4 years later- Jon Stewart was right, and Wall Street is still crooked

This week featured Wall Street reaching new levels, with the Dow closing at record highs nearly each of the last four days, and the S&P now being up nearly 9% for the year so far (so much for higher taxes on the rich hurting investments, eh?).

This months also marks the 4-year anniversary of the market's low point during the Great Recession, when the S&P was down around 680 and the Dow around 6,600. It was during those dark days when Rick Santelli went on his memorable rant, where the Chicago floor trader blamed the late 2000s housing crash on irresponsible homeowners, and claimed they shouldn't be bailing out these people to keep the home market somewhat stable. Santelli's rant was quickly found to be classic Astroturf, where a "Chicago Tea Party" magically sprouted up within days, with clear connections to the Koch Brothers and their front groups.

Then, Santelli bailed on an interview with the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, and Stewart memorably destroyed CNBC for blowing it during the financial crisis, and for being in bed with Wall Street and covering up for all the lies that led to the crashing of our economy. I wish I could find an embed of this video, because I still think it's Stewart's finest moment. One of my favorite portions of this segment is when Stewart shows CNBC's Carl Quintanilla kissing the ass of Allen Stanford, before Stanford was arrested and later sentenced to 110 years in prison for running a Ponzi Scheme. Stewart sums up the moment well, yelling "FUCK YOU!"

What's remarkable to me is that none of these assclowns at CNBC have paid a price for the fraud they pulled over on the American public. Santelli, Quintanilla, Jim Cramer, Larry Kudlow, the "Money Honeys", Joe Kernan. All of these people have been consistently wrong about Wall Street and the economy for the last several years, and all still pull a paycheck as CNBC is allowed to continue as the pro-Wall Street propaganda factory that it is.

Heck, there was Santelli having a sad today as the U.S. jobs report showed another 236,000 jobs being created in February and unemployment dropping to its lowest levels since 2008. It is disgusting that these hacks still are polluting our airwaves and lying to the unsuspecting dupes at hpme, but apparently when you spout right-wing BS, you never have to be held accountable for being wrong. It's a game we know well in Wisconsin.

And despite the Obama recovery, there still hasn't been nearly enough real change in our economic system over the last 4 years. Sen. Elizabeth Warren illustrated that well this week, noting the irony that drug possessors in the U.S. get huge sentences, but Treaury regulators and U.S. prosecutors did little to HSBC execs who were found to be money-laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money in their banks, and the U.S. allowed the banks to continue their dirty operations.



I do love that woman.

Well, I'm off to see what extreme inequality looks like in a third-world country for the next few days. And no, it's not the Confederacy (that was 2 weeks ago).