Search - Ripped Off: Madoff and the Scamming of America on DVD

We Set The Stage... Now Enters Bernie!

Doctor A. | San Diego, CA United States | 09/01/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A fact-based overview of the quintessential Ponzi scheme. Madoff is a con artist to be sure, but he is only the tip of a glacial mass on Wall Street. Since Reagan, the waves of federal deregulation and the ill-conceived withdrawal of oversight and transparency literally created an incubation chamber for greed and abuse. The casino capitalism of Bush/Cheney opened the gates to outright fraud and rampant corruption.

Corporations were seduced into turning accounting upside-down. Projected revenues became reported income, massive debt became corporate assets, legitimate stocks became credit default swaps... go figure? If we look back not that many years, Enron, Tyco and WorldCom were simply the prelude to Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, Fannie, Freddie, AIG -- and Madoff. Gordon Gecko's "greed is good" soliloquy (from the movie Wall Street) was indeed prescient and emblematic of these times.

Sadly, America has become a nation that knows the price of everything... and the value of nothing. From corporate debt that is reported as assets, to fantasy home mortgages that are expected to default, to the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless" mentality that is so widely promoted by the media and embraced by the public, it is abundantly obvious that this nation has lost it's moral compass. To quote Justice Louis Brandeis, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
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Half Decent

Adrian D Saville | Bryanston, South Africa | 08/25/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This is a reasonable account of Bernie Madoff's scamming of American investors. The story is told in an entertaining way and is watchable. However, what it has in terms of watchability it loses in terms of fire power. The production is thin and tends to be based on surface evidence. At the end of the movie I am left wondering: "How did he do this? Did he ever generate real returns? Did a legitimate business somehow morph into a fraudulent entity? What happened in the court case? What were the arguments? Who delivered the knockout punches? What about the clowns at the SEC? How will they be held accountable?" Greater rigour would have turned this movie into a decent documentary. Still, the show is watchable."