On viewing the 2010 Academy Award winning Documentary 'Inside Job' a few weeks ago i thought it was brilliant. Interesting and combative against the absolute fuck up of a system that risks millions in stake of overwhelmingly large financial gains for businesses and those who run them. Those millions being risked are from other people's money of course, the pensions of the everyday worker, the savings of the everyday worker, the livelihoods of the every day worker. Yada, yada, yada, financial crisis, who's accountable, the political aspect of it all, not to ruin the ending or anything, but basically we can safely assume that due to networks of power and the old moneys trillionaire club, no one's being held accountable for the economic crisis thats now cutting and slicing the world over.
Watch it, it really is brilliant.
Now here's how i feel about it today, this morning. The tag lines on the dvd case read 'The global economic crisis of 2008 cost tens of millions of people their savings, their jobs, and their homes. This is how it happened.' Well it just cost another.
After i was born, my mother who's work ethic honestly exhausts me just thinking about it, went straight back to work at the Early Learning Centre, ELC. She started there the year i was born, and so has now been there for 23 years. Hard work, etc, paid off and she became the store manager. Well done mum! She complains every christmas that the holidays are going to kill her, frenzied parents shopping for countless toys, i can see her point. She works hard still, no sick days, she doesn't get sick. Can't afford to be sick. She's gone through several interesting blends of polyester uniform shirts, hundreds of simple black work pumps. Thousands of bruises from lugging boxes up and down what can only be described as an 'intimidating' load of stairs to her stockroom. And today at quarter to nine this morning, she was told that her store is being shut down. The rents along the town centre high street have been going up, hers is coming under review, Mothercare - who recently took over ELC and have since done a fantastic job of running the company into the ground, kudo's on that guys - superb job, have a store across the road they can just incorporate the ELC products into. How cost effective.
In the meantime, my mother, an extremely proud woman, is left to open her shop, serve her customers and inside her head i know she's screaming, reeling, devastated. So today, im thinking about that documentary and how few people i know who have seen it, or even heard of it. In the face of a very real consequence of the greed and absolute disregard shown by those who created and caused the economic crisis i feel the need to rush up to everyone i see and scream at them to watch it, to rage through the streets shouting about how unfair it is. That these wallstreet ASSHOLES are sitting comfortably on their plush antique fucking chairs whilst we're looking at perhaps having to sell our goddam house.
So in some sense of solidarity or whatever, please, watch the film, feel angry about it, because it sucked then, it sucks now and with no end in sight, it's gonna suck for years to come.
Its on youtube in parts so you can watch it for free - for those who're already feeling the pinch.
Amen.
