jesus on the main line

Tell Him what you want.

Jon Stewart's much touted interview with MSNBC host of Mad Money, Jim Cramer came to pass this week with more hype than the return of the Friends cast to television. Stewart's show has been calling out Cramer in recent weeks for his role, or more precisely, his lack of a role, as an unbiased business reporter. Instead of talking about some of the writing on the wall, Cramer's show was more of a non-stop, razz fest on the joy of unfettered, free-market capitalism. Watching Mad Money is a bit like watching a young Louis Rukheyser, if Louis Rukheyser had spent ample amounts of his investment earnings on cocaine and dressed like a croupier.

Unfortunately, it's not as though MSNBC was a lone wolf in the land of myopic dreams and cars that get 20 mpg. The same argument, that journalist failed to do their job, could be leveled against most everyone (outside of Democracy Now) who covered the the war in Iraq and much of the Bush administration. It was only in about year six of Bush's two-term reign did the tide in the mainstream media shift against Bush. Many of them are still too scared to take on the war in Iraq, lest they offend our troops. Although doing a show from mid-town Manhattan in the shell shock of 9/11 made them initially cautious as anti-war activists, to the Daily Show's credit, they were on the stink earlier than most.

Here's what I find amusing, if not troubling. People are acting a though a great secret has recently been revealed to them -- capitalism is just a giant pyramid scheme. Have they just previously chosen to ignore the underlying premise of social security, retirement accounts, and houses that double in value every seven years?It's a system that can only work if more and more people come in at the bottom and support those who have gone on before them. There are enough pink Cadillacs still rolling on the streets to prove this point.

Everyone is fine and happy with this system so long as their 401k plans continue to earn 10 percent per annum. And if they earn 20 or 30 percent per year, then that earns them the right to buy bottle service and fuck who they want. Yet they rarely stop to ask themselves, is there some God-given right to double-digit returns on investments? Unfortunately many, especially many Americans, have come to believe this to be true.