Heist
Funds Needed for Completion: $ 275,000.00
Estimated Completion Date: 02/01/2010
Synopsis
Heist tells the story of how Wall Street orchestrated the greatest theft in history -- the robbery of Americans’ prosperity, savings, and retirement security.
Today’s news blames Americans’ devastated 401(k)’s and collapsed home values on financial-market earthquakes within the last two years. But we will trace these seismic shifts back to their roots in the early 1970s. We will see how large corporations -- acting through lobbying organizations like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- began a political mobilization that would propel the largest transfer of wealth in history. The winners were the top 1% of our population. The losers were ordinary Americans, whose real income has barely increased since 1973.
Heist will reveal how wealthy right-wingers founded conservative think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, that provided intellectual justifications for redistributing wealth upward. Their free market economists insisted that the only way out of the 1970s’ crippling “stagflation” was massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and broad deregulation of the economy. After years of constant repetition, this fringe prescription would become economic accepted “wisdom.”
The film will show how Ronald Reagan’s presidency radically reshaped our government, and unraveled our social compact, to match these right-wing prescriptions. Corporate executives took over the very regulatory agencies that had overseen their own industries. Markets were opened to a flood of imports from low-wage countries, decimating U.S. blue-collar jobs and labor unions. Congress complied with a dramatic transfer of wealth, through tax changes, to the wealthiest tip of the population.
As our manufacturing sector was being outsourced, Wall Street successfully lobbied Congress and successive presidents to drastically deregulate financial institutions and transactions. This fueled the 1980s’ mergers-and-acquisitions boom, leveraged buyouts, risky junk bonds, hedge funds, and exotic“derivatives” that promised high returns on minimal underlying assets.
Why did decades-old Wall Street firms risk their reputations, and in some cases ultimately destroy themselves, over such precarious gambits? First-hand participants, like former Wall Street manager Nomi Prins, will reveal the mindset of these onetime Masters of the Universe. Their gambles were made with (quoting the title of Prins’ bestselling memoir) Other People’s Money.
Heist will show how Alan Greenspan, the high priest of free market fundamentalism, ran the nation’s key financial regulator, the Federal Reserve Bank. Greenspan’s Fed not only failed to regulate -- it enthusiastically enabled Wall Street’s transformation into a speculative casino.
Why did our media fail to inform us about this historic, and precarious, transfer of wealth? Media critics such as David Brock will tell us on-camera, how media companies themselves were being merged, consolidated, and transformed into toothless cheerleaders for market mania.
Finally, how might we have avoided this disaster -- and how can we rebuild sound prosperity? Heist will foreground some of the shrewdest observers of the American economy who were sounding alarms all along. Interviewees like Prins, law professor Lawrence Mitchell, and economist Robert Kuttner will show us who stole what, and where the bodies are buried. The film will point Americans to solutions based on a sustainable, green economy, the restoration of good paying union jobs, and a fair trade policy for the 21st century.
Budget:
$ 275,000.00
Project's Financial Needs
To complete post-production; enter the film in festivals as well as streaming it on the Web.
Other financial Support
The producers have been funding the costs to date, as well as raising money from individual donors. Public Interest Pictures is a partner in the production.
Current stage of production
Post-Production
Estimated Completion Date
02/01/2010
Structure
Our film is structured as a detective story, interviewing individuals who were involved in changing the economic policies of the United States, as well as interviewing those who were warning about the result of these economic policies. We interview people who were involved in the neo-conservative movement, politicians, media critics, as well as a political psychologist who helps us understand how the political brain works to accept misinformation propagated by the mass media.
Target Audience
Our audience is any American who draws a paycheck and anyone who cares about the democratic process. We have created and are developing relationships with organized labor and non-profit community organizations involved with economic justice, churches, student groups, and academic economists.
Production Personnel
Frances Causey and Earl Katz
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