Jon Cramer on Daily Show

The financial crisis is largely attributed to the collapse of the housing market and reckless leveraging of bad securities. Recently Jon Stewart began a campaign on The Daily Show to expose the effects of our corporate-owned media’s influence on this crisis, namely CNN (no link to them for a reason).

Our media should be a protected, locally-sourced, community-driven industry. It should not be corporate owned, money-driven. Radio and TV were once a community service, now they are a community annoyance.

Herman Daly mentions this briefly in this article:

“Since we are not trying to stimulate aggregate growth, we no longer need to spend billions on advertising. Instead of treating advertising as a tax-deductible cost of production we should tax it heavily as a public nuisance. If economists really believe that the consumer is sovereign then she should be obeyed rather than manipulated, cajoled, badgered, and lied to.”

Stewart is scratching the surface of some of the Steady State Economy philosophies in his comments during this interview. For instance, fair distribution is an obvious one. He also mentions that we need to realize that “we’re all workers.” We are just putting out 401ks into the hands of evil, greedy men. We have a disillusion that we can all get super rich. This is not possible, but we can all be comfortable if we push for a Steady State Economy.

Every time I watch the Daily Show I gain more admiration for Jon Stewart. It is unfortunate that we find Comedy Central as the most reputable news outlet today. We need a public campaign for stronger accountability in media just as badly as we need accountability of corporations.

What this episode! You can watch the whole full uncensored cut online here. You should also see Jon Stewart on Crossfire a while ago.

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. The Earth Bleeds Out
2. Federal Reserve Transparency
3. The Robin Hood Tax
4. Misgivings On Giving
5. Points of Progress