Crime Pays — Big Time

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Socialist Action november 2010 11 “Inside Job,” a documentary film directed by Charles Ferguson, narrated by Matt Damon. C documentary films, “No End in Sight,” a couple harles Ferguson made one of the best antiwar of years back, which I reviewed here. Now he has come up with another winner.

“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 ... Iraqi deaths (continued from page 7: “U.S. finds Iraqi deaths have come back to haunt them”) and it is the supreme irony that the biggest military adventure of the United States since the Vietnam war threatens in the end to strengthen its major enemy in the Middle East.

Fear of the reaction of the Shiites in Iraq is probably already a major factor discouraging the U.S. from an assault on Iran. But the play the big press has given to the reports of Iranian support for Shiite insurgents in Iraq threatens to be an encouragement for U.S. leaders edging toward a military confrontation with Iran.

The British Guardian published an analysis of the U.S.-Iranian hostility Oct. 21 under headline: “Dread juggernaut of conflict with Iran is drawing closer.” This comes at roughly the same time as increasing hostility to the U.S. in Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan is beginning to threaten the U.S. supply lines for its war in Afghanistan.

A more reasonable conclusion from the reports of Iranian activity in Iraq in the Wikileaks archive is that the U.S. wars threaten to expand and that if they do, it would be beyond the capacity of the U.S. to control the entire region.

At the same time as exposing the human cost of the U.S. war in Iraq, the Wikileaks exposures revealed the basic ineffectiveness of the new privatized U.S. forces (including private security forces built up by huge corporations, which have now reached numbers comparable with the regular U.S. military.) The growth of these “murder for hire” outfits is an important factor in allowing the U.S. to make war without resorting to a re-imposition of the draft.

An article in the Oct. 23 New York Times analyzed the information in the Wikileaks archive relating to the performance of the mercenary outfits: “The documents sketch, in vivid detail, a critical change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.”

The article continued: “The archive, which describes many episodes never made public in such detail, shows the multitude of shortcomings with this 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 ... Mumia Abu-Jamal (continued from page 12: “U.S. Court of Appeals Nov. 9 hearing — Execution for Mumia?”)

the iceberg in regard to the legal atrocities that have been committed to keep this innocent man on death row. His is a case study in the use of lying witnesses, falsification of evidence, manipulation of the crime scene, witness intimidation, police lying, exclusion of evidence proving innocence, and a myriad of constitutional violations including rejection of the right to act as one’s own counsel, Mumia’s physical exclunew system: how a failure to coordinate among contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy. “Contractors often shot with little discrimination—and few if any consequences—at unarmed Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security forces, American troops and even other contractors, stirring public outrage and undermining much of what the coalition forces were sent to accomplish “But despite this evidence, the authors of the article, James Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren, conclude: “Even now—with many contractors discredited for unjustified shootings and a lack of accountability amply described in the documents—the military cannot do without them. There are more contractors over all than actual members of the military serving in the worsening war in Afghanistan.” Moreover, the effective legal impunity of these hired killers has just been reconfirmed by the dropping of cases against operatives of the now Steven A. Stephen in “Inside Job.”

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. n sion from a majority of the trial proceedings against him, the racist exclusion of Black jurors, a racist judge who ruled against more than 100 motions presented by Mumia’s defense team, and more.

Mumia’s freedom would represent a victory for all people struggling for freedom and equality. All out to Philadelphia, Nov. 9! Stop the execution! Free Mumia now! n For further information contact: International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, (215) 476-8812 or The Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, (510) 268-9429, freemumia.org.

renamed mercenary outfit, Blackwater. U.S. attorneys found that they could not effectively prosecute them because of immunity deals made in the field.

Thus, the Wikileaks disclosures not only discredit the leadership and policy of the U.S. war but also the structure of its military machine. So, it is not surprising that the presiding genius of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has become the object of one of the most massive international persecutions since the Stalinist regime’s persecution of Trotsky.

The U.S. government is pressuring all countries where he might find refuge to deny him a safe harbor. He is being subjected to a campaign of personal vilification with the connivance of the Swedish police. The big press is playing up examples of Wikileaks employees that have turned against him. They may be sincere, but under such pressures, renegades are to be expected.

Whatever weaknesses Assange may have or whatever mistakes he may have committed, he has made an immense, inestimable contribution by exposing a massive machine of murder, corruption, and demoralization. All those who defend the values of civilization must come to his defense. n

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Joseph M. Ryan