A complete restructuring of the economy is needed rather than some poking and prodding and hand-slapping of arch criminals. An investigation should be conducted just as it was after the Great Depression, undoubtedly resulting in another necessary cure, a "jail-out." If Obama accomplishes this, rest assured that he will be as vilified as Madoff by the diluted posterity of poor Bill Buckley--is he resting at all, let alone in peace?
And by the way, mainstream media indifference to most of the meltdown fueled it, the film emphasizes, masking it with exigencies that included Sarah Palin's wardrobe. Otherwise they'd lose their advertisers, among other assets.
*****
Schechter calls this injustice the "crime of our time," the largest injustice in world history, a condoned form of burglary that strokes the criminals while striking the innocent, making a mockery of the dream the criminals have attained to and will now perpetrate for themselves only. The middle class has been vaporized. As new regulations are imposed by governments, so will new forms of circumvention rise--they are "very smart" and well educated, says one interviewee--and what is more dangerous than a smart criminal?
Schechter interviews villains, refugees from their lairs, as well as victims and their standard bearers to provide all of the above information and lots more, including devastating statistics--the ultimate price of predatory lending may soar to hundreds of trillions--so far the cost has been $12 trillion, or 2 percent of the world's GNP (by my calculation). Think of that: a good chunk of the universe in terms of the finances that cross our desks and store counters daily. Now 70 percent of this country's wealth is held by the richest one percent, as if we've evolved into a banana republic.
Schechter films Jesse Jackson, Sr., rallying the people--all visibly victims--on Wall Street, which he calls a crime scene, as well as yuppie twenty-somethings being trapped into hedge funds while modeling their precocious fluidity at their lush cocktail parties. He soars and dives through the crisis that has mingled upscale tents with cardboard housing, high-up executives with homeless people. Recall that soon after the bailout one financial firm took its yacht to some tony island resort, spending $400,000 they had set aside before their collapse for this long-scheduled celebration. So much of the funds disappeared without a trace as the banks still skimp on the loans the bailout funds were meant to enable.
The editing is superb, the interviewees, from articulate "men on the street" to experts, very well chosen. Schechter as narrator and filmed speaker is less of a presence than usual. The film is an archive that will speak to all posterity of a crisis that, God willing, they will know how to pay for without becoming generations of serfs with the same minute percent of plunderers, or fewer, in control than currently afflict most of us, the vast majority.
I can't help wondering about the sequence of events of the alternative scenario, if we the people had received the bailout funding? How much of it would have become entangled in corruption--we are no angels? Let's see: foreclosures would be avoided and lots of other direct and immediate damage undone--perhaps as much, but at different levels, to revive the economy as it is now breathing again, with unemployment figures motionless?
I hope not. I considered phoning Congressman Dennis Kucinich's office, but as an out-of-stater, and worse yet a resident of DC, I might have been put on permanent hold. Economics is such an inexact [social] science.
While the media ignored him, phone calls flooded his office when he suggested that as long as we have deregulation Wall Street should attend to its problems by itself.
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