Robert Reich's new film Inequality for All exposes America's
growing wealth disparities.
The Hollywood
blockbuster film, Elysium, depicts a polarized Los Angeles in the
year 2154. The vast majority of inhabitants live in overpopulated and polluted
slums, toiling in grinding poverty.
Meanwhile, a wealthy
elite live on Elysium, a space station modeled after a luxurious neighborhood
in Malibu, California. Life expectancy on Elysium is three times longer than on
the sweltering toxic earth, thanks to advanced medical technologies and a
pristine environment.
Matt Damon stars as
the character Max DeCosta, who is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at his
factory job. With five days to live, he must get to Elysium and climb into a
“med bay,” a scanner that cures cancers and other life-threatening ailments.
Elysium is a cautionary tale, a dystopian vision of the kinds of extremes that might result if America’s growing economic inequality were to continue unabated.
A more earthly version
of this story is opening this week in movie theaters around the country, Inequality
for All. The documentary features former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich as
the expert narrator.
In the film, Reich
brings our collapsing middle-class standard of living and the expanding gap
between rich and poor into stark focus.
He’s refreshing,
funny, and upbeat about a serious and discouraging topic. Asked for an example
of a country he thinks does a better job of addressing inequality, he replies,
“The United States, between 1950 and 1975.”
He’s not kidding. The
three decades after World War II were, compared to today, a rousing era of
middle class expansion and shared prosperity.
Starting in the
mid-1970s, we changed course. Wage and wealth inequality began to grow then,
and it’s still ballooning now. A recent study by
economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty reveals that the
top 10 percent of America’s earners took home more than half of all income in
2012, the highest share recorded since the government began to collect this
data in 1917.
Inequality for All refrains from attacking the wealthy.
Instead, Reich underscores how too much inequality is bad for everyone —
including the rich. Extreme inequality undermines social mobility, economic
stability, democracy, and healthy capitalism.
Nick Hanauer, a
multi-millionaire venture capitalist and early investor in Amazon.com, argues
in the film that his economic self-interest would be enhanced with a return of
middle-class prosperity.
“We don’t need more
trickle down tax cuts for the wealthy,” Hanauer warns. “We need a ‘middle-out’
economic policy that strengthens and expands our middle class. That’s what
grows real wealth.”
Today’s wealth and
income inequalities aren’t the consequence of differences in individual effort.
They’re the result of a rigged game, as the rules of the economy — such as tax,
trade, and wage policies — have been tilted in favor of large asset owners at
the expense of wage earners.
As a result, the past
three decades have been a great time to grow a substantial nest egg or trust
fund and a lousy period to depend on wages to pay the bills. It’s no surprise
that so many U.S. wage-earners have taken on potentially unpayable debt to
survive.
A September report
from the U.S. Census
Bureau reveals that median American household income today,
adjusted for inflation, is no higher than it was for the equivalent household
in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, stock prices and investment income for households
in the top 5 percent have skyrocketed.
Documentary films
don’t usually flourish at the theater box office, especially when they’re up
against dramatic thrillers like Elysium. But if there is one
documentary you watch this fall, see Inequality for All.
Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy
Studies, is the author of 99
to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It. 99to1book.org
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)
Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)