INSIDE THE MELTDOWN, PBS "Frontline" Documentary Watch hour online at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/view/ Soviet-level propaganda on behalf of the TARP and FED bailouts.
The chronological framing is the primary device for skewing the story. We open breathlessly at a point that is actually seven months after the crisis first manifested in Aug. 2007. Bear Stearns is going under and Timmy Geithner rides to the rescue. The crisis is treated like some outbreak that hit the market from nowhere.
Bernanke and Paulson are both brilliant minds and brothers in arms, fighting to rescue the world from a meltdown. Bernanke has been studying all his life to prepare for exactly this crisis. A few origins and flaws of the system are detailed incidentally as we follow these heroes. The point is always that the world is burning and they must do something!
After the Fannie/Freddie nationalization comes Lehman Brothers, and here the terrible mistake is made not to bail it out, causing all credit to freeze! Then AIG. The TARP plan finally appears as the only possible solution. None of its opponents are allowed to speak for themselves in interviews. The initial House rejection of TARP is a great disaster, brought on by right-wing Republicans, who are granted brief snippets of them speaking from the House floor. As for the 90 left-wing Democrats who voted against TARP, they are mentioned once and not one of them gets to speak at all. No critic of the TARP or of the banking system, and none of the many who warned of the inevitability of the crisis years in advance are acknowledged.
All of the interviews are with top-level bankers, regime officials, NYT reporter Nocera but actually not on the interesting stories he's pursued (like when he found out that JPM intended to use its bailout money for acquisitions, period). And Krugman.
Commoners such as the folk taking these ARM deals or even the mortgage selling scoundrels on the ground level are indicated in the abstract, by way of helicopter shots of suburban sprawlscapes.
In the final scenes, it absolutely kills Paulson to have to back away from his deep free market ideology and call in the nine presidents of the biggest banks presidents for a morning conference, where he forces the poor bastards to take hundreds of billions of dollars in direct cash injections from taxpayers. They do this only reluctantly, so as to save the world, since it's on fire. Let's hope it will be enough, but (by implication as Obama enters) be ready to flood in more money for bankers now!
Puh-lease.
CNBC - House of Cards http://www.cnbc.com/id/28892719 Amazingly the CNBC 2-hour documentary was far, far superior. Had some key omissions (for example: the role of the media, such as CNBC!). But it started from 2002 with the Greenspan interest-rate cuts and the easy-credit housing boom, giving at least a partial history. This is not entirely satisfying, a more honest approach would start with the Clinton-Gramm-Rubin OTC deregulation of 1999-2000, or even earlier with the many waves of deregulation under Reagan. (I'd want to start back at the fall of Bretton Woods I in 1971 and the rise of financialization and neoliberalism as solutions to the perpetual crisis of capitalism, or perhaps with Das Kapital I, but never mind.)
The program took a broad perspective on market and economy, with a number of house-buyer suckers and a close look at some of the ground scammers like this one Russian mortgage-scheme seller who was clearing $5 million/month doing his dirt selling negative-amortization mortgages (the kind where the principles goes UP with every monthly payment!). The key role of the ratings agencies was emphasized throughout, it's made clear they were utterly corrupt and totally indispensable (investors only believed the scammery because the bonds had AAA ratings). And we got a good look at the investors too, like that now-famous town bankrupt town in Norway.
The commercial breaks with promotionals for Cramer made for a hilarious counterpoint, or left me thirsting for blood on the guillotine.
(See here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5092269)
One weakness: Greenspan got to rationalize on his own behalf that he knew there would be trouble but he was a prisoner of the politics, and the reporter treated him with too much deference.
.
BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT GREAT STUFF TO UNDERSTAND THE CRISIS:
.
Three visual treatments.
The Crisis of Credit Visualizedhttp://crisisofcredit.com/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4759275362410693117(See the actual site, but you can download it at the google link.)
Blow-by-blow pictogram animation summary (nice music) of the mechanics and money flows from 2002-2008. Most important to you media-addicted animals: FUN! Explains leveraging, CDOs, tranches, etc. Best of all is at the end, how the default wave starts and propagates. Guy did it as his graphics thesis, best I've seen for beginners. Rather unpleasant in its brief depiction of the poor "unreliable" families who get the subprime mortgages. Mostly ignores the deregulation that preceded and touched it all off, or the politics, thus too faux-neutral and respectful about motives and scammery. Which is why we have the following:
How Subprime Works in Stick Figures - Powerpointhttp://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ddp4zq7n_0cdjsr4fn&skipauth=true45 slides, very funny, ends with a big "fuck you" all around.
The following I can't recommend enough, because it summarizes the production economy and its relationship to ecology in 20 minutes, and for our purposes underlines the ultimate cause of all economic crisis: GROWTH IS NOT ETERNAL. You can't have that on the planet, and you certainly can't substitute for it by the miracle of compound interest either.
The Story of Stuffhttp://www.storyofstuff.com/Can also be downloaded at above as .mov, or below as .mp4.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9153550196656656736.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
