"There's literally billions of reasons to fire Ken Lewis," said SEIU's Stephen Lerner, slamming the controversial Bank of America CEO yesterday on CNBC's "Power Lunch." Just what are these billions of reasons? Well, there's over $5 billion Bank of America dished out in executive bonuses while receiving $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds. There's the $10 billion Bank of America collected from raising overdraft and interest fees. Not to mention the hundreds of billions Bank of America caused shareholders to lose when its stock plunged after the Merrill Lynch acquisition. No wonder Lerner and the SEIU are leading the charge to Fire Ken Lewis.
Now that Rick Wagoner is out at GM, my money is on Lewis as the next corporate CEO on the chopping block. As David Sirota pointed out recently, it will be a tragic double standard if the White House doesn't call for Lewis's resignation at this point. Bank of America's bailout abuses, continued predatory lending, and other wasteful corporate practices have been so atrocious that the best defense Thad Woodard, CEO of the N.C. Bankers Association, could muster for Lewis to keep his job was, "I can tell you right now that Ken Lewis is not Satan." That bit of praise was by far the most amusing moment from yesterday's "Power Lunch," though a close second was when Woodard ganged up with the show's hosts to twist calls for Lewis's resignation into an attack on unions.
A few weeks back, the FixCNBC Campaign was launched by the PCCC, attempting to get 20,000+ signatories to their letter to CNBC pressuring them to practice responsible journalism. Well, the goal has been reached, and when it was time to send the letter to CNBC Headquarters, the PCCC reached out to several progressive New York comedians, including Laughing Liberally favorites Negin Farsad, Lee Camp, Katie Halper and Baratunde Thurston - and in the three days since it's been posted to YouTube, it's already cracked the 20,000-view mark. Watch the magic, and consider helping to support further work like this:
It's incredible. Just as 20,000 viewers signed an open letter to CNBC telling them to listen to Jon Stewart and hold Wall Street accountable instead of mindlessly repeating Wall Street talking points, NBC doubled down.
This morning, Meet The Press host David Gregory repeated what CNBC's Erin Burnett has been saying all along: The public is ignorant. If only the simpleton public understood what the Wall Street "experts" understand, we wouldn't be so populist and angry. See for yourself:
In these economic times, NBC needs to stop blaming the public and instead focus like a laser on holding Wall Street accountable. David Gregory, instead of calling the public stupid, how about saying on the air that there are, in fact, no "best and brightest" at AIG worth giving bonuses to if they threaten to leave?
That being said, CNBC is still the center of the fight to get the media to do their job. If we can get CNBC to truly start holding Wall Street's feet to the fire, that will have ripple effects throughout NBC and the entire financial news industry.
You can join leading economists, journalists, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and over 20,000 members of the public in signing the open letter to CNBC here.
We all saw Jon Stewart make the case against CNBC -- showing how they served as a PR machine for Wall Street instead of holding Wall Street accountable.
I've also made this case before -- calling out Erin Burnett's often-absurd analysis.
So, here's a question. Is it possible to reform CNBC? Can we turn them into a force for Wall Street accountability?
Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism - asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies, and reporting the truth...
CNBC should publicly declare that its new overriding mission will be responsible journalism that holds Wall Street accountable.
I helped put this effort together over the weekend, and was pleasantly surprised that so many respected people in the economic and journalism communities thought reforming CNBC was possible--and were willing to add their names to the cause.
If the public agrees, and 5,000 people sign the open letter, it will be delivered to CNBC's headquarters...always a fun spectacle.
Anyway, what do you think? Does Jon Stewart's intellectual case plus people-powered activism make reform of CNBC possible?
Piling on to Jon Stewart's thorough indictment of CNBC, let's look again at this recent PEW survey of how knowledgeable consumers of various venues of information are.
Respondents were asked (in Fall 2008) 1) Which party was in control of the US House of Representatives, 2) Who the Secretary of State was, and 3) Who the British Prime Minister was. How did CNBC's regular viewers stack up? Here's a selection of the results, ordered by % knowing all three answers:
Outlet
US House Control
Name Sec State
Name UK PM
All Three
New Yorker/The Atlantic
71
71
59
48
NPR
73
72
57
44
Rush Limbaugh
83
71
41
36
Business Magazines
71
64
46
36
Local TV News
55
44
28
16
CNBC
51
45
28
17
TV News Magazines
56
44
28
16
All Resp
53
42
28
18
So there's CNBC, managing (just) to beat out readers of TV Guide for political awareness, but losing out to local news, and below the average.
Sometimes this blogging stuff is too easy. Almost as easy as transcribing official lies. Today, for example, Salon had the following two stories in a headlined box together:
Watch this greatest hits compilation of the network's rah-rah fronting for the Bush economy and "losers" like Bear Stearns, Lehman and AIG
By Joan Walsh
Now, of course, Stewart's piece taking down CNBC is hysterically, wickedly on the money about how utterly clueless they are--and thus utterly useless as a source of financial information--their supposed reason for being:
But it also--accidentally, really--completely undermines the attempt to blame Obama for Wall Street's financial collapse. The attempt is absurd on its face: too many folks remember George W. Bush was President until just a few weeks ago. And so the right is trying to trace the fall of Wall Street back to Obama's clinching the nomination, or even, perhaps, his birth in 1961. But Stewart's bit also shows how--if that's the case--CNBC never even remotely noticed the evil badness for bidness back then, when Obama first started destroying all of Wall Street's hard-earned wealth.
"The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth was one of the best science fiction stories written in the 1950's, and instrumental in making me a science fiction fan for life. I've had it on my bookshelf for close to 30 years now, and occasionally pull it out to re-read.
It is, at one and the same time, tragic, comic, loathsome, prescient, and just about any other adjective that you might care to come up with.
Listening to the Republicans "plans" for the future, Michael Steele's incomprehensible opposition to the stimulus plan on "This Week," John Thain and the rest of Wall Streets "Masters of the Universe," brought the phrase to mind, and as I began to ruminate on it, I was reminded of just why I love that old story so much.
That, and one of the companion stories in "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame," Frederick Pohl's "The Midas Plague," speak from out of the past to offer us a bleak, ironic view of a future which has, in large part, come to pass.
