the famous 2009 confrontation between comedian/ faux newsman Jon Stewart and faux financial adviser Jim Cramer. You can find the guts of the confrontation here, around 7 minutes in. Image from Wikipedia.

I open this post with a picture of a video confrontation from nine years ago. DAILY SHOW host Jon Stewart took on the people who appear on CNBC, a 24 hour network that (mis)advises people on their finances. CNBC celebrity Jim Cramer was upset, so Stewart invited him on to defend himself. It was probably the best TV of the decade–Stewart’s staff had found numerous videos of Cramer advising other hedge fund guys on how to game Wall Street and break the weak-tea laws the SEC had passed to protect the 90% of people who are invested in stocks because that’s their 401K retirement.  Trillions had been lost and none of the Wall Street manipulators had gone to jail. Stewart was livid, and Cramer squirmed like a worm on a hook.

The most chilling moment in the piece is in the second part,  when Stewart cut to the chase in the long version of the video. And the thing that made Stewart furious was the segments of video.  Stewart bored in on Cramer. (I’m paraphrasing)YOU ALL KNEW. YOU WERE Burning the place to the ground and you were ALL IN ON IT. It was good to hear someone call out the financial pundits who looked the other ways as Wall Street burned the house down. 

(if you want to watch the whole 20 minutes, it’s divided into three episodes–start here).

This is a post about global warming, but we’ll return to finance a bit later. A couple days ago, the Trump Administration admitted that there was no stopping Global Warming. They used the euphemism ‘too late’ (because nobody wants to say the E word).  They predicted we’d have heating of up to 7 degrees F by 2100. If you’re not caught up on this reality, go to my post from last week. 

And nothing changed. I thought the day would come when the people in charge (‘THEY DON’T PLAN TO TELL US‘ was a bromide I was using on this blog several years ago) might ultimately have to tell us things were crashing and there was no hope. And I thought people would be smart enough to know it was coming. But I also thought we’d react. Somehow, I thought we’d know it was time to burn the house down and schedule the necktie parties for the Trumpies. But the presidents before Trump also knew.

This is the kind of necktie party it would take to break the corporate stranglehold.

This occurred to me. In one of the first interviews of Guy McPherson I ever watched, he pointed out that he couldn’t be the only person in the science community who knew that we were facing a Sixth Great Extinction. All of his predictions and projections and prognostication were extrapolated from readily-available scientific work (mostly peer-reviewed research). And the NHSTB rules that Trump is currently overturning (originally approved under Obama), were weak tea compared to what would have to happen if we really wanted to save the species Homo Sapiens from extinction . 

But the people in charge all knew. They’ve probably known for 20 years.

So were all of  these weak tea proposals proffered to keep people thinking that we could prevent the climate disaster running at us?

And I close out with the casino economy, where we’ve come back to disaster. Thanks to two administrations worth of people who didn’t want to hold Wall Street’s feet to the fire after the Lehman Crash, we’re back to where we were in early 2008, just before the house blew up. We passed September (the month for most of our economic disasters), but we’re drifting into October, the month that saw the 1929 stock market crash. We don’t need a full blown economic crash for things to go off the rails. Another prediction from The Good Doctor. When September Ends.