Symphony Space (Venue Partner)
2537 Broadway
212.864.5400
This event has passed.
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American Casino
- When
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Oct 25, 2009 – Nov 1, 2009
Sundays (4–5:29 & 8–9:29pm)
- Where
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Directions: Subway: 1,2,3, B, C trains to 96th Street (two stops from Times Square on 2,3 trains). Bus: M104 up- or downtown to 94th Street; M96 crosstown to Broadway
- Price
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$11; Members $7; Seniors $9
- Links
2009. Leslie and Andrew Cockburn. US. 89 min. Color.
"TERRIFIC! A lucid and comprehensive picture of a rotten system."—The New Yorker
"Sensationally effective. You'll never hear an economist explain derivatives again without thinking of the woman who walks away from the camera, weeping, as her mortgage broker refuses her check."—New York Magazine
This documentary explains how and why over $12 trillion of our money vanished. In December of 2000, Congress passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which called for less regulation on Wall Street and, and according to a former director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, "freed Wall Street to essentially shoot itself in both feet." Eight years later, the US economy is crumbling, and trapped under its wreckage are the American homeowners and taxpayers.
Politicians love to talk about the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, but Cockburn gets to the crux of the matter, eliciting candid revelations from defectors from Bear Stearns and Standard & Poor's and other high-level players in the subprime mortgage gamble. On the flipside, she gives a voice to the minority Americans on "Main Street"–a high school teacher, a therapist, a minister–who were the unwitting chips in this high-stakes game of chance. The filmmakers cruise past rows of freshly boarded-up homes in the mostly minority neighborhoods of Baltimore and Stockton, California. Here, foreclosure and property neglect have let to the spread of drugs, crime, and disease. And lest we forget, Cockburn reminds us that it's the Main Street Americans who are now bailing our the financial institutions responsible for the fall.
