"Inside Job" exposed the fraud that led to a global meltdown, but still no one has gone to jail.

I pulled into Nazareth, just feelin' about half past dead;
Just need to find a place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, and "No", was all he said.
-- The Weight

We can only wait until the Internet does its job and destroys Hollywood, a healthy development for the world and especially for the city of Los Angeles. Until then, we'll have the Oscars and the movie industry's occasional dabbling into politics. So it was good to see the recognizing of Charles Ferguson's "Inside Job", a powerful and damning indictment of the fraud at the heart of Wall Street, the mega-banks, and our economics academia.

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My guess is that it was recognized because Hollywood saw quite the drying up of finance money over the last few years and they likes their monies. But it brings to mind how the rest of the business community's silence on the crimes of Wall Street and the banks has been deafening. After all, they all likes their monies too, so why pay the corruption tax? I once asked someone with more knowledge of these matters why that was, and his reply was that a CFO of a major Fortune 100 company told him they're all using derivatives and other financial chicanery a la Greece and others, so no one wants to say anything.

Ferguson's quote on accepting is best:

Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong.

That's more than wrong -- that's the criminal culpability of the American political class. Speaking of which, the Guardian has an excellent piece on Eliot Spitzer, the one, and I mean the only one, member of officialdom to take on the financial boys and their crimes. It's well worth the read.

Joe Costello was communications director for Jerry Brown’s 1992 presidential campaign and was a senior adviser for Howard Dean’s effort in 2004.