Please welcome Alex Gibney!
(applause and cheering)
Welcome to the show.
Thank you. A pleasure to be here.
I have such a strange relationship with your work,
because I'm a huge fan of what you do,
but it always makes me feel
like the world is not worth living in.
-(laughs) -You created the documentary,
um, Going Clear, which I know a lot of people loved,
-about Scientology. -Yes.
Uh, you've worked on this new series, Dirty Money.
-What is it all about? -Dirty Money is all
about corporate crime.
And at moment when our president says it's...
it'd be good to deregulate everything having to do
with, uh, corporate activity,
this shows you what might happen
if that were to come to pass.
-And indeed, these are real stories, so... -Right. You look
at some of the stories...
I mean, we can kick it off with the first episode,
which, uh, you not only created, but also directed.
It's a story of VW, the emissions scandal, right.
Everyone has now learned of VW coming out,
you know, and figuring out a way to trick the emissions test,
but you broke the story
that they were using monkeys to experiment on.
I didn't even know that car manufacturers had monkeys,
-first of all. -(laughs)
And what were they actually doing with these experiments?
Well, what they were doing-- and it was VW,
and actually Mercedes and BMW-- they set up a...
kind of a fake non-profit to try to prove
that diesel exhaust was good for you, or wasn't bad for you.
And so, they set up a scientific test in New Mexico,
and originally, as you saw from the clip,
they were gonna test it on human beings.
And then they thought...
Somebody at VW America thought, "Well, you know,
"this was a company that was jumpstarted by Hitler.
"Maybe that... the optics of that aren't so good--
-that we're gassing human beings." -Right, right, right.
-Yeah, yeah, gassing the people. Yeah. -Just saying.
Yeah. Um, so...
I like that there was just one person who said that.
-"Should I, uh, speak up? Just me?" -"Excuse me." Yeah.
-(laughter) -But interestingly, it didn't stop there.
Instead of saying,
"Right. Forget it. Going back to the drawing board,"
they said, "Ah, we've got an idea."
"Okay, humans-- maybe that's no good.
How about NHPs?"
And somebody said, "Well, what are NHPs?"
"Non Human Primates."
And so, what they did was, they got monkeys,
and they put them in, um, plastic, clear plastic boxes.
They made them watch cartoons,
and they piped diesel exhaust into those boxes.
Uh, and then the tested them.
They scraped their lungs afterwards
to see what had happened to them.
It's horrifying.
And they were doing it in order to be able to prove
that diesel exhaust was good for you.
It's like the cigarette companies trying to prove
that cigarette smoke is good for you.
So now we find out this story, it becomes big news.
I mean, now The New York Times
is reporting on this story as well.
I'm watching this documentary of yours, and I'm going,
"What happens, though?" Because it feels like
the company pays a fine-- I think VW's was $26 billion?
-Yeah. -And then it all seems to go away.
Now, I would say, in VW's case,
some executives are going to jail.
One guy's going to jail for ten years.
There's another guy, I believe he's going to...
going to jail for seven years.
But what hasn't happened yet, uh, is...
they haven't gone up the chain.
And at a company like VW, there's just no question
-that the people at the top knew what was happening. -Right.
Not only with the monkeys, but also with this cheating scandal.
'Cause the cheating is not just cheating.
These emissions, you know, they were... the cars were disgorging
50 times the allowable limit of nitrogen oxide.
And that stuff is terrible.
My daughter has asthma, and it was, um...
I saw her collapse in front of me on a soccer field
because she couldn't get enough oxygen.
We think that she got that condition
in part by living in Southern California,
-breathing in NOx fumes. -Right.
So when you're disgorging
50 times the amount of allowable pollution,
it's really concerning.
And in fact, we discovered in the course of doing this film
that as a result of nitrogen oxide pollution,
there are over 10,000 premature deaths a year in Europe.
So this... these have life-and-death consequences.
You talk about the people at the top
not facing the consequences,
you talk about some people maybe going to jail,
but there's another part of the series
where you examine the banks, HSBC, specifically,
-Yes. -who were found to be helping Mexican drug cartels
launder their money.
Now, what's particularly infuriating about this is
not only do they find them guilty--
HSBC seems like they don't really care about it,
they're really arrogant in the way they handle it,
and then they want to pay the fine and move on--
and now the Department of Justice is dropping the charges?
Indeed. They're moving on. And nobody at HSBC
has been prosecuted for that.
It's appalling.
And it's really frustrating-- in the film,
which is terribly well directed
by a woman named Kristi Jacobson,
you see prosecutors
and all sorts of journalists and so forth saying:
You've got them red-handed. You know, prosecute them.
And then clearly, the people at the Department of Justice
decided they were too big to jail.
That's the appalling thing in terms of white-collar crime.
You know, we'll put somebody into jail for ten years
-for stealing a TV set. -Right.
But steal $500 million, and you get a new private jet.
So what you're saying is, people need to steal more things
-to not go to jail. -Correct.
-(laughter) -Now... now you're catching on.
Okay, okay. How does the administration respond to this?
Because let's say somebody like Donald Trump,
and he's come in with a very tough "no on crime,"
and "we're gonna stop the drugs" and "we're gonna..."
But you could argue that without these banks,
many of these drug cartels don't have, uh...
the power that they... that they have right now.
Because if they don't... if they can't transport their money,
if they can't buy weapons, if they can't move things around,
then they just don't have the same ability.
You would think that the administration
-would be going after them the hardest. -You would think.
But those are big businessmen
who provide campaign contributions.
And as Lindsey Graham reminded us recently,
you know, it's all about those campaign contributors.
That's who they're doing this for.
You know, it's interesting, in the Trump administration...
just announced its new budget
for the Consumer Protection Bureau.
-Right. -You know what the budget is?
I'm gonna say less than it should be?
-Zero. -Zero's less than it should be.
Yeah, zero's not very much for consumer protection.
Which means they don't care about it.
-Correct. -And so we live in a world now
where the bankers now wait for the next group of people
-that they can do the same thing with. -Indeed.
And this is why I say you make me hate life.
Oh, but there's got to be some good news, I'm sure there is.
Well, the good news is, you make the shows
that expose the people, and then hopefully because of that,
the people are shamed into doing something about it.
So thank you very much for being on the show.
-Thank you very much. -Pleasure. Really appreciate it.
Dirty Money is available now on Netflix.
Alex Gibney, everybody.