Too bad President Obama did not see this documentary when he came into office... As late as February of 2010, President Obama was willing to publicly express his admiration for Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs when questioned about their multimillion diollar bonuses...
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek... “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system."This appeared in the Feb. 2010 edition of Bllomberg Business Week.
Unfortunately, for those of us in the USofA, it's a new series on CANADIAN public television. This is the link to the FACTS Page of the series website. .
UPDATE - Thx Lepanto -Meltdown on YouTube
I am fortunate enough to live in Seattle and my local basic cable has CBC channel... which is why I am watching the first episode of this hard-hitting, no punches pulled series that pins the tails on all the de-regulatory, free-market jackasses and charlatans who rigged the financial regulatory laws and agencies to let the bankster jackals run free in markets around the world.
Here is the series intro...
Doc Zone has traveled the world - from Wall Street to Dubai to China - to investigate The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse. Meltdown is the story of the bankers who crashed the world, the leaders who struggled to save it and the ordinary families who got crushed.
September 2008 launched an extraordinary chain of events:
General Motors, the world’s largest company, went bust.
Washington Mutual became the world’s largest bank failure.
Lehman Brothers became the world’s largest bankruptcy ever:
The damage quickly spread around the world, shattering global confidence in the fundamental structures of the international economy.
The CBC’s Terence McKenna takes viewers behind the headlines and into the backrooms at the highest levels of world governments and banking institutions, revealing the astonishing level of backstabbing and tension behind the scenes as the world came dangerously close to another Great Depression.
The series starts with an on-camera interview with a London bankster,
Geraint Anderson, aka “City Boy” – This hippie-turned-stockbroker in England reveals the dirty secrets of high finance. He says lying and cheating were all part of the high-stakes game
Anderson was a low level fish who was making $1,000,000 a year in salary and bonuses... he states flat out on camera that it was all about the bonuses, and the rules were there were no rules because Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown had managed to get the markets deregulated, following the US example...
That is just the beginning. The epsiode then focuses on Iceland and how the same type of free market snake oil peddlers infected that country with the deregulation virus...
This first episode would cause an outcry if aired in the US on PBS or Frontline...fat chance of that ever happening.
Here is the rest of the series intro on the CBC website...
Meltdown also tells the stories of desperate foreclosed homeowners in California, disillusioned autoworkers at the end of the line in Ontario and furious workers in France who shocked the world by kidnapping their own bosses.
Since the financial meltdown began, trillions of dollars have been spent rescuing banks and jumpstarting economies, yet recovery remains fragile. Fears abound of a “double-dip” return to recession. The millions around the world who lost homes and jobs are demanding answers: How did it all go so wrong? Who is to blame? They are angry because to date, only a few smalltime players have been held to account. No major banking, regulatory or government figures have yet been convicted of any wrongdoing.
Meltdown is the first comprehensive documentary portrait of the worst economic crisis of a generation.
I checked to see if it could be streamed, the answer is yes..if you are in Canada...
or you are lucky enough to get CBC on your local cable.
One Last Link - To the backup documentation the series is based on....
Just remember, past is prologue.
UPDATE = Thanx Lepanto for finding all four episodes on YouTube