About the Film
Heist tells the story of how corporations and their political allies in Congress, orchestrated the greatest theft in history -- the robbery of Americans' prosperity, savings, and retirement security. Heist exposes how free-market extremists steadily dismantled the regulatory protections that the New Deal had built to prevent a repeat of the 1929 Wall Street crash.
Today's news blames Americans' devastated 401(k)'s and collapsed home values on financial-market earthquakes within the last two years. But we will trace these seismic shifts back to their roots in the early 1970s. We will see 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 top 1% of our population. The losers were ordinary Americans, whose real income has barely increased since 1973.
Heist reveals how wealthy right-wingers 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, and broad deregulation of the economy. After years of constant repetition, this fringe prescription would become economic accepted "wisdom."
The film will show 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 our manufacturing sector was being outsourced, Wall Street successfully lobbied Congress and successive presidents to drastically deregulate financial institutions and transactions. This fueled the 1980s' mergers-and-acquisitions boom, leveraged buyouts, risky junk bonds, hedge funds, and exotic"derivatives" that promised high returns on minimal underlying assets.
Heist reveals how corporations tore up jobs and communities in order to show profits that matched Wall Street's new short-term horizons. Meanwhile, secure pensions evaporated, 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.
Finally, how might we have avoided this disaster -- and how can we rebuild sound prosperity? Heist will foreground some of the shrewdest observers of the American economy who were sounding alarms all along. Interviewees like Nomi Prins, law professor Lawrence Mitchell, activist Van Jones, and economist Robert Kuttner will show us who stole what, and where the bodies are buried. The film will point Americans to solutions based on a sustainable, green economy, the restoration of good paying union jobs, and a fair trade policy for the 21st century.