Think of the saddest tearjerker movie you’ve ever seen, now prepare for it to become #2 on the soggy hankie list.
The documentary Inside Job is a must-see film about the financial meltdown that crippled the world thanks to the piggy greed of fat cat pin stripers on Wall Street and in the government.
There’s plenty of evil bastards to blame: financial firm scumbags, shady politicians in the pockets of lobbyists and academics getting their palms greased to concoct and support the tools for raping the public to benefit the rich.
Inside Job brilliantly shows us how we’ve gotten to the place we are today–– with 1% of the nation’s population controlling 23% of its wealth.
There are heroes in this movie; people who spoke and wrote and questioned the madness that was going on, all to no avail. Reason lost out to greed; the greed of financial firms to gamble, the greed of politicians to allow the rules to change to protect the greedy and the greed of the public to actually believe they could get something for nothing (or next to nothing).
None of it would have been possible had the laws not been changed and had regulation been enforced. But it wasn’t. We let Alan Greenspan and the Wall Street goons lead us down an ideological path to the guillotines.
The fix was in–– the bastards won, our economy almost collapsed and the public bailed out all those responsible.
The saddest part of all is this: nothing’s really changed except that we’ve had our coffers raped. The rich are richer. Too big to fail is now super-sized too big to fail. Politicians are still funded shills for our corporate overlords.
Inside Job lays it all out and you can see many of the worst elements of our society on camera actually trying to support their cases. In the end, we’ve all been played for suckers, and while I’d love to say this is a movie that could never be made again, I’m afraid such is not the case.
As Charles Ferguson, the filmmaker said in his Academy Awards acceptance speech for best documentary, “Not one of these guys is in jail yet.” And the very same people responsible for much of the robbery are still empowered in government, still lobbying, still playing three card monty with bad debt. We can all sleep well knowing the foxes are guarding the hen house.
Cry, America. Cry enough to wring your hankie because your wallet’s already been wrung dry.