20 years of the british house of commons. after that, another chance to hear chairman bernanke's remarks in atlanta. . . >> leslie cockburn, when did you first think about doing the documentary, "american casino.?"

>> back in 2008. we were watching the market very closely after what happened in 2007. you had a mini-crash and hedge funds disappeared. by that time, you had, on the courthouse steps in any city around here, you had houses being auctioned once every three minutes. we could see at that point that the one important -- first of all, boast of a spot that this could be as important as 1929. i had just been reading the book on 1929 and andrew's father cover the crash of 1929. we could see the rumblings and thought that we'd better jump on this now. with a documentary like this, we

to tie together what was happening in baltimore with wall street. >> after you got the idea, what did you do next? >> we started talking to people. what we do as journalists is we are trained to get in touch with the subject very quickly. we started to look around to see who was doing interesting reporting about this. we came across mark pittman and bloomberg -- at bloomberg. we also went to baltimore to see what was happening on the ground. serendipitously, which started to meet people who ended up in our film -- which started to me people who ended up in our film. -- we started to meet people who ended up in our town. -- our film.

to meet the ordinary mainstream bar were. we went to places like foreclosure workshops with people who were wrestling with how to get out of the situations. we really started to get into this subject. even at that stage, which was january 2008, the memory i have was how terrified people were on wall street. people were talking in very apocalyptic terms. one of the big banks told me that he is sitting there looking at his six screens and

it looks like armageddon. this had not yet made it to the front pages of the papers. >> where do you find money for something like this? >> investors. fortunately, documentaries like this are not that expensive to make. i have been making documentaries for 30 years. i know how to make something without spending too much money. it is really about editing as much as possible in the camera. we had the camera people that worked on it and they were people we had worked with for many years. week ended did -- we edited and with a production house. there are ways to do things without spending at a lot of money. there are a number of places to go to find people who will put

in relatively small amounts of money. we are not talking about a multimillion-dollar project. this is less than a million dollars. >> who did you want to see it? >> we wanted several clauses of people. we wanted people to see it that were experiencing this nightmare. whoever caused this, it was not necessarily people who have gotten themselves into debt. there is a strain of thought in this country that it is somehow the victim's fault. people took out loans that they could not afford. they got what was coming to them. we wanted to show people that were in that situation that there were lots of people like them and maybe they had been unwise, but they had not been wicked by getting into this kind of trouble.

i guess, beyond that, we wanted everybody to see it. mark pittman called us and said this was a hundred years storm. everyone wants to know what happened. suddenly, there we were rolling merrily along in the economy is looking good and unemployment is under 5%. then, we are over a cliff. we wanted to show people that. >> there is a lot of shots in the opening of the boards in new york. we will not show that. when i saw it, i saw the political point. let's watch that. it is a couple of minutes and we will come back and explain why you chose this. >> this is a mental recession.

we've never had more natural advantages than we have today. we have sort of become a nation of whiners. >> to understand why this is like a gambling casino, you have to understand what is at stake here. on december 15, 2000, phil gramm walked to the floor of the senate and introduce a 262 page bill as a writer arider len appropriations -- a rider to an appropriations bill. that led to the heart of this meltdown.

he not only excluded them from federal regulation, but he excluded them from state regulation as well, which is important because these instruments could be viewed it to be gambling instruments where you are betting on whether people will or will not pay off their loans. he announced that this measure would be a boon to the american economy and a boon to wall street because it would be free of any supervision in this regard. >> too many american families do not own a home. there is a home ownership gap in america. the difference between an all- america and african-american and hispanic home ownership is too big.

we have to address this. by the year 2010, we must increase minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million. >> is this where you thought to politics started -- bought the politics started? >> wiig shows phil gramm -- there were a lot of things that happened, but the legislation in december of 2000 was the big one. it basically said that you could not outlaw derivatives. if you read it, it protects these derivatives and allowed them to just ballooned beyond control. phil gramm was instrumental in that.

you will remember michael green berger who is now a lawyer and a professor, he was a regulator. he was on the commodity futures trading commission. as early as 1998, he would have liked to outlaw these kinds of derivatives that have gotten us into some much trouble. he said that that point was the critical moment and that phil gramm was the person that pushed that through. >> were to happen to get that video -- where did you happen to get that video? >> he is enjoying his reward as vice-chairman of the union bank of switzerland. he is still a very powerful person in texas politics. >> if you go back to that time,

he did not do this in a vacuum. did that go through that conference? -- at conference? >> it had been discussed and it failed. it was a separate bill and it had not gone through. what phil gramm did was to attack it on to an appropriations bill on december 15, 2000. everyone was wanting to go home for christmas. clinton signed it and tack it onto an 11,000 page bill. how many people actually read it? there is a speech by gramm introducing the bill. i went to your excellent organization to get the tape and

your researchers tried to find the tape and said that there was no tape because he did not actually give that speech. it was inserted into the record afterwards. this momentous piece of legislation wasn't even spoken in the senate. >> for the record, this is the first time i knew you came to our organization. go back to the george bush clip. that was at george washington university? >> actually, he made that exact same speech again and again and again in 2002, which was very interesting. you could look at it runway -- at it one way and it could be that he was anxious for minorities to have decent

housing or you could save i wonder what forces were in play in 2002 to give him to say this. if you look at it from wall street, in 2002, that was a critical time. it was just about that time that the smart people on wall street decided that instead of being so diversified in the securities, why not just love them up with subprime loans? they started pouring subprime loans into these products in such large numbers that it made them much more vulnerable to explosion. >> what were the democrats doing about the idea of subprime mortgages? >> not enough. it is fair to say that no one was raising alarms.

i think she'll bear -- she loved their -- i think one woman was raising concerns by 2004. apart from some people on wall street that started to bet against subprime loans in, no one really raised the alarm. >> in this next clip, mark pittman is a part of it. also david adasani, a mortgage broker. where did you find the mortgage broker? >> he was not a mortgage broker. he worked on wall street for a number of firms and he asked me

not to mention the various firms, but they would all be extremely familiar to you. some of them no longer existed by the time we went to see him. >> he was marketing these mortgages bundled into bonds and he was selling the securities to other banks. buc>> i worked for four companis on wall street and three of them do not exist anymore. nothing is permanent in life. my grandfather worked for the same company for 25 years. nothing is permanent anymore. these m stock market could go south. it is the way americans live.

i don't take any responsibility for this mess at all. >> it really started getting he did in 2004-2005. -- key in 2004-2005 -- heated in 2004-2005. that may be others more valuable. when you have that much cash flow, you can siphon off a whole lot more fees. it is all about money. >> why did she go to him? >> when you try to explain this stuff in a film, you want to take it slowly and mark was very good at explaining how these things worked. he talks about when the whole

subprime market started heating up and it may -- he makes this very important point. a lot of people do not even know what subprime means you get more money. the guys on wall street make more money out of subprime loans. he introduced the idea of the fees which are extremely important. everything on wall street is speed based -- fee based. they wanted to do more and more and more because the fees were so good. mark is one of the best -- unfortunately, at the age of 52, he had a heart attack. he was one of the great financial reporters of our time. i also felt that mark was from

kansas city. he has a real presence and he is an all-american guy and he is a populist and that he loved covering a wall street, but he wanted the rules to be fair? >> was a surprise that he died of a heart attack? >> it was a terrible shock when we suddenly heard he had gone. he had been so much a part of our lives. when we were making the film and after the film, he was very supportive and always ready to explain to people. he really wanted ordinary people to understand this, that this huge event was very

complicated and he wanted people to know what had happened. >> i saw it in a theater in washington. can you see it around in country? can you by the dvd? >> it has been on a theatrical run for 2.5 months. it just opened at a film festival in amsterdam. you can buy the dvd on our website. americancasinothemovie.com. >> what makes this a success? >> one that we like best is when people say that they understand. they did not understand why the economy spun out of control or what happened on wall street. they see the film and

understand. >> when this film first open, it was at the tribeca film festival in the spring. we had a three screens and they were packed with wall street people -- they had three screenings and they were packed with wall street people. these guys stood up and started talking to each other and they gave them the first opportunity to really -- they were right -- they were yelling at each other. it was quite lively. it was exciting to see why street reacted this. it was the first time a lot of those people understood what a fact they have on people's lives. -- what the fact they have on people's lives. -- what the fact they have on people's lives. >> -- what effect they have on

people's lives. >> the agencies would not run their own. when they raidted a deal, the investment bank would run the entire model for them and give them the results and the results would go to the agency. analyst would take it to committee and would eventually agree on the rating. >> how do you know this? >> because i worked at an investment bank that was running the models for them. >> i was requested by the head of the cdo group to put some ratings on some bonds, but we did not have any information.

we had not read the illegals. we rode back and said that higour criteria requires that we have the tape and we have illegals. they wrote back and said that we need to just guests and put a rating on it. that was clearly a violation of our ethics. i told them i would not do it. >> what is the importance of this? >> the ratings agencies -- he was in charge of all mortgage backed securities . they were crucial to the whole system and to the disaster because they were the ones that said that this investment could be rated aaa which means it is

super safe and will never go broke or aa or double be. -- or bb. from what frank is saying in the anonymous banker was saying, there is essential function was to take -- their essential function was to take subprime mortgages which are not so creditworthy and basically, through the magic of securitization, they would say that they were aaa. they basically took garbage and spray paint and it -- spray- painted it with gold paint. it was garbage and was presented as gold. that is why we have had such a huge disaster.

beans were assigned false readings -- things were assigned false readingatings. they were being paid by the investment banks to give these ratings but then the investment banks were given the ratings. the big three, standard and poor and then fitch. >> go back to that in thiinvestt banker in silhouette. can you tell me what that is behind him? >> i will not say. there is nothing distorted there.

his voice is distorted and he is dark. >> how did you find him? >> vet took a long time. -- that took a long time. we spent months talking to more and more people on wall street. you meet one person and they say that they want to introduce it to somebody. it was important to us to meet the guys that were at the heart of the business of making these collateralized debt obligations that blew up in everybody's face. we had many meetings with groups of these people from different banks. this person actually was at bear stearns. he was very brilliant at what he did. i do not want to say too much more about him except that he represents a group of people

that understood these securitized of vehicles. the problem for wall street people in going on camera is that they have deferred compensation rules. eastview went on camera, you could lose millions of dollars in compensation. you kind of sign away your life when you take one of these jobs. you agree to a lot of things that make it very difficult to go public. you rarely get to hear the bankers talk the way bankers talk to each other. we could not have made this film without him because he is the heart of the matter. there is a moment, later on, when he actually takes you through how you make a cbdo. from that moment, the audience

understands the incredible scam of making these things that were packed with 1.5 million subprime loans that were rated aaa and sold off to korean bankers. the ratings agencies have this inherent conflict of interest. the big three, you have the government saying that it is a stamp of approval. they are acting as regulators, but they are paid by the investment bank's. the guys in career or germany -- in korea or germany would not buy something that did not have a aaa rating. the ratings executive said if it

had been tightened up, this whole thing would not have happened. right now, they are not being regulated. the relationship with the banks is still the same. the only thing that you see is that there are a couple of dozen suits around the country. >> go back to that tribeca film festival in new york city were you showed this three times and there was the discussions that broke out afterwards. were you in the audience? >> it started by people asking us questions. the house was basically full wall street people. pretty soon, someone else would jump up and say that it was your fault, not ours.

it turned in miinto this mess. >> did anybody blame you? >> no, in a way, they were pleased how we laid the whole thing out. this was a foreigum where they could have their say. >> attitude how did you to divip responsibilities -- two/possibilities. >> who wrote the script? >> leslie. there is not much of a script to this film. it is just people talking. we have no narration. when you see the writing on the cards, is deliberately very dry and very straightforward.

it is not a script that is pulling you through the film, it is the people that are pulling you through the phone. i would say that there really is not a script at all. it is laid out so that one person follows the last person. >> come much of the music is the original? >> andrew found the original music. >> we were spending time in baltimore and baltimore is a very musical city. i suddenly thought that maybe people are doing music about this. we had other tracks of bruce springsteen. we went to baltimore and ask around. we passed what the chances were of getting some current street

music about foreclosure and mortgages. we got 60 tracks presented to us and we used 3. they were just these kids, a group of three young people from age 11-14 who got together at an after-school program and recorded a heartbreaking song called "losing my home." >> let's run that so we can see what we are talking about.

♪ >> again, how old are those kids? >> at that time, a 11-14. >> who wrote the song? >> they did. a lady helped them, but it was their idea and they come posted in it was based on personal experience. >> those numbers that we receive on the screen or what? >> they were the numbers -- are what? >> those were the members of the total bailout that has been given to the banks by the

treasury and the federal reserve. it did numbers are enormous. we have heard a lot about the $700 billion program. that is often spoken of as the sum total, but as you can see from here, it is a lot more than that. the total commitment was 12 trillion dollars. four trillion has been spent so far. most people do not realize how much of our money and our credit as american citizens has been invested in shoring up wall street? >> how hard was it to get these figures? >> we got these figures from mark pittman and others from bloomberg. he decided that he wanted to do his own figures. he wanted to check it out for himself.

the two of them did it twice. and they did it in january when it was eight trillion and by march it was 12 trillion. now it is obviously higher. >> make a little bit of a transition here. we saw one fellow earlier and then we moved to the baltimore st.. >> some people ask what i think caused all this. i always say that it comes down to greed. >> ♪ this place was a house

what we called home with those of problems -- with those subprime loans ♪ >> i just and it is immoral for there to be such a huge boom around the housing industry. a lot of people made a lot of money. now, all of those people that bought during that time are losing their homes. i teach about human rights issues and social justice issues. i have been considering talking with my students about the mortgage crisis and what that does. there is a loss of security. it is terrible.

>> $37,889, first and final call. >> that was on the steps of what? >> the courthouse steps in baltimore. any day of the week, at that time, you can see these guys on the steps, selling these houses. it is a very long list every morning. we went to the options and simply drove around baltimore with our cameras, go into these different addresses. on the first day that we did it, one of the first houses we went to was the house that belonged to the high school teacher that had just been auctioned with the

caveat that it be affected with a bankruptcy filing. he had just come from filing for bankruptcy and he was loading up all the boxes. he was in complete shock. that is how we found him. he is incredibly articulate and it is a very interesting case because we were able to track his mortgage all the way into are securitized product at goldn sachs. >> how did you find the reverend? >> we found her through word-of- mouth in baltimore. someone said there was this minister of the church who was living in her car.

we were particularly interested because people say that people got into trouble because they took out loans that they could not afford. the wanted to buy a bigger and better house. she was one of the many people who lost their homes and on the house free and clear. she took out a loan on the house because she wanted to make some improvements. she borrowed $28,000. she says, in the film, her lot -- her life is destroyed and she is living in a car. it is hard to believe that all this happen because of $20,000. >> here is a little bit from the rev.. >> right now, i live my life in pain and i am depressed because i miss my home.

it is hard to read it is a struggle. it is devastating. it is upsetting. it is unbelievable, but in israel. i do not have a home anymore and i will never forget this as long as i live. this is the house that i grew up in most of my life. i came here in 1961 with my mother and my father. i have been here a lifetime. i went to school here. we used to have a church next door and the neighborhood was home. i wanted to do an assisted living here. i wanted to help people. the property was not in the proper condition that it needed to be, so i was advised to take equity out of the property and do alone and start my -- it do a loan. this was all lost over $28,000.

i was on a fixed income. they got to be too much. wells fargo was the mortgage servicer and that is to service my loan and who i got my loan from. at the time, i did not know all the ins and out of mortgages. the settlement was really fast. you're trusting your mortgage broker. you're trusting the bank. what else can you do? you really do not have a clue. you just have someone said they will finance you. yes, you are approved. >> what would happen today she went in for a loan? >has anything changed? >> she would not get a loan at this point.

it is much tougher to get a loan these days. she should not have been given a loan at that point. she knows that now. >> what happened to her church? >> the church is gone. she is not functioning as a minister, now. she is basically survive in. that loan was for 7.5%. it had the possibility of rising to almost 13%. >> 13% with a rise every six months. >> how much of this is our responsibility? >> we explore that to someone in the film. in the film, you meet the community lawyer.

both of them are very smart lawyers and they say that smart lawyers do not understand all of the jargon in these loans and loans were all tied to all kinds of fancy numbers. it was very individually tailored. even if you read one of them all the way through, you would not necessarily know what the next one was going to be like. i have not run into a human being who has read every single document before they sign. robert points out that it got so lax that people were being signed up for mortgages on the hood of their car. it would be done late in the afternoon, when people had to pick up their kids from day care. they would be penalized

monetarily if they did not pick them up on time. you have a half an hour, you sign the documents, and what happened in baltimore, they would get to the signing in the numbers were different. this happened at 2 diggs 0 mitchell -- to do adenzdenzell mitchel. there was a real slight of hand going on. >> in the next clip, we will see the mayor of baltimore who has been convicted of one count. her name is sheila dixon.

let's watch this. >> you have people that are homeless, looking for a place to live. an unoccupied house is a house that gets broken into. they take over the house and they start renting rooms. they start their own business on a house that somebody else has left. >> baltimore was primed for investors. investors come in and they see an opportunity and they grab a property and start doing some rehab and try to sell it to somebody. investors are in business to make money. they want a return on their investment. do they care if the person can hold onto the home for the long haul? probably not. once the property is sold, they are gone. the record reflects that this is part of a foreclosure as well.

>> when you have to put additional revenue in a neighborhood by boarding up homes, it takes away revenue that you could use to reach stabilize an area. it is costing us with additional police, fire, resources coming out of housing and community development. >> had she been indicted when you interview her? >> no -- interviewed her? >> no. she has not been sentenced. whether she will step down is not clear.

but i have to say that whether or not she was convicted or anything, any mayor in america would have said what she said. this crisis has had this incredible municipal effect on the city'ies. you have a huge problem with abandoned property. in baltimore and other cities, but are trying to force the -- they are trying to force the banks to least maintain them -- to at least maintain them. it costs them huge amounts to look after these houses. they try to deal with squatters that move in.

what we are trying to explain in that segment is that this is not just something that happens to an individual homeowner. what it has done his impact whole cities -- is impact whole cities. when that went into foreclosure, the peiping setback -- the bank takes a bacit back. everyone else's house values go down. they are paying more -- of their mortgage is more than the value of their house. it is having a huge effect on american cities. >> if viewers want to watch the

whole documentary, you can buy it from your web site. and does it bother you when you see us chop up your documentary because you are setting a mood? how long is it? >> it is 89 minutes. it is regular feature length. it is actually a fascinating to see what you had chosen -- actually fascinating to see where you had chosen -- what you had chosen. >> there are sections of it that are self-contained. >> i know that members are sensitive, but can you give us a range of what this cost? >> i am not sure what other people would spend on something like this. i suspect that we spend less because when you have been making films for a long time,

you have a ratio that maybe 50- watt or 20-1 in terms of the hours that you shoot. >> documentary's cost somewhere between $500,000.999999 dollars? >> for some people, it could go from a quarter of a million to $2.5 million. if you have a big staff and a lot of people and you are running around the world in shooting a lot, you can really -- in shooting a lot -- a l lot, you can really racking up.

>> of all the days that we shot, i think there was one day that we did not use something. everything got used. >> in the edit room, people could spend months if not years in the edit room. we were moving along at the sort of pace that we have to move if we are working with front line or 60 minutes where you have a deadline? we added a couple of things. we finished in february and in march, one of the people we focused on in baltimore that was in the process of foreclosure, they lost their home and so we added it to the film.

in august we added some figures to make sure all the figures were correct. >> i would like to go back and get video from when we first met, and that was on "the book notes" in september that year. >> we met in london. we met at a club called zanzibar. at the time, i was finishing graduate school. i had a started working at nbc news. >> where is home? >> san francisco. >> what is your relationship? >> well, we are married and we

work together and make films together and we write books together so it is a very close relationship. >> what other books have you written? >> this is our first together. i wrote a book called "out of control." it was about covert operations. >> where were you from originally? >> i was from ireland. >> amended to leave there? >> life was interesting. in the early years, we did not have a car or a telephone and so we went everywhere by force. -- by horse. we communicated by telegram.

it is a perfectly viable way to live. i left there when i was 17 and went to london. >> how many books and documentary'ies have you done since 1991? >> three or four books. >> your daughters are about to him or seven. >> one of them is an actress. people would have seen her on "house." she also does movies.

another daughter is a lawyer and she is doing work at the aclu. >> we always ask you about your brother. >> he is at home in england. he is deciding whether to return to kabul or baghdad. >> alexander? >> alexander is living in california. he is engaged in ever more interesting projects on his house. >> you have a little wraps on in a hearing situation. this is only a minute or so. let's run this and then we will wrap it up.

>> this morning, we meet on actions regarding investment banks and other financial institutions. ♪ ♪ >> the video, you must have gone

over that idea because you were out in a normal position. >> actually, no, it did not work that way. the boy shot before the idea happened. that music, you might want to say how we ended up with that music. >> that was written in 1982. we heard about it from former traders from bear stearns and there were playing of that in the bear stearns trading room. it is very eloquent. >> in 60 seconds, what did you learn? you better go first.

>> the most important is when they tell you that things are too complicated for you to understand. that is not to. -- not true. it is very simple. >> i think that what i learned is having spent so much of my life covering stories overseas and post apocalyptic scenes in somalia or afghanistan, what amazed me was how much damage could be done right here at home it was really an eye opener for me to see all the destruction and just how bad it can get. >> the web site is

americancasinothemovie.com. we will run these credits again so we can see those numbers. >> thank you. ♪

♪ ♪ >> we will replace this tonight at 1015 eastern here on c-span.