Kevin Welner wrote about it at the Huffington Post.
It offers an explanation of how the current economic crisis came about, describing the securitization of mortgages; the extraordinary leveraging of assets; the regulatory capture by Wall Street leading to minimal enforcement of federal regulations -- a deregulation intended to spur innovation; and the fraud, greed, hubris and general belief among hedge fund titans and others in the financial services world that they are infallible. The film also points out the growing and now extreme inequality of wealth distribution in the United States.I knew that the "rich were getting richer" but I didn't realize the extent of it until I followed the link to this one statistic...
The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation's pretax income in 2007 -- up from less than 9 percent in 1976Welner looks at Inside Job, compares it to Waiting for Superman, and comes to the conclusion that the former does a better job of explaining the "school crisis." Again, from his article at Huffington...
Rather than addressing these poverty issues, Superman serves up innovation through privatization and deregulation. We're shown charter schools that give hope to these families. But what we're not told is that the extra resources and opportunities found in these charters are funded in large part with donations from Wall Street hedge fund millionaires and billionaires. Problems of structural inequality and intergenerational poverty are pushed aside in favor of a 'solution' grounded in the belief that deregulation will prompt innovation, all the while guided by the infallible judgment of Wall Street tycoons.The money to be made from charter schools is a lure that the rich can't ignore. America's public schools are paying the price.
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