I made it all the way to the opening credits before I wanted to kill someone write my Senator to bring back the pillory for financial crimes. I almost feel guilty for hating the spokesman for the financial trade association as much as I do; unlike his bosses, at least he earns an honest paycheck. Whatever. I keep hoping that Aragorn will ride in on a horse.
You just end up feeling like the world is a different place than you thought it was. It’s like Alan Moore wrote down what is real in 1987, newspapers are comic books and people who understand it can end up like either Rorschach or the Comedian. Fight it and lose, or roll with it until one day you realize that the system is even more of a cruel joke than you thought.
***Update***
Thirty minutes in and my wife wants to turn it off. She asked me why we should bother to know more of this crap when nothing can or will be done about it.
Ideas?
***Update 2***
An hour in, and now my wife’s chief problem is that the people who destroyed the world look like a bunch of overdressed schmucks. She could almost handle some brilliant cabal executing an evil plan behind the scenes. This idea that we are actually at the mercy of careless douchebags who would need help to fill out a 1040-EZ scares her more than anything else. I watched the Bush years close enough that I got over that already, though ‘got over it’ is really not the right word.
asiangrrlMN
So, did you actually watch it all the way through? I simply cannot bring myself to watch it.
P.S. I loved the graphic novel until the very end.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
I think the cruel joke is the 20th century. Because social/economic progress and technological advancement all happened around the same time, I think we came to believe that all of them are on an upward trajectory. But even though that’s reasonably true for technological progress (even then there’s the dark ages), history doesn’t support the idea that social/economic progress are on an inevitable upward trajectory.
We’re just unfortunate enough to bridge a divide such that we’re aware the social achievements of past generations are being reversed. But we’re returning to the long-term trend, which is that the average person is screwed economically and politically.
gbear
Is this a good thread to bring up how Borders bookstores are trying to pay their top executives 8.3 million in bonuses while closing most of their stores and dumping their employees?
The Raven
Croak!
But you know, people have done something about it. They did something about in the 1930s, and they kept on doing it until Reagan started gutting the regulatory system in the 1980s. It hasn’t stopped being possible.
asiangrrlMN
@gbear: Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I need to strangle a CEO now!
@gbear: Nope. Are trying is right. Borders BOOKSTORES makes it plural–unless it’s part of their name.
gbear
@gbear: Crap. Can’t edit. IS trying, not are.
The Dangerman
Can’t watch it; I know the game is rigged. I don’t have an answer other than knowing to my core that electing Democrats is better than electing Republicans. Under Democrats, the little guy only gets fucked, but, under Republicans, they get FUCKED. So, you wife is both right and wrong (don’t tell her I said so).
MoeLarryAndJesus
“She asked me why we should bother to know more of this crap when nothing can or will be done about it.”
Well, let’s say there’s a nuclear attack and you’re roaming the ruins and you come across one of the chief villains from the movie. Since you’ve seen it you won’t feel guilty when you kill him and cook him.
Call it the “A Boy And His Dog” Theory.
Chad N Freude
I watched it a few days ago. It plays well as a satire of greed, corruption, smugness, and complete detachment from both real business (the kind where people exchange money for real stuff) and humanity. As a true documentary, not so pleasurable. Those self-righteous see-nothing-wrong morally bankrupt Good Honest Citizens should be imprisoned forf*ingever.
On the other hand, the aerial shots of the financial centers and the Iceland coast were pretty spectacular.
ETA: I try to find positive things. Not often very successful.
Suck It Up!
You already know what’s going on so why force yourself to watch it? just so you can say you did? f-it. Watch a feel good movie and then gotv when the time comes.
Anya
I sympathize with you wife and most of the time, I feel the same way. However, I think we need to organize and put as much effort into local offices as we put into the presidency.
Chad N Freude
It’s actually a seriously good documentary, comparable to a well-made NatGeo film about monster creatures in the wilderness.
The Raven
…or you can adopt the pseudonym of a large black bird that eats dead things. I’ve been told over and over that what I have to say about politics is too grim; that’s part of the reason for the pseudonym.
I was telling the truth, as best I understood it. This stuff…was never secret; the only reason it was not widely known is that most people did not want to know it. Now, maybe some saint could lay out the realities while keeping people from feeling horrible about it: Al Gore has done a pretty good job of doing that for global climate change. And I grew up in a really nasty family, so I have an unusual tolerance for harsh speech. But if we are going to change this, we have to engage it and while we can sugar-coat the bitter pill, it would be poor work to withhold it entirely.
How do people cope? I do, but I don’t know how to explain what I do. Paul Krugman, who I am beginning to think is some sort of saint, has a supportive family and professional life. Fred Clark (Slacktivist) is a man of profound religious faith. Others…I think that would be really good question to think about. What keeps activists going, when we know victory in our own lives is unlikely?
vernonlee
This movie has been #1 in my Netflix queue since right before it became available and it’s always listed as “very long wait.”
This & John Cole’s earlier post mentioning he had to turn it off after a half hour to primal scream for awhile indicate why it’s taking so long for me to get it:
All the rage breaks slow down viewing time.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Surely President Obama hasn’t seen it – otherwise he would have done something about it PDQ.
.
.
Maude
The point I make is that the regulations were relaxed and things for the financial sector were made legal. That’s the problem.
These cheaters are always going to come up with ways to make plenty of money. Without restaint of laws and the people to carry them out, they will lie, cheat and get the best of anyone.
Bush was a friend to Wall Street. Clinton was their very best friend.
Without the repeal of Glass Steagal, too big to fail would not exist. There will be 40% of investments banks that will be too big to fail by 2015.
The Commodities Moderization Act of 2000 allowed credit default swaps not be regulated or regarded as insurance so a company selling them did not have to have capital requirements to cover losses. AIG is a good example of what happened.
The banks started to get out of holding mortgages.
The sub prime mess wasn’t stopped at all. People were lied to and told they could afford a house when they wouldn’t be able to afford the house when the payment amount went up. The no money down, no check on someone’s ability to pay was another problem.
The securitizing of mortages ramped up beyond the speed of light.
It was the Credit Default Obligations that were insured by credit default swaps which took things down when the price of houses stopped going up. The investors got out and got their credit default swap money.
The way the mortgages were bundled with risky, not so risky and good mortgages (CDOs) fooled the credit ratings agencies into give the top rating to CDOs that had a lot of risky mortgages in the bundle.
The cheaters had a wonderful time and they are rich as can be now.
We was had, but good.
The Republicans are fighting tooth and nail trying to prevent funding of the Finreg law.
Obama proposed the reverse offshore tax and Mitch MacConnel said he was worried about the multinational corporations.
gbear
@asiangrrlMN: Nope. Borders Bookstores is a single entity, so it should have been ‘is’. I’ve got a CD on backorder on Borders’ website and can’t find a way to cancel the order. Their FAQ says I have to wait until it’s shipped to me then return it.
Chad N Freude
@vernonlee: It was listed as a long wait in my queue for less than a week when it arrived. It took me two evenings to get through the whole thing.
I would like to see these guys in “SAW 2008”.
Mike Nardozzi
Own as little as possible, buy used, work for the good of other people..not for yourself. Teach your children to be kind and happy, not safe. We already live in two separate worlds, and our non-participation wont bother them a bit, but at least we wont be helping…and maybe along the way WE can learn to live without THEM.
asiangrrlMN
@gbear: Ah. Then singular and a capital on the Bookstores. Gotcha. And, that sucks.
Chad N Freude
@gbear: While you guys are arguing pedantic points of grammar (one of my specialties, BTW), I read the article. It can be summed up as “These guys have special skills and knowledge that we need and can’t replace on our timeline, and they are so contemptuous of the bookstores they managed into oblivion that we have to bribe them to stay and manage them out of oblivion.”
The Raven
Could do worse than to study the speeches of the Eugene V. Debs. This one is his defense, before he was imprisoned for opposing the World War I draft.
“That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a think as the brotherhood of man. And that’s not the funniest part of. As long as he’s around I believe it myself.”–er, “left political activist,” quoted by journalist Heywood Broun in his syndicated column, It Seems To Me.
hilts
Tim,
As a follow-up to Inside Job, check out Plunder: The Crime of Our Time a film by Danny Schechter. It explores how the financial crisis was built on a foundation of criminal activity uncovering the connection between the collapse of the housing market and the economic catastrophe that followed.
stuckinred
I was Raven at FDL for 5 years.
gbear
@Chad N Freude: Yep. The executives that drove a company to bankruptcy are too valuable to lose. WTF.
Chris
Maybe I should take up a pseudonym myself.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame Clinton. Yes, he signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act, and when he did, I said, at least once out loud, that we should prepare for the next Great Depression … but Congress had been poking holes in the Glass-Steagall firewall for years. A fire in the FIRE sector would eventually have broken through it one way or another.
I also keep pointing out that, yes, it’s true that things are “more efficient” with the firewall taken out. Just like your car would be more efficient if you took out all the safety systems: the weight would drop enormously and you could get great gas mileage. It’s still a bad tradeoff.
Efficiency is all well and good, you just have to look at the price(s) paid for it. (Which reminds me of the electric car remarks I made just moments ago. There is a price, rather literally an up-front one in the form of a few thousand bucks, for the more efficient electric or hybrid gas/electric cars. It’s just that in most cases, it’s ultimately a pretty good tradeoff.)
kdaug
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
Seem to remember a rather – unsavory – outcome to that particular tale.
Bruce S
Having lived through the Great
CrashBailout of ’08, reading Michael Lewis/Joe Stiglitz/Matt Taibbi/Etc. Ad Nauseum and watching “Inside Job” while eating popcorn and drinking Coke Zero at my local cineplex, I am absolutely convinced of one thing: Our nation’s lamp-posts are underutilized. Rope is cheap and available at any hardware store…I’m more than willing to join a mob and grab up some of these MFers for some Madame DeFarge-style justice. Why the hell should these moronic TeaBaggers have all the fun?Incoherent Dennis SGMM
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
Where ya’ been?
The Raven
@stuckinred: If I’d realized how popular “Raven” was as a pseudonym, I might have considered something else. The word has many resonances in the northern cultures of both old and new worlds.
@efgoldman: “You the same large, black bird from over TNC’s?” If that’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s, no, I’m not. BTW, TNC is another one who seems to be able to keep his energy up in this fight.
LM
My favorite part of Inside Job was the last section, about economics professors. The rest was better covered, I thought, by the Frontline documentaries Inside the Meltdown and The Warning, and also Michael Lewis on 60 Minutes. But seeing those profs and other economists really brought home the level of uninformed groupthink behind the arrogance. They patronized the interviewers, saying it was just too complicated to explain, and they looked so self-pleased, presenting themselves as a Masters of the Universe brainiacs. But then when they got challenged with simple facts and obvious consequences, they blinked like befuddled innocent little lambs. I couldn’t believe they basically kept saying that everyone thought this or that… as if they themselves weren’t the sources of the lazy misinformation.
Linda Featheringill
@Mike Nardozzi:
I agree. We don’t yet know how to survive without the fatcats.
Linda Featheringill
@The Raven:
Good question. I’m not sure of the answer.
I will suggest one thing, though: Protect your ego. You need it to be strong so you can keep you going.
Illegitimi non carborundum. [Don’t let the bastards grind you down.]
Chad N Freude
It’s their revenge for being dissed in eighth grade and not allowed to sit at the Cool Kids’ table.
Bob Loblaw
I liked that Fred Mishkin guy the best. He was on the Federal Reserve board. Making monetary policy decisions. Uncontroversially. Let that sink in.
techno
I have seen Inside Job in the theater and on Blu-ray. I happen to think it is a superb piece of work and have written as much. It would have been better, of course, if Ferguson had been able to interview more of the bad guys but he got plenty of them to talk.
If this movie makes you angry, try to imagine what the country should do to rein in the crooks who believe they are masters of the universe. Try to imagine an economics that is whole lot more enlightened than the drivel coming out of the mouths of the “professional” economists in the film.
And then let’s start organizing to get the appropriate legislation written and passed.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Chad N Freude:
The absurd thing is that they look like the nerds who got stuffed into lockers in middle school, but they act and promote bullying of the highest order like they were the biggest baddest of asses ever.
The Raven
@LM: “My favorite part of Inside Job was the last section, about economics professors.”
BTW, Jay Ackroyd’s Virtually Speaking interview with Brad Delong Thursday night was really great. Check it out. Link.
techno
@Bob Loblaw:
Mishkin was a favorite of mine too. Not only did he look and talk like Woody Allen, he had the same facial tics when he told lies.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@kdaug:
Albert was happy.
MoeLarryAndJesus
@Incoherent Dennis SGMM:
I didn’t know I’d been missing.
Sly
That’s sort of the whole point: These guys want everyone to think they’re all a bunch of greedy super-geniuses, because that expands their opportunities to gamble with Other People’s Money.
The reality is that a lot of them are just really fucking stupid. Hell, most of the big brokerages have turned their decision making over to robotrading algorithms that are also really fucking stupid. It was their stupidity, moreso than their greed, that fucked everything up, and thats pretty much the last thing that they want anyone to realize.
Kristine
@gbear: Because the folks who got the company into the mess it’s in are just the folks to get it out?
Chad N Freude
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
That’s the revenge part.
Citizen_X
@The Raven:
And that’s why he’s so universally loved and admired by Americans across the political spectrum.
Barb (formerly Gex)
I’d go with “numbed to”.
Or “explains why I drink and smoke”.
Makes me want to go all “I got mine” but I have to live with myself.
The Raven
@Citizen_X: “And that’s why [Al Gore] so universally loved and admired by Americans across the political spectrum.”
He almost is. Gore is a very popular man, despite all the efforts of right-wing smear machine.
Ija
@The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik:
It’s not really surprising. They probably were the kids stuffed into lockers in middle school, and now it’s payback time for all the bullying they suffered as children.
Jocks and cheerleaders aren’t the only kids who can grow up to be jerks.
mcd410x
Henry Paulson is a Christian Scientist and worked for Ehrlichman? How did I not know this?
That aside, there’s some really good journalism about the crisis. I read The Big Short a couple weeks ago (excellent) and am working on All the Devils Are Here (I really enjoyed McLean’s Smartest Guys in the Room). Some great stuff.
Donald G
“Come now, Daniel, I’m not some Republic serial villain. I destroyed the global economy a full thirty minutes ago.”
burnspbesq
Walking around central London this morning, the debris from yesterday’s misdirected anger is everywhere.
burnspbesq
@mcd410x:
“All the Devils Are Here” is every bit as good as “The Smartest Guys in the Room.”
Pat
Three pension funds are being named plaintiffs in suing goldman sachs on the Abacus deal with that other bozo hedge funder, Paulson. What struck me as ironic was one of the pension funds represents retired plumbers and pipefitters.
Joe the Plumber, where are you????????????
UmYeah
@LM:
The best was the doucheknocker from Columbia who tried really hard to be condescending and sound victimized at the same time.
These guys are obviously so used to having softballs lobbed at them and face it normal reporters are too ignorant or lazy to call them on lies or bullshit anyway.
jinxtigr
Sounds like I’d like it. I also liked Enron- The Smartest Guys In The Room. I’ve got a theory about this…
My mom’s always watched WWII documentaries and stuff- and she came out of a very twisted family and was so traumatized that she became alcoholic and a junkie (clean now, for a bunch of years)
I survived my childhood, but also turned to drink and drugs, and I’m also clean now for a bunch of years- but I always was drawn to stuff like the book ‘Nightmare’, on Nixon, and HST’s Fear And Loathing on the Campaign Trail (way more than Las Vegas, actually)
I think some people revel in this stuff because it’s really awesome to watch people who are so viscerally worse than you- especially when the book or movie is also deconstructing them, putting them in contest where you see past their front into their profound damage that leads them to act so badly and defend their actions with such conviction. A normal person would just be upset, but if you grew up really broken, being able to expose other people’s brokenness makes you feel somehow vindicated :)
ornery curmudgeon
@UmYeah: “…face it normal reporters are too ignorant or lazy to call them on lies or bullshit anyway.”
No, I think it’s just that it’s corporate media; it’s owned by Big Biz. The corporate media is not ignorant, not lazy (not cowed either, or clueless, or silly high-schoolers, or insular, or out of touch, or any of these excuses), and making comforting, dismissive excuses is how we got here.
The conventional eyes of our society have been bought and made blind.
Tim O
Remember this classic Taibbi?
“The best way to understand the financial crisis is to understand the meltdown at AIG. AIG is what happens when short, bald managers of otherwise boring financial
bureaucracies start seeing Brad Pitt in the mirror. This is a company that built a giant
fortune across more than a century by betting on safety-conscious policyholders —
people who wear seat belts and build houses on high ground — and then blew it all in a
year or two by turning their entire balance sheet over to a guy who acted like making
huge bets with other people’s money would make his dick bigger.”
wcdude
I read up on the whole mess over the past year because I never really understood what went down. I can’t watch the film, I don’t think I could take it. What blows me away is the knowledge that “Inside Job” is dismissed among the R camp as blatant left wing tripe against free enterprise and the American Way. I have met people that put it as I would an O”Keefe “expose”.
Hypnos
“Then Lucifer and all his angels were let loose; for they raged and stormed no differently than if they were mad and possessed by every devil.
First they seized the count, then the nobility and the cavalry, and some were stabbed as they resisted. Dietrich von Weiler fled into the church tower, and as he called down to the peasants for mercy, offering them money, someone fired a shot up at him and hit him, then climbed up and threw him out of the window. They then led lord Ludwig, Count of Helfenstein… to a field in the direction of Heilbronn and with him thirteen nobles, among whom were two ensigns, Rudolf von Eltershofen and Pleickhart von Ruchzingen.
There they made a circle and made the well-born and the noble run the gauntlet with their servants, twenty-four persons in all. The count offered to give them a barrel of money if they would let him live, but there was no way out but to die. When the count saw that, he stood stock still until they stabbed him. Rudolf von Eltershofen went into the ring with his arms crossed and gave himself up willingly to death. Thus, all these were driven through the lances contrary to all the rules of war and afterwards dragged out naked and let lie there.
May Almighty God have mercy on them and us! After all this, they set alight to the castle and burnt it, and then marched off to Würzburg.”
Tom Scott and Bob Scribner, The German Peasant’s War. A History in Documents (London: Humanities Press, 1991), 158.
http://www.cas.sc.edu/hist/faculty/edwardsk/hist310/reader/weinsberg.pdf
Citizen_X
@The Raven: Oh, I agree completely with you, that he has done a fine job of explaining the science to people. But in practically every online comment they make about AGW, the wingnuts foam so hysterically about Algore–their bizarroworld projection of Gore, who apparently invented AGW theory all by his lonesome–that it’s pretty clear he’s hated by the crazy 27%.
KXB
@vernonlee:
That’s my fault. I got my copy through Netflix on Wednesday, and sat down last night to watch it with family. I’ll mail it out tomorrow.
This was the second time I saw it – first was in a theater. It still packs a punch. Even my aunt, who does not follow business news (I don’t blame her), was stunned at the behavior displayed.
As a story-teller, Ferguson understands that there is an audience for documentaries that take time to explain complex problems, without getting too caught up in financial gobbldee-gook, or talking down to the audience as children. After a strong debut with “No End in Sight” and now “Inside Job”, I can’t wait for whatever he tackles next.
Ruckus
@Linda Featheringill:
I agree. We don’t yet know how to survive without the fatcats
Sure we do. We settle for less. Unfortunately that is almost what they want us to do.
What they really want us to do is settle for nothing.
Ruckus
@jinxtigr:
Experience can give one an unparallelled perspective.
Luzeelu
It’s my fault! I’ve had the DVD sitting here for several days, trying to work up the necessary fortitude and/or masochistic frame of mind to watch the thing. Plus I had 3 grandsons here for the weekend, so that was a bit distracting.
Reading all the different bloggers who say they can’t watch more than 20 minutes at a time doesn’t help much. But tonight’s the night and I’ll try to mail it back to Netflix tomorrow so you, too, can achieve higher blood pressure.
burnspbesq
@Tim O:
That’s remarkably stupid, even by Taibbi’s standards, because the “solution” that flows from describing the problem in those terms is no solution at all.
The solution isn’t “don’t let companies hire guys like Cassano.” That’s not a solution that can be implemented in any meaningful way. The solution is meaningful and timely regulation. Taibbi probably knows that, but the imperative of selling magazines means he can’t write that, because it doesn’t sell nearly as well as a profane and unhinged rant.
Jim, Once
@The Raven: Yup. My husband and I started watching it the same night Cole did. When the phone rang about two-thirds of the way through, he opted to answer and not return, asking, “Is there anything here you didn’t already know? What’s the good of getting yourself all worked up all over again?” I couldn’t answer him, but I did watch the whole movie.
Jim, Once
@Mike Nardozzi: This. Over and over. This is something we’ve tried to live by throughout our marriage and childrearing years. And have never regretted it, not for one moment.
Sophia
I saw it in the theater with an old friend from college. We are in our late 30’s. We stopped at a liquor store and picked up a pint of Jim Beam on the way to the theater. It seemed immature of us and yet horribly appropriate for the experience.