This weekend I saw the new documentary film, Inside Job, which is about the economic crisis of 2008. It’s very well done, and I recommend it. (It’s web site is here and includes a list of theaters where it will soon be showing.) I’ve been reading about the crisis and have had some trouble understanding the economic jargon. The film helped me clarify meanings. Mostly, though, it confirmed what I already knew, that the trouble began with Reagan administration and its push for deregulation. The film did give me a greater realization of how massively corrupt—sociopathic, really—the capitalist system has become. But the most striking moment for me was a particular image of skyscrapers and cranes in some Asian country (I don’t remember which) that made me aware of how completely globalization has ensnared the world. The system is intended to be “too big to fail.” We’ve been dumbed down to think that we can muddle along indefinitely and that we have entered a road from which there is no turning back. But everything that is corrupt undermines itself until it finally collapses. That’s universal law. We have the choice of dismantling the system deliberately and gracefully or of waiting for catastrophe. Even if we do get the corporations and banks under control, oil scarcity is going to put an end to the current system. Our way of life is absolutely unsustainable. Unbelievably, the political energy seems to be running in the direction of greater deregulation. Like everyone, I’m waiting to see how this election goes. If the right wing ideologues get what they want and the markets are let off the leash, we will be putting ourselves in line for economic chaos and failure on a scale that will dwarf what we saw just two years ago.
I should add that the film makes it clear that many of the people who got us into this mess (Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and so on) are in positions of great power under Obama. As one interviewee, Robert Gnaizda, says of Washington D. C. in general, Democrat and Republican, “It’s a Wall Street government.” It gives me the creeps.
Tags: Capitalism, Inside Job
October 28, 2010 at 11:01 am |
Years ago a guy I knew got into “day trading.” I told him that I thought it was dangerous because I felt the “game” was rigged against small players, who can never know when a stock is being manipulated. He went on to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, and his wife came close to leaving him. Today things are even worse on Wall Street with the rise of microsecond trading by high-speed computers (they “hold” stock for an average of 11 seconds!). And yet even now some unscrupulous, self-aggrandizing politicians are telling the mindless masses that Social Security should be privatized and we should all invest our retirement savings in the stock market — and that it is safe. What is worse is that some of these mindless masses agree with them! GAG!
I do not understand why people didn’t learn from the Savings & Loan scandal, brought to us by Reagan and the entire Bush family (remember Neil Bush and Silverado Savings), that deregulation is simply a way for a few money-grubbing sociopaths to steal the hard-earned dollars of the many.
October 29, 2010 at 6:16 am |
So Cloward and Piven were wrong? Just unleash capitalism, and it will collapse by itself?
November 1, 2010 at 3:14 pm
I have to admit that I’d never heard of Cloward and Piven. I had to do a little research. Their theory, or I should say “stratagem,” reminds me of the Bassett-Lowke model of economic training and engineering. Both theories have been derailed by recent historical developments.
December 19, 2010 at 11:36 am |
I thought that quote, “It’s a Wall Street government,” was the most powerful moment of the movie. Then they detail other, less well known, people in the Obama treasury dept who were also instrumental in facilitating the economic meltdown — people you’ve never heard of, but who were integral players — and you realize that the deck is truly stacked.