Barbarians At The Gate

This is the story about a leveraged buyout offer (LBO) of RJR Nabisco in the 1980's.   The made for television movie is important because of the hostile nature of the company's takeover.

Gasland

"It is happening all across America-rural landowners wake up one day to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. Reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas." Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground-a hydraulic drilling process called "fracking"-and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower. " Written by Sundance Film Festival

Inside the Meltdown

PBS’ great documentary about the U.S. government’s responses to the economic collapse in September of 2008.

From Brendan Wright:     Inside Job conveys the fact that large investment banks are to blame for our current economic situation. The film uses the effective metaphor of comparing the banking industry to an oil tanker. An oil tanker is compartmentalized, dividing one large pool of oil into smaller, manageable pools of oil. If the large oil pool was not divided, the ship would be at risk of capsizing or losing all of the oil should something happen. In the case of the banking industry, the economist, who provides the metaphor, that the banking industry should be divided into smaller, more manageable banks, as opposed to a few immense banks. Should these few banks fail, we would all go under. God forbid that day ever comes…

               With these few immense deregulated banks, there is ample room for error. As seen in the once model of a sound economy, Iceland experienced the consequences of deregulation before us. The deregulation led to huge borrowing, which led to a bubble. Housing prices skyrocketed and unemployment tripled as the banks went under, shortly after being upgraded to a AAA rating. Government regulators did nothing to help the people.

The United States economy took a turn down the wrong road by starting a process of deregulation. This deregulation allowed for risky investments from speculations with deposits. Banks began to consolidate with the knowledge that if they went under, they would be bailed out by the government to prevent a total economic collapse.

Inside Job

This is a commercial film narrated by Matt Damon about the reasons why the U.S. economy collapsed in September 2008.

Boiler Room

A college dropout gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm, which puts him on the fast track to success, but the job might not be as legitimate as it sounds.  (From IMDb)

Wall Street

This is one of Oliver Stone’s earliest films.   It portrays the 1980′s story of fictional Bud Fox, portaryed by Charlie Sheen, a young Wall Street stock broker seduced by the lure of fast, big money through insider trading.   Michael Douglas portrays Gordon Gekko, an iconic inside trader, who was allegorical to a Wall Street inside trade Ivan Boesky.

Maxed Out

A documentary about credit cards and what  predatory banking practices do to average Americans.

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room

A documentary about the Enron corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its fall.

Syriana

A politically-charged epic about the state of the oil industry in the hands of those personally involved and affected by it, starring George Clooney.

A Crude Awakening: the Oil Crash

OilCrash, produced and directed by award-winning European journalists and filmmakers Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack, tells the story of how our civilization’s addiction to oil puts it on a collision course with geology. Compelling, intelligent, and highly entertaining, the film visits with the world’s top experts and comes to a startling, but logical conclusion – our industrial society, built on cheap and readily available oil, must be completely re-imagined and overhauled.

The idea that the world’s oil supplies have peaked, or will soon, is gaining mainstream currency.  Robert B. Semple, Jr., associate editor of the New York Times editorial board, writes in the paper’s March 1, 2006, online edition:

 “The Age of Oil — 100-plus years of astonishing economic growth made possible by cheap, abundant oil — could be ending without our really being aware of it. Oil is a finite commodity. At some point even the vast reservoirs of Saudi Arabia will run dry. But before that happens there will come a day when oil production ‘peaks,’ when demand overtakes supply (and never looks back), resulting in large and possibly catastrophic price increases that could make today’s $60-a-barrel oil look like chump change. Unless, of course, we begin to develop substitutes for oil. Or begin to live more abstemiously. Or both. The concept of peak oil has not been widely written about. But people are talking about it now. It deserves a careful look — largely because it is almost certainly correct.”

Semple concludes: “These [are] not doomsday scenarios from conspiracy theorists, but hard scientific facts backed by serious research.”

You needn’t be a conspiracy theorist to see a connection between America’s current obsessions with the Middle East and national security, and the world’s looming oil crisis.  The frenzied search for alternative sources of energy now being pursued by the largest multinational energy corporations makes it clear they also believe a crisis is fast approaching. Each day’s headlines, whether the subject is Iraq or South America, sheds new light on the issue.” from  http://www.oilcrashmovie.com/

Food Inc.

Food Inc. This documentary focuses on the food industry.   It is an unflattering look inside America’s corporate controlled food industry.