Thursday, March 3, 2011

Inside Job

A classic skit on the Dave Chappell show portrayed what would happen if white-collar financial crimes were treated in the same manner as street crimes. In this hilarious bit of satire Dave exposed a massive double standard that we all know exists, yet do nothing about. We cheer on the police and call them "heros" for writing traffic tickets or enforcing the no cell phone rule while we drive, yet we expect law enforcement to do nothing when the greedy men who run wall street literally steal billions out of their pension and retirement plans. After they have have traded, bundled and sold billions of dollars in "crap" (quoting a Merrill Lynch e-mail here) and paid themselves out massive bonus and cashed in their stock options they than turn to the government to bail them out because they are "too big to fail." I am writing this piece on Rileyrandr because both Bush and Obama deserve the blame for an incredible failure to regulate the financial industries.
I would encourage everyone to watch the documentary, Inside Job, to gain an understanding and an insight as to what happened to our financial solvency during the past eight years. As one congressman put it, "we put people in jail for robbing banks, but we do nothing when the people who are robbing the banks are the CEO's". This film will force you to take a hard look at the players of all the major financial institutions, the Fed, the SEC and yes, even Spitzer himself. The Wall Street players want to make things complicated with words like "credit default swaps," "sub-prime" etc but it is really nothing more than a classic ponzi scheme with the American worker playing the role of the sucker. Watch this documentary and take a look at what "deregulation" has done to America.

1 comment:

  1. I agree, we just watched "Inside Job" and it's a must see. It's surprising that we are not in the mist of a revolution against wall street controlling capital hill in this country. Guess what, these bubbles will repeat and all the news outlets will fill airtime with the bankers and politicians repeating "No one saw this coming", and we will cut even more from our public education, retirement, national park funding etc. to keep wallstreet stacked.

    American economics has become privatized gains, socialized losses.

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