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Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? reveals how billionaires and their political henchmen orchestrated the dismantling of middle-class prosperity through rampant deregulation, the outsourcing of jobs, and tax policies favoring the wealthy.
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The collapse of the U.S. economy 2008 was the result of conscious choices made over forty years ago 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 was not a catastrophe, but rather the planned outcome of their long, patient work. For the rest of the country, it was the biggest heist in American history.
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We are now dealing with the reality that the film predicted — A billionaire president, and a cabinet full of other billionaires who are dismantling the federal government to serve the rich and impoverish the rest of us.
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For the last 40 years, big business lobbyists and campaign contributions have dominated public policy. They demolished safeguards, gave government a corporate makeover, smashed unions, pushed deregulation, exported jobs, bought the media, evaded taxes, and decimated retirements funds.
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“Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?” is a feature documentary that investigates the roots of the current economic crisis and the hidden story of the systemic, multifaceted corporate attack on the middle class that transformed America’s well-regulated economy into a battlefield littered with foreclosed homes, runaway jobs, and broken dreams. Over the past four decades, deregulation, the outsourcing of forty million manufacturing jobs, and self-serving tax policies have eviscerated the American economy and created a new class of robber barons. The film shows how large corporations in the early 1970s – 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 wealthiest 1% of our population. The losers were ordinary Americans, whose real income has barely increased since 1973
Beginning with background on the New Deal, HEIST explores how Ronald Reagan and subsequent presidential administrations derailed FDR’s progressive policies, benefiting only the wealthiest investors and CEOs. Corporate leaders worked with elected officials of both major political parties to create the largest transfer of wealth in history, looting the economy to create a gap between rich and poor previously seen only in impoverished colonial nations. It reveals the impact of the infamous Powell memo of 1971 entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” which was a call to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for American business to defend its interests against criticisms of unregulated capitalism. The Powell Memo and the 1000 page Mandate for Leadership document published in 1980 by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which were written to promote business interests and deregulation, serve as the starting points of the story to show the roots of the class warfare unleashed by big business, and how wealth in the U.S. was transferred from workers to corporate interests over decades of policy shifts
HEIST also reveals how corporate right-wingers such as Joseph Coors founded conservative think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, which 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, diminished power for unions, and broad deregulation of the economy. After years of constant repetition, this fringe prescription would become economic accepted ‘wisdom.’ The film shows 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 enabled a dramatic transfer of wealth, through tax changes, to their wealthy patrons.
As the American manufacturing sector was being outsourced, Wall Street successfully lobbied Congress and successive presidents to drastically deregulate financial institutions and transactions. This fueled the mergers-and-acquisitions boom, leveraged buyouts, risky junk bonds, hedge funds, and exotic ‘derivatives’ that promised high returns on minimal underlying assets. The film reveals how corporations tore up jobs and communities to show profits that matched Wall Street’s new short-term horizons. Meanwhile, secure pensions evaporated, replaced by 401k plans, as middle-class Americans were sold on an illusion of democratized wealth — a mirage of an ever-rising stock market in which everyone could be a millionaire. The final effort to shift wealth to those who are already rich was the effort to privatize Social Security by George W. Bush. Though that effort failed, there is again talk of cutting “entitlement” programs.
HEIST calls into question the current structure of our economy, examining alternative pathways to economic justice for Americans. It posits that a fair economy requires that those responsible for the economic meltdown be held accountable, that rigorous reforms must be enacted into law, that American people must resist the takeover of our country by large corporations, that wealth transfer to the very rich must be reversed, and that a new, fair, sustainable local model of economic resilience be accelerated.
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