Besides Mat Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine it’s almost as if everyone has already forgotten about the financial crisis. If you haven’t seen this movie already I highly recommend it to everyone.
It’s difficult to say what is the most terrifying revelation of the movie Inside Job. Certainly the end result was terrible which has been probably the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich.
Maybe what bothers me the most is the complete capitulation and failure of Barack Obama. The American voting public attempted to make some sort of correction on this miscarriage of justice yet absolutely nothing was done. Instead of prosecutions there were compensation packages in the hundreds of millions. So much for democracy.
Maybe it’s that in the face of a complete breakdown and failure of our banking system we have seen nothing in the way of new regulations.
Maybe it’s how the financial industry has turned our government into the moral equivalent of their pool boy.
I think the worst thing about this crisis is how conservatives have managed to sell their story to such a vast swath of some of the poorest Americans. Lower and middle class teabagger slobs have been defending the criminals responsible for the crisis. They are also avidly parroting the talking points provided by the industry that we should be blaming the millions of homeowners who have been thrown into bankruptcy by predatory lending practices engineered by Wall Street. The bankers barely understood these sleazy loans they were writing; how could we expect lower class, working class people to have a clue as to just how insidious these loans were in many cases?
Biggest Shitheels in the movie:
- David McCormick, Under Secretary of the Treasury Bush Administration
- Scott Talbot, Chief Lobbyist Financial Services Roundtable, who says that financial officers in the industry have earned their staggering salaries.
- Glenn Hubbard, Dean Columbia Business School, a more unctuous asshole would be hard to find, even in this movie of unctuous assholes.
- Hank Paulson, former CEO Goldman Sachs and Treasury Secretary for GW Bush. He walked away with $500 million, tax free after driving his company into the ground.
The $124 billion Savings and Loan scandal of the Reagan years looks like child’s play. Sherman McCoy of The Bonfire of the Vanities looks like a slacker in comparison to this new breed of Wall Streeter.
Another frightening thing about all of this is that America's "best and brightest" are drawn to this sleazy industry instead of actually creating something worthwhile. Of course they aren't the best and brightest. As my brother Mat pointed out before there exists this Risky Business generation of privileged assholes with a sense of entitlement unknown even during the monarchies of the Middle Ages.
The bailout should have been to insure that not a single family lost their home and worked from there.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
This great Daily Show clip about the public workers debate in Wisconsin.
This great Daily Show clip about the public workers debate in Wisconsin.
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