Tag: Film

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Inside Job [Film]

Inside Job presents how a chain of actions and decisions underpinned by increasing self-interest in the U.S. financial sector over the past 50 years has brought the U.S. to its current worsening socio-economic state.

Maximized Self-Interest – The Financial Crisis Time-Bomb Ticker

The key point that Inside Job presents is how the “securitization food chain” developed – borrowers, lenders, investment banks, investors, ratings agencies – governed by the commonly held value of maximized self-interest at every rung of the chain. It shows how precisely this chain was the ticking financial crisis time-bomb that exploded in September 2008, the effects of which are felt worldwide until today.

Here’s how maximized self-interest worked at every level of this chain:

  • Borrowers wanted loans for buying homes or other high-cost assets (and since it was in the financial interest of people in the higher parts of the chain for as many people as possible to get loans, then loans were highly promoted during the first years of the 2000s)
  • Lenders wanted the extra money they could make from any loans they provided, no matter how risky, since they sold all the loans to investments banks
  • Investment banks wanted the extra money they could derive by collating all the loans they bought into complex derivatives called CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations), and selling those CDOs to investors
  • Investors wanted the extra money they would get from the borrowers paying back the loans (the CDOs)
  • Ratings agencies, which were hired by investment banks to evaluate the CDOs, wanted the extra money they would get from giving high ratings to the CDOs (since people in the ratings agencies would get paid more for giving CDOs high ratings, regardless of the actual value of the CDO)

This setup presents how the financial crisis of 2008 hit, showing one bankruptcy after another of major firms as the securitization food chain imploded:

  • Lenders could no longer sell their loans to the investment banks
  • As loans went bad, dozens of lenders failed
  • The CDO market collapsed
  • Investment banks held onto billions of dollars in loans, CDOs and real estate that they could not sell

Who Is Accountable For The Financial Crisis? A Few People Or Commonly-Held Values That Frame Society?

As the film follows the effects of the 2008 economic meltdown, it searches for a voice to be held accountable among the major players of the financial sector, finding none. No person or group of people could be found responsible, but speaker after speaker, what becomes clarified is that everyone in this chain was simply subjected to the commonly held value of “maximize your profit at any expense.”

As long as everyone in the chain was getting what they wanted, everything seemed fine. However, when the system imploded, resulting in bankers having to lose those profits, and millions of people losing their homes and jobs, it shows how the commonly held value at every layer – “maximize your profit” – is in dire need of a revision.

Watch Inside Job Trailer

Buy Inside Job full version on DVD

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Zeitgeist: Moving Forward [Film]

Through the voices of scientists, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward stresses the central, vast role social and environmental influence plays in shaping people’s lives, how today’s Western society’s influence leads individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis, and the need to change the values permeating society in order to set the conditions for a healthy, balanced society.

Social Influence Makes Or Breaks You

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward raises current scientific views that challenge age-old views that diseases of all kinds – mental, heart, cancer, strokes, rheumatoid, autoimmune, addictions – and inclinations toward violence, are not genetically determined, but acquired through the social and environmental influences a person experiences, from as early as one’s fetal development, emphasizing the considerable sensitivity toward a person’s development through fetal stages, infancy and childhood.

Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward thus uses this basis to show how the values that shape Western society – self-interest values that measure people and countries’ well-being based on how much money and assets they have – create an unsustainable feedback loop that continues leading the world deeper into myriad crises.

If Social Influence Of Self-Interest Values Breaks You, What Kind Of Social Influence Would Be Needed To Remake You?

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward very clearly brings the problem and its approach to the surface:

  • People are products of their societies
  • Society’s current self-interest values lead individuals and society as a whole deeper into crisis
  • To undergo a positive change, each person individually and society as a whole, needs to perpetuate different values into the society that would bring about personal and social well-being

It’s clear that we’re on the verge of a great transition in human life. That what we face now is this fundamental change of the life we’ve known over the last century.”

–Dr. Richard Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of social epidemiology, University of Nottingham

Watch Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward official sites:

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Blind Spot [Film]

Blind Spot

Blind Spot

Blind Spot analyzes the problem of peak oil, that:

  • Oil and fossil fuel energy is finite, and coming to its end in the near future
  • Human population is constantly increasing
  • Society is not preparing for the end of oil and fossil fuels, but instead self-interest values, which encourage the direct and indirect use of fossil fuels, continue being perpetuated in the media.

The Problem Of Peak Oil – That It Connects In A Complex Web Of Other Problems

Blind Spot presents the complications in dealing with the problem of peak oil, by showing how it connects to many other current and future problems: inflation, stagflation, pollution, climate change, global warming, overconsumption and overpopulation.

Through interviews with scientists and experts in ecology, economy and sociology, Blind Spot proposes some approaches to these problems, including population control, policies for using less energy and implementing different kinds of energy.

Peak Oil’s Central Problem – Challenging The Strong Influence Of Self-Interest Values Upon Society

However, central to the problems that the film’s experts’ mentioned is the issue of social influence. There is an in-built threat in challenging generations of self-interest values at the center of society’s beliefs and assumptions, or “The American Way,” as people in Americanized societies are used to relying on cheap oil and energy, living in big houses, being highly individualized, and traveling long distances.

The cultural constraint on change becomes very dangerous, because when it is challenged, it is challenging generations of belief and assumptions. … There are people who have to study raw data, who are trained as scientists to have their belief system based upon evidence, and when that contradicts generations of belief, then they become cultural outcasts. That became incredibly frustrating to me. I have kids, I want peace on earth, I want all good things, and yet, I found that people that also want those things unable to realize that we’re all a huge part of this problem.”

–Jason Bradford, PhD, ecological scientist and expert in sustainability and local food systems

Watch Blind Spot Trailer

For more info about the movie & to purchase a DVD copy, visit: blindspotdoc.com

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Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Film]

Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]

Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse [Movie]Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse paints a picture of the 2008-to-2010 global socio-economic sphere. It follows the banking bubble’s burst in September 2008, and the worldwide domino effect of troubles and uprisings that followed.

The Financial Crisis Forced People To Recognize Global Interconnectedness

Most notably, Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse presents how the 2008-to-2010 financial crash and its effects stamped an imprint of global interconnectedness into people’s worldviews, especially those of bankers, economists and politicians, forcing a revision on issues of global-scale responsibility and interdependence.

Meltdown: The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse takes the viewer through the times before the 2008 financial crash, when there was little acknowledgement or concern about the vast reaching implications of global interconnectedness, as New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin points out in the first part of the movie, about how people in New York did not take the English bank Northern Rock’s crash as a warning sign:

People in New York saw the crash of the Northern Rock bank in England as ‘that’s happening over there, that’s not happening here.’ The sense of interconnectedness was not realized until the very last moment.”

… to 2010, a time when the change in people’s sensitivities to globally connected relationships became felt, as IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde mentions in the film’s final part:

Everyone has changed in this crisis. When the real estate and financial bubbles burst, it caused an examination of conscience about the creation of wealth, how resources should be allocated, the sharing of wealth, how countries relate to each other, what defined well-being. On those issues, we have all evolved, the President included.”

Watch Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse

[myyoutubeplaylist ZWU65Zbka4E, pqBlVBhv0ag, JBhAvUTW5ZE, bZwMIIJLWOw]

  1. Episode One: The Men Who Crashed The World
  2. Episode Two: A Global Tsunami
  3. Episode Three: Paying The Price
  4. Episode Four: After The Fall