They made the wrong choice, and now it's sad days ahead for CNBC and Squawk Box. The best investment opportunities are all overseas but CNBC can't share in that. The channel is 100% committed to invest in American. This put them in a separate world from performance-based investors. The smart money left the room.

Listening to CNBC now is like hearing a horse race announcer get excited over the five horses bringing up the rear and never mentioning the five in front because they have foreign names.

Now that Squawk on the Street is welded by contract to the NYSE, we must hope the NYSE is successful in merging with overseas exchanges. Without that internationalization, Squawk looks doomed.

NBC has a channel called CNBC World but it's little more than channel squatting ... a place holder. They have no idea how to make a coherent presentation, and no talent in the room.

Meanwhile, Squawk Box slipped into 2nd place in coverage of US investing. The information offered on the Bloomberg channel is as good or better, and Bloomberg's presentation tries to be adult and professional. CNBC sometimes loses sight of that goal.

But that's to be expected. NBC is a business under the thumb of greed meister GE whose sole intent is maximizing profits. Bloomberg has higher goals including an attempt at communication with refinement.

For example, at 10 AM on a Saturday CNBC will typically be running an infomercial (with graphics, yet) for a habit-forming laxative that's targeted to unschooled hypochondriacs. Bloomberg will be running a long interview with an orchestra conductor about his new, state-of-the-art music hall.

And this would not be middle brow culture pap we get from A&E, USA, and other channels that program for MA 13s with fare like the insipid "America's Castles." The Bloomberg script I saw would be at home in The New Yorker.

NBC would never dream of such a show unless someone paid to air it. GE closed down NBC's structure to produce quality programming of their own. It's unlikely any NBC suit watches Bloomberg's cultural shows, but Bloomberg people do.

After GE took control of NBC, they let CNBC's reputation ride on ads such as one for black scalp polish to hide baldness. That monument to viewer disrespect is quintessential GE. "If it pays, it plays." And they'll even do it as part of the programming, such as "Rage."

"Rage" is when CNBC interrupts mature programming to present a few minutes of vacuous, immature prattle endowing half-formed ideas with meandering barbarisms ranted all at once by whomever is in the room.

Mock tantrums and free-for-all cacophony is adult broadcasting in who's view? Oh, right...Jerry Springer and Jim Cramer.

NBC is paid to insult viewers with moronic commercials. "Rage" they do for free. What kind of focus group encouraged this? Surely not Squawk Box viewers or anyone who might be. This is programming by suits who would buy scalp polish.

CNBC's flagship Squawk Box was cleaved Dec. 18, 2005, into two programs using the Squawk name, one from 6 to 9 AM, the other from 9 to 10. The first part is a round table. The second is a broadcast live from the New York Stock Exchange.

Mark Haines was tossed as Squawk Box host, demoted to boosting the NYSE from 9 to 10, then given another hour and warned to be bubbly and enthusiastic. His shares the time after 10 with Liz Clamen, a cliche queen who could make me mute a live broadcast of the Hindenberg disaster.

The show reflects that TV can wangle space inside the NYSE and wander the floor with a cam. That may impress Madison Avenue yahoos, but so far they can't find anyone on the floor to interview who is consistently worth hearing. No market genius, no eloquent insight. "Squawk on the Street" is still, still, still seeking relevance.

CNBC threw Haines, the near-perfect round table host, off the round table. It was a bizarre twist, as it turned out a year later, because they ended up restoring Squawk's structure of reason, grace, and style that Mark pioneered but without the creative force.

But not at first. After CNBC dumped Haines they added to the Squawk table a loudmouth bully with a superiority complex who let no one complete a thought and insisted on dominating discussions. The addition of Charles Gasparino trashed what used to be "the most gemutlich and professional" show on cable, turning it into an argumentative ego trip where everyone including all-pro Joe Kernen and guests appearing by satellite had to fight to be heard.

That's gone now, though whichever NBC suits champion naive slap-stick are still around. They dumbed down Larry Kudlow, GE's pet right-wing economist who made up his mind and no longer uses it. They designed an ego trip rant for Kudlow that makes Jim Cramer look chastened and unassertive.

Some months before the Squawk squeeze, the regular cast was enlarged to include a splendid new addition, Becky Quick. Becky fit seamlessly into the Hibernian Hall collegiality of old Squawk Box and new. She has wit, investment training, street smarts, an attitude tactfully expressed, and a pleasing on-air presence and voice. She is often the first voice of reason and always a voice of sense. Long may she grace the table, and grace it she does.

Rounding out the new talent and professionalism is Carl Quintanilla, another excellent fit to the Squawk Box team.

[See if you can spot what follows that applies specifically to the old Squawk Box that is no more.]

The investment world is the world of three-digit IQs, not two-digit. Therein lies the reason CNBC, which is owned by GE and serves the world's plutocrats, has an audience focus unusual in the television industry.

Every week day thousands of people in the investment industry or wannabe, mute clicker in hand, start watching CNBC before the US stock market opens. It's how to pick up valuable business info delivered with insight, humor, and intelligence.

What especially elevates CNBC is Squawk Box, a unique weekday 7 to 10 AM Eastern time Pandora's Box of surprises. What flies out of the box is sometimes essential news to make intelligent investments. The news may reveal a pattern of what Wall Street insiders will buy and sell that day.

Nearly all the top CNBC staff contribute to Squawk Box.

Among them is the Hibernian Hall crowd of anchor Mark Haines, stock analyst Joe Kernen, and reporter David Faber, who along with Maria Bartiroma make these hours the most gemutlich and professional on the satellite.

Squawk's frequent reports from the Chicago Board of Trade are amazing. Rick Santelli's grasp of things is breath-taking. Rick is visiting us from an advanced planet. And he's such a straight arrow he's probably not invested.

These are entertaining people, but under GE's NBC they are in the trade Toulouse-Lautrec found entertaining. Every day presents scores of examples. For instance, Haines is college educated and a law school graduate, yet he can look at a cue sheet showing that prices of petroleum products are at record highs, oil company profits are at record highs, and never make the connection.

Do kids ever discover parents sold out? How is that handled?

CNBC will invite oil industry Svengali Trilby Lundberg to explain that pump prices or heating oil rose because of OPEC and a hail storm in Montana, and she is thanked for her candor. They literally kiss Trilby's ass to be the first to air the Lundberg Letter's jive of the day.

On Sept. 15, 2003 Squawk Box put an oil industry spokesman on who related that the average price of gasoline rose an unprecedented 21 cents in August due to ... the east coast power failure. On the screen was the daily chart of gas prices for August. It clearly showed most of the increase came days before the blackout. No one asked about that.

If intellectual prostitution were funny this would be a comedy channel.

500-pound liars get their way on CNBC. On June 2, 2004, the chairman of profit-bloated Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker, was asked in a Squawk Box interview if there would ever be competition in the retail drug industry. Hank McKinnell's stupefying reply: "There is competition. Surveys show that in every city in the United States there is a 100% range of drug prices." No one asked him to explain that gibberish.

McKinnell is also chair of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a lobbying group that reportedly has two full-time lobbyists assigned to each member of Congress. Misleading members of Congress and lavish "campaign contributions" didn't come up in the CNBC interview.

A third [old] example. Internet search engine Google is about to go from being privately held to publicly held. This means they are changing masters. A company that had been indebted to users to be successful will now be enslaved to ever-growing profitability to be successful. "What do users want?" will be replaced by "What revenue producing burdens will users bear before they switch to metacrawler or dogpile?"

You won't hear about that on CNBC when a company goes public. Capitalism has no negatives here. The most you will hear is feigned wonder whether going public will change a company. Yet these people know that an IPO eventually forces a company to switch from value pricing to profit enhancement, to the customer's detriment. That truth is off-limits on TV, which is why CNBC is tied with Bloomberg for 2nd place, and no one is in 1st.

When CEO McKinnell said Pfizer was using it's excess billions of profit to buy back company stock rather than address the back-breaking cost of its drugs in the US, no one at CNBC even sighed.

The most effective inoculation to keep ethics from infecting business is the IPO. Taking the company public blunts the values that built the company, replacing them with the Wall Street mantra, "what have you done for me lately." That's all explained elsewhere on this site in the 2 cows file.

Now we are seeing a reciprocal of that, public companies taken over by private investors. They bribe stockholders to sell out using some cash they will bleed from the company. Later when the climate is right they will IPO back to stockholders the company name and whatever assets they didn't spin off. If nothing is left but the name, sell that offshore like RCA, Zenith, Emerson, etc. Names too big for their tombstones that became nomadic names or Chinese names.

Critics complain that Wall Street sucks up profits without creating anything, but is that true? Wall Street creates the business that fuels Wall Street, a major global industry. Not just anyone can wipe out the retirement accounts of 50,000 unprotected employees and fly off scot-free to the islands. That takes Wall Street expertise, JPMorgan expertise. Those obscene fees and Jesus birthday Chanukah bonuses are earned.

Squawk Box anchor Haines is the unsung hero of Cable TV. In all my years of TV viewing since 1947 I've never seen a better anchor. Avuncular in the Cronkite mold, but an informed, interactive participant. The opposite of a network gas bag, Haines has a knack for analysis without losing sight of production values. Ambience springs from Haines. The more he participates, the better the show.

When he occasionally had a guest from the consumer side of the aisle or anyone on the left, he eviscerated them with sometimes uncontrollable gusto. These became memorable TV cameos.

Some of the guest co-hosts have little or nothing useful to say. Even respected analysts can talk like salesmen. To these fellas there are but two categories of stock: one to buy now and one to buy later. Names everyone on Wall Street knows and respects may come across no better informed than a commission-driven broker in Nebraska.

There was a wider variety of guests in the mid-90s. Old school iconoclasts like Meyer Berman and Yale Hirsch who brought a touch of circus; former pillars of the industry like Bob Salomon giving us a glimpse of Wall Street's bygone integrity. Today's CNBC producers may see those as youthful Squawk Box indiscretions. A pity. They provided the spice. Without them, today's hamburger and fries make a bland serving, and "Rage" is the e-coli of the mind.

Guests invited for interviews all have impressive titles. Few give impressive advice.

Hearing a flak from Bank of America Securities talk about stocks makes you realize these folks are today's medicine men. Guest interviews are today's version of whooping and dancing to make it rain. The bank's "Chief Investment Strategist" (impressive title) came on Squawk Box to perform incantations in hopes the great stock god would favor him. There's no better explanation for the unmitigated malarky Thomas McManus handed us for five full minutes one Bastille Day.

General Electric owns NBC, CNBC has a working partnership with Dow Jones, and politics comes in one flavor: big business Republican. Plutocracy. The supply side is us, consumers are them, and don't forget it. So CNBC never heard of, for example, the oil cartel.

This is not too different from Rupert Murdoch's Faux News "We distort; you decide" but with a decade or two older cast not freaky with insecurity.

A career at CNBC means being comfortable with fairy tale capitalism. America's myths continue unabated.

They also editorialize without saying so. They are heavy users of stock price charts. By choosing how to base a chart, the same data can make a company stock look stable and safe, or wildly gyrating and risky. There's no visible sign of chart standardization.

For example, if a stock varies between 12 and 14 over a 3-month period, charting this against a graph whose bottom is 11 and whose top is 14 will create a chart with steep curves associated with volatility and risk. If the chart bottom had been zero and the chart top 25, the graph would have accurately reflected stability.

To make a shaky stock appear stable, they may display a 5-year chart with a zero base and a 120 top. A 20-point drop in the last two months, evidence of large-scale dumping, is all but imperceptible on that chart.

It's not necessary to watch all of Squawk Box. The game plan is to re-hash and update the main news every half hour. No matter when you turn Squawk on you'll hear updates in under 30 minutes on anything that matters. The banter, the humor, and the updates keep it from becoming stale. There's a ton of savvy entertainment here.

The quality comes through because the techies behind the glass are 1st rate. This is the smoothest live TV in history. The screen is ablaze with distracting, jittery motion to feign a powerful control center. CNBC controls bupkes, but by strobing lights on the screen and counting the time ticking down by flashing it in hundredths of a second, it screams Busy! Dynamic!

Squawk is generally over-commercialized to the point of pain. Over and over it's two or three spots, 20 seconds of someone clucking at us to stay tuned, then two or three more, which have been followed by yet more. You can safely channel surf at least 4 minutes before "We're back."

Demographics and focus groups must favor patronizing or vacuous ads for this target audience because most of these ads are patronizing or vacuous in addition to insulting, which is a given.

At its worst it included that ad for black scalp polish to hide baldness. Not an oversight that slipped through, that one ran for six months. If you can afford (or trade out?) GE's price of admission, you can be "as seen on CNBC." GE ownership means there is no clash between production values and earning a buck. There is only the buck.

TV, like radio, is where to put my 50-year observation to the test: "The longer the ad, the less inspired the message."

GE's greed for income appears to include selling editorial content.

An example is Donald Trump. Trump Hotels was once gushed by CNBC to such an extreme it looked like a 1-day infomercial for the Donald. Perhaps it was, but it wasn't labeled that. The Donald was just there every few hours, welcomed like royalty and trumpeting his stock. Even the underwriters must have blushed.

Investors weren't fooled. Donald was there because his watered stock was tanking and it continued to tank on horrid fundamentals.

We learned years later, in 2004 with The Apprentice, that GE and Trump are deeply enmeshed, though just how remains a mystery. Not only was The Apprentice aired to provide artificial glitz to boost badly performing Trump stocks, but it is GE - not Trump - paying that $250,000 annual salary to the winner!

Maybe Trump took a cue from Rick in Casablanca, and lets NBC/GE boss Robert C. Wright win at roulette.

CNBC once gave over an entire day including Squawk Box to a newly-released Lucasfilm movie. For fully 15% of the time between 7 AM and 10, the name of the film was in a banner ad at the bottom of the screen, or there was a filmdom interview on, or the film was the topic of air staff banter. None of the hype was labeled as advertising. It was passed off as news.

Lucasfilm is privately held. Was GE apple polishing while trying quietly to buy it?

Eastman Kodak was another firm that benefited from CNBC hype. Rather than examine its new business plan for the digital era, CNBC heartily endorsed it with no key questions asked. Yet there were glaring questions to be raised the Squawk Box regulars were aware of.

No one asked the Kodak CEO what the new plan would do to photo processing fees, despite the expectation they would rise substantially. No one asked if the company test marketed the plan that consumers would pay Kodak for what they could do themselves for nothing on their home printer. By not asking, Squawk could gush fantasy over Kodak's future while viewers screamed in unheard anguish.

When Kodak implemented this improbable business plan, it bombed and their stock fell from 80 to 20. The company was dropped from the list of 30 stocks comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Caveat emptor. If glaring, obvious issues aren't raised, you're being conned by CNBC.

CNBC is devoted to the financials market from before sunrise in the east to after sunset in the west. It's live TV. Every minute of every hour must be filled with either talk or ads.

There's nowhere near that much news so much of the talk is just talk. Professional prattle, not infrequently self-serving misinformation from reliable sources, delivered with "Wall Street integrity and sincerity."

There's a ton of gossip masquerading as news, and a ton of speculation.

Don't expect it to move the market often. Data show 1% of American stockholders hold 47% of the market's total value. They make it move. They set the agenda. 80% of American stockholders have 4% of the value. CNBC aims at that 4%.

To be missed: the daily parade of guest financial advisors touting or slamming stocks or predicting market direction. Most are short as well as long. They own Futures and Leaps, Puts and Calls, Straddles and Hedges. They have no fiduciary relationship to you. Unless you're invested in the markets and derivatives they are, acting on these interviews will cost you. Fall for their hidden agenda and lose your shirt.

It's one way Wall Street drudges make money, sounding profound and relying on perception to change reality. Appearing on CNBC is self-serving. Don't fall for it.

At GE the suits upstairs make decisions suits make. For example, they copycat other channels to try to keep viewers from straying. That includes a useless weather component describing the entire nation's weather in 30 seconds. They changed that to a useful mention of the major airports reporting delays, or might. Then they changed it back to useless.

GE culture sets the ground rules for all the NBC channels. "Corporations Before People" dominates that culture. GE is very likely the major mover of jobs off-shore, so little is said about that. In fact, GE was the first company to require even its suppliers to out-source off shore, as GE's former CEO Jack Welsh bragged to Haines on CNBC.

On NBC, American jobs are lost because, golly gosh, shit happens.

After 10 AM Squawk Box is over and so is the reason to watch CNBC. Still, a day trader shouldn't ignore it. There is immediacy in hearing what reporters Kernen, Faber, and Pisani say at any hour. They break stories that can move the market simply by being reported, irrespective of importance. Active daily investors have to act fast on what they hear. There's no time to research it.

Live interviews with company execs can boost share price ahead of the interview (buy the mystery) and see it fall afterwards (sell the history.) That's a change due to daytrader psychology. Before the daytrader era a positive CNBC interview nearly always boosted the stock for a day or so. Not so now.

Between 10 AM and 4 PM news is distorted by melodrama. Benign happenings might be introduced in crisis terminology. Ordinary reports are masked behind headlines that over-state, or offer misleading rhetorical speculation. A story the editor thinks matters will show up again and again through the day, making small news act big.

In the heady Internet boom years, any down day was sure to have the news editor reaching for the standing head, "Are we witnessing the end of the bull market?"

When we did reach the end CNBC didn't know and didn't save us a dime. Too many cries of "Wolf!" resulted in the wolf eating the village when he did show up. Those who sold Intel near its high [smile] don't have CNBC to thank for it. We sold despite Ashok Kumar's previous eleven wrong predictions of Intel's impending doom.