Frann Michel and Hyung Name review "Heist: who stole the American Dream." Directed Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, narrated by Tom Hartman, based in part on the book "The Global Class-War: how Amerian's bi-partisan elite lost our future and what it'll take to win." Heist foregrounds the question of who are the villans in the current crisis and points to both Democrats and Republicans. The film touches on the Powell Memo of 1971, the rise of right-wing think-tanks and ends with a section what we need to fight-back --- publically funded elections, tax and energy policy changes, support for unions and expansion of worker-owned cooperatives. The Movie Moles comment on how the film presets the political and economic shifts that happened in the 1970s. This includes the Powell Memo, written basically as an organizing platform for making capitalism popular again. They also consider how these shifts contextualize the rise of neoliberalism, but also the meaning of the "American Dream" as a mythic past we may or may not want to return to.
- KBOO