By Lu Schilling

Inside Job will be screened February 21 at 4:30 pm at the Fellowship. The film exposes the shocking truth behind the economic meltdown of 2008, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians, and journalists, Inside Job traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships that have corrupted politics, regulation, and academia.

Filmmaker Charles Ferguson gives an unflinching look at some deep-rooted deceptions and shines a light where our focus is needed for enlightenment.  Narrated by Matt Damon, Ferguson begins and ends in Iceland, a flourishing country that gave American-style banking a try–and paid the price. Then he looks at the spectacular rise and cataclysmic fall of deregulation in the United States.  Ferguson builds his narrative around dozens of players, interviewing authors, bank managers, government ministers, and even a psychotherapist, who speaks to a culture that encourages “greed-is-good” behavior. The number of those who declined to comment, like Alan Greenspan, is even larger. Though the director isn’t as combative as Michael Moore, he asks tough questions and elicits squirms from several participants, notably former Treasury secretary David McCormick and Columbia dean Glenn Hubbard, George W. Bush’s economic adviser. Their reactions are understandable, since the borders between Wall Street, Washington, and the Ivy League dissolved years ago; it’s hard to know whom to trust when conflict-of-interest runs rampant. If Ferguson takes Reagan and Bush to task for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, he criticizes Clinton for encouraging derivatives and Obama for failing to deliver on the promise of reform.