Untitled from harisgr on Vimeo.

 

‘Inside Job’ provides insight into how irresponsible, unethical and illegal practices in the financial sector led to the global economic crisis of 2008. The documentary focuses on Wall Street but I’m pretty sure a lot of this applies to London.

Robert Fisk draws a parallel between the protests against Arab dictators and the Occupy protests against the financial dictators in the west:

The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against “governments”. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks”, who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners.

Source: The Independent.

The film, and Fisk’s article, made me wonder why David Cameron is so keen on defending the financial sector and why the media seems to believe that he is wiser than all the other EU leaders .. actually they seem to like that he is ‘being tough’ but don’t know why (I listen to LBC a lot). Anyway I found some interesting thoughts on this blog: gregpytel.blogspot.com