Dane Smith, The Daily Record Newswire
Policy wonks are abuzz everywhere over French economist Thomas Piketty’s dense and monumental book, “Capital in the 21st Century,” and about the seeming inevitability of widening inequality under global capitalism.
But a poignant scene in the movie “Inequality for All” brings home that reality in a way that charts and graphs can never capture.
A struggling West Coast couple, Deborah and Moises Frias, explain how they are doing all the right things: working two jobs, paying bills, getting more training, raising their beautiful daughter together. But Deborah almost tearfully confesses that they still have less than $100 in their checking account and they simply don’t know how they will save for the future.
The movie also focuses on an older and more affluent Mormon couple, Ladd and Nancy Rasmussen, who were dealing with a recent layoff and a pay cut, and who are concerned not so much for their own finances as for the future of their children, who lack health insurance. And Ladd, it turns out, is trying to organize workers at his renewable energy plant.
Stories like these — combined with killer graphics that illustrate the obscenity of skyrocketing wealth and income at the very top, and virtually no wealth at all for the entire bottom half of American households — make “Inequality for All” one of those classic transformative socio-economic documentaries.
The 90-minute movie was released last fall and has been compared in its impact on economic policy debate to the effect of “An Inconvenient Truth” on the issue of climate change. Critics and online audience reviews are uniformly high. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives it a rating of 96 percent among top critics. Amazon reviewers have given it a 4.7 out of 5 star average, and rogerebert.com puts it as 3.5 out of 4.
This is a must-see film, regardless of whether one agrees with narrator Robert Reich and his practical and progressive solutions to our inequality crisis.
This is not a Michael Moore screed, with ambush interviews or taunting of hedge fund managers and corporate CEOs. Instead, the movie features some of the wealthiest capitalists in the nation — such as Warren Buffet and Amazon investor Nick Hanauer — explaining why higher taxes and public investment in human capital are desperately needed to level the field. Their basic argument is simple and powerful: inequality and the decline of the middle class will reduce demand and be bad for business in the long run.
But Reich does get down to brass tacks with a very specific “to do” list that will help a growing movement of folks who are intent on doing everything they can to reverse the trends. And the very encouraging news is that Minnesota policymakers already have begun to tackle most of the items on the to-do list.
The movie’s website, inequalityforall.com, lays out six major state and national public policy initiatives that will reduce inequality, along with “Show Me How” links that elaborate on each. Here are the six big ideas:
Make work pay, through minimum benefits and wages that employers are legally obligated to provide.
Invest in education and workforce training, improving the earning power of the next generation.
Reverse policies that diminish bargaining rights and union representation of workers.
Undo the great tax shift that dramatically reduced rates for the wealthy.
Reform Wall Street to prevent speculative and predatory behavior by financial institutions.
Get big money out of politics with campaign finance reforms that reduce the enormous and growing influence of wealthy interests on policy decisions. This one needs a lot of work and recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions won’t make it any easier.
Changing course on inequality will not be easy, perhaps comparable to turning an aircraft carrier. But they do and must turn. States and most Western democracies — including the United States from 1932 to the mid-1970s — have proven that they can alter the course and correct capitalism’s natural maldistribution of resources, while still reaping the benefits of a free enterprise system. Movies like “Inequality for All” will help build the public will to do just that.
