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Chris Matthews and Jim Cramer praise President Obama, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner for saving us from another Great Depression while failing to note a number of things. One, what caused the financial collapse in the first place that resulted in the need to rescue it. Two, that we still don't know where all of our tax dollars went. And three, that the system is still not safe and as Simon Johnson just pointed out on Bill Moyers Journal, things could worse because the system has not been reformed.

Matthews: Well, I guess the big question I would have Jim is if you had to look say five, ten years from now, looking back to now with the clarity of history, does Barack Obama deserve credit for a) avoiding a second Great Depression as he came into office with a strong stimulus of almost two trillion dollars in fiscal stimulus, huge printing of money, the bailouts etc. and secondly has he really put us on the course to recovery from this recession?

Cramer: Alright, I think it’s a team effort. Chris, first of all Ben Bernanke was late, but really went into high gear and the transition from Bush to Obama was really saved by Bernanke’s actions. Second, Bernanke did a good thing, but also Tim Geithner did a good thing and you could argue well Tim Geithner’s totally Obama’s man. Geithner made everybody feel that the banking system was safe. Once we had the banking system safe we began to have the recovery. So Obama should get a lot of credit for that.

Matthews: Well you know when the politicians wag and the right wing goes after them as they do—that’s the way politics works—they say bailouts, bailouts, bailouts as if there’s something wrong with the guy. They say deficits, deficits, deficits as if there’s something wrong with the guy. But everything I studied on college and grad school was that you’ve got to do those things, both in terms of the sectors of the economy which were in trouble, the financial sectors, the auto industry and you had to do something with regard to the over all economy in terms of printing the money, monetary policy, fiscal policy. The very things he did are things you’re taught you have to do. Am I wrong?

Cramer: No! You’re totally right. I hear those people criticize and I think, did they ever read any history about what this country did wrong between 1929 and 1932? This was exactly—what these pundits are calling for is exactly what created a multi-year depression. No! I mean, Bernanke, Obama, Geithner…they got it right!

Matthews: Well, all you hear from on the right is like Terry Jeffrey’s my pal who sits there like from Human Events on the far right, they come on here as if all you had to do was laissez faire. Step back; let the invisible hand solve the problem. Say’s law is still in effect, everything’s going to clear—they actually say this crap… so loudly they must believe it or else they’re just desperate. But they do believe that doing nothing was the right answer. Just balance the budget.

Cramer: They’re dreamers. Look!

Matthews: Let business solve the problem.

Cramer: Here’s the hand. It wasn’t invisible. It was choking America. We are very lucky that these guys understood history. Now the reason why it’s easy to criticize Obama and why he doesn’t take any credit is we haven’t created any jobs yet Chris.

Matthews: Yeah.

Cramer: And that is bad.

Sadly being humiliated by Jon Stewart was not enough to keep Jim Cramer from ever appearing on my television set again. He was right back on the air pretending it didn't happen. I don't know why anyone would take this guy's advice about anything. Later in the segment he also said this when asked about where we were headed with unemployment.

I think we are at the peak or within .1 [of the peak]. We are not going to breach 10%. I have my neck on the line on that.

Oy.

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Via Media Matters, via rightwing site Newsbusters.org.

The above video exchange was first highlighted by NewsBusters.org, who approvingly cited Burnett's observations as noting "a teachable moment," which "reflects how secret ballots could end up in an election as to whether or not unionize a company."

Oil is not going up because...

"North Korea, Syria - I mean these are places when they always have elections, there's always a couple of people who don't vote for the right guy," Cramer said. "But I think the price of oil is going to tell you exactly how everything is going to play out in Iran, which is it's much ado about nothing."

and for Newsbusters, "a teachable moment", as Media Matters points out.

However, as Jim Cramer's colleague, "Street Signs" host Erin Burnett pointed out - this is a teachable moment. It reflects how secret ballots could end up in an election as to whether or not unionize a company:

CRAMER: I mean obviously, you were able to vote against this guy, but the idea you thought there was going to be a fair count.

BURNETT: And it wasn't a secret ballot. I think that's important. They're going to know - they know everybody and how they voted.

CRAMER: Absolutely.

BURNETT: It makes a strong point for this whole union conversation we're having in this country.

CRAMER: The card check, the card check.

BURNETT: But, we'll leave that debate ...

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The cast of Morning Joe while fear mongering about the EFCA can't manage to name a single successful unionized company, even though they work for one. Media Matters and TPM are already all over this one. Jamison Foser at Media Matters:

The Morning Joe crew was on an anti-union tear this morning, claiming the union label on a company means "sell." Mika Brzezinski went so far as to say of unions: "They cripple the system that makes a company work." Collectively, the journalists on Morning Joe couldn't name a single "successful" unionized company.

.....

Oh, what the heck, let's take one more example. GE is one of the world's largest companies; in 2006, its revenues were greater than the gross domestic products of 80 percent of UN nations. The company made more than $18 billion in 2008 -- again, billion with a b, and again, those are profits, not revenue. All that despite (or, perhaps, because of) the fact that 13 different unions represent GE workers.

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Please support our drive to Fix CNBC and sign the petition. Jim Cramer finally commented on his much talked about appearance on The Daily Show after he was left sitting there, almost teary eyed and speechless when he was confronted by Jon Stewart face to face. His remarks on The Today Show just underscored how out of touch this man is and what lengths he'll go to distort the truth. (rough transcript)

Viera: ...you guys had been cheerleaders for the financial bubble, that you had also allowed CEO's to come on the shows and essentially lie to the American public without really challenging them. I don't want to rehash the whole thing, but did he have a point?

Cramer: I don't think so.

Viera: Not on any of this?

Cramer: Well I think it was a naive and misleading thing to attack the media. We weren't behind this. CNBC in particular has been out front on this"

Viera: So you don't think the media bears any responsibility, Jim?

Cramer: I think there are people that bear so much more responsibility that it's just wrong headed...

Sure, there were a lot of parties responsible for the meltdown of the economy, but that doesn't absolve the news media for turning a blind eye to it, Mr. Jim. Meredith Viera really asked the right questions so good for her and as Cramer bashes Jon Stewart I would like to ask this. Why was he such a coward on the Daily Show when he had the chance to confront Stewart?
Comedy Central makes a good point in there piece : Jim Cramer Attacking Jon Stewart Again From a Safe Distance.
Since Cramer became so outspoken about CNBC's role in the financial crisis, he and Rick Santelli are becoming the poster boy's for it, but Cramer has another huge credibility problem and his name is Lenny Dykstra. Cramer has a lot of juice in the Wall Street world and he promoted Lenny Dykstra like no other. On HBO he said this:

Jim Cramer: “He is one of the great ones in this business. Lenny Dykstra.” HBO: “Lenny Dykstra?” Jim Cramer: “Lenny Dykstra.”

So much so that Lenny was posting his stock picks on The Street. Well, it's now being revealed that Dykstra is possibly a fraud.

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Seriously, is there anyone more annoying than Tucker Carlson? The least self-aware pundit on TV, still nursing his own bruised ego from the thorough spanking he received at the hands of a comedian that took down his show, cried that Jon Stewart is nothing more than a partisan hack in "attacking" Jim Cramer. Mr. "I'm an ideologue, not a partisan" repeats the favorite GOP meme that Cramer was only attacked because he dared to criticize Obama's budget. Hmm ... repeating GOP talking points ... but Carlson's not speaking on behalf of his party, no sirree.

Leave it to Carlson to completely miss the point. Despite Stephanie Miller's and Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik's multiple attempts to reason with the petulant, whiny man-child Carlson devolves into, Tucker can never grasp that the whole event was precipitated by Rick Santelli's rant on the trading floor and that Stewart's focus was not Cramer so much as the responsibility CNBC holds in informing the public rather than giving corporations carte blanche to propagandize on their channel. He's more concerned that Stewart, in his attempt to speak on behalf of the Democratic Party (huh?) is losing 'teh funny,' and will go the way of Lenny Bruce. Double huh?

The best part of the whole segment is after Carlson's plaintive wails (who needs a nap?), Howard Kurtz airs the Crossfire segment where Stewart calls Carlson a "partisan hack", a nice little STFU in not so many words. Perrspectives has more:

Prior to making his case this morning on CNN's Reliable Sources that Stewart is a "sanctimonious, partisan hack" and an operative for the Democratic Party, Carlson on Friday denounced him to the Politico:

Carlson, reached Friday, described Stewart as "a partisan demagogue."

"Jim Cramer may be sweaty and pathetic--he certainly was last night--but he's not responsible for the current recession," Carlson told POLITICO. "His 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."

Of course, Jon Stewart's weeklong diatribe against CNBC was initially triggered by the network's Rick Santelli slandering troubled home mortgage owners as "losers." And as it turns out, it is Tucker Carlson who has made a career out of doing someone else's bidding. That someone else is the Republican Party - and his father Richard.

The scandal surrounding the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame and the subsequent conviction of Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby provides case in point. Few voices on television were more strident in Libby's defense than Tucker Carlson. But throughout, he remained silent on his father's leadership of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Fund.

From the beginning, Tucker Carlson aimed both barrels at Libby prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In November 2005, he insisted Fitzgerald was "accusing Libby - falsely and in public - of undermining this country's security," adding, "Fitzgerald should apologize, though of course he never will." Reversing his past position in support of independent counsels, Carlson in February 2007 blasted "this lunatic Fitzgerald, running around destroying people's lives for no good reason."

Hey, Tucker "Pot" Carlson, guess what sanctimonious color you are!

John Amato:

At the end of the segment, Howard Kurtz give us his take and informs America that since Stewart is a comedian, he doesn't have to follow journalistic ethics for his humor and thinks Jon unfairly blamed CNBC for the entire economic meltdown. Using a wide brush to paint The Daily Show tries to diminish the impact Stewart had on CNBC because he didn't unfairly criticize them. Cramer's performance justified Stewart's concerns. That wasn't what Stewart was doing at all, but then Kurtz praises Stewart and says talking heads can learn a lot from him in their efforts to get at the truth from our politicians.

Kurtz: He has a way of cutting through the clutter and using clips to show when people were wrong. I think we need more of that.

Ya think?

Oopsie-daisies. Talk about your unexpected consequences. The highly-blogged about tête-à-tête between Jon Stewart and CNBC's Jim Cramer has exposed the very ugly underbelly of how the former hedge-fund manager made money before his TV career. Former Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA) says it's time some investigator takes a closer look at Cramer:

CNN reporter Jim Acosta reflected on limited regulation of hedge fund’s and how they attracted “wealthy investors.” He then turned to former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., once chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, who said Cramer’s the reason hedge funds should be considered for more regulation.

“I think he’s become a poster child for why hedge funds need more regulation and transparency,” Davis said.

When asked if what Cramer said was illegal, Davis admitted that it was not, but “should be. He may well have crossed the line.”

Davis suggested the powers that be “ought to be looking at” Cramer’s confessed manipulation from 2006. “I think the tragedy is over the last few years nobody’s been looking at this at all.”

Wow. A Republican calling for more regulations and ethics over the interests of the oligarchy? Will wonders never cease?

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CNBC's Jim Cramer refused to mention his interview with Jon Stewart on Friday's edition of Mad Money.

"A lot of people are talking about what happened," Cramer explained. "I want to be very clear. Be very clear that although I was clearly outside of my safety zone, I have the utmost respect for this person and for the work that they do, no matter -- no matter how uncomfortable it was to be on. So I want you to take a look at this clip from yesterday of Cramer versus Stewart," he announced.

Mad Money then cut to video tape from Cramer's appearance on Martha Stewart's show. Cramer never mentioned or showed any clips of his appearance on The Daily Show.

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(h/t Heather)

Jon Stewart made Jim Cramer look like a wounded puppy tonight as the CNBC host joined The Daily Show after a full week of back-and-forth.

It all started when Cramer got perturbed by a segment TDS did on CNBC's financial network (Jon Stewart Eviscerates CNBC and Rick Santelli ).

He was so mad that he showed up on a bunch of NBC shows crying about the way he was portrayed. Stewart really just said what all of America wanted to say to Wall Street: F*&K You!

Tonight we had the big face-off, the heavyweight bout, the Super Bowl square-off between CNBC's Jim Cramer and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. Cramer was especially upset about being included in a segment TDS produced on the horrible and almost criminal reporting CNBC has been airing as THE go-to business network after CNBC's Rick Santelli attacked average working-class people who got caught up in the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Santelli dubbed them as "losers." Well, the only loser tonight was Cramer and CNBC.

Jim basically sat there, starry-eyed like a lost puppy, and was virtually silent throughout the three-segment show featuring him. He basically waved the white flag and said, "You got me."

Comedy Central had to edit out eight minutes of video to accommodate the show format, and it will be available on their website tomorrow.
Stewart's point was that Wall Street got fat off of all our pension plans, 401K's and long-term investments, while the "Fast Money" crowd cashed in our long-term investments -- and CNBC was complicit in the entire gambit...

I wonder if Rick Santelli will show his face on Stewart's set? Highly unlikely.

Here's more: Stewart hammers Cramer on 'The Daily Show'

Jon Stewart hammered Jim Cramer and his network, CNBC, in their anticipated face-off on "The Daily Show," repeatedly chastising the "Mad Money" host for putting entertainment above journalism.

"I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a ... game," Stewart told Cramer, adding in an expletive during the show's Thursday taping. The episode was scheduled to air at 11 p.m. EDT on Comedy Central Cramer insisted he was devoted to revealing corporate "shenanigans," to which Stewart retorted: "It's easy to get on this after the fact."

At one point, Cramer sounded the reformed sinner, responding to Stewart's plea for more levelheaded, honest commentary: "How about I try that?" said Cramer. "I'll do that."

By the end, the two-segment interview went far beyond its allotted time. Comedy Central said the on-air version would be cut by about eight minutes, though the entire interview would be available unedited on ComedyCentral.com on Friday.

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Jon Stewart expanded his assault on Jim Cramer to include Joe Scarborough. In defending Cramer, Scarborough attempted to criticize Stewart: "Politicians stumbles over himself. They pick it up. They edit it. He runs the clip. Then he makes a funny face and the audience has a Pavlovian response."

"What do I do now? He nailed me," mocked Stewart. "Here's what I didn't know. If I had picked on CNBC, Cramer would take it personally and get the whole NBC family involved. Don't mess with the peacocks."

Stewart then went on his own "rehabilitation tour" using Viacom shows. Viacom owns the family of networks that includes Comedy Central. While visiting Nickelodeon's Dora the Explorer, Dora used the spanish term for jackass to describe Cramer and Scarborough. "Why is everyone being such a pandejo?" ask Dora. "Hey, kids, can you say jackass in Spanish?"

"Hooray for the pandejos," exclaimed Stewart.

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Jon Stewart reminds CNBC's Jim Cramer of bad investment advice. Cramer had advised his viewers to buy Bear Stearns stock seven weeks before it collapsed.

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CNBC's Jim Cramer got defensive when NBC's Meredith Vieira asked him about criticism by late-nite comic Jon Stewart. "Did I make a mistake? Okay, first of all, any time you recommend a stock and it goes down, you've made a mistake," confessed Cramer.

The CNBC host tried to defend himself. "I did come on [The Today Show] and tell everyone to sell, and when Stewart makes that call, I'm all over him, but he won't do that, because he's a comedian," he said.

Update: John Amato:

I love the fact that NBC is making sure that Cramer gets his soap box to cry about the truthiness Jon Stewart hit him over the head with. Poor CNBC and poor Cramer. Jon Stewart is just a comedian and what does he know? Yes, during the whole market collapse, how many times did Cramer say to sell stocks? He says that he did something an investor is never supposed to do:

Cramer: I came on this show and did something you're never supposed to do if you have a stock show. I said people should sell everything.

Cramer can you see how wrong that is? Why can't a stock show tell the public the truth? I guess because he'd have a tough time filling time on the air. If you can't tell people the truth because you have a "stock show" then why should anyone believe you at all?

And I watched these shows when the news broke about the sub-prime mortgage crisis last year I'd say 80% of them defended the system and dismissed calls of caution from any pundits that said the market was facing a real crisis. They were cranks or just plain scared of their own shadows.

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I write a lot about the FOX stock shows as well as the CNBC network because they are completely unbalanced while they scream at anything that tries to regulate Wall Street. And they need to have their wingnut welfare tax breaks too.

D-day has a great post up that discussed the abuses that are being documented against CNBC and Jim Cramer in particular:

Obviously, Wall Street rage is aimed at getting the biggest banks paid off and the shareholders made whole so that only taxpayers will bear the burden of the collapse. There may be a very good reason, however, for outlets like CNBC, in particular Jim Cramer, to claim that Obama is responsible for the fall of the market. It deflects the blame from themselves. The story of Deep Capture is epic and needs to be read in full by the investigators who followed it for years to really understand. But TocqueDeville at Daily Kos does a pretty decent summarizing job.

This rabbit hole involves the thugs surrounding Jim Cramer and some of the top financial "journalists" from the New York Times, WSJ, Fortune magazine and BusinessWeek, top hedge funds, the Mafia, and the DTCC. It also includes "blackmail, smear campaigns, espionage, fraud, harassment, extortion, bribery, rumor-mongering, sabotage, off-shore money laundering, political cronyism, frivolous lawsuits, witness tampering, biased financial research, false identities, bogus credit ratings, bribery, libelous blogs, bad science, forgery, wiretapping, counterfeiting, collusion, lying, cheating, threats and theft."

And if that wasn't fun enough, it may be the underlying story of what collapsed the entire, global banking system or at least served as the catalyst for the collapse.

We're talking about financial journalists using the power of their megaphone to trash a stock, or even tout it at the last minute, and then, through naked short-selling, earn millions while destroying public companies. And Jim Cramer is perhaps the greatest offender.

There needs to be an investigation into the use of the media outlets for ill-gotten gain. Kind of like Bernie Madoffs for Cable TV.

Every stock show I watch just attacks President Obama's economic plans mercilessly as if he caused the international crisis the world faces, while they themselves were willing players in the entire charade. Jon Stewart hit a nerve when he exposed them on his show, which probably took all of a week to put together. And their response to him was just as ridiculous as the "news" they peddle.

Erin Burnett was so bad on Real Time Friday night that Bill Maher called one of her answers "bullshit."
Digby saw it too.

I just saw Erin Burnett on Bill Maher and I honestly think Britney Spears could do as well. She said that nobody on the left and nobody on the right wants nationalization. And then she said,"At the end, the taxpayers will probably get a check and it will be used to save social security."

Isn't it in the best interest of America that these networks, with their stranglehold on broadcast information, become regulated? Not in an overwhelming way, but in a way that forces them to present hard news, objective information, about the very subjects they cover?

These networks are the information pipeline to the people. It's how we get the data we need on what our money is doing. And when the people running those pipelines are permitted to lie, distort, slant, and finally manipulate that data for the purposes of getting rich -- and to hell with how it affects the global economy -- then it's time to make some changes.

TocqueDeville of DKos writes a great post called:Jim Cramer Uses CNBC to Manipulate Stocks that d-day cites and it's well worth a read.

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From The Colbert Report March 5, 2009. Stephen offers Jim Cramer a solution to make everyone feel better about getting back into the stock market...puppies and kittens.

After reading this diary over at Daily KOS on Jim Cramer I'm wondering who else needs to be talking to him besides Stephen Colbert if what's reported there is proven to be true.
Jim Cramer Uses CNBC to Manipulate Stocks

The diary links to this video from Bloomberg on the illegal naked short selling that's been going on for years. Why this did not receive more attention when it first aired is beyond me. The video is from March 2007.

What have I said, over and over? Bill Kristol is NEVER right. And even Foreign Policy Magazine agrees with me, as they list the worst predictions of 2008 and who else but our favorite war-mongering chickenhawk neocon, William "The Bloody" Kristol.

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

Oh Hallelujah! What a Christmakwanzukkah present that would be. Also in the Hall of Shame:

2. Jim Cramer of Mad Money, for advocating holding onto BearStearns stock six days before it lost 90% of its value and was eventually sold to JP MorganChase.
3. Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal, for seriously underestimating the potential risks to oil tankers along shipping lanes.
4. Donald Luskin, for not only denying the existance of a recession, but questioning the sanity of anyone who thought we might be in a recession.
5. The Economist Magazine, for their rose-colored view of Kenya's presidential election.
6. Business Week for their prediction that Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg would duke it out for the Democratic nod, only to have surprise underdog John McCain win the presidential election.
7. Scientist Walter Wagner for his opposition to the Large Hadron Collider by suggesting everything from mini-black holes to all out planetary destruction would result.
8. Goldman Sachs analyst Arjun Muti for predicting $200/barrel oil by year's end.
9. Charles Krauthammer, for his completely wrong forecasting of the battle between South Ossetia and Georgia...(not predicting foreign warfare correctly is a specialty of Krauthammer, evidentally).
10. Henry Paulson, for assuring that the banking industry was stabilized by his magic spewing of $700 billion to various industries with little to no oversight.

Please, can we call out an end to taking seriously people like Kristol, Cramer and Krauthammer now?

After hearing about John McCain's ridiculous criticism of Social Security -- you know, the fact that it still functions the way it has for, oh, 75 years -- CNBC's Jim Cramer can't help but laugh at the "disorganized" John McCain and his complete lack of knowledge about all things economic.

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"I gotta tell you: McCain is the most disorganized, lack of any knowledge whatsoever about economics."

Cramer makes another salient point when he mentions that McCain is in favor of private accounts (well, he does depending on which day you ask him) and that millions of Americans would have lost their shirts if they had been investing their money during this economic climate.

"The fact of the matter is the whole banking system is falling apart. If you had money in the stock market...Republicans want you to invest it yourself...you would have lost a fortune. Is that what we really want? A bailout of another bailout or another bailout?"