First off, I should say I’m grateful to CNBC for allowing me — an ill-kempt socialist of no great renown — to air my views on their channel, though I suspect they did not quite know exactly what I was, beyond some sort of critic of Jamie Dimon, when they invited me. The producers and crew members I interacted with were all friendly, helpful and highly competent. The segment itself was just bizarre.

Everything about being on TV is unnatural, and the strangeness of this appearance was only heightened by the setting. The New York Stock Exchange is at this point essentially a heavily guarded television studio and occasional film set, which I guess is an appropriate enough symbol of American capitalism in late 2013. The makeup artist — who did a wonderful job making me look human in a context in which only strange rubber-skinned television creatures appear human — sort of gave my hair a few desultory spritzes of hairspray and attempted to pat portions of it down. (I am aware that I need a haircut and a shave, thank you.) For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you’re sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.

I was on to be one side of an argument about Jamie Dimon, the chairman, president and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase and Co. I was arguing “against.” I was up against business reporter Duff McDonald, arguing “for.” Except I was actually, really, up against “Closing Bell” co-hosts Maria Bartiromo and Other Guy (OK, he is Scott Wapner, apparently), who, as CNBC anchors, rather openly and proudly consider themselves allies of the great men of Wall Street. And Dimon is generally considered the greatest.

So this was my point: Jamie Dimon should be fired because he has not done a good job of preventing JPMorgan Chase from doing heinous things. He should be fired because JPMorgan has repeatedly violated the law, and engaged in unethical and reckless activities. The “news hook” for this debate was the fact that Dimon had just traveled to Washington, D.C., to have a private conversation with the United States attorney general to negotiate the size and terms of what will probably end up being the largest fine in the history of American financial regulation. JPMorgan has already paid $3.68 billion in settlements this year.

JPMorgan has been and is being investigated for foreclosure fraud, Libor manipulation, an attempted coverup of the trading losses of the so-called “London Whale,” for possibly knowing about Madoff and not actually doing anything about him, and, as I mentioned on TV, for bribery in China. That one seemed to anger and confuse Maria Bartiromo, but I can assure her and everyone else that it’s not a crazy thing some Occupy hippie alleged in a pamphlet, or the Nation.

The story of JPMorgan’s hiring of the children of prominent Chinese officials isn’t merely a bit of “everybody does it” nepotism, it’s the target of a bribery investigation. An investigation launched by the SEC, and then joined by the Justice Department. I may have erred in citing the notoriously liberal New York Times (part-time professional home of “Squawk Box” co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin), when the same information has also been reported in more business-friendly outlets like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. (I also intended to mention energy market manipulation but Bartiromo got really caught up in the bribery thing and I didn’t have time.)