Saturday Night At The Movies
Double Feature: Of toxic loans and yellow cake
By Dennis Hartley
The legislative branch meets here: Inside Job
Rising up to break this thing
From family trees the dukes do swing
Just one blow to scratch the itch
The law’s made for and by the rich
-Paul Weller
I have good news and bad news about the documentary, Inside Job, director Charles Ferguson’s incisive parsing of what led to the crash of the global financial system in 2008. The good news is that I believe I finally grok what “derivatives” and “toxic loans” are. The bad news is…that doesn’t make me feel any better about how fucked we are.
To their credit, writers Chad Beck and Adam Bolt don’t stoop to “ripped from today’s headlines!” hyperbole (pandering to those steadily depressing, low down mind-messing, workin’ at the car wash blues that we’re already feeling as a result of this economic nightmare) but step back a bit to give some actual historical perspective to the whole affair. The filmmakers start at the very beginning-all the way back to where the seeds were sown-during the spate of rampant financial deregulation during the Reagan administration (aka, “morning in America”-remember that?). No POTUS (including Obama) who has led the country post-Reagan is let off the hook, either. The film illustrates, point by painful point, how every subsequent administration (Democratic and Republican alike) did their “part” in enabling the current crisis-mostly through political cronyism and legislative manipulation. The result of this decades long circle jerk involving Wall Street, the mortgage industry, Congress, the White House and lobbyists (with Ivy League professors serving as pivot men) is what we are now living with today.
The film is very slickly produced; it’s well-paced, nicely edited and Matt Damon’s even-toned narration helps to keep the somewhat byzantine threads of the story accessible. Ferguson was able to assemble a fascinating cross-section of talking heads, including financial insiders, economists, politicians, academics…and even a Wall Street madam (who, relative to the kinds of people she provides services for, is in all likelihood one of the most virtuous and forthright interviewees on board). In fact, the overall impression I came away with was that the entire financial system, taken along with its associative ties to lobbyists, legislators, economics professors and corporate-backed MSM lackeys, is nothing less than a glorified prostitution ring-ultimately funded by America’s working poor and middle class taxpayers (and we don’t even get to enjoy, er, “full release” for our pay-in). This brings me to the film’s one flaw. Ferguson is very good at getting you all riled up (and there’s plenty here to get pissed about)-but doesn’t necessarily offer a “release” (like maybe suggestions on how to fire up grassroots activism?). But I suspect that as a Hullabaloo reader, you already figured that out (that it’s up to “us”). Me? I’m kind of slow on this stuff-that’s probably why I just do movie reviews around these parts.
Previous posts with related themes:
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Capitalism: A Love Story
The International
Outed: Watts and Penn in Fair Game
And now, gentle reader, I would like to invite you along for a little stroll down memory lane…to a time, not so long ago, when we had this man in the White House who, well…went a little ‘funny’ in the head after a terrorist group attacked America. You know, ‘funny’ and what he did was, you see, he sort of…girded his loins to invade a Middle Eastern country that actually had very little to do with the specific group of terrorists who attacked America. Naturally, he first had to come up with a viable reason to do so. And what he did was, he convinced the Congress that the country in question was not only chockablock with evildoers, but evildoers who had weapons of mass destruction that surely would be wielded against America in the near future. Now, he couldn’t actually produce any photos of these Doomsday Machines, but they did discover some suspicious aluminum tubes. Oh-and they heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who, heard it from another that they had been messin’ around with a substance called “yellow cake” which can be used in the manufacture of WMDs. Again, no real evidence, but nobody in the Congress wanted to be labeled as unpatriotic or anything like that, so they all went “Booyah! Shock and awe!” and opened those bomb bay doors wide.
So, the invasion was going swimmingly for a spell, and even those Americans who may have been scratching their heads a little over the aluminum tubes and yellowcake and such were keeping mum, because they didn’t want to be labeled as unpatriotic, either. Besides, all the journalists on the TV were supporting the troops, too! And they wouldn’t lie, because they’re all purely objective about these kinds of things! But then, as the war began to drag on, and no stockpiles of WMDs seemed to be turning up, sleeper cells of not-so-patriotic grumblers could be detected all around America. However, as they turned out to be mostly aging, drug-addled old left-leaning hippie panhandlers and radical progressive pundits, the White House didn’t pay much mind to such gibberish-that is, until the summer of 2003. That is when a former Foreign Service officer and ambassador named Joe Wilson published an op-ed in the New York Times called “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”. Wilson had been sent on a fact-finding trip to Niger in 2002 at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney, to investigate a report that Iraq had purchased some of the aforementioned yellowcake back in the late 1990s. The gist of the piece was that there seemed to be a credibility gap between what the guy in the White House (you know, the one who went, sort of ’funny’) was claiming regarding the alleged stockpiling of yellowcake in Iraq, and what Wilson had actually discovered. ‘Someone’ obviously lied.
And it wasn’t Mr. Wilson.
That’s why ‘someone’ involved with the White House became very cross with Wilson. As a result, ‘someone’ accidently-on-purpose allowed some confidential information about Wilson’s wife to get leaked. In fact, it was only 8 days after Wilson’s op-ed appeared that conservative journalist Robert Novak published an article in which he identified Valerie Plame Wilson as an “agency operative” (as in CIA). The Wilsons' life became hell, and the question of whether or not ‘someone’ in the Bush administration was guilty of a criminal act (by outing a CIA operative) became a widely debated issue. Eventually, following a Department of Justice investigation, a member of the administration, Lewis “Scooter” Libby (former chief of staff for VP Cheney) ended up taking the fall in 2007, when he received a 30-month sentence for perjury and obstruction The President (apparently still feeling a little ‘funny’) commuted Libby’s sentence, 4 months after the conviction. You’ll note that I said Libby “took the fall”. I don’t want to name names, or put on a tin foil hat and suggest that there was a powerful cabal behind the smear, but in 2007, the Wilsons did file a civil suit against Messrs. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Richard Armitage (it didn’t take). Ah-(*sentimental sigh*) those were the days.
Indeed, many “Kodak moments” from the BushCo era came flashing back as I watched Fair Game, Doug Liman’s slightly uneven dramatization of the “Plame affair”. Jez and John-Henry Butterworth based their screenplay on two separately written memoirs by the couple-The Politics of Truth
by Joe Wilson, and Fair Game
by Valerie Plame. Sean Penn and Naomi Watts bring their star power to the table as the Wilsons, portraying them as a loving couple who were living relatively low key lives (she more as a necessity of her profession) until they got pushed into a boiling cauldron of nasty political intrigue that falls somewhere in between All the President's Men
and 3 Days of the Condor
.
Viewers who are unfamiliar with the back story could be misled by the Paul Greengrass-style opening scenes-complete with pulse-pounding music and hand held “shaky cam”. You get the impression that you might be in for a Bourne-style action thriller. The conundrum is that the part of the story concerning Valerie Plame’s CIA exploits can at best be only speculative in nature. Because of the sensitivity of those matters, Plame has only gone on record concerning that part of her life in vague, generalized terms, so what you end up with is something along the lines of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
(although I would think that Plame has slightly more credibility than Chuck Barris, no?).
The most important part of the story, however is what transpired for the couple once Valerie was “outed” by Novak, and how they ultimately stood up to the White House. The CIA, of course was no help; they dropped Plame like a hot potato once her cover was blown (essentially throwing her under the bus while wishing her best of luck). Although Valerie (the more guarded of the two) is initially reticent to go on the counteroffensive, Joe is able to convince her that there is much more at stake than merely salvaging their pride by pushing back. Liman wisely shifts the focus of his film to showing us how they weathered this storm as a couple, eventually becoming something greater than the sum of their parts once they decided to take Karl Rove and his merry band of ratfuckers head on.
In light of this past Tuesday’s depressing results, the timing of this film’s release could be seen as an unintentional bit of serendipity in some respects. We know from experience how ugly it’s going to get, and also learned that a bully is a bully until you start pushing back. So why not take a little inspiration away from this little political David and Goliath tale from our not-so-distant past? We’d best get in shape now. So...drop and give me 20!
Previous posts with related themes:
W.
Burn after Reading
The Good Shepherd/638 Ways to Kill Castro
Breach
Charlie Wilson’s War
.
