After viewing the first two episodes of this four part series yesterday I decided on the title ‘Too Close to The Sun’ based on an Icarus analogy used in the film during a discussion of the global housing bubble. But then, when in Episode Three, I got a look at all nine of the Wall Street honcho rapists lining up before Congress, I was stricken by the reptilian quality of each and every one. Those nine, and the scumbag King Shrub the Younger, as well as the psychotic Spanish financial tycoon, and every other rich fat bastard in the lineup, had the pasty mottled hue of an aged alcoholic who did too much cocaine, and spent too much time in the sun. These jerks fit the Lord of the Rings Nazgul lineup better than the Witch King of Angmar.
This is a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation product, and hence a bit more respectful than what an American would produce, if he were allowed to. The four episodes are:
1. The Men Who Crashed the World
2. A Global Tsunami
3. Paying the Price
4. After The Fall
The investigative reporting and interviews are extremely informative, to the point of angering any normal citizen of the world. Hank Paulson, former CEO of scumbag firm Goldman-Sax, does an excellent Mouth of Sauron imitation. The best scumbag of the corporate crack-head plutocracy is CEO Dick Fuld, who is seen on film stating the following to a packed house concerning whistle blowers, “Reach in and rip out their heart and eat it before they die!”
The financial disaster that transferred massive wealth from the working class, costing tens of millions of jobs and homes, flows from sleazy London, to wimpy Iceland, to savage France, to deluded Spain, to dying California [which is treated as a first-world to third-world nation!] to insane Dubai, worn down Ontaria, cold remorseless China, ravenous New York and ultimately complicit Washington. The world economy is exposed as a blatant pyramid scheme. The best thing is that the bad guys won, and every expert interviewed expects them to pillage the world again, soon, facilitating a sequel as surely as Michael Meyers rising at dawn in a hockey mask.
Some of the craziest facts included: the LA County jail has the world’s largest concentration of mentally ill people; 1.5 million American children are homeless; 100,000 U.S. Army veterans are homeless; California municipal laws prevent evicted people from pitching a tent on private property, even with written permission from the owner; and that slave labor in Arab nations like Dubai is provided largely through Indian criminals who buy people, ship them oversees, and then collect their earnings until they pay down their own purchase price—then they get laid off and marked for death!
The most surreal portion of the documentary was the Dubai footage, where the same sheik who ripped off billionaire Japanese contractors and two-dollar-a-day wage-slaves was taking money from German billionaire bimbos to make an artificial chain of islands in the shape of the global map, complete with air-conditioned streets! Imagine rolling down your window and catching a cool breeze as you cruise in the 120-degree Arabian summer. I was disappointed in the inability of Icelanders to even stage a convincing riot after their government permitted banks to put every single one of them into generations of debt. Meltdown is plotted just like every action B-movie or thriller, where the greedy corporate heads are above the law. Only in this version, there is no hero, just a ditzoid nation who thinks the president that gets elected with donations from those very same multinational crime syndicates will turn on them.
Ultimately the state-owned CBC failed to point the accusatory finger at the hand that feeds it. But they at least gave us a tour of the zoo.
