Movies |
Inside Job
directed by Charles Ferguson
By
Published: Mar 14, 2011
Category:
Documentary
Matt Taibbi — I’d call him the Hunter Thompson of Wall Street, except that Taibbi can find his way to the facts — was having drinks with a former Senate investigator.
They were talking about Wall Street criminality.
“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," the former Senate investigator said. "That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
Almost right. Bernie Madoff went to jail. But name another. And compared to executives at the giant Wall Street banks, Madoff’s fraud looks like a misdemeanor. He ripped off a few billion; Wall Street cratered the world economy. And no one’s been punished. Executives still have their big jobs, still make huge money. The only novelty: They now tell us, at every opportunity, how they’re offended when we call them crooks.
When ”Inside Job,” the documentary that Charles Ferguson made with Audrey Marrs, won the award for Best Documentary at the Oscars, Ferguson couldn’t ignore that astonishing reality. Here’s the start of his acceptance speech: “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”
Have you seen “Inside Job?” If not, you should. Not as homework. Not as an act of citizenship. Just to get righteously pissed off. Oh, at the end of it, there’s a moving shot of the Statue of Liberty and Matt Damon says some nice words about reclaiming our democracy, but let’s get real — do you own a lobbyist? Can you outspend the Kochs? Didn’t think so. And because, as someone says in the movie, Wall Street owns Washington, converting your outrage into some sort of political action seems kinda pointless — to me, anyway.
The words to take away from this movie are “plutocracy” and “oligarchy.”
Bummer. So why see this movie? Because, as Philip Slater has said, “The first cure for illusion is despair.” You want to operate in a fantasy, be my guest. You want to see things as they are, start with this movie. [To buy the DVD of “Inside Job” from Amazon, click here. To rent/buy it and watch it right now, click here.] < As you watch, the first thing you’ll wonder is: Why did these bigshots agree to be interviewed by Ferguson? It’s not like he’s hidden who he is. He began his career as an MIT PH.D. who founded Vermeer Technologies, which developed a web development tool (FrontPage) that allowed non-geeks to operate a Web site. He sold the company in 1996 to Microsoft for about $130 million. (“Only a small fraction of that came to me. The majority of it went to the venture capitalists who invested in the company. I’m very happy to say that I believe that every single one of the employees became a millionaire.”) He got interested in what went wrong in Iraq, so he and Audrey Marrs --- who, in a past life, played keyboards and bass for several Pacific Northwest bands --- made “No End in Sight.” His technique in “Inside Job” was the same he used in his first film: There was no bait and switch. Essentially, everyone interviewed for the film was given the same information. We told them who we were. A few people asked for my C.V., or information about me, which we supplied. We said that we were making a documentary. We described the subject of the documentary. Some people had further detailed questions. Most didn’t. Glenn Hubbard did not. We asked him to be interviewed. He agreed to be interviewed.
Here’s the list of the arrogant gents who thought, I guess, that Ferguson would be as toothless as the rest of the media: Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University Business School and formerly chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Martin Feldstein, who headed Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and is now a Professor at Harvard; and Frederic Mishkin, who moved on from the Federal Reserve board to Columbia. Alan Greenspan, Bernanke, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner all declined.
Don’t understand sub-prime mortgages? You will after you see this movie:
Few women appear. That’s because they seem to be extraneous on Wall Street. But do watch Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister.
Partisan? Sorry. The film is quite tough on Obama:
You keep hoping for a hero. There are some. They blew whistles, spoke up — and got nowhere. And so, I suggest, would we, even if we banded together and pooled our pennies.
No happy ending here. Indeed, there’s a strong likelihood Wall Street will screw up again — and stick us with the bill. Thanks to “Inside Job,” at least you won’t be surprised.
