…The “Bamboozle” or “Fraudster” Flick Long a favorite Hollywood category, these movies take a major Ponzi scheme or financial industry swindle and give the audience a meaningful back-story. “American Greed” is the story of Samuel Israel’s $450 million hedge fund swindle. “The Madoff Affair” is an account of Bernie Madoff’s $60 billion Ponzi scheme. That’s topped by “Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room,” about the $63.4 billion dollar collapse of Enron. In times of widespread financial fraud, such movies provide Americans the relief of Schadenfreude. There is comfort knowing that despite the horrible losses, at least a guilty party finally paid for his crimes.
The documentary movie in this genre I would like to pitch is called “The AIPAC Job: Undercutting American Industry for Israel.” It would reveal the true story of how an Israeli minister of economics stole the trade secrets of 70 American labor and industry organizations and gave them to Israel’s top U.S. lobbying organization in order to undermine justified industry opposition to unilateral trade concessions to Israel in 1984. In this category, numbers matter. Through May of 2013, the total losses to American industry via the AIPAC action shift in trade patterns has cost $100 billion in deficits—more than any other in the bamboozle genre…
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