I've already raved about Charles Ferguson's superb 2010 documentary "Inside Job" on the causes of the 2008 crash. It won the Oscar for the best documentary in 2011, and when he received the Oscar he said:
"Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail. And that's wrong".By the beginning of 2012, it was still the case that there has not been a single criminal prosecution of a senior financial executive related to the finanacial crisis. That's why Charles Ferguson wrote an entire book of 370 pages that details the crimes the were committed, and tries to understand why nothing has been done. It tries to understand why many of the people in Obama's administration are people who were directly implicated in the crisis.
The book makes for very sobering reading. There is clearly something very wrong with the world in which we live.
In the last chapter, Charles Ferguson asks "What should be done?". His list includes
- Bring the financial sector under control
- Control the impact of money on politics
- Reform the tax system
- Greatly strengthen antitrust policy and the regulation of corporate governance
He specifically mentions the need to impose a financial transaction tax (hooray!) but he doesn't mention the need to take the power to create the money supply away from commercial banks and to give it to elected governments who should create money only for projects that are in the interests of citizens. Oh well, perhaps he might find the 14 minutes needed to check out my video on "Some Radical Proposals for Monetary Reform"!
For some strange reason, the book is not being sold by Amazon in the USA. But you can buy a copy via independent sellers, or via Amazon.co.uk where there is also a Kindle version. Could it be that the corporations that control the economy have been able to block Amazon marketing it? Stranger things can happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment