When Will It Ever End?

Saw the documentary Inside Job about the causes behind the economic collapse we find ourselves in the midst of.

This is what the documentary form is for. It lays out, clearly, what Wall Street and its enablers did to, well, fuck the global economy. It names names, is non-partisan, goes to the trouble of finding the news footage of the official hearings, and nails a few bastards to the wall on camera.

This is one of those documentaries that if I were a teacher in a high school, I'd show it to all of my classes. Twice. Once at the start of the year and once at the end. To say this is a "must-see" would be nothing but an understatement.

If something like this played out in a small town, the perpetrators would have that clammy moment of terror when the squeak of brakes is heard out front of the house, the view out the front window is several men with grim expressions climbing out of the back of a pickup bristling with guns, glancing up and down the street to see who might be watching, while two of them walk to the front door. Things are not going to go well for the person in the house.

The evil done by the men and women as outlined in Inside Job is the scandal of our age. The kicker is NONE of them has been brought to justice, and given the fact that they made sure no regulations existed around what they did with derivatives and then with executive bonuses, there may be no way to do anything about it in America. Europe has already moved to regulate this shit out of existence, which may be American's only hope, since about the only thing that can be done here is to hope those in power would shun them, but that's not what's happened.

Maybe enough outrage will come from those who've seen Inside Job, or read any of the books that outline the egregious evil visited upon the world, and our legislators will do something about it. Maybe it'll take the European courts and justice system to bring these people to justice.

It sickens me to even have to write that as an American.

What sickens me more, though, is we are in the middle of yet another fuck-over by Wall Street, and seemingly nothing's being done about that, either. The current price of gas prices is due to bullshit "speculation" by Wall Street, which directly parallels what Enron did back in the day that caused rolling brownouts on the West Coast. Why do we allow this immoral, evil shit to occur? Again, if America were a small town, Wall Street would suddenly show up dead on mainstreet, and everyone would be good with that. (Btw, I'm not advocating or suggesting vigilantism; my point is the sheer wrongness would not go unaddressed were it to happen on a smaller scale.)

According to this article, we have regulations that could be invoked to stop this. Right now. So why isn't it happening? (Yes, that's a rhetorical question.) Here and here are a couple more articles of interest.

My only quibble with the flick is they regularly display information as a block of text rather than have the narrator, Matt Damon, read it. It's in teeny tiny text, as well, which would be readable in a theatre, but even on a good-sized set, it is difficult to read.


(Re the title: I quote the line in the spirit of the lyric from the Monty Python song, "Here Comes Another One," resigned acknowledgement of the silliness and seriousness of the matter at hand.)