Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Matt Damon (Voice)
Hank Paulson and the Merry Assholes
Directed By:
Charles Ferguson
Men are pigs, that is a known fact. As soon as one of them pigs out on the others, the whole place turns into a pigsty. Inside Job is an argument for the expensive designer suit to be the twenty-first century's hamburgler costume. After viewing the Oscar winning documentary, I can imagine every suit wearing, important looking motherfucker on the planet showering in hooker's pee pee with my life earnings. Banks are not what they used to be, yet common folk think it is. Trusting a bank with your hard earned cash is not a, you-come-and-deposit-your-money-and-let-knowledgeable-people-handle-it-for-you type of transaction anymore. No, it's at your own risk. But you don't know that, because people like Alan Greenspan keep saying things like: "Even if you had a PhD in mathematics, you wouldn't understand what's good for you" (actual quote from the movie). Coming from the chairman of the federal reserve, it means you're fucked whatever you do.
So how has the 2008 financial crisis been engineered? It's a bit of the children of the laissez-faire capitalism that hit Wall-Street in the 1980's. After Ronald Regan put the axe in the finance regulations, banks were pretty much free to do whatever the fuck they wanted. Credit became a way of life and bad customers became a better milking cow for banks than a paying one. That all bulked up to the invention of derivatives and CDOs (Collateral Debt Obligations) somewhere in the nineties. That is about the stupidest trading item. You can't possibly invent this if you didn't think about robbing people blind. Basically what it is, is the bank that sells your debts. You contract a loan with them and they sell your debt to somebody else. If it worked so well, it's because everybody was in on this. Even the rating agencies who qualified of "safe investment" debts that were contracted through predatory loans. Number of investments rated "AAA" (the safest ones) went from two hundred to over four thousand during this period. And who bought those debts you think? Yes, you. The hard working person who trusted his institutions to handle his money. So debts are owned by you and the money and the solid assets are owned by the banks*.
Seeing all these self-important Wall-Street type lie to Charles Ferguson's face with a satisfied smirk was dishearting, to say the least. Those guys have planned the perfect heist and you are the victim. Hank Paulson, ex-CEO of Goldman-Sachs sold for over four hundred million dollars of stock when he left his job to go work for the Bush Administration. Who's money do you think it is? What can drive those guys to want more and more like that? Are those guys loved by anybody? Probably not. Maybe a few of them have wives they never see. Are they enjoying life? Taking trips around the world to see and enjoy other cultures? Probably not. They are insulated in skyscrapers wherever they go. One of the bank CEOs even got his PRIVATE FUCKING ELEVATOR built, that went right away to his floor. Talk about hating humanity. All these guys have is more money that they can find use for. Some spend it in coke and whores (Ferguson interviewed an escort and a therapist), but the real love of those guys in money. They have a sexual lust for the power that it brings them. If those bankers looked so calm and collected on screen is that they were actually getting off.
I am very happy Inside Job won the Oscar, because we cannot afford to lose this film. It's a courageous documentary where Charles Ferguson got up to people's face and asked the real questions. It's sad, infuriating and somewhat fatalistic, but this is where we're at. Caught in a machine where our dollars are disappearing. Remember Elizabeth Warren's answer to Michael Moore's question "Where's our money?". "I don't know" she said. Charles Ferguson found out. It's invested in a gold plated statue in Hank Paulson's vacation home backyard. It's a terminal disease rooted in the image we have of success as a society. John Galt is winning. How could we change something that is so firmly installed in our collective psyche? I think the target for that is entertainment. What people do outside they work, what defines who they are is entertainment. That can also change the way they think. I was watching another documentary not long ago, The Striking Truth**, on the lives of MMA fighters Georges St-Pierre and David Loiseau. Georges, being pretty much the masculine archetype that young boys are looking up to, said that the happiest day of his life was when he actually SHELLED a lot of money to pay off his parents debts. I think we're on to something here.
SCORE: 100%
* It's a little more complex than that, but this is the low down. It's a movie review, not a class in economics.
**Which I will not review for obvious reasons.