1947
on a Bible held by daughter Nancy.

What I understood Pelosi’s father to mean was that the best defense is a good offense against those seeking your destruction for their own political gain. However, he must have recognized that political survival tactic had its limits, because “Big Tommy” was a man with a history of putting community safety and national defense first even at the risk of his own political career, a principle daughter Nancy does not appear to share.

He had opposed the Klu Klux Klan, among other groups, in battles against separate but unequal racism in Baltimore when Jim Crow was quite popular. He had made radio broadcasts in Italian urging his piasons to reject Benito Mussilini and anti-Semitism at a time when both were more popular than can be imagined today. On the flip side, D’Alesandro was part of a political moral dichotomy in which Baltimore politicians, police and judges received alleged cash payoffs with one hand while they kept organized crime and street criminals under tight control with the other. That was not always accomplished via genteel means.

“Enhanced interrogation” at the cop shop was freely employed then using the three languages hardcore criminals understand: Loud, fear and pain. Brutal? Unconstitutional? Maybe so. But contrast the relative calm of  that Baltimore past with the present dystopian one filled with murderous drug dealers and street criminals which was so accurately portrayed for years in “The Wire” HBO TV series. Now fast forward and compare the national domestic calm of the last eight years with the alternative of bloody attacks which the CIA says its interrogators stopped by forcing terrorists to talk. Somehow, Nancy Pelosi missed her father’s presumed lesson about community security being more important than political pettiness.

I met Pelosi’s father shortly after moving to Baltimore from North Carolina during the early 60s. The introduction was made by Greg Binicki, a guy who became a friend after helping me in a street fight against some neighborhood characters seeking to test the new kid on the block. Greg needed help each week delivering envelopes he would collect at union headquarters and other places to people in Baltimore’s city hall, police department and courts. The recipients all wanted their envelopes ASAP, but the number getting them had expanded to the point that he could not make the appointed rounds fast enough to stifle the kvetching. So for twenty bucks,  decent weekly money for a teenager then, I rolled off the turnip truck I rode into town and signed on.

After being introduced around, learning the routes and being repeatedly told by serious men that my task was to deliver the envelopes, not to wonder what was in them or to talk to anyone about them, I found myself with a pretty easy job that included lots of side benefits like the good will of important people and free food at some of Baltimore’s best restaurants — and Baltimore had some truly great eating places. That’s why I was always glad to find an envelope I’d know was for D’Alesandro in my stack and head for his drop at Sabatino’s in Baltimore’s Little Italy. If Sabatino’s sounds familiar, it’s the same restaurant where Nixon Vice President and former Maryland governor Spiro Agnew was later revealed to have received his payoffs while an elected state official. According to Agnew, everybody in Maryland politics got payoffs and it wouldn’t surprise me if they still do.

Mr. Canzani (we addressed all adult men as Mr. then), the owner,  would accept my delivery and then offer me pastries or even a meal. But on occasion, “Big Tommy” himself would be there in the process of transforming himself into “Big Tummy.” Those times, he’d invite me to his table and then engage me in the sort of personalized conversation that had gained him so many friends and supporters. A fair percentage of that support was certainly due to the job and charity patronage he dispensed, but unlike most younger politicians I’ve met, people really liked Pelosi’s father because there was nothing at all phony about him. He was genuinely interested in my studies at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (the city’s top academic high school),  what I thought about current events and what I wanted to do in life . The fact that I knew North Carolina US Senator Sam Ervin, a fellow Democrat D’Alesandro also knew, probably enhanced his friendliness. But his was an “old school” caring style shared by his contemporaries that would seem to be at odds with the obvious corruption that Greg and I abetted.

The envelopes we delivered allegedly contained cash. I say “allegedly” since neither of us were foolish enough to open them and look, but I did learn later that certain people were required to tithe to the Baltimore powers that assured their businesses or activities could operate. Some of those were legal adult businesses that benefited from prostitution like the many strip joints that comprised “The Block” near Baltimore’s inner harbor. Others were illegal businesses like the drug dealing that was quarantined in one section of town under the thumb of a black gangster named Little Willie Adams.

Adams always denied that he was a gangster or that he had parlayed his well known numbers racket into a drug operation, but the understanding between him and those Greg and I visited each week was that Adams could keep on keepin’ on for those willing to put their lives at risk in his part of town (the land of the “misdemeanor murder”) so long as no drugs showed up for sale in other parts of the city — which they didn’t.  So when Baltimore Colt star defensive tackle “Big Daddy” Lipscomb died from shooting enough heroin to kill five men in 1963, there was barely an official shrug following the pro forma outrage of being “shocked!” that heroin was available in Baltimore.

That was about the year I met Nancy Pelosi the first and only time at some Catholic thing. Practically everybody I first met in Baltimore was Catholic and they all tried their hardest at one time or other to convert this protestant southerner to the “true faith.” On this occasion, Municipal Court Judge Mary Arabian had me in tow to meet some people. She was a smart, beautiful woman with jet black hair. Unfortunately for my teen hormones, she was also a Catholic version of Judge Judy whose interest in me was purely parental to the point of insisting that I bring my report cards and assorted other schoolwork by her office on occasion for inspection and discussion. She and others in Baltimore’s hierarchy were concerned that academic standards in the public schools were sliding. And except for my school, they were.

At one time, I began to think of Judge Arabian’s interest and that of others I met as stifling. All seemed obsessed with the protection of children and mainstream society from corruptions and vices that could be contained by extra legal means but never eradicated by legislation, they believed. They were probably right, but not once did I hear any include the pay-offs I allegedly delivered on their list of corruptions. It was a notable hypocrisy but a bigger irony: The corrupt political world of  “Big Tommy” D’Alesandro that protected little Nancy while she learned power patronage politics provided more safety, more personal freedom and less government intrusion into private lives than The People’s Republic of Political Correctness fascism big Nancy and her legion of latte liberals want to impose by fiat.

“Big Tommy” would probably say that fascism is the Fiat of political ideology — both being Italian embarrassments that don’t work for long — before telling his Speaker daughter to get back in touch with her inner childhood and the concepts that made his world work.

For the benefit of those who may not know, machine guns (not the same thing as the demonized “semi-automatic”), hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other such military items are illegal to possess by US civilians, which means they are not for sale in gun stores. OK, in the interest of extreme accuracy for anyone in need, there are some civilian owned machine-guns in America, but they all have to have been registered with the ATF by 1986 as evidence that a special Treasury tax has been paid and the owner’s residence state has to approve the possession. What’s more, none of these arms has ever been involved in a crime, to my knowledge, and all are considered very pricey collectors items. That means they are not for sale to or in the hands of Mexican drug goons.

That raises some questions:

If Mexican gangsters are not buying military weapons in the United States, why do people like ATF officials, Attorney General Holder, Secretary of State Clinton, gun prohibitionists like Sarah Brady and multitudes of media talking heads claim they are while calling for an American “assault weapon” ban they say will to keep the Mexican drug gangs from buying what they really aren’t buying here because they can’t?

And if Mexican gangsters are not buying their military weapons in America from gun dealers as claimed, where are they buying them?

Confused? Well, as Fox News’ pundit Charles Krauthammer explained in one of his 1996 Washington Post columns, the answer to question one is quite simple:

Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is symbolic — purely symbolic … In fact, the assault weapons ban will have no effect either on the crime rate or on personal security. Nonetheless, it is a good idea … Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation … Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquillity of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain … Yes, Sarah Brady is doing God’s work.

Krauthammer is able to so clearly state the obvious that most government officials, politicians, gun banners and reporters keep denying because he does not have to lie to voters in order to stay in office or keep donations coming in, as Sarah Brady does. Neither do I. So please note that all the public safety blather about “plastic guns” that can evade metal screener detection, “cop killer bullets” that are specifically made to murder police officers, “Saturday Night Specials” which are unsafe for anyone to possess (except for police — there’s always a police exception) and the other oft repeated gun control paradigms are simply bogus media ready scare phrases that have zero to do with public safety and everything to do with eventually outlawing the private ownership of firearms.

Maybe you agree with that goal and maybe you don’t, but that’s the object of “reasonable gun control” advocacy.

The answer to the second question is equally obvious. Gun running from the United States into Mexico has been going on since the 1800s. But the stuff bought or stolen here is not the military weaponry we are continually told is arming the gangs there. This paragraph from a Los Angeles Times story managed to get the story right even if nobody else in the media will report it:

Most of these [military] weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semi-automatic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. . . . The enhanced weaponry represents a wide sampling from the international arms bazaar, with grenades and launchers produced by U.S., South Korean, Israeli, Spanish or former Soviet bloc manufacturers. Many had been sold legally to governments, including Mexico’s, and then were diverted onto the black market. Some may be sold directly to the traffickers by corrupt elements of national armies, authorities and experts say … These groups appear to be taking advantage of a robust global black market and porous borders, especially between Mexico and Guatemala. Some of the weapons are left over from the wars that the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said.

Stratfor, a private intelligence agency, noted more:

Grenades used in three recent attacks in Monterey, Mexico, and Pharr, Texas, all originated from the same lot delivered from South Korea.

So let’s recap.

Attorney General Holder, Secretary of State Clinton, ATF officials and a host of others claim that an “assault weapon ban” against American civilians will keep Mexican drug cartels with gazillions of dollars in their jeans from buying military weapons on the international black market.

Hey, makes sense to me.

Latte anyone?

Every time I have started to write a follow-up to last week’s piece about the evolving Jon Stewart, Rick Santelli, Jim Cramer CNBC massacre, new information that altered the narrative slid in over the transom. The newest part of that story comes from a self described progressive (leftist) group called “Fix CNBC” which has seized on Stewart’s gold standard sophomoric schlock attacks to publicly call for CNBC to start being Wall Street’s watch dog instead of its public relations puppy. That ain’t likely to happen and some personal disclosure of my own a bit later will illustrate why.

Stewart Vs. Santelli And Cramer

A week ago, I took issue with the way Jon Stewart took a cheap shot on his “Daily Show” at CNBC’s Rick Santelli. Today, I have limited praise for Stewart’s skewering of CNBC’s “Mad Money” guru, Jim Cramer. If that seems inconsistent or hypocritical (oh gawd, not that), it isn’t. The difference is that when Stewart blasted Santelli, he blasted a straw man of his own making. Santelli did not say what Stewart led his audience to believe he said in order to set up his put-down of Santelli. I did not comment on Stewart’s general tear down of CNBC that followed his Santelli snark because I did not know whether Stewart had taken the video clips he made fun of out of context and still don’t. After that, Cramer went on the Daily Show for national humiliation by a Stewart who demanded to know why Cramer didn’t warn people to sell their stocks. “It’s not a fucking game,” Stewart postured. Cramer could have challenged that and Stewart’s other crock but didn’t.

Why didn’t Cramer point out the video clip that got played ad nauseum on practically every network of him screaming about impending doom in the financial markets on August 3, 2007 before the market bear took hold?

“He [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke] has no idea, and these firms are going to go out of business and he’s nuts, they’re nuts! They know nothing!!!!” (about the Fed not injecting liquidity into the system).

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Why didn’t Cramer talk about his October 5th, 2008 advice on the “Today Show?”

“Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week. I do not believe you should risk those assets in the stock market.” (stock market 30% off its highs?)

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Or this one from October 20, 2008?

“Stop trading these two stocks (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) … this is an outrage … It’s very clear that someone knows what’s happening (and isn’t telling the public).

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I dunno why Cramer didn’t come back at Stewart. On the other hand, opinions abound about the reason Stewart went after CNBC and Cramer in the first place.

“Jon went after Cramer because he hates phonies and hypocrisy,” according to fellow comedian Dennis Miller on Bill O’Reilly’s show.

“I heard people in Stewart’s family lost a lot of money in the market,” O’Reilly said to Miller. (Stewart’s older brother, Larry Leibowitz, is head of US Markets & Global Technology at a Wall Street firm)

“His [Cramer's] real sin was attacking Obama’s economic policies. If he hadn’t done that, Stewart never would have gone after him. Stewart’s doing Obama’s bidding. It’s that simple,” MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson told Politico.com reporter Michael Calderone. “He’s a partisan demagogue.”

The London Telegraph’s Tom Leonard has a thoroughly cynical take: “… chat show cross-pollination. It’s a heinous practice which, in these desperate broadcasting times, viewers are going to see more of. The strategy is simple: keep non-essential guests – film stars, politicians, anyone with something interesting to say – to a minimum so you can concentrate on other people with shows. After dipping his proboscis into [Jon] Stewart’s pollen, Cramer was meant to flutter home with some of his young viewers, curious to see what the fuss was about. Indeed, Cramer had just inserted his schnozzle into The Martha Stewart Show (another NBC show). They pounded some pastry and pretended it was Jon Stewart. It’s all showbiz, after all.”

Not if some of CNBC’s critics have their way.

University of North Carolina business journalism professor Chris Roush proposes a Joe Friday change to just the facts: “The more that CNBC allows its reporters and anchors to state their opinions instead of simply reporting facts, the more it will hurt CNBC in the long run. When you state an opinion and you’re wrong, you cause people to lose millions or billions of dollars. Stating opinion with business news is extremely dangerous. Stating politics in political news is not as dangerous because people know that the person is stating their political viewpoint.” Roush’s point is understandable at a time when so many are looking for someone to blame for their losses instead of looking in the mirror. But the people I see on CNBC are educated, informed people with generally worthwhile points to make about the companies and markets they cover. What’s more, they challenge each other because the facts are often in dispute. Turning that off, as Roush recommends, would probably turn off CNBC’s lights.

“Fix CNBC” wants the lights to stay on for change:

Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism – asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies, and reporting the truth. Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You’ve been so obsessed with getting “access” to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today. You screwed up badly. Don’t apologize – fix it!

CNBC should publicly declare that its new overriding mission will be responsible journalism that holds Wall Street accountable. As a down payment, we ask you to hire some new economic voices – people who have a track record of being right about the economic crisis and holding Wall Street executives’ feet to the fire.”

OK, La Mancha wannabes, mount up. But take it from one who been der, done dat and knows: Ya can fugget about it! Nobody can be right enough often enough to satisfy a herd of TV viewers chasing quick profits and nobody is gonna hold any Wall Street feet to the fire in any real way that matters. Too negative? Read on — and pay special attention to the interwoven tapestry of relationships.

Before joining Lou Dobbs’ “CNN Moneyline” (now “Lou Dobbs Tonight”) in New York, I auditioned for a spot at CNBC in 1989 on the anchor desk with Sue Herera, who is still there. My agent, the late great Sherlee Barish, said that all went well except that my reputation for exposing financial criminality bothered the brass and that they were concerned about having me in their midst. I may ask questions that would alienate the Wall Street biggies and business leaders they hoped to curry favor with. Worse, they were concerned I may find an R. Foster Winans at CNBC, Barish told me.  Winans was The Wall Street Journal “Heard on the Street” columnist who leaked market moving stories to his stock trading buddies and inside information peddlers seemed to be everywhere.

In case you weren’t there or don’t remember the 80s paranoia, Wall Street had crashed, Godzilla market moving “geniuses” like Ivan Boesky with a “talent” for picking takeover targets that spiked in price had been unmasked as insider price riggers while lending institutions were failing because of looters like Charles “Cheating” Keating which, in turn, caused many businesses to close. Anyway, one particular story I had done, Barish said, in the midst of all that really bothered the CNBC boys: My expose on “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” that a great many of the businesses going under at the time were not the result of bad loans made to bad people who should not have gotten them (where have we heard that before?), but the result of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation forcing lenders to classify performing loans as delinquent and call them early. FSLIC Chairman M. Danny Wall demanded MacNeil/Lehrer take that fact out of the story I had done before it aired, but my editor, Gregg Ramshaw, said “no” as did his superiors, a principled stand for which I am still grateful. I was not grateful for the federal bullying that followed, but that’s a story for another time.

In any case, maybe the CNBC people had a point, because at CNN, I angered “The King of Wall Street” at the time, discovered that my boss, Lou Dobbs, had serious journalistic conflicts of interest and found corruption sludge at the now defunct Financial News Network.

That Wall Street king was Salomon Brothers CEO John Gutfreund of “Liar’s Poker” fame, and I earned his ire when I asked him about the way his bond traders, “The Big Swinging Dicks” as they called themselves, were sodomizing Salomon’s customers (and yes, there is something wrong with that). He was especially angry that I called him by the German pronunciation of his name (gootfroind) instead of the English translation (goodfriend) he liked. Gutfreund was no “good friend” to anyone, as far as I was concerned, other than his fellow financial sodomites. Long story short from there: Warren Buffett bought Salomon and fired Gutfreund, lots of lawsuits were filed, Gutfreund was banned from ever running a brokerage firm and CNBC still puts the sonuvabitch on the air as a credible “goodfriend” of investors! I’ve sent CNBC complained to CNBC, but whatcha gonna do? On to the Dobbs man.

Drexel Burnham Lambert of Michael Milken junk bond fame was in trouble when I joined CNN. How much trouble before it crashed several months later never completely got aired, from what I saw, because Lou Dobbs had a conflict. It was common knowledge that Lou wanted to be CNN’s president and that he was threatening to resign and take a big salary job at Drexel if he didn’t get it. Lou’s neighbor was Drexel’s top guy, Fred Joseph, the source of much reassurance that things at Drexel weren’t as bad as nearly everyone suspected or knew them to be. On the night that Drexel finally did crash, Lou told us all after the show that “Fred lied to me.” Maybe he did and maybe Lou was just doing his part all along to try and keep Drexel going for his own benefit as a viable bargaining tool, I certainly don’t know which. But how many people lost serious money because CNN’s reporting was possibly mollified by compromise? And this wasn’t the only example.

When I was assigned to do a story about some 1989 earnings at Shearson, I saw that a big insurance payment gave Shearson a bottom line profit even though it was losing money on its operations and said so in my story. The next day, there was hell to pay for saying that and Lou did a retraction. A week or so later, The Wall Street Journal noted the same thing I did and several other CNN news people took pleasure in pointing it out to me on the sly, always wary of Lou’s mercurial temper tantrums. But why would Lou do a retraction on something that was probably true, I wondered? Well, it did not take long to discover that Lou was being paid by Shearson and some other companies we were reporting on for work he did for them on the side. Lou fired me, but The Wall Street Journal somehow got hold of the story. Can’t imagine how that happened.

click to enlarge

Barish next sent me over to Financial News Network. It was the original network financial news source and the one the fledgling CNBC wanted to challenge. Right away, I began noticing some things that did not look right and soon had confirmations from some in a position to know that CFO Steven Bolen, among others,  was lining his pockets with FNN money and sending it to secret offshore accounts. FNN is now history.

Rest assured that what I’ve just written is only the tip of the Wall Street journalistic ethics iceberg that “Fix CNBC” seems to believe it will be able to melt. To its credit, CNBC has made efforts to eliminate the appearance of impropriety by forbidding its reporters to own individual shares of stock and drawing boundaries on the proper association between reporter and reportee, I’ve been told. That’s a notable change since the network got a black eye from the friendship between its star, Maria Bartiromo (an off air producer at CNN when I was there whose CNBC star status is well deserved, by the way), and former Citigroup executive Todd Thomson. Thomson flew Bartiromo on Citgroup’s private jet from New York to Beijing to host a party costing five million Citigroup dollars in 2007. It’s also a change from the time I watched Bartiromo coo to JP Morgan Chase Chairman Bill Harrison (my upper class counselor at Virginia Episcopal School) that she owned 1,000 shares of a certain bank stock. “Maybe you should buy more,” he said. That may not sound like much, but Bartiromo is married to Jonathan Steinberg, son of mega investor Saul Steinberg. And a suggestion from Harrison to “buy more” could be taken as a tip and cause a large position to be taken. Now, what about those people who are consistently right and will hold Wall Street executives feet to the fire that “Fix CNBC” wants hired?

I’ve been closely involved in the markets since 1970, and in all that time I have yet to see anybody who could consistently tell a mass audience which specific stocks will make them money. Every generation has its guru that rides a trend or makes some dramatic right call (remember Joe Granville?), but they tend to fade away after the conditions that made them hot stuff change– which they do. There are simply too many market variables, too many ways of interpreting winners (today, next week, next year?) and stock calls made on TV are too public to keep working even if they are correct. The simple reason is that once too many people start buying the same stock, it tends to stop rising because there are too few people left to buy and too many already in who want to sell and protect profits. The bottom line: Jim Cramer probably does as good a stock picking and market education job as it is possible to do on TV. As for holding Wall Street feet to the fire, antagonize the suits too much, and they’ll stop talking to reporters and start talking to their lawyers about defamation of character, harassment, loss of reputation, tortuous interference, you get the picture.

CNBC doesn’t want that headache and neither do any other news organizations I can imagine, especially during these tough financial times. So take it from one who has been tossed off company premises many times and dealt with death threats from criminals of all sorts, CNBC is not going to start burning Wall Streeters unless it has people like my former news director, Jim Topping (now the retired president of KGO-TV, San Francisco), who knew exposing financial crime was the right thing to do, knew I had the goods on the crooks and was willing to stare the bastards down. I don’t believe CNBC has people with that sort of gut in management who are willing to give up their Four Seasons table or toni party invites in order to rake Wall Street. Neither do I believe there are many reporters around these days with the background or desire to spot legitimate fraudulent activity and expose it before law enforcement does. The ability to do that is not learned in business school, a background shared by most of the bright, articulate faces on CNBC. And that’s why “Fix CNBC” is probably going to have to be happy with the police holding Wall Street feet to the fire while CNBC shows the perp walk.