On the 6 August 2012 Old Mole Variety Hour, Hyung Nam and I discuss Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?, a documentary directed by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, narrated by Thom Hartmann, and based in part on the book The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future—and What It Will Take to Win by Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and one of those who appears in the film. Heist is one of a number of recent documentaries about the current financial crisis. Movie moles have previously reviewed the documentaries Inside Job and Capitalism is the Crisis.
As the title suggests, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? foregrounds the question of who are the villains in the current crisis, and it blames both Democrats and Republicans for the problem it characterizes as the rollback of the New Deal and other protective regulations. The film attends to the Powell Memo of 1971, and the subsequent development of right-wing think tanks and their propaganda efforts. It ends with a section on what we need to do to fight back, highlighting the need for public funding of elections, changes in tax and energy policy, support for labor unions, and the promise of worker-owner cooperatives and grassroots democracy as in Madison Wisconsin, Occupy Wall Street, and organizing efforts in Richmond California that got Chevron to actually pay more taxes.
Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
Movie mole review of Inside Job
Movie mole review of Capitalism is the Crisis
RSA Animate – Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey