Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? reveals how American corporations orchestrated the dismantling of middle-class prosperity through rampant deregulation, the outsourcing of jobs, and tax policies favoring businesses and the wealthy. The collapse of the U.S. economy is the result of conscious choices made over thirty five years by a small group: leaders of corporations and their elected allies, and the biggest lobbying interest in Washington, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. To these individuals, the collapse is not a catastrophe, but rather the planned outcome of their long, patient work. For the rest of the country, it is merely the biggest heist in American history.
http://www.heist-themovie.com/(embedded trailer video at link)
Directors' statement:
Every American, indeed every human being on the planet, is acutely aware of the current world-wide economic crisis. We are a directing and producing team of myself, Donald Goldmacher, a longtime social issue filmmaker, and Frances Causey, a journalist and former CNN News Editor. "Heist" began in May 2006 as an investigative media piece on the massive influx of undocumented workers across the Arizona border, where Frances lives. But it soon became apparent that the issue of undocumented workers was part of a larger story about how the American economy had been transformed to serve the interests of a few at the expense of all workers at all rungs of the socio-economic ladder.
snip
Beginning with the infamous Powell Memo of 1971, which called for corporate interests to prevail above all else - through the support of Republican and Democratic administrations alike - millions of manufacturing jobs were outsourced, organized labor was decimated, industry was widely deregulated, and tax policies were implemented that favored corporate interests and the elite. In addition, media deregulation and consolidation created a situation where the American public was left out of any critical debate about what was going on in the U.S., politically and economically. Once we understood the magnitude of these changes, the goal was to create a primer for the American middle class to understand the country's economic history, and to motivate audiences to redefine and rebuild the American Dream with local, sustainable green economies.
Ultimately, "Heist" can serve as a sober warning about what is happening to our country, and provide some ideas of how to restore fairness and community, while reigning in the power of corporations. The underlying idea of "Heist" is that knowledge is power, and that social change comes from the bottom up. Creating a social movement for a new economy is critical to reclaiming of quality of life for American workers, and compelling, fact-driven storytelling is an essential way to achieve this.
http://www.heist-themovie.com/theFilm.html
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