Today Bill Black, the chief prosecutor for the S&L financial disaster of the 1980’s (who put a thousand white-collar criminals in jail for the rip-off) joined me to pitch a DVD of the movie “Inside Job”. As much as I loath begging for money with increasing frequency to keep the lights on at KPFK, it was such a pleasure to have Bill explain the significance of this feature documentary up for the Oscar tonight.
Bill was able to explain the economic and political reality we face and show how “Inside Job” lays out the story that the Democrats and Obama have failed to tell, and in failing to do so, have allowed the Tea Party to capture and turn the political tide against them.
Capitalizing on the biggest crime of the century, the Republicans have prospered from the Wall Street rip-off that has devastated the global economy and hobbled Main Street, and escaped with the perfect getaway. Stealing right out of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”, they have turned what was largely their mistake into a political Trifecta.
They’ve sold the deficit fraud to the American people while maintaining tax breaks for the uber-rich who helped bring about the crisis. They got elected by promising jobs and are now cutting them and preventing a recovery from the recession. And they have convinced a lot of Americans that our financial woes are the result of lavish union benefits enjoyed by public employees at the expense of the downsized non-union private sector.
And of course as we know from the prank call with the Wisconsin governor, their strategy is not to balance the budgets in state houses with increasing revenues that have collapsed because of the Wall Street created recession, but to destroy the public employees union because they fund the Democrats. And thank to the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United “ decision, corporations now have an unlimited advantage in campaign funding which they are just beginning to exercise.
So you might ask, “are the Democrats suicidal?” Why did they not do what “Inside Job” does, tell the story? And as Bill Black said today, put the Wall Street crooks on trial and capture the headlines in an endless perp walk from 2008 until the present. Why didn’t they explain what happened with indictments and trials? Show how the insiders rigged the casino and how they fleeced the poor. Reveal how they bought the politicians and neutralized the regulators.
The Tea Party would never have gotten off the ground if Obama had not chosen to “not look back”. He would have commanded the “jobs” narrative from the beginning, and they would never have been able to steal it as they did in 2010 and con America with the deficit hoax and the big lie of getting Americans back to work while they lavish tax breaks on the billionaire who are laying off workers and cutting their benefits.
I hope “Inside Job” wins tonight and more people discover the message that it delivers. If so maybe this criminally distorted political debate can be turned around. Clearly our political leaders wont do it, even if it will save them from electoral defeat in 2012. So we must do it and lead them, since they have failed to lead us.