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“Inside Job,” a documentary film directed by Charles
Ferguson, narrated by Matt Damon.
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Charles Ferguson made one of the best antiwar documentary
films, “No End in Sight,” a couple of years back, which I reviewed
here. Now he has come up with another winner.
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“Inside Job” tells chronologically how the biggest banks,
mortgage companies, insurance companies and other behemoth financial
institutions like Lehman Bros and Goldman Sachs screwed everyday,
ordinary working people like you and me—taxpayers—in a Ponzi scheme
that makes Bernie Madoff’s rip-off look like kindergarten. It took
white-collar crooks, with the backing of the U.S. government, 30 years
to pull it off, starting when Reagan deregulated financial
institutions. The head honchos raked in billions, leading, on Sept. 18,
2008, to the biggest financial collapse since 1929.
Many books have been written on the subject, such as
interviewee Charles Morris’s “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown,” yet few
are willing to pour through these seemingly dry tomes about finances
and economics. So, here’s this movie where you can sit down in front of
a giant screen with a bucket of popcorn and a mega cup of fizzy, to
watch and listen as the story unfolds in a straightforward, lucid but
scary manner, narrated by the measured tones of Matt Damon.
Ferguson utilizes easy to grasp graphics not only to explain
terms such as profit-making CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and
CDSs (credit-default swaps) but also to show how “money” moves around,
enabling these company heads to walk away with millions of their
investors’ cash.
For interviews, director Ferguson was well armed. He did his
homework. He studied, read documents and the books we didn’t want to.
Watching interviewees sweat, squirm, tap dance, and backpedal is
satisfying—though not as satisfying as seeing them in orange jumpsuits
and handcuffs.
He interviewed Lehman Brothers’ head, Dick Fuld, and others who
did lose their jobs and/or companies, yet still made millions. Refusing
his requests for interviews were former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson
and head of Goldman-Sachs; Alan Greenspan, and Ben Bernanke, as well as
some of the investment-bank executives who made millions from
CDOs.
Ferguson tracked the careers of Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke,
Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson, and Alan Greenspan; he included clips
showing them working in or with the U.S. government and/or presidents
in some capacity or other since Ronald Reagan.
Ferguson also interviewed economics professors from noted
universities, some who warned early on of the imminent collapse. As
early as 2005, Raghuram Rajan, the chief economist of the IMF, spoke of
the danger to an audience that included honoree Alan Greenspan,
retiring as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Larry Summers. Of
course, he was ignored and criticized. Some academic economists were
paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to write articles in financial
rags declaring that shaky companies were actually solvent, while
teaching students economic models that showed otherwise. Ferguson asked
if they didn’t see a conflict of interest.
The collapse went global. Ten million Chinese workers lost
their jobs, exports collapsed. “They fell off a cliff.” Ferguson
includes film clips of shuttered factories and the desperation of the
thousands of unemployed in many countries who now have no means with
which to feed, clothe, and house their families.
Remember those real estate company TV ads showing happy
couples—usually Black and Latino—expressing joy when signing papers
that would make their American Dream of owning a home come true? Now,
all those thousands of homes have been foreclosed, and for tens of
thousands of men, women, and children that dream has become a nightmare.
When the bubble, which grew from $30 billion to $600 billion in just 10
years, burst in 2008, Alan Greenspan and good ol’ “W’” told the world
it was because too many unqualified people had signed mortgages for
homes they couldn’t afford. They couldn’t pay their loans, and mortgage
companies couldn’t lend any more money (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ran
out), so those first-time homebuyers were “responsible.”
Ferguson shows a clip of a tent city in Florida for
affluent-looking white people who lost their homes and their jobs, yet
the head of bailed-out insurance giant AIG receives one million a month
in retirement pay. We taxpayers had to fork over $700 billion so Bush
could bail out Lehman Brothers.
Ferguson interviewed Eliot Spitzer, who, as attorney general of
New York, investigated financial industry fraud in 2002. Ironically,
his takedown for engaging the services of a prostitute doesn’t compare
with the hookers, drugs, and expensive evenings that were part of the
rewards from illegal Wall Street shenanigans.
The filmmaker interviewed a heavily made-up, zaftig blonde
who contracted prostitutes for these guys, and showed videos of them
(faces obscured) entering luxury hotels with their “dates.” Their
flunkies, Spitzer told Ferguson, said that they hid the costs in “phony
expense chits.”
Spitzer feels these underlings could possibly testify against
their bosses—one way to get them to “pay.” However, he demurred, he
might not be the most appropriate person to suggest such a course.
Today, as the wars grind on, some predict they will end up
costing some trillions of dollars. Unemployment numbers continue to
rise; state and federal government cuts funding for public housing,
services and education; businesses and factories close; more people are
now or soon will be poor—and homeless.
Even when there are no jobs, the rich still get rich, and the
poor get even poorer. It’s prison or the military—or the streets. So
far, no one has been prosecuted or arrested for the Wall Street crimes;
the wrong people are in prison.
Though Obama promised in his inauguration speech to clean
house, he retained all the criminals left over from the Bush
administration and replaced Greenspan with Bernanke. As Matt Damon
narrates: “The men who caused the crises are still in power.”
Ferguson ends his film with a shot of the Statue of Liberty and
Matt Damon’s voiceover assuring us that Americans are strong and full
of hope; these crimes will not go unpunished—or some such drivel. I
felt like throwing my empty bucket at the screen.
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