Home >> United States & Canada >> Media & Internet

     Email   Print 

Oliver Stone has a poor sense of direction

Mike Spaniola - 12/10/2010

Hollywood’s Oliver Stone recent sequel release to his Wall Street in 1988 reveal his penchant, if not obsession, with hastening the financial demise of the Western world, a goal shared by his fellow travelers for more than a century.

Life imitated art recently when U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara used Stone’s signature Wall Street line recently in announcing a sweeping securities investigation. “Sometimes,” Bharara said, “greed is not good.” [1] Hear ye, hear ye! But let’s put that in perspective, as Eric Hoffer did in 1951 in his acclaimed book, The True Believer. “The monstrous evils of the 20th century have shown us that the greediest money grubbers are gentle doves compared with money-hating wolves like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, who in less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a hundred million men, women and children and brought untold suffering to a large portion of mankind,” Hoffer wrote. [2]

One could say that people such as Michael Moore, Stone and Bharara – to name just a very few – see Gordon Gekko hiding behind every trading desk.

Stone’s sense of direction was off by approximately 1,000 miles to the west of Wall Street, a place made synonymous with for evil and greed by Stone and comrades. But the tail that often wags the big dog is the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). Imagine that: the city that gave us Capone, Alinsky, Ayers, Obama, Daley and Durbin is home to an exchange that can regularly roil the markets, stick it to average investors and blame it all on capitalism, free enterprise and the investment community in general.

Stone should have titled his two movies, South LaSalle Street, the location of The Chicago Board Options Exchange, which trades U.S. options on more than 2,200 companies, 22 stock indices and 140 exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The CBOE set up shop in 1973, and was the first exchange to list standardized, exchange-traded stock options, and is a part of the Chicago Board of Trade. [3] Of course, CBOE proponents will say the exchange merely provides a means of hedging risk. That’s what they said about heavy short-sales speculation that played a large role in The Crash of 1929.

Tantamount to short sales on steroids, the leverage of options and futures contracts used in a concerted manner can wreak financial havoc quickly. In fact, Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas in Stone’s Wall Street, is portrayed buying and selling option contracts. George Soros operates one of the larger hedge funds in the world, called The Quantum Fund. Soros is much more than Gordon Gecko in the flesh; he is the real-life version of every megalomaniac James Bond villain: intent on taking over the world and remaking it in his own image. In all such cases and with all such demagogues, the Western world is Enemy No. 1 and has to be dispatched post haste.

Consider that Stone’s original Wall Street movie opens with footage shot from a helicopter of the upper floors and rooftops of the now-defunct World Trade Center buildings. Stone’s contempt for the buildings were clear in his use and edits of the shots. This was 1987, six years before the first attempt to level the buildings with explosive devices placed in the basement of the North Tower and the tragedy in 2001 occurred.

The Wall Street films also present Stone as an advocate for the little guy, but hedge fund managers and cronies have traded in virtual regulatory anonymity unlike overregulated and federally burdened mutual fund managers.

South LaSalle Street now benefits from exchange traded funds, or ETFs, that use derivative products to create funds that trade like stocks and that can be leveraged up to three times an underlying index. Unlike standard CBOE equity contracts, ETFs don’t have expiration dates. All in all, ETFs are like applying a fresh coat of paint on that lemon of a car you’ve been trying to sell once the word’s gotten out.

People like Stone convince us that capitalism and all but Democrats are to blame. But “Democrats have specialized in insulating financial giants from the consequences of their own high-risk bets. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs alone have been rescued from their risky bets by unwitting taxpayers four times in the last 15 years. Bankers get all the profits, glory and bonuses when their flimflam bets pay off, but the taxpayers foot the bill when Wall Street firms’ bets go bad.” [4]

Mike Spaniola writes political commentary that seeks to counter the oxymoron known as mainstream media. He lives in central Colorado.

Citations