AMERICAN CASINO
If you’re wondering what the hell happened to our economy and exactly how the banks did it, this film is a pretty clear explanation but with enough details to be called accurate. I’m hoping this documentation of Wall Street gambling can help direct the rage at the proper targets. Maybe if we could mobilize those Beckian mobs, chucking out the racist rhetoric, the increasing anti-capitalist movement, reminiscent of the last Great Depression in the 1930s might actually go somewhere. Oh, how I dream.
At the center of the documentary is a former crime now financial reporter, Mark Pittman and who let his healthy skepticism question and then investigate the “housing prices will continue to soar” mantra. We hear from various ex-Wall Streeters, mortgage brokers and loan officers, many of whom look pretty comfortably ensconced in their luxurious residences, having gotten out before the fall. There is even one in shadow, but they all now decry the very products they were involved in peddling.
A good chunk of the film is devoted to effects though and the most personally embodied effects are in Baltimore, Maryland where veteran civil rights attorney John Relman is suing Wells Fargo Bank. It’s clear from the three individuals who agreed to participate, Denzel Mitchell, a schoolteacher, Rev. Almalene Wade, and Patricia McNair, a therapist that it wasn’t just poor ignorant people who got caught in bad loans. Two of the three had solid jobs but were most likely targeted and sold sub-prime, high interest loans despite qualifying for lower interest products. Rev. Wade owned her house free and clear and lost it because of a $30,000 home equity loan taken out for renovations.
But we know it wasn’t just Baltimore and it wasn’t just African American homeowners who are losing homes and jobs. In California, a state without one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, we see whole subdivisions where the majority of houses are either in pre-foreclosure, foreclosure, or are already bank owned. One of the most telling interviews is with Jeff Greene, a California real estate investor, from atop a perch on his Malibu property. Greene confirms what I noticed when I first moved to Los Angeles three years ago. Everyone was asking us when we would buy a house. Since I couldn’t see anything for less than a half a million dollars I firmly stated...never. Having a fairly good understanding of what percentage of people in the United States actually make even $75,000 per year, I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand how all these people could afford all these houses. Greene bet against Wall Street that they couldn’t and has made $500 million dollars so far. In the film he says that in truth only something like 12% of Californians can afford even the median priced house (that’s the half million dollar one) so he couldn’t figure out where all the buyers were coming from either.
It’s not rocket science it’s unregulated capitalism. When greed is good, as Gordon Gekko said in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street things go bad for the non-rich and that’s the bottom 99% of the population. Towards the end of the film we meet Jared Dever who keeps track of all the abandoned swimming pools in Riverside County, outside of Los Angeles. Many people fail to drain their pools leaving them to become West Nile Virus breeding grounds or homes for snakes and other wildlife. Some people drain the pools and then dump all the junk they shopped for to keep the economy humming like garden furniture and other spoils of capitalism into the empty concrete pit. Dever seems perplexed by it all but by the end of this film, I wished I had something to throw in as well.
American Casino opens in Los Angeles on September 18, 2009.
Directed by Leslie Cockburn; written and produced by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn. Released by Argot Pictures. Running time: 89 minutes.
With: Mark Pittman; Professor Michael Greenberger; The Man in the Shadow; Denzel Mitchell; Rev. Almalene Wade; Patricia McNair; David Attisani; Frank Raiter; Rania Hanano; Bill O’Malley; Robert Strupp; Vanessa Perry; John Relman; Erick Booker; Cara Stretch; Sean O’Toole; Jeff Greene and Jared Dever.
