Pulling Punches? <i>Inside Job</i>'s Charles Ferguson's Latest: <i>Predator Nation</i>

We need to ask ourselves why this liberal critique will be widely ignored and what we can do to insure it won't be. It is deserving of attention. I respect the prodigious effort, but what is also true is that the elite with whom he eats, or does business, is unlikely to be the agency for change.
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Hail Caesar! The circle of those of us crusading for a jail-out of banksters, and not another bailout for them is widening, Our newest Commissar of Condemnation, Charles H. Ferguson, director of the film Inside Job is in the house with a new must-read book, Predator Nation, that documents and details how the financial elite and its values took over our culture and country.

When I first saw Ferguson's film, coming out two years after my Plunder: The Crime Of Our Time on a similar subject, I was a bit jealous because of all the support he attracted from Sony and Hollywood insiders who waged a successful Oscar campaign on its behalf. He had access to big money for a film on big money, after selling a software company. He could afford high production values but also the kind of marketing that indie filmmakers like myself dream about.

As a Ph.D., former business executive and government adviser, Ferguson had developed a keen skill for synthesizing information and creating a filmic "explainer," almost like a big screen PowerPoint presentation, that recounts how we got into this financial crisis through government deregulation/complicity.

A member of the elite himself, he is well schooled in how to talk to his counterparts.

Given the devolving state of our media and the fact that these issues are mostly covered in an arcane and superficial way stashed away in business sections, he was able to create a chronology-driven narrative by connecting facts that are often hidden in plain sight.

His was a top-down but lucid film that treated the harmful impact of the crisis in great detail but the impact on ordinary people was almost an afterthought. There was more on government than banks; it is more intellectual than emotional with more on protests in Iceland than America.

At the same time, because it had mainstream, if still far too limited, distribution, it was as an eye-opener to people who weren't paying attention or being informed even when they should have been thanks to media blindness.

At least he wasn't being totally ignored as were my film and companion book, The Crime of Our Time, on pervasive Wall Street fraud that predated his work. Not only wasn't I a "name" but since I did not have insider credentials as an academic or financial journalist, I could be ignored, by the press and even Ferguson.

Besides, I only have a master's degree and an honorary Ph.D., not the full card monty that Ferguson sports. All you get are brownie points for being first. I have written about this rejection by a media elite that looked the other way for Harvard's Nieman Foundation in Journalism.

To my knowledge, Charles never claims to be on the left. When he was at MIT, Ferguson's hero/adviser was not the institute's most famous professor, Noam Chomsky, who blurbed my book, but economist Carl Kaysen, a WWII intelligence office who later worked for JFK on nuclear policy.

Kaysen's claim to "fame," according to Wikipedia, was bizarre. He "was asked to prepare a report on how to utilize the US nuclear arsenal to preemptively destroy the Soviet Union's nuclear capacity and its ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons. ... (His) report, which envisioned 'only' half a million to a million Soviet casualties, caused outrage and disgust within the administration, with White House Chief Counsel Ted Sorensen calling him crazy."

Ferguson is not crazy but calculating when it comes to getting attention. To his credit, once he won the documentary Oscar, he used his fifteen seconds of global visibility to call for the prosecution of Wall Street executives -- not a major theme of his movie, but a gutsy and widely quoted news-making move.

"Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, " he told the world. "And that's wrong!" (In fact, one Mortgage exec, exposed by ml-implode.com, is doing time along with many smaller fish with whom the government would not reach "settlements" as they have with bigger corporate criminals.)

If Michael Moore has said what Ferguson had, he would have been dismissed as a rabble-rouser. Ferguson's business background and low-key style shielded him from ridicule. Alas, there was no extra Academy airtime to explain that over 1500 "banksters" had gone to prison years earlier after the far less serious S&L crisis or urge support for the many organizations battling fraudulent foreclosures.

Suddenly, he most visibly joined the ranks of journalist Matt Taibbi, former federal regulator, William Black, the blogger Mandelman, former IMF economist Simon Johnson, Aaron Krowne of ml-implode.com, Yves Smith and a handful of others, myself among them, who have, for years, repeatedly called for prosecuting financial criminals, a course of action that does not win any favor in a Obama White House too busy 'bundling" Wall Street largesse for the president's re-election campaign.

When Inside Job came out, we contacted him to see if he might be interested in supporting a petition campaign against banks not too big to jail, as well as join a speaking tour on the issue. He never called back.

More recently, his publicist wrote me to see if I might be interested in having him on my radio show. After reading the book, I jumped at the chance, and we even discussed a possible date. The next thing I heard was that he was no longer interested, no reason given! Alternative media is not on his radar! Dismissed!

When I read his bio and the acknowledgements in his book, I guessed why. It is a class thing. Not only does he thank top execs in Hollywood for help and express appreciation to two gourmet restaurants in Berkeley, Chez Panisse and Oliveto, for feeding him well, but also curries favor with well-known millionaires who he assures he is not against before announcing he is voting for Obama.

Perhaps he should read a newer expose, Bailout by Neil Barofsky, who was the Inspector General on the TARP bank giveaway and whose work was sabotaged by the Obama Administration. A press release for the book stated, "His revelations show in stark detail just how captured by Wall Street our political system is; why the banks have not been held accountable; and how the failure to enact effective regulation has put the country in danger of an even bigger crisis in the future."

Nominally against the system, Ferguson still curries favor with it, a smart maneuver to position himself as the "reasonable" alternative to more strident "crazies" -- while selling movie tickets and, now, books, of course.

The words capitalism and imperialism do not appear in the book's index. He makes only a fleeting positive reference to Occupy Wall Street and ignores all of the other nationwide anti-bank grassroots activism.

At points, he comes off as a one percent-er but I don't really care about that. We need more one per-centers to turn against their class interest, as he seems to have.

While his social critique is trenchant, including attacks on corruption, greed, university complicity with the financial elites etc. -- he offers no deep understanding of the system or call for its replacement by another. He exposes university-based economic think tanks for not disclosing who subsidizes their research -- what they don't say -- while I take on the mainstream media industry that distorts the news, what they do say, showing our different orientations. And just for the record, I worked in corporate network news.

Ferguson speaks briefly and approvingly, (maybe patronizingly) of Occupy, but the elite is his primary frame of focus. He is earnest and almost evangelical in his indictment. His analysis is often provocative and always well-written, but there is no real call to action, only some modest policy prescriptions.

According to Random House, his key points are these:

  • "The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
  • Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
  • Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world's most unequal and unfair societies."

The promo material does indict President Obama who he plans to vote for because, "the Obama Administration... has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed "reforms" installed after the collapse of 2008."


Predator Nation reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became mere courtiers to the elite. (DS: Revered by whom?) Based on many newly released court filings, it details the extent of the crimes--there is no other word--committed in the frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial crisis. And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for how we might take back our country and the American dream.

So far, a half dozen prominent economists and financial writers for elite publications seem enamored with him.

Simon Johnson writes:


Charles Ferguson makes a convincing case that the world's banking system was brought to the brink of complete collapse in 2008-09 by a virulent combination of unchecked greed and criminal behavior.

Predator Nation provides a roadmap for prosecution, systematically covering the banks involved, the names of culpable executives, the obvious crimes, the precise laws broken, and the evidence hiding in plain sight. No doubt it will be widely ignored by our legal officials.

We need to ask ourselves why this liberal critique will be widely ignored and what we can do to insure it won't be.

It is deserving of attention. I respect the prodigious effort, but what is also true is that the elite with whom he eats, or does business, is unlikely to be the agency for change.

Hopefully, he will realize that analysis often leads to paralysis without action, and that he has to get down with the 99% to raise hell with the hell his book denounces.

News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs at newsdissector.net. For more on his book and film on financial crime, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com. He also wrote Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street (Cosimo Books). He hosts a weekly show on ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com (PRN.fm.) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

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