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Meltdown

By: David Sirota, Dan O’Donnell, Shoshi Shmuluvitz, Kiarra Powell
Narrated by: David Sirota
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Economics Politics & Government
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Episodes
  • Meltdown Trailer

    Meltdown Trailer
    Oct 14 2021

    Listen to the trailer now and the full podcast on 10/28.

    How did we end up in this version of America, with neighbors divided against neighbors, and some citizens angry enough to storm the U.S. Capitol?

    The 2008 financial crisis - and the government’s botched, multibillion-dollar bailout - is the skeleton key that unlocks almost every big thing that’s gone wrong in America in the 21st Century, from climate change, to the all-out assault on democracy, to the rise of white nationalism.

    In this thrilling, 8-part podcast, investigative journalist David Sirota explores why the financial crisis happened, how the bailout went so wrong, why politicians covered up Wall Street’s crimes and what the lasting impact of the meltdown was on America’s political, social and economic fabric.

    This is an epic adventure, a search for answers that stretches from Bogotá, Colombia to Madison, Wisc., to Washington, D.C. Sirota talks to politicians who made the laws, the investigators who uncovered massive fraud and ordinary people who lost homes, families and livelihoods, in order to shed light on why the economic disaster happened, why nobody succeeded in fixing it, and why the country soon embraced the politics of rage.

    Meltdown is the first collaboration between Audible, a leading producer and provider of original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks, and Jigsaw Productions, the production house launched and helmed by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) in collaboration with Transmitter Media, the Peabody-nominated and Webby-winning production company behind podcasts such as Finding Fred, Work Life with Adam Grant and Tabloid: The Making of Ivanka Trump.

    Meltdown is enraging and engaging, must-listen audio entertainment for anyone who wants to know how we ended up where we are now - and where we might be going next.
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    2 mins
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  • Episode 1 -The Big Heist

    Episode 1 -The Big Heist
    Oct 28 2021
    The 2008 Meltdown was a pivotal moment in modern history, as harmful to America as the Moon Landing was inspirational. But the government responded in a much different way than President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the Great Depression - and here’s why that failed response was even more disastrous than the crisis itself.
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    54 mins
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  • Episode 2 - The Rant Heard Round the World

    Episode 2 - The Rant Heard Round the World
    Oct 28 2021
    CNBC pundit Rick Santelli's on-air rant helped give birth to a new movement and channeled a deluge of bitter hate towards the average homeowner. How did something as simple as taking out a loan to buy a house turn the American Dream into an American Nightmare?
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    49 mins
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Jigsaw Productions
Alex Gibney
Transmitter Media

About the Executive Producer

Jigsaw Productions is helmed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, considered one of the most prolific and thought-provoking documentary filmmakers of our generation. Jigsaw has produced some of the most acclaimed documentary films, including Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, which won three Emmy awards, a DuPont Columbia Award, and a WGA Award, and was one of the most watched documentaries in HBO’s history; the Oscar- and Emmy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side; the Oscar®-nominated “ nron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; the multiple Emmy Award-winning Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God; Showtime’s Emmy Award-winning History of the Eagles; the controversial We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks; the provocative film about Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace, The Armstrong Lie; and Client 9, the in-depth look at the rapid rise and dramatic fall of former New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer. Jigsaw releases from the past several years include the Peabody Award-winning and Grammy-nominated Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown; HBO’s two-part special, Sinatra: All or Nothing At All; and Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.

About the Executive Producer

Director Alex Gibney has been called "the most important documentarian of our time" by Esquire Magazine ( Esquire) and "one of America’s most successful and prolific documentary filmmakers” by The New York Times (The NY Times T Magazine). Known for his cinematic, gripping, and deeply insightful documentaries, the filmmaker has won the Academy Award, multiple Emmy Awards, the Grammy Award, several Peabody Awards, the DuPont-Columbia, The Independent Spirit, The Writers Guild of America Awards, and more. Gibney was honored with the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award in 2013 and the first ever Christopher Hitchens Prize in 2015. Gibney’s films include: Taxi to the Dark Side (2008 Oscar); Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Oscar nominated 2006); Triple Emmy Award winning and Peabody Award Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (HBO); Emmy winning The History of the Eagles (Showtime); 2015 Peabody Award and Grammy nominated Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown; The Armstrong Lie (2013), which was short-listed for the 2014 Academy Award and nominated for the 2014 BAFTA Award, along with his film We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (2013); and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010), which was nominated for three Emmys.

About the Executive Producer, Production Team, Co-Writers

Transmitter Media is a Peabody-nominated and Webby-winning creative podcast company specializing in highly-edited and beautifully sound designed work that has reached many millions of listeners worldwide. Proudly woman-owned-and-operated since 2017, they create strong story-driven shows that start conversations, including Finding Fred, Tabloid: The Ivanka Trump Story, Work Life with Adam Grant, Rebel Eaters Club, and Doing Justice. Their work is often on best-of lists and has been called "downright addictive," "the Porsche of podcasts", and "the best of the best."
The production team on M eltdown includes: Writers/Producers Dan O’Donnell, Shoshi Shmuluvitz and Kiarra Powell, Executive Editor Sara Nics, Executive Producer Gretta Cohn, mix engineer Hannis Brown and fact-checker Meral Agish.

About the Co-Writer and Performer

David Sirota is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author living in Denver, Colorado. He is the publisher of The Daily Poster, an editor at large at Jacobin Magazine, and a columnist at The Guardian. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter in 2020. Sirota was an investigative reporter for Capital & Main and the Senior Editor for Investigations at IBT/Newsweek. Sirota has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Politico Magazine, Harper’s, Wired, Vice, The Nation, and Salon.com. Sirota has published three books, Hostile Takeover (Crown, 2006), The Uprising (Crown, 2008), and Back to Our Future (Ballantine, 2011). He is co-producing the upcoming Netflix film Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio.

What listeners say about Meltdown

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Profile Image for Maximillion

This is more educational than the corporate press

I loved this podcast. I hope to see more content like this from Audible. You cant learn about the 2008 financial crisis from mainstream media segments that are 5 mins long. You will come away bewildered about what happened behind the scenes that you never knew existed.

If you are curious about how the MAGA phenomenon occurred and are willing to hear a nuanced explanation then this is for you.

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Profile Image for Jessica Williams

Finally someone tells the truth about how we got here

I have always been amazed at the utter lack of analysis about how we got here in the news. The financial crisis and the Iraq war lies have decimated Americans’ faith in our institutions, in media, and in each other. Thanks David Sirota for breaking it all down.

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Profile Image for JS

fantastic

so glad Audible decided to pick up Sirota. This is what real investigatory reporting looks like

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Profile Image for Brandon

Drawing a clear line

So many people have said "how did we get here" even though there are numerous explanations. This is just one reason for the state of our current society and world. This podcast does a great job at drawing a clear line from the causes and events of the financial crisis to the discontent that we've been experiencing, but in an enjoyable and interesting way. There would be no surprises if the vast majority of us engaged with history on a regular basis.

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Profile Image for Spectator

Very good for liberals, okay for leftists

Sirota does a great job of explaining the what, but the 'why' is still murky. The 'why' question is the more difficult ask, and requires a more systemic analysis of capitalism's perverse incentives. The intro to episode one about FARC is a great example of something that appears black-and-white to the average liberal listener, but on closer inspection becomes quite murky. Portraying FARC as terrorists, and the DEA and Colombia as the good guys is not really how we should be analyzing these relationships. The DEA has worked with cartels, organizations that one assumes the DEA would be trying to crush. The CIA may have given cartels leave to kill DEA agent Enrique Camarena in 1985, likely tied to the CIA's drug running in the 80s. All these episodes have the exact same root cause as Goldman Sach's selling toxic assets while betting against those same assets. That cause is the profit motive, or the desire to maintain the steady flow of capital (in the case of the DEA/CIA). Until we ask the 'why' and if the 'why' is worth the detrimental effects to the world, we will continue to experience episodes like the Great Recession.

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Profile Image for Amazon Customer

Amazing!!

An amazingly well written, produced, and laid out podcast. I was in high school during the meltdown and my family definitely felt its affects but I can't say I fully understood what was happening in the world. I wish everyone would listen to this to gain a clearer understanding of how we got here.

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Profile Image for Spenser

Fantastic podcast

Found the podcast through the Intercept's Deconstructed. It's amazing how little coverage this stuff has gotten in the years since the crash. Puts in perspective the show that was made surrounding why Trump ended up in office.

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Profile Image for Admiralu

Clear, Concise Account of a Coverup

Everyone should hear this podcast about the Wall Street bank crash of 2008. Political hacks from both parties beat back efforts to punish the banks for risky and fraudulent activities, while throwing the American people under the bus. The hope and change people voted for were second fiddle to those who bankrolled campaigns. Might just make you mad. Everything is explained in easy to understand terms of what really happened. Eye opening. Might change your mind about many things.

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Profile Image for Judy R. Williams

It’s an excellent telling…

David Sirota did an excellent job of explaining how the bank failures and mortgage fraud debacle and the lack of government accountability led to the election of Trump and the decline in our democracy. Money is truly the root of all evil and our country is being run by the moneyed!

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Profile Image for Brad B.

One of the best podcast series I've listened to

it's a great limited mini series podcast. Production is great and very timely. This series is a story about the failures of the Obama administration and of congressional Democratic majorities we will probably never see again to do anything to help people because of their ties to the financial industry. We're seeing it play out again as Democrats feign that they don't have the power to do anything.

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