I'm sure that many of you reading this have been reveling in Jon Stewart's take-down of banks, speculators, and financial commentators this week on The Daily Show. I have too. I think my favorite part was from last night's floor-wiping spectacular with Jim Cramer.
"Listen, you knew what the banks were doing, yet were touting it for months and months, the entire network was. For now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."
Exactly. You go, Jon!
Of course, he's taking a lot of flak about this from various sides - even the New York Times was a bit of a scold in their article today. So we at ACORN are taking a minute to thank Jon Stewart and The Daily Show for actually staying on this story and taking some of the biggest culprits to task.
And we'd like you to join with us and send him a thank you message as well. In a few days, we're going to deliver a big "Thank You" directly to The Daily Show's HQ in New York with all the messages.
Can you take a minute to send Jon Stewart a message right now?
Here's his initial salvo against Rick Santelli, who recently called foreclosure victims "losers" on his show.
Not to toot our own horns or anything, but we did see this coming way back in summer of 2006. As the problem raced towards a crescendo and the predatory practices of the subprime industry grew to engulf most of the financial sector, ACORN issued a report called The Impending Rate Shock (PDF) that said these practices "pose a huge threat to the security of individual homeowners and entire neighborhoods." Of course, we made a mistake of scale: they posed a threat not just to neighborhoods, but to the entirety of the world's economy.
Jon's angry. We're angry. We're angry at the financial institutions who got us into this mess and we're angry at the regulators and media who looked the other way. Jon's looking out for us, so let's have his back while he's under attack from those who would rather blame the crisis on hard working Americans. Let's make sure he hears our thanks.
Here's last night's episode with Jim Cramer for those who missed it.