Triple Feature
Nov. 10th, 2008 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorka(Or, as Mojo Nixon says, great googly-moogly!)
You probably shouldn't watch them all in one night - too depressing - but there are three documentaries that I think give a pretty clear idea of How We Got In This Mess. Strictly speaking, none of them are political documentaries - not my usual stuff, like Fog of War - although they all have political repercussions.
#1 - Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room. Astonishing how quickly we forgot about these guys. They collapse, and it's big news for a few years, but in all the muck raked about the current financial crisis, almost no one has pointed out that the banks crumbing now are largely the same ones that had massive exposures to Enron, or that the weird financial instruments that are bringing them down look like Skilling and Fastow's illegitimate brain-children. And then, of course, there's Enron's own self-defeating question, "ask why?"
#2 - The Corporation. An interesting look as why corporations behave the way they do. Curious about why every investment bank would leap off the same cliff, even if one of them knew it was a bad idea propped up by pure finagling? They pretty much had to. If every other corporation in the industry was raking in money hand over fist doing this, they'd be ill-serving their shareholders by not doing it, and so by the rules of how these immortal artificial persons work, they'd be negligent if they didn't. This isn't Darwinism; it's free-market psychosis.
#3 - Who Killed the Electric Car? And this is an explanation for why the US car companies are in free fall. A very careful detailing of how GM aimed deliberately for its own foot and blew it off in the name of the next quarter's profits. Interestingly enough, in some ways this is an argument for more market innovation, rather than less - but on the part of the corporation. Maybe it's imagination rather than innovation, precisely. But they still built a pretty good mousetrap, and then refused to sell it to the people who beat a path to their door because it wasn't a great one yet - and was more expensive to produce than the older, messier, more polluting ones.
Anyway, those are my movie recommendations for the week for anyone who hasn't seen them all yet.
You probably shouldn't watch them all in one night - too depressing - but there are three documentaries that I think give a pretty clear idea of How We Got In This Mess. Strictly speaking, none of them are political documentaries - not my usual stuff, like Fog of War - although they all have political repercussions.
#1 - Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room. Astonishing how quickly we forgot about these guys. They collapse, and it's big news for a few years, but in all the muck raked about the current financial crisis, almost no one has pointed out that the banks crumbing now are largely the same ones that had massive exposures to Enron, or that the weird financial instruments that are bringing them down look like Skilling and Fastow's illegitimate brain-children. And then, of course, there's Enron's own self-defeating question, "ask why?"
#2 - The Corporation. An interesting look as why corporations behave the way they do. Curious about why every investment bank would leap off the same cliff, even if one of them knew it was a bad idea propped up by pure finagling? They pretty much had to. If every other corporation in the industry was raking in money hand over fist doing this, they'd be ill-serving their shareholders by not doing it, and so by the rules of how these immortal artificial persons work, they'd be negligent if they didn't. This isn't Darwinism; it's free-market psychosis.
#3 - Who Killed the Electric Car? And this is an explanation for why the US car companies are in free fall. A very careful detailing of how GM aimed deliberately for its own foot and blew it off in the name of the next quarter's profits. Interestingly enough, in some ways this is an argument for more market innovation, rather than less - but on the part of the corporation. Maybe it's imagination rather than innovation, precisely. But they still built a pretty good mousetrap, and then refused to sell it to the people who beat a path to their door because it wasn't a great one yet - and was more expensive to produce than the older, messier, more polluting ones.
Anyway, those are my movie recommendations for the week for anyone who hasn't seen them all yet.
