Nullary Sources

I believe I’ve mentioned this here once or twice in passing, but about a year ago I stopped watching CNN for any reason. I just could not stand the tripe they called “news,” calling a Democrat and a Republican yelling talking points at one another “analysis,” crowdsourcing journalism, and basically everything else that anyone on that network ever did. And I’ve been a much happier person since then.

CNN’s “Chief Business Correspondent,” Ali Velshi, was on The Daily Show yesterday. Because I try to pretend CNN doesn’t exist, his face was kind of familiar, but I hadn’t really heard of him before. So when Jon Stewart introduced him, and especially when the cover of his new book was shown, confidence was not inspired in me about how this interview was going to go.

But my jaw dropped when it turned out that someone at CNN is actually capable of critical thinking:

The three things that make you feel prosperous in your life, are (1) the value of your investments going up, if you have investments, and that’s the stock market; (2) the value of your home going up, if you have a home – but you can actually live without investments and a home. You can’t live without an income. So your job, and the idea that you will earn and continue to earn, is the most important. So, the stock market’s not the most important thing, the debt ceiling’s not the most important thing – employment or unemployment is the most important thing, and that’s what you feel good or bad about.

…

I wish that we had treated jobs the way we treated this debt ceiling, which was a bit of a manufactured crisis. Jobs isn’t, so what if we actually got everybody together and said there was some deadline for us to figure out how you create jobs in this country. Can you imagine if the passion and the energy that went into this ridiculous debt ceiling debate had gone into, “how do we actually get jobs created?”

And then there was this amazing exchange about retraining. Why doesn’t anyone talk about this?

Ali Velshi: We have a whole lot of people unemployed in this country who are not trained for the things we actually need people to be able to do. So what if we had a way for those unemployed people who are trained in the wrong thing to get retrained, take the time out to do that – maybe it’s a year, maybe it’s two years, maybe it’s longer…

Jon Stewart: Who would retrain them?

AV: Well, they could be retrained in the private sector. There are companies, there are colleges that do this. Or you go to a college to become a nurse. If you’re a manufacturing worker…

JS: But if you don’t have a job, who pays for your…

AV: What if the government could guarantee the cost of that transformation?

JS: So you’re a socialist.

AV: What if the banks do it? The banks could do it. I can tell you what it would cost to reinvent yourself. What if you could take that calculation and say, “It’s going to cost me this much money, but I’m going to make this much more and pay taxes for the rest of my life, so why don’t you finance that transformation?”

This guy has a good head on his shoulders. I highly recommend watching this if you’re tired of the bullshit and want to hear a real person talking about real things.