30 January 2011

Pitchforks and Torches

(Crowd leaving the Hoffman 22 Cineplex in Alexandria yesterday after watching the documentary “Inside Job.”)

I was going to share a couple really good pre-Superbowl recipes with you this morning. I have a nice comfortable story in the can so I can go to the Car Show down at the Convention Center this morning and ogle the new vehicles. Not that I am going to buy one, but I am a car guy and that is just the way it is.
 
I listened to the news from Cairo when I got up. The Army seems to be stage-managing the transition to the post Mubarak-era at the moment, and the chief of intelligence and Hosni confidant Omar Suleiman has been installed as the VP. He is the transition guy if they can keep the army fingers on the levers of power...but who knows.

The interesting thing about this is that it is starting in the center, and that is not where insurgencies begin.

I am still fired up about the film I saw yesterday. It was the documentary by Charlie Ferguson called “Inside Job.”

I am still seething about it. We all, by now, understand a little bit about Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default swaps and how those greedy bastards at Goldman-Sachs and the other banks committed fraud on an unimaginable basis.  

The movie is a first rate polemic, and sometimes a little weak on the analysis, but hey, how would you get drama out of the repeal and erosion of oversight of the The Banking Act of 1933?

The impact of the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act?

Of course the cocaine and the hookers are more interesting. The best character in the movie is disgraced former Governor Eliot Spitzer, who as it turns out, was brought down for exactly the same thing the execs at the investment banks were writing off on the corporate expense accounts.

So no further polemic this morning. But if you do not see this film, you are missing the fact that the bastards that mugged you and me have not paid a dime for their crimes. They are still large and in charge.

They kept the billions they stole from us. Not one has been charged with anything.

America has become a kleptocracy, and they are going to do it to us again.

Don’t say they didn’t try to tell you.

Oh, did I mention there were about eight of us at the matinee?

Crap.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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