The Global "Inside Job"

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It was a thrilled when “Inside Job” won the Oscar for the best documentary feature last night, even though “Gasland” and “Restrepo” were equally worthy efforts.  And I jumped out of my chair when I heard Charles Ferguson’s acceptance remark that three years after the devastating financial disaster caused by Wall Street, no financial manager has gone to jail. 

Bill Black made that point very forcefully yesterday and I hope to interview the producer of “Inside Job” today to find out whether this publicity boost for the movie will translate into more attention to what is the real root cause of our economic distress today.  But as we all know, that message has been buried by the pervasive propaganda about the phony deficit “crisis” being self-righteously sold by the likes of New Jersey’s fat fraud of a governor, who is telling everyone that they should go on a diet. 

Perhaps a sequel to “Inside Job” might be a documentary exploring the global inside job that is the evil twin of Wall Street’s scamming of the American taxpayer.  Has anyone done the math to add up how much the current crop of deposed despots have stolen from their people?  Just the latest dominos; the Tunisian thieves the Ben Alis, the Mubaraks three decades of pilfering and the Qaddafi clan’s forty years of fleecing Libya are worth adding up.

I’ve heard that it could be thirty billion, fifty seven billion and one hundred and twenty billion respectively; just from those three.  But if you did an inventory of the world’s dictators whose country’s treasuries are indistinguishable from their dictator’s personal bank accounts, you might come up with a number that even Wall Street would be impressed by.

We seem to selectively decry blood diamonds and Imelda Marcos’ shoe collection, but not only is this predatory pillaging systemic, it has been sustained for decades.  Sometimes called sovereign funds, this dirty money is eagerly accepted by the big banks and their off shore branches, and ends up enriching the global elite who may not allow the dictators into their exclusive club, but clearly profit from this transnational cabal of embezzlers. 

The sub-prime scam on Wall Street was a massive Robin Hood in reverse where the rich speculators conned the poor aspirants to the American dream into buying houses that were sold out from under them, leaving the mostly minority families broke and living in their cars.  And adding insult to injury, the taxpayer bailed out the thieves not the victims, in the greatest transfer of private debt into public debt in history.

But someone should look at this on a global scale, since most poor and Third World countries are under the boot and in the grip of kleptocrats and their clans of crony capitalists. How much has and is being stolen from the poor to give to the already rich? And how much does this endemic looting contribute to the growing global divide between the rich and the poor? That’s a question that deserves an answer.