Broke is an ambitious movie, covering ground from the subprime meltdown to the relationship between the stock market and the “irrational exuberance” targeted by Professor Robert Schiller.  For all its ambition, the film does come off as a bit scattered, mixing personal stories with broader (and often vaguer) points about the nature of the financial markets.  If you’re looking for a detailed analysis of real estate finance or an explanation of the mismanagement by the federal government and Wall Street, you’re not likely to find it here – this is more of a media critique, and a critique of the American mindset that we should “get rich quick” through the market rather than doing our research. 

The content of the movie, however, isn’t as important as the mood it creates.  It’s a well-cut movie, a high quality production, and it captures the sense of foreboding we all feel about the chaotic state of our economy.  Broke’s finest moments come from its analogies: a visit to an Asian fish market is likened to stock trading; the stock market’s vagaries are likened (and then differentiated) from playing the lottery.  Broke also convincingly tears down the financial news networks like CNBC, which, as creator Michael Covel sees them, are catering to an audience of news junkies in an attempt to score ratings (a point made in less elegant fashion by Jon Stewart in his grilling of Jim Cramer).  In Covel’s view, Americans have stupidly allowed themselves to become pawns of the “know-it-alls” who tell them where and when to invest – they’ve given up the financial autonomy they truly need to make smart investment decisions. 

Broke isn’t the all-encompassing “recession movie.”  What Broke does do in beautiful imagistic fashion, however, is remind us of the situation we now face, even if it doesn’t offer specifics for how to get out of it other than a blanket warning to face up to our responsibilities as investors.  If we take Covel’s advice on that point, we’ll all be a lot better off.

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.

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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.

It’s been a few days, so you have to wonder if Cramer’s figured it out yet — or if someone’s explained it to him. He certainly hadn’t pieced it together during his appearance on the “Daily Show” where he looked liked a fighter who didn’t see the punch coming – and he didn’t. Why would he? Through months and months of recession, Cramer’s been on the air doing what he’s been doing for years:  Ranting, raving, predicting, promoting, suggesting, picking, pointing, and putting himself across as some kind of Market Seer –just like so many others out there, only he uses action figures.

Cramer’s transgression had nothing to do with any part of the thrashing he took from Jon Stewart. Cramer, an Obama supporter, committed the sin of turning on Barack Obama with his “wealth destroyer” comment.

Had Cramer not hammered Obama, does anyone believe Stewart would have given him the attention he did? The same is true with Rick Santelli. How long has Santelli been doing what he does on CNBC? But it’s only after Santelli criticized Obama that Stewart found something about Santelli (and CNBC) to get morally indignant over. There was only one dynamic that changed here, and that wasn’t how CNBC, Santelli or Cramer do business, it was that they criticized Barack Obama.

But Stewart employs a sleight of hand to keep the rules of the game below the radar. He can’t thrash and humiliate these men for criticizing Obama, that would give the game away, so he finds something else. But the pop culture rules of the game are clear: Stay in line or we will humiliate you. And “we” is Stewart and all those who participate in the viral aspect of Stewart’s game of humiliation.

And don’t confuse this with a defense of Cramer or any of the noisy, smarter-than-thou market guys. But unlike Jon Stewart, I’m not smug enough to believe I’m the only one who can see through their schtick. This, of course, would’ve been Cramer’s defense – standing up for the intelligence of his audience and the investor crowd. But I guess only Jon Stewart is smart enough to know bad investment advice when he hears it, even though Stewart didn’t appear to give much of a damn about “the rubes” until Cramer and Santelli dared stray from the liberal talking points.

People who have reached a time of life when they’re in a position to invest are generally a pretty savvy bunch able to discern and make decisions on their own, it’s those not fully formed we should worry about, which is why Jon Stewart’s detached irony and refusal to honor anything other than his own outrage is much more of a pox on society than CNBC.

In the movie “Tin Men“ (1987) there’s a scene where a dishonest aluminum-siding salesman drops a five-dollar bill in the home of a potential sale and then asks the homeowner if the bill belongs to him. The hustle is obvious: do something dishonest to con the sucker into believing you’re honest. In the first minute of this video, you’ll see Jon Stewart drop his own five-dollar bill when he refers to what he does as selling snake oil.

It’s a nice feint on Stewart’s part, a disingenuous shot at humility, a way to hide behind the “I’m just a comedian” card he’s been pulling for years, but Stewart and Co. take themselves very seriously and a flag has been planted and a message sent that there will be a heavy price to pay for criticizing President Obama.

That’s the question I had after watching two interviews this week.  The first interview featured a buffoonish jackass interviewer who fancies himself a comedian because he smirks (Jon Stewart); the interview subject was a buffoonish jackass who fancies himself a militant financial analyst, and who is, in reality, a wimp (Jim Cramer).  

The second interview featured a buffoonish jackass interviewer who fancies himself a comedian because he once made someone laugh.  The interviewer, for some odd reason, also thinks he is a profound thinker on religion and politics; in reality, he’s more famous for dating porn stars than for his philosophical musings (Bill Maher).  The interview subjects were Michael Eric Dyson, the sort of faux intellectual beloved by the academy (Dyson teaches at Georgetown University), and our own Andrew Breitbart. 

I’m not going to focus on the guests – their various performances speak for themselves (although I’d argue that Cramer was a sad-sack sissy; Dyson was purposefully obfuscatory and pretentious, as befits a lifelong “academic”; and Andrew was both brave and trenchant for taking on a hostile crowd and refusing to back down).  

Instead, I’m going to focus on the hosts. 

Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are both supposed to be funny.  Stewart has a show on Comedy Central, of course; Maher does stand up.  Yet from these two interviews, you would have thought that Stewart and Maher are angry sociology undergraduates from Brown University.  Stewart beat an apologetic Cramer into submission by citing, of all the ridiculous clichés, his grandmother’s retirement account.  Maher slandered Rush Limbaugh as a racist, then slammed Bush’s stem cell policy, which is far more nuanced and ethically coherent than Barack Obama’s “science must not be challenged” amorality. 

Neither of them were funny. 

Now, I’m a conservative.  I’ll admit that some liberal humor just doesn’t appeal to me — Sarah Silverman grates like nails made of bitchy on a chalkboard made of whining; Family Guy has become an irritatingly dull version of The Simpsons, relying largely on shock value rather than actual humor.  

But I contend that there’s one objective indicator that Stewart and Maher have lost their ability to be funny: their audience is so stacked that they laugh at clearly unfunny lines – they’re living laugh tracks.  Here’s Part II of Stewart’s interview with Cramer. 

Listen to the audience at 4:48.  Stewart says he can’t reconcile Cramer’s financial brilliance with the “crazy bulls***” you do every night.  And the audience laughs.  Now, there’s nothing funny about that observation, the use of the word “bulls***” notwithstanding.  The rest of the interview is like that, too.  Joe Scarborough was right on the money when he said, “Basically he’s got 100 people working for him. They scour the Internet and TV night and day. They find people that put themselves out on the line. … whether they’re politicians or commentators. Then if somebody makes a little mistake here or there … I’m talking if a politician stumbles over himself. They take it out. They edit it. He runs a clip and then he makes a funny face and then the whole audience has a Pavlovian response.”  It was a comment that enraged Stewart, but the clips demonstrate that Scarborough was speaking absolute truth on this score. 

The same holds true with Bill Maher.  During Maher’s interview with Andrew and the deliberate obfuscator Dyson (a man of tremendous hypocrisy who claims to read others’ motives through their “code words,” then simultaneously claims that he is not into ad hominem attacks), Maher got laughs from his primed audience. 

Watch this segment in Part II at 2:02: 

Maher compares the schools shifting bad teachers around to the Catholic Church shifting around pedophiles, a stale joke at best.  The audience goes for it.  The joke, however, is so stale that after Maher repeats it, the audience doesn’t laugh – even the living laugh track can’t be bothered to wake up for that one. 

Political comedy can be funny.  But political comedy requires that the comics do not see themselves as crusaders standing up to the man.  The “speaking truth to power” folks are about as humorous as a punch in the groin, and nearly as painful.  

There’s a bigger problem here than the death of comedy, however.  The biggest problem is the holier-than-thou Stewart and Maher types posing as comedians for purposes of self-defense.  If you’re going to enter the political battlefield, don’t claim to be above politics.  It’s gutless and pathetic.  

Let’s remember that while Stewart went after Cramer with a chainsaw on his show for Cramer’s manipulation of the market, he originally went after CNBC because many CNBC-ers, including Rick Santelli and Cramer, opposed Barack Obama’s spendathon plan.  He went after Cramer personally only after Cramer turned on Stewart’s object of worship, Obama.  Likewise with Maher – Maher hates religion and pretends to be bipartisan, but his show has become a virtual cult of Obamamania.  Watch the interview with Andrew and Dyson and see if there’s a single thing Obama has done that Maher, that incisive critic, actually touches. 

And yet when commentators attack partisan hacks Stewart and Maher, the “comedians” hide behind the shield of comedy.  

It must be nice being a “comedian” in the mold of Stewart or Maher.  It means never having to defend your positions.  It means you get to go on shows like Crossfire and state that they’re bad for America, even if you grill conservatives and bootlick liberals on your own show.  It means you can pretend to be the everyman – the “layman,” as Stewart so cloyingly states in his Cramer interview — even when you’re representing a rabid partisan base that cheers your every move. 

Now Stewart and Maher are down in the political mud.  With Stewart’s decision to enter into direct combat with anyone who lays a glove on his White House valentine, he becomes fair game.  With Maher’s anti-religious documentary and his shilling for the Obama administration, he too enters the pantheon of hard-nosed politics.  

So here are a couple starting questions for Stewart and Maher: 

Jon: You said in your Cramer interview, “When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work?”  Is Warren Buffett’s wealth “work,” or is it wise investment of capital?  How about Bill Gates?  Should we all sell our stock and stop trying to invest our money in companies in which we believe?  You also said this financial crisis was because of “guys that had leveraged 35 to 1,” not because of “mortgage holders.”  We can agree that the guys who allowed the 35 to 1 loans were idiots.  But let me ask you this: didn’t the borrowers leverage 35 to 1?  Even if you’re a borrower, aren’t you just a bit complicit in bad leveraging, particularly if you lie about your salary to get the loan?  And speaking of leveraging, isn’t Obama’s plan leveraging phantom future dollars for current spending precisely the problem you’re talking about here, except on a far larger scale? 

Bill: You claim Rush Limbaugh is racist.  Yet he has not been sued based on alleged racial comments.  You have.  Does that mean you’re a racist?  Or should we examine your words for “code” based on such allegations?  Meanwhile, you rip religion on a regular basis, and you state that you believe in science.  Fair enough.  But do you believe that science inherently provides moral checks?  Are you willing to defend Larry Summers’ research on women in hard sciences?  How about Charles Murray’s works?  Or, if you’re willing to go all the way for science, how about Dr. Mengele or the experiments at Tuskegee?  

I know you’re both comedians, and therefore that you are at a higher moral level than the rest of us poor political schlubs.  But now that you’ve deigned to descend from on high, how about answering a few questions yourselves?