(This post is a part of a series of documentaries I’ll be reviewing. To follow: To follow: Collapse and Food, Inc. Previous reviews: Transcendent Man and The Cove)

Hearing how a bunch of surnames and acronyms caused the world to almost collapse can be puzzling. At times, shocking. But there is worse — seeing a complete lack of repentance on the faces behind them.

In any fair justice system, these people would today be pleading bargains on their two-decade-long life sentences, reading Malcolm Gladwell in their 6x8 prison cells, and wishing that they could somehow wake up tomorrow having skipped a few parole visits. But in these moving pictures, they’re seen constructing shaky excuses to conceal conflicts. And if you look really hard, you can almost catch a glimmer of hope in some of them — the hope that something could soon lead them away from this madness, unnoticed, to their newly renovated Tuscan villa in the Hamptons.

This is what you get to see in Inside Job, the documentary film where we find out the dice were loaded, the fight was fixed, the rich get richer, and the poor stay poor. It seems that Leonard Cohen inadvertently wrote a tribute song to it some years ago.

For the most part, Inside Job is an exposition of a game.

You see, this game started with the rise of American capitalism during the 1900s. And it was all fair and good for a period of time. From the 1940s to 1980s, the country saw a steady, upwards climb. Things were regulated and tightly managed. No crisis could and would occur. People sold, bought, earned, and lost. Most importantly, everybody played by the rules, for everybody knew that is how a game is played.

And then greed stepped in.

“You want more? I’ll give it you,” it said. A man named Gecko gave a speech and praised it. We all nodded heads and shouted, “Show me the money!”.

What followed was 30 years of deregulation, rule-bending, and a rigged game of hot potato. The documentary does a far better job, but allow me to explain this to you in my own terms.

First, there were four playing:

• Financial institutions: They took our money — potatoes, if you will — and promised us that when we need it, it’d be there for us, and then some. Meanwhile, we agreed that they could pass it on, hoping that when we needed to borrow some more for something we could pay over time — say, a house — they’d give it to us if we could afford it. But of course, they didn’t want to give back the very potatoes we lent them — so they made it the next guy’s job to do it.
• Investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc.): Originally old cigar-wielding men in suits, it used to be in their interest to lend out potatoes to those they knew could pay it back. And they would damn well make sure they did, for it was, you know, their potatoes. Until they went public and decided that it’d be more fun and less risky to play with our potatoes instead, promising us that we could someday wield their cigars and wear their suits. They bought our loans, combined them into CDOs (collateral debt obligations), and — wait for it — passed it to the next guy.
• Investors: Also us. So all the potatoes we’d saved up and given to lenders or put into funds, hoping that there would be more for us in the end, was essentially being used to buy our own bad debt. We borrowed potatoes from our own backyard, but by this time, they’d been around the dirt-ridden hands of a few. And since we needed to hedge our bets to ensure that the potatoes we were lending were infact secure, we made friends with a bookie.
• Securitized insurance companies (AIG, MBIA): The bookies asked for quarterly premiums from us and gave us something in return called credit default swaps. Potato insurance. As long as our potatoes were good, we’d pay them. When they went bad, they’d bail us out. But they went a step further. Not only could we buy insurance on our potatoes, others could join in as spectators and bet against us. So, when our CDOs did badly, our spectators would pay us, and vice-versa. What was previously potato insurance was now a potato insurance party, and the main guests to this party? Investment banks. The very people who sold them to us in the first place. Looking to hedge what they sold to us — knowingly.

Of course, a game of hot potato — even a rigged one — needs its set of referees. The ones who set rules and watch over us, and make sure the potatoes aren’t dropped or swapped with onions. And our game had a couple:

• Rating agencies (Moody’s, Standard & Poors, Fitch): These guys rated potatoes, supposedly carefully examining each one after the other. A potato with a “AAA” rating was the safest, most ripe, “BBB” much less so, and so on. But instead of seeing themselves as referees or protectors, they saw their ratings as mere “opinions,” making no qualms about being unbiased. What’s worse, they even took money from us — and we paid them — to essentially assure us and everyone else that we weren’t in the risk of going wrong.
• Government officials (Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson): As far as failed referees go, you don’t get more inexcusable than these. Not only were they in charge of watching over the rules, they were in charge of setting them. If a game goes badly, can you blame a referee? If they’re the same ones who also happen to be playing the game, I think so. (Henry Paulson, in charge of the U.S. Treasury during 2006 - 2009, was previously Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. His successor, Timothy Geithner, watched it all happen as the previous president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.)

So, now you know the secret: This game was in fact no game to its players.

No one was winning or losing. Everyone was just doing what they were told to do: Pass the potato in your hand, put on a front, and watch the real game being played behind this one. A game in which all you had to do to win was to be a part of it; to pass the potato. And for being a part of this game, you were rewarded six-figure salaries, seven-figure bonuses, and, yes, Tuscan villas in the Hamptons.

The real losers? The ones who weren’t playing it at all. The rest of us. Not only did we lose the homes we were tricked into believing we could afford, we lost the savings that would later see us through.

And in revealing the players behind this rigged game to us, Inside Job succeeds. Their attitudes say they didn’t know what they were doing. They request to stop interviews. They don’t see anything wrong with a conflict of interest. They don’t feel an inch of guilt or responsibility to the 30 million who lost their jobs, and many others their homes. All they see is their failure to keep the game going for some time. They dropped the potato. But here’s the kicker: They’ve managed to pick it up, and they’ll keep playing.