Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? (2011/2012)

Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? is a feature documentary which investigates the roots of the current economic crisis, and the ongoing assault on working people in the United States. It tells the hidden story of the systemic, multifaceted corporate attack on the middle class that, starting in the 1970s, transformed America's well-regulated economy into a battlefield littered with foreclosed homes, runaway jobs, and broken dreams. The American economy has been eviscerated due to four decades of deregulation, the outsourcing of forty-million manufacturing jobs, and self-serving tax policies that have created a new class of robber barons. Today's news blames Americans' devastated 401(k)'s and collapsed home values on financial earthquakes within the last two years. But Heist traces these seismic shifts back to their roots in the early 1970s. It shows 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 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 Franklin Delano Roosevelt's progressive policies were derailed by Ronald Reagan and subsequent presidential administrations, benefiting only the wealthiest investors and CEOs. Heist exposes the full story: how 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. The film is structured as a political thriller, showing the shift from FDR's New Deal reforms to an ideology where the free market reigns. 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, 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, 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 shortterm 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.

With clear, fact-driven storytelling, Heist calls into question the current structure of our economy, examining alternative pathways to economic justice for Americans. Heist posits that a fair economy requires that those responsible for the economic meltdown be held accountable, that rigorous reforms must be enacted into law, the American people must resist the takeover of our country by large corporations, wealth transfer to the very rich must be reversed, and a new, fair, sustainable local model of economic resilience be accelerated. The film's protagonists include a roster of characters doing critical work around rethinking the current American economic structure which allows the film to be solution-oriented and a beacon of hope and change for economic justice. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders - a modern hero of the middle class - asks who is going to jail for the misdeeds of Wall Street. Political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz, author of Unjust Desserts, points to the remarkable growth of co-ops and worker-owned companies. Van Jones, former Senior Advisor on Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and founder of Rebuild the Dream, talks about the "World War II-level mobilization" needed "to retrofit a nation, to re-power a nation," to "bail out the people and the planet too." Former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall advocates an industrial policy demanding that companies receiving taxpayer bailouts begin making high-speed rail networks and electric vehicles in exchange. Jeff Faux, founding president and distinguished fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and author of The Global Class War, talks about the need to revitalize government, making "public service something that's respected, that's paid decently, that people can look up to, because those are the people who are going to have to get us out of here, not just in the next six months, but over the next 20, 30 years." Interviews with local organizers working for a green, resilient, locally sustainable economy illuminate paths to economic and political reform that can serve all Americans by creating a people-centered government.

Heist is structured as a political thriller, and the filmmakers effectively weave past and present throughout the film, connecting the dots for audiences who haven't been exposed to the full story of the American political economy. By revealing the perpetrators in the slide of the U.S. economy into a two class system and the dramatic political wins that began in the 1970s, Heist is a warning as well as a vision of a new future. The film will be indispensable in bridging the gap between economic experts and ordinary taxpayers, in demanding accountability and building support for economic justice. Viewers will come away from the film feeling that they understand who broke the economy and how, and knowing what is needed to fix it.

Filmmaker Statements

Growing up in the South, I was horrified by the economic and racial injustices which were institutionalized. This experience instilled in me a deep sense of fairness and a strong belief that no one is above another. I knew in my heart that I could make a difference through journalism and storytelling by making people in positions of power accountable for their actions.

-- Frances Causey, Co-Director/Co-producer

My father was a union organizer. I saw how hard he worked to make a living as we went through three periods of unemployment every year, and we had to scramble for money. So fighting for the underdog has always been my motor, my underlying engine of passion. My motivation in making this film is to give people a picture of how they can fight back, and not allow themselves to be bullied and pushed around by big corporations.

-- Donald Goldmacher, Co-Director/Co-Producer

Project Background

Every American, indeed every human being on the planet, is acutely aware of the current world-wide economic crisis. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? is an investigation of the roots of this crisis which reveal important truths about the systemic and institutional changes that took place over forty years to create the largest transfer of wealth in modern history. We are a co-directing and coproducing 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.

Fortunately, we stumbled on two newly written books - The Global Class War and The Disposable American - in summer 2006, which made it clear that American businesses had morphed into multinational corporations with no allegiance to the success of the U.S. economy, and would do anything to increase their bottom line, even going so far as to impoverish the American middle class. To meet rising costs of basic needs such as housing and health care, the middle class has been going into ever deepening debt, because of wage stagnation that began in 1973 that were a result of economic policies favoring businesses and the wealthy. There has been very little discussion about income inequality in the U.S. or the prevailing two class system which has emerged with an ever widening gap between rich and poor. The need for this analysis on the wide scale became a great motivator for us to tackle a complex and multi-layered story that we believe has not been told to public audiences from start (the dismantling of the New Deal) to finish (an ongoing attack on the middle class.)

As we began to understand the scope of the story, we contacted thought leaders and experts on these issues, including the father of Reaganomics and key Clinton economic adviser, Alan Blinder, as well as other experts who were predicting a coming housing bubble collapse. As fate would have it, these interviews we had scheduled months in advance in New York City and Washington D.C. took place during the week that Wall Street collapsed. As the economy was crumbling before our eyes, we felt an even deeper urgency to explain how it happened and to address the fundamental institutional and political changes that had taken place over a period of decades in the U.S. which had created a bubble economy.

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 presidential 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. What makes us an innovative and effective filmmaking team is the point of view that emerges when an activist and a journalist take on one of the most pressing issues of our time. The need to enlighten and educate is uniquely balanced so that audiences will gain both critical knowledge and invaluable inspiration about the U.S. economy and how we as a society can reclaim fairness and equality for the American people.

--Donald Goldmacher, Producer/Director

On-Screen Characters and Experts (in order of appearance)

Lou Mattis - Former Chairman, Sterling Winthrop Drug Co.

Jeff Faux - Founding President, Economic Policy Institute

Leo Gerard - President, United Steel Workers

Deepak Bhargava - Executive Director, Center for Community Change

Donna Edwards - U.S. Representative, (D) Maryland

Bernie Sanders - U.S. Senator, (I) Vermont

Jakada Imani - Executive Director, Ella Baker Center

Robert Kuttner - Economist

Kimber Lanning - Founder Local First Arizona

Robert Crandall - Former CEO, American Airlines

Nomi Prins - Former Managing Director, Goldman Sachs

Elizabeth Warren - Former Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

David Cay Johnston - Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist, Author of Free Lunch

Michael Lind - Former Neo-Conservative Writer; Co-Director, New America Foundation

David Brock - CEO, Media Matters for America

Drew Westen - Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University

David John - Senior Research Fellow, Heritage Foundation

Leslie Griffith - Investigative Journalist, Huffington Post

Alan Blinder - Professor of Economics, Princeton University

Kim Berry - Computer Programmer

Lawrence E. Mitchell - Author and Professor of Business Law at the George Washington University

Van Jones - Founder, Rebuild the Dream; Author, The Green Collar Economy

Gar Alperovitz - Historian, Economist, Writer, Professor and Government Official

Jovanka Beckles -City Council Person, Richmond, CA

David Green - CEO, Contra Costa Employees Federal Credit Union

Key Filmmaker Biographies

Donald Goldmacher (Co-Director/Co-Producer)

Donald is the President of PsychComp Associates and is both a psychiatrist and a filmmaker. He has served as director of Planning for the California Department of Health, and was the director of Mental Health, Alcohol, and Drug Abuse Services of Contra Costa County, CA. His first film, "Do No Harm," revealed the controversial marketing and research practices of the pharmaceutical industry. His most recent film, "Ruthie and Connie; Every Room in the House," won over 20 festival awards around the world, aired on HBO and television stations around the world. You can also see his co-production of "Helping Your Baby Sleep Through the Night" at http://helpingyourbabysleep.com

Frances Causey (Co-Director/Co-Producer)

Frances Causey is a producer of television and film content, and advises non-profit clients on media and public relations matters. In 2004, Ms. Causey launched the exclusive historical DVD and online merchandising brand, American Stock, based on her award-winning original documentary series. The signature film of that series, The Wendell Scott Story, appeared on The History Channel and the Turner Networks. Ms. Causey began her career in broadcasting and film in 1987 as an entry-level video journalist at the global headquarters in Atlanta for Cable News Network (CNN). She worked her way through the ranks becoming Senior National Assignment Editor for the domestic newsgathering operation eventually moving to the New York City bureau as a producer. During her 14-year career with CNN, Ms. Causey covered the most important stories of the late eighties and nineties and was a senior member of a team honored with News and Documentary Emmys for team coverage of both the Olympic Park and Oklahoma City bombings in 1995 and 1996.

Earl Katz (Executive Producer)

Earl is the President of Public Interest Pictures, an activist/documentary producer, and has led several national and international peace and environmental initiatives, many under the aegis of Fellowship of Reconciliation. Earl recently completed "Broadcast Blues." Since 1970, his award-winning documentaries have been an adjunct to his career as a political, social justice, and environmental activist. Katz was Executive Producer of "Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election" with Danny Glover (Sundance Channel), "Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties" (Sundance Channel), and "Hacking Democracy" (HBO), for which he received an Emmy(C) award nomination. He was Executive Producer of several other documentaries including: "El Barco de la Paz - The Peace Ship to Nicaragua," "The CIA & World Peace," "Lanzo Del Vasto: Warrior For Peace," and "One Earth." He was the fundraiser for "Winter Soldier," a documentary film for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (Cannes Film Festival Award). Earl serves on the boards of: Earth Communication Office, and Free Speech TV.

Hollis Rich (Writer)

Hollis has a 25 year career as a television writer and producer that spans both half-hour comedy and hour drama, including "Doogie Howser, MD," "Grace Under Fire," "Picket Fences" and "Party of Five." Hollis co-created and executive-produced ABC Family's "State of Grace" with colleague Brenda Lilly. The critically acclaimed dramedy featured Mae Whitman, Alia Shawkat and Academy Award-winning actress Frances McDormand as the series' off-screen narrator and earned Hollis four Jewish Image Awards and two Humanitas nominations for its humorous, authentic depiction of two girls of different faiths growing up in the 1960's South.

Rogelio Garcia (Director of Photography / Editor)

Rogelio brings a wealth of experience and creativity to the project. As a senior videographer for both KUAT and KVOA in Tucson for ten years, Rogelio won numerous awards including 9 Associated Press Awards for Videography and Editing and one Emmy nomination in 2002. Rogelio has also worked on three feature films and in 2007 he worked as Cinematographer for the short film, "The Runners" which was screened at the Lone Star International Film Festival and the Santa Fe Film Festival. Rogelio served as Director of Photography for the Bravo reality series "Show Dog Moms & Dads" in 2005. Rogelio is a Broadcast Television Production Journalism Instructor at the University of Arizona.

Jennifer Schmidt (Associate Producer)

Jennifer has extensive experience in the film business. Born and raised in Los Angeles, her first position was at art-house distributor Strand Releasing, which was followed by several years in commercial and film production on such indie features as "Chuck and Buck." In graduate school at UCLA she ran a prominent film series, which parlayed into programming positions with the California Film Institute in the Bay Area. Now a resident of San Francisco, Jennifer has also worked at Active Voice and Katahdin productions on film-based outreach and social action campaigns. Most recently, she associate produced "The Power Of Two," a feature documentary about cystic fibrosis and organ donation which premiered at IDA's DocuWeeks and is screening in festivals internationally.

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