American Casino - Movie by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn

[Magda Hassan]

This month has been a very good one for leftist documentaries. Joining “The Cove” and “Crude” are two films at the Film Forum, a prime location for bold independent fare. The first is “American Casino”, which opens today. Directed by Andrew Cockburn (Alexander’s brother) and his wife Leslie, this amounts to a film version of Matt Taibbi’s hard-hitting Rolling Stone article on the subprime meltdown but without the gonzo flourishes. This will be followed by “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers” that opens on the 16th. Both movies are outstanding.

For those who ever been mystified by what the terms collateralized debt obligation or credit default swaps mean (including me most of the time), “The American Casino” will bring you up to speed. Calling upon industry experts like Professor Michael Greenberger, who was the Director of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Clinton, we find out that they are nothing more than crap games, hence the movie’s title. In one scene Greenberger sits at a computer terminal clinically dissecting a securitized mortgage courtesy as if it were a poorly executed counterfeit thousand dollar bill.
We also meet a former big shot at Bear Stearns, who is seen only in shadow. As a designer of the Byzantine financial products that brought his own company and the rest of Wall Street into the toilet, he must be taken at his word when he described the investments as “fourth dimensional”, adding that “the banks did not really care” whether subprime loans could be paid off. Given his rueful tone, you get the feeling that you are listening to somebody who ran a child prostitution ring.
After meeting the crooks who ran the gambling casino, we meet their victims. The Cockburns introduce us to three homeowners in Baltimore, where a virtual conspiracy by major banks like Wells Fargo lured the unsuspecting African-American to take out loans that they had no chance of repaying. We meet Denzel Mitchell, a social studies teacher with a special interest in human rights, packing up his books and his children’s toys after his house has been foreclosed. In his case, as is the case of all the other interviewees, we are dealing with a swindle. Unscrupulous mortgage brokers and bankers lied to people with good credit ratings in order to harvest fat fees. One woman, a therapist, shows up at her mortgage broker’s office with a check for most of the latest month’s payment but is refused.
One can only wonder if the election of an African-American president has helped to keep the lid on the housing crisis. Unlike the early 1930s, there have been far fewer angry protests at the doorsteps of people being evicted. Although the movie focuses exclusively on Bush’s role, attention must be paid to the failure of the new administration in keeping people in their homes. Even Jesse Jackson, who has never met a Democratic President he didn’t like, is starting to grumble. After seeing a new surge of foreclosures and a continued tilt toward the big banks rather than working class homeowners, he decided to lead a prayer vigil at the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta. Unfortunately, it did not occur to him to mount a militant mass demonstration. That would be so 1960s.
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