Filmmaker Charles Ferguson Interviewed by Katie Couric Of CBS News

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJCWY-_gG2k&feature=related

All,

This is a very important extended interview conducted by Katie Couric of CBS News with Charles Ferguson, director of the critically acclaimed and Oscar winning documentary 'Inside Job' which deals with the massive criminal fraud and gigantic Ponzi schemes instituted and carried out by huge "too big to fail" Wall Street investment banks and the resulting meltdown of the American financial system in September 2008 which put the U.S. on the very brink of a complete and total economic collapse before its failing mega corporate institutions were bailed out by American taxpayers to the tune of an outrageous 800 BILLION dollar ransom. Ferguson fully documents in great detail exactly how and why both the Bush and Obama administrations were and are directly responsible for essentially covering up for as well as aiding and abetting the Wall Street debacle directly via Bush and Obama Secretaries of the Treasury Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner as well as Obama's former major economic advisor in the White House Larry Summers (who left the White House in September 2010 to return to teaching at Harvard) who was not coincidentally also Bill Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury in the mid 1990s (I know--it's a very slimy and INCESTUOUS group of in-house government 'fixers', isn't it?)...For the Katie Couric CBS interview with Ferguson watch the video below:



And for further information on how investment banks and corporations on Wall Street continue to steal our money click on this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffHFjlqIzKE&feature=player_embedded


Kofi

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-ferguson/the-financial-crisis-and-_1_b_782927.html


By Charles Ferguson
Director of the Wall Street documentary 'Inside Job'
Posted: November 12, 2010
Huffington Post


The Financial Crisis and America's Political Duopoly

What unites the midterm election results, the Federal Reserve's decision to spend another $600 billion to keep interest rates down, the failure to address the foreclosure crisis, and America's worsening relations with its G-20 partners? And, more generally, what explains the Obama Administration's toothless response to the financial crisis, in particular its reversion to status quo regulatory and economic policies, over the past two years?

In making my documentary on the financial crisis, Inside Job, I obsessed over these questions. Some argue that President Obama, as a matter of individual personality, is averse to confrontation; others say that, lacking financial experience while being forced to confront the most severe crisis since the Great Depression, he was hostage to his campaign advisers, who happened to be Clinton-era insiders who had helped cause the crisis. Gradually, however, I have come to a different conclusion, one based on a more fundamental, structural problem in American politics.

My answer is this: far from being in an era of brutal partisan warfare, as conventional wisdom holds and as watching the nightly television news might suggest, the United States is now in the grip of a political duopoly in which both parties are thoroughly complicit. They play a game: they agree to fight viciously over certain things to retain the allegiance of their respective bases, while agreeing not to fight about anything that seriously endangers the privileges of America's new financial elites. Whether this duopoly will endure, and what to do about it, are perhaps the most important questions facing Americans. The current arrangement all but guarantees the continuing decline of the United States as a nation, and of the welfare of the bottom 90% of its citizens.

First, consider Obama Administration policy. The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates down, which greatly enriches the financial services industry. And while, to its rare credit, the Obama Administration has sought to repeal some of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it has avoided any serious attempt to tax or control financial sector compensation, to recover any of the massive amounts taken by bankers during the bubble, to penalize or prosecute those who caused it, or to reverse the extraordinary rise in inequality that has transformed America over the last generation. The Republicans go even further in catering to the wealthy and the financial sector, but the differences are relatively minor.



The financial services industry and the most successful American multinational firms now obtain rapidly increasing fractions, often already the majority, of their investment, employees, and revenues from (a) other wealthy individuals and corporations and/or (b) outside the United States. Over the last two decades their political interests, contributions, and lobbying have gradually followed these larger trends. As a result, the political duopoly has overseen a massive disinvestment in the future of the United States and the American people, and a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 1%. Taxes on dividends, high incomes, capital gains, and estates have sharply declined, while tuition at public universities, hours worked per family, household debt, and government deficits have all increased.

And yet there is, obviously, real political fighting out there. Of what, therefore, do these vicious partisan fights consist? The two parties and their supporters attack each other on vague ideological grounds (big government, being a Washington insider, socialism, whatever), issues of personnel and power (holding up Obama appointments, redistricting, earmarks), or, more excitingly, with regard to social values issues dear to their bases: abortion; gay rights; don't ask - don't tell; sex education versus religion in schools; guaranteed-health-insurance-as-socialism; gun control; welfare; global warming. On these issues, each side can credibly tell its base that defeat would mean real losses. People do care about abortion and gay rights, for excellent reasons, and so many people on both sides grudgingly continue to participate in the charade.

The losers, of course, are the American people, and particularly America's younger generation. For at least the bottom half of the population, America's educational system is a disaster, with our high school graduation rate at 78 percent and declining (versus, for example, 96 percent for South Korea and over 90 percent for most developed nations); broadband infrastructure generally rated at about 20th in the world; and gradually deteriorating physical infrastructure. Quietly, as inequality has grown and the financial sector rose to political power, the wealthy in America have constructed increasingly separate, parallel, and private infrastructure systems for themselves - elite private schools and universities, gated communities, private planes, the hedge fund universe.

The political duopoly arrangement, with its emphasis on intense fighting over values issues, serves to divert attention from the financial sector's "quiet coup," to use the economist Simon Johnson's phrase, and to divide potential opposition to it. People who should be aligned in calling for fairer taxes, campaign finance reform, stricter financial regulation, better public education, and investment in America's infrastructure are instead divided by their opposing views on gun control, abortion, and gay marriage. It is a strategy that has worked remarkably well for both parties.

Even so, the American people have begun to sense that the system is rigged, and the recent election results are partially a consequence of this. Fewer people are voting, more people are registering as independents, and voters are more willing to switch parties. Of course, as long as the duopoly holds, there is very little that they can do. The big question is: can it hold?

Forming third parties and social movements in this kind of situation is difficult. The financial sector and the wealthiest 0.1% of the country have the twin advantages of great wealth and great cohesion. America's election districts, campaign finance arrangements, and voting rules discourage populist third parties whose base would be dispersed and, individually, not at all wealthy. At the same time, however, there are many precedents in American history for such a rebellion - the Progressive movement, FDR's post-Depression reforms, and more recently the nonpartisan civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements. In my personal conversations, I sense an emerging consensus based on nothing more complicated than a sense of basic honesty, fairness, and common sense, qualities which the American people still have in abundance. Let us hope that this can be translated into some organized force that can put an end to the present political cartel.



Charles Ferguson is the director the documentary Inside Job, a documentary film about the financial crisis now playing in theaters nationwide. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from MIT.



Author Note: The above is a corrected version of an earlier post. I would like to apologize to the bipartisan deficit reduction commission, and to the readers of the Huffington Post, for misrepresenting the commission's draft recommendations, which are in fact largely progressive in their tax and income effects. The error derived from relying upon an inaccurate secondary source, something I rarely do. Otherwise, the article was factually accurate and represents my views.

The Failure of the Obama Administration To Hold Wall Street and the Banks Fully Accountable and Its Dire Consequences

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/opinion/24rich.html?src=me&ref=general

All,

Frank Rich typically gets it 100% right in his analysis below--as truly depressing as it is...BTW: Chuleenan and I saw the incredible documentary "Inside Job" last sunday. If you get a chance please go see this movie immediately! The whole fascinating and equally horrific story about Wall Street, the banks, the corporations, and the Obama administration is brilliantly detailed in a very dynamic and extremely informative film by the genius director/writer Charles Ferguson...

Kofi


October 23, 2010

What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?
By FRANK RICH
New York Times

PRESIDENT Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut.

The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House’s surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It’s the country’s fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever.

No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.

This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.

The latest example is Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide and the godfather of subprime mortgages. On the eve of his trial 10 days ago, he settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for $67.5 million, $20 million of which will be footed by what remains of Countrywide in its present iteration at Bank of America. Even if he paid the whole sum himself, it would still be a small fraction of the $521 million he collected in compensation as he pursued his gambling spree from 2000 until 2008.

A particularly egregious chunk of that take was the $140 million he pocketed by dumping Countrywide shares in 2006-7. It was a chapter right out of Kenneth Lay’s Enron playbook: Mozilo reassured shareholders that all was peachy even as his private e-mail was awash in panic over the “toxic” mortgages bringing Countrywide (and the country) to ruin. Lay, at least, was convicted by a jury and destined to decades in the slammer before his death.

The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide’s mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensation during roughly the same period Mozilo “earned” his half a billion. Citi, which required a $45 billion taxpayers’ bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement — at $75 million, less than Rubin’s earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.

It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in “Inside Job” than in the hit movie of election season, “The Social Network.” Summers — like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson — is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry’s advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has “step by step captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration’s image of being lax in pursuing finance’s bad actors. This tone is set at the top.

Asked in “Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.” With the aid of the “Manhattan Madam” (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were “perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer’s personal vices to force him to resign in 2008” have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.

The Obama administration seems not to have a prosecutorial gene. It’s shy about calling a fraud a fraud when it occurs in high finance. This caution was exemplified most recently by the secretary of housing and urban development, Shaun Donovan, whose response to the public outcry over the banks’ foreclosure shenanigans was to take to The Huffington Post last weekend. “The notion that many of the very same institutions that helped cause this housing crisis may well be making it worse is not only frustrating — it’s shameful,” he wrote.

Well, yes! Obama couldn’t have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan’s blogging finesse, he wasn’t promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not. The largest bill of reparations paid out by Bank of America for Countrywide’s deceptive mortgage practices — $8.4 billion — was to settle a suit by 11 state attorneys general on the warpath.

Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn’t commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC’s “This Week” last month, he typically railed against the “extreme” government of “the last year and a half,” citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction — the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it — went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.

The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It’s the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we “lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase” for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life — from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support.

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

An Incisive Examination of the 2008 Financial Crisis

A Film Review of 'Inside Job' and Interview with the Director Charles Ferguson

by Chuleenan Svetvilas

Inside Job tackles the financial crisis of 2008, delving into the economic policies, conflicts of interest, hubris, and greed that created this decades-long disaster in the making. Yeah, a documentary about the financial catastrophe seems like a super-boring film to sit through but this film is anything but dull. Through riveting personal interviews and plenty of facts and figures, director Charles Ferguson chronicles the intricate web of connections among the investment banks, credit rating agencies, economists, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Treasury Department under the Reagan, Bush I and II, and Clinton administrations.

Though the film is loaded with talking heads — everyone from New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini (aka Dr. Doom) and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer to French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and former Federal Reserve Board member Frederic Mishkin — it is tightly edited to keep the viewer's interest.

Ferguson asks pointed questions and it is painfully funny as well as infuriating to watch Mishkin squirm as he tries to explain whether the credit ratings were accurate and why he left his position in the midst of the economic collapse. Economist Glen Hubbard, former chair of the U.S. council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush and now dean of Columbia’s business school, becomes very hostile and angry when asked about his financial conflicts of interest, for example not revealing that he was paid $100,000 to testify in defense of a financial company. He sneers at Ferguson, "You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot."

Narrated by Matt Damon, the film is divided into five parts: 1. How We Got Here, 2. The Bubble, 3. The Crisis, 4. Accountability, and 5. Where We Are Now. The first four sections craft a cogent argument that deregulation was at the root of the financial crisis and that there were many opportunities to lessen its impact or even prevent it from happening in the first place. The last part seems to falter, not only because it shows how the Obama administration is simply continuing the same policies as previous administrations but because the fury Ferguson raises in the previous parts is gone. It ends with platitudes. The last scene, one of city streets, ends with Damon’s voice intoning: "It won't be easy, but some things are worth fighting for."

Chuleenan Svetvilas interviewed director Charles Ferguson in San Francisco on September 21. Inside Job, his second film, will open in New York on October 8 and Los Angeles on October 15, and in the Bay Area on October 22. Ferguson's first documentary, No End in Sight, a remarkable exposé and indictment of the occupation of Iraq, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2007.

When and why did you decide to make this film about the 2008 financial crisis?

Well I made the final decision when in a 48-hour period, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG fell apart in September of 2008. And when also, as a result of that and everything else that was going on, we all found ourselves staring into nothingness. Then it was crystal clear that this was a gigantic thing and would be with us for a very long time and would have a lot of effects on a lot of people; it was something worth looking into. I had actually started thinking about it earlier, long before. I have two friends, both of whom are in the film, Nouriel Roubini and Charles Morris. They’re both old friends of mine.

In 2007 both Nouriel and Charlie began telling me that there was this huge problem coming and in late 2007 I read Charlie’s book and manuscript. It was published in February 2008, one month before Bear Stearns had collapsed and it was called The Trillion Dollar Meltdown. And at the time I thought he was exaggerating and he told me, “Just you wait, Charles.” And then you know, when major financial institutions began collapsing, I began to take my friends more seriously. Then in September of 2008 I decided, I gotta do this.

At that point did you start contacting people to interview? Once you decided to make the film, what was the first thing you did?

The first thing actually was I approached the two guys who run Sony Pictures Classics, Michael Barker and Tom Bernard and asked them if they would be interested in the film and they said yes. And in fact they financed a little over half the film and agreed to distribute it. So it was at that point that I started doing serious work. The first thing that we did is a lot of research. I talked to a million people. I read everything I could get my hands on.

We did mainly research for six months, a lot of research, including who we might want to film. Then we started filming in March/April 2009. We filmed basically through the end of the summer. I think our last interview was in September 2009 by which point we had already started the editing. We started editing around the time of the last interview.

So did you come up with the other half of the budget yourself?

We had another equity investor and then a small fraction of it is me, myself as an equity investor.

Did you feel that you were well prepared to tackle this subject because you already had one critically acclaimed documentary under your belt [No End in Sight] and then you have this PhD in political science from M.I.T. where you studied economics, political economy, and economic history?

It did and it helped a lot. My prior background in academia was very useful. In the first place I knew a lot of these guys. I also had some understanding of the issues. I wouldn’t say I had a lot. I had become rather disconnected from the financial world over the previous decade and it had changed a lot. It’s very clear that it had changed a lot and mostly for the worse. But I had some familiarity with finance and I also knew from my prior academic background, about the conflicts of interest in academic economics. I had seen the beginnings of that problem when I was a graduate student and a post-doc. So when the crisis occurred and I started making the film, I thought, there’s probably something here so I should look at this. And I looked and I found.

So when you were a graduate student, what did you think about the Chicago School of thinking regarding economics? Did you think that it was a viable thing – unfettered capitalism?

No, and it always seemed obviously dubious to me. I spent a lot of time studying it actually. I took a lot of economics. I read a lot of the kind of advocacy things that the Chicago School and other people wrote. I read Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman’s book, and it always struck me as just very clearly deficient in reality for one thing. It seems as if Friedman was completely sincere in his beliefs. There’s no evidence that he was doing this for financial gain but it was clear that many other people were.

And he had his faithful disciples, Alan Greenspan being one of them.

Yep.

I saw an interview you did in Cannes and you said that you were surprised by the Bush administration’s incompetent handling of the financial crisis. I’m wondering why you were surprised given that you had done No End in Sight, which showed the incredibly inept handing of the occupation of Iraq.

The reason I was surprised was that some of the people who were doing the handling in this case were people who seemed to be more practical and less ideological than the people who had been in charge of the Iraq war. Hank Paulson, whatever you think of him, he had real experience with the real world, not experience handling a financial crisis but a lot of experience with handling what investment banks do and how they behave. And so I was very surprised when it turned out that neither he nor Bernanke had understood that when they shut down Lehman Brothers that British and Japanese bankruptcy law would force the immediate closing of those offices, the immediate freezing of all transactions and accounts that would have this cascading effect throughout the financial system. He didn’t know that. I found that rather surprising, that he wouldn’t know that, that he wouldn’t take the trouble to find out.

I also thought that there would be more and more intelligent consultation with other people. When I asked Christine Lagarde, the finance minister of France, how did you find out Lehman was going to go bankrupt, I assumed that she was going to tell me a day or two earlier or someone had given her a call, and when she told me she found out about it after the fact by opening up the morning paper, I was dumbfounded.

Why wouldn’t you talk to other people who have a stake in this? We’re talking about a worldwide financial market, not just a U.S. financial market.

That seems to have escaped their notice.

Did you decide to structure the film in these five parts because that was the best way to explain the different steps of what had happened? I see similarities to your previous film: dividing the film into different parts and going through things chronologically and having people reflect back on what happened.

I think that I just naturally think like that. I guess it’s my academic background, I don’t know. I have a somewhat systematic, rigorous mind. I tend to do that to things. So partially that and partially I thought that the subject required it. This is something that could be very easily complicated where it would be easy for people to get lost. So giving some structural guidance in the film was something that would help relax the viewer and guild the viewer through a fairly complicated film. There’s a lot of facts in that movie. There’s over 100 documents in that film and a lot of people say a lot of things so it just seemed like a good idea but it’s always naturally how I tend to approach things.

There is a heavy use of voiceover in the film. You have Matt Damon reciting a lot of facts that way. Was that one way you tried to get around putting a lot of numbers and figures on screen to avoid overwhelming the viewer?

Yes, and also we tried to use a mixture of different ways to present information just to keep people stimulated so they wouldn’t get bored. So sometimes you would look at a graph and sometimes you would hear it from somebody’s voice. Sometimes you would see somebody saying it to you. We tried to keep the film visually and otherwise stimulating.

Did you try to interview Brooksley Born, [former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission]?

Yes, I actually had a very long private conversation with her off the record. She didn’t want to be interviewed on the record because she knew that she was soon going to be appointed to be a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which she is now a member of. My inference, she didn’t say this, but my inference is that she was afraid that if she spoke on the record that she wouldn’t get appointed and she wanted to be part of that effort. So she didn’t feel comfortable being interviewed on the record. It was too bad. She’s amazing to talk to, really an amazing person.

Does the same thing go for Elizabeth Warren?

Yes, I also had a long private conversation with her. She also declined to be interviewed on the record for similar reasons.

You make it really clear in your film that the regulators, the ratings agencies, economists, etc. didn’t do their job. And even after the crisis they still wouldn’t say that they didn’t do their job or would imply that somebody was looking at things but clearly that’s not true. So what do you hope to accomplish with this film?

I hope to make people aware that this is still an important issue that hasn’t been dealt with and they should become more active in dealing with it — both with regard to their personal financial lives and also in the larger political landscape. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so too finance is too important to be left to the financiers. So first of all that. I also just wanted to inform people about why it is that America is still in this state, why so many people are losing, have lost their jobs, their savings. I think that, I hope that people want to understand that.

You had mentioned earlier how you were aware of the conflicts of interest regarding people in academia, the economists. At what point during the interviews with people like Glen Hubbard [dean of Columbia Business School and economics professor] did you start asking more probing questions about conflicts of interest?

It depended but it was pretty early. I usually asked them a few relatively general questions first. I wanted to hear what they thought about the crisis in general and so I usually asked them those kind of questions first but pretty quickly I started asking them about these other things and they got uncomfortable pretty quickly.

Yeah, Hubbard was incredibly uncomfortable and said, “You’ve got three minutes.” So how long had you been talking to him before he started shutting down and getting really angry?

Maybe 15, 20 minutes into the interview. There was tension almost immediately but then it kind of got progressively more tense.

Were you surprised that it got so tense so quickly?

I didn’t know what to expect. The personal chemistry issue, how people are going to respond at the emotional level was hard to predict and people responded differently but I was a little bit surprised at how hostile Glen Hubbard got.

After all he agreed to be interviewed.

Yes, but I think what happened with all those people is that they’re not used to being challenged. They’re used to being deferred to, they’re used to people being very respectful and favorable and not antagonistic and not challenging. So I think that they were surprised that they were being challenged. And I think that they were also surprised at how much I knew. They weren’t used to people having read through their papers and gone through their C.V., looked at their financial disclosure forms. I think that came as a bit of a shock to them.

What’s your next project?

I don’t know, I have a number of ideas, some of them documentaries, some of them feature films. Right now I’m spending all of my energy trying to make sure people watch this film. That’s going to totally consume me for at least the next month, maybe for even longer but certainly for the next month.

What are your plans for the film’s website?

The website will have many things on it. It has a lot of information about the people in the film. It has information about some of the issues discussed in the film. It has links to an enormous number of the documents that we read and reference materials that we read: articles, books, all kinds of things. Also, links to organizations that work on these issues. So there’s going to be a lot on the website.

Do you plan on doing a book like you did with your other film?

I tend to doubt it. For one thing the website is going to have so much material on it that it’s not clear to me that there would be much additional benefit to doing the book. Also, I hope that the film speaks for itself. I hope that from watching the film that people will get a good enough idea what the issues are.

What question would you like to be asked or is there anything else you would like to add?

Well, I will take your opportunity to say that I think that the most disappointing thing I encountered was the reaction of the Obama administration and of President Obama personally. Many of us had high hopes for him and he’s been a great disappointment and that’s really too bad. A big opportunity lost but hopefully, hopefully the American people will start pushing him to change.

Chuleenan Svetvilas is a writer and editor in Berkeley, California. Her articles on film have appeared in print and/or online in Alternet, California Lawyer, Documentary, DOX, Hyphen, The Panopticon Review, and Mother Jones. Her 2007 review of Offside will be reprinted in Soccer vs. The State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics in 2011.