Question

Watch “Heist, Who Stole the American Dream?” By Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher. What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

“Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?” is a documentary polemic that comes out swinging. Immediately after the film’s opening scene of an Occupy Wall Street demonstration, a chipper narrator announces:

“The mess we’re in now did not begin on Wall Street. Long before the financial collapse, the dismantlement of government regulation was well under way. All the consequences are the result of a brilliantly executed coup. This is the story of the biggest heist in American history.”

Be that as it may, this project, produced and directed by Frances Causeyand Donald Goldmacher, has the virtue of taking the long view of a crisis that recent films like “Inside Job” and “Too Big to Fail” have only sketchily explored. It makes a strong case that government regulation of business is essential for democracy to flourish. One of many pertinent observations from a host of experts is that the rich really don’t need the government as much as everybody else.

The seeds of the financial crisis, the film maintains, were sown by Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Virginia lawyer and representative of the tobacco industry who later became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. In a confidential memo to the United States Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” he urged American corporations to take a much stronger role in influencing politics and law.

The memorandum helped spur the formation of advocacy research organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and paved the way for lobbyists to descend on Washington. In 1978, while on the Supreme Court, Powell successfully argued for the right of corporations to make political contributions.

The movement to deregulate government control of corporations and to disempower organized labor accelerated after the 1980 presidential election. An early public battle in 1981 pitted Ronald Reagan against striking air traffic controllers. The film says that the number of American workers in unions has dwindled to 1 out of 14, from 1 in 3 in the 1950s.

The filmmakers swiftly tick off legislation that they regard as concerted class warfare waged by corporations in collusion with corporate-controlled news media against the middle and working class: Starting in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which encouraged the outsourcing of cheap labor; the 1999 repeal of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had separated commercial and investment banking; and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated over-the-counter derivatives, allowed financial institutions to run wild. Both major political parties, they argue, promoted deregulation fever.

“Heist” feels rushed. Many of its points could use elaboration. Its final section is a to-do list delivered in the tone of a high school civics teacher: restore fair taxation; make Wall Street play by the rules; build communities; develop efficient and sustainable energy through “a green New Deal”; and restore the labor movement.