Movie Night-- Eat The Rich... Or Feed Them To Pigs

My friend Mike is a film critic and every week he sends me a list of coming releases and invites me to see them. Since I had my stem cell replacement operation, I've had to avoid movie theaters. I hadn't been to one in about 2 years. But one of the films looked interesting this week, Lauren Greenfield's Generation Wealth. I liked another movie she made a few years ago, The Queen of Versailles, which had given me plenty of ammo to use in posts. I imagined Generation Wealth would be as political. Instead, it was like a long, long, long advertisement for new her photo book. And did it ever suck! I hated every single character in it, especially Greenfield, although watching how she framed her very bright young son, Noah-- who she should have made the unscripted narrator if she wanted to save this nightmare-- was interesting.

At least Generation Wealth reminded me about two movies by Jamie Johnson that successfully accomplished what Greenfield didn't. Johnson's Born Rich (2003) is at the bottom of the page. Here's The One Percent (2006):

Johnson received some Emmy nominations for his work. That's not going to happen with Generation Wealth, which, if it wasn't already sickening enough, had some gratuitous Trump scenes. Rupert Neate reviewed Generation Wealth for The Guardian and I think he liked it more than I did. "Greenfield," he wrote, "introduces us to characters all motivated by the accumulation of wealth. 'No matter how much people had, they still wanted more,' Greenfield says of her subjects. We meet Florian Homm, a hedge fund manager living in self-imposed exile in Germany to avoid extradition to the US where he has been sentenced to 225 years in jail. Smoking cigars and dripping in gold, Homm, who became known as 'the antichrist of finance' for ripping off his investors for hundreds of millions of dollars, tells Greenfield that morality changed in the 80s. 'The value system changed completely. It wasn’t about who you are, but about what you are worth… Morals are completely non-productive in that value system.' As his hedge fund was imploding during the financial crisis of 2008, Homm, now 58, fled the €5m Majorcan villa he shared with a 27-year-old Russian lingerie model. With $500,000 stashed in his underwear and a humidor in hand, Homm boarded a plane to Colombia and disappeared for five years. We learn that he used his fortune to buy his son, then 15, the services of a Dutch prostitute. Homm was later arrested at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence."

Then there’s Eden Wood, six, a beauty pageant princess and star of reality TV show Toddlers & Tiaras, who tells Greenfield “My favourite princess is me” and says beauty means “that I get money, and I’ll be a superstar.”

...A growing number of academics warn that the widening gulf between the richest 1% and everyone else could lead to a backlash. The richest 0.1% of the world’s population has increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50%-- or 3.8 billion people-- since 1980, according to the World Inequality Report. The report, by the French economist Thomas Piketty and 100 other researchers, also found that the richest 1% of the global population “captured” 27% of the world’s wealth growth between 1980 and 2016. Piketty warns that inequality has ballooned to “extreme levels” in many countries, and will only get worse unless governments take co-ordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance.

...Greenfield interviewed several experts for the film, but just one survived the cut. Former New York Times journalist and leftwing activist Chris Hedges is quoted as saying “Wealth is whatever gives us value” and warns that “Societies accrue their greatest wealth at the moment they face death.” This last remark might trouble Americans in particular: last year Professor Philip Alston, United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty, made a statement accusing Donald Trump and the Republican party of consciously distorting the shape of American society in a “bid to become the most unequal society in the world.”

Poor Brett, doesn't he have enough problems already without appearing in this completely gauche movie?

Alston, who acts as a watchdog on extreme poverty, said Trump’s administration had passed tax laws that “overwhelmingly benefitted the wealthy and worsened inequality.” He said Trump’s policies “seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege.”

But Greenfield says the chasm between rich and poor was widening well before the reality TV star’s 2016 election. “The American dream-- that everyone has equal opportunity-- became a fiction long before Trump,” she says. “Americans don’t hate the rich, as they imagine they could become the rich. They don’t want high taxes as they think they could become rich and won’t want to pay them. But what they dream of is an increasingly unbelievable fantasy.”

She says that while examining her photos it became clear to her that “We have left behind the American dream of my dad’s generation where there was the possibility of social mobility and the belief that anyone could make it. The things that were valued then-- discipline, hard work and frugality-- are not so important now. We have a culture that prizes celebrity, bling and narcissism.” Trump, she says, “is the apotheosis of generation wealth. With Trump you have wealth and celebrity achieving the ultimate goal. Trump is the natural evolution of the values of our culture.”

Party of the Rich-- Isn't Just One Enough For Them?

One of the buzz stories of the week is in the new Rolling Stone, How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich. Where I grew up, they were always the Party of the Rich. Alas, in recent decades the Democrats have made a concerted effort to given them-- literally-- a run for the money. After Tuesday's election-- a victory, at least in Ohio and Maine, not for the conflicted and often useless Third Way Democratic Party but for the awakening, angered and revitalized 99%-- Democrats ought to start rethinking that. Perhaps Obama demoting lifelong corporate whore William Daley was a sign of that... but I doubt it. As a friend pointed out hours after the votes were counted, "It seems like last night's election gives the clearest indication to the Democratic Party that when it decides to define the problem, the culprit who is responsible for the problem, and draw clear discernible lines around it (on behalf of the 99 percent of the electorate, which is essentially the party of the 'little guys' is supposed to represent)-- WE WIN. It's not just about 'fighting,' it is about fighting with a clear cause and not catering to the middle."

Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone:

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad-- one that benefits the prosperous classes."

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million-- while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes-- five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."

The GOP campaign to aid the wealthy has left America unable to raise the money needed to pay its bills. "The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree," says Rhode Island governor and former GOP senator Lincoln Chafee, pointing to two deficit-financed wars and an unpaid-for prescription-drug entitlement. "It tanked the economy." Tax receipts as a percent of the total economy have fallen to levels not seen since before the Korean War – nearly 20 percent below the historical average. "Taxes are ridiculously low!" says Bruce Bartlett, an architect of Reagan's 1981 tax cut. "And yet the mantra of the Republican Party is 'Tax cuts raise growth.' So – where's the fucking growth?"

Republicans talk about job creation, about preserving family farms and defending small businesses, and reforming Medicare and Social Security. But almost without exception, every proposal put forth by GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates is intended to preserve or expand tax privileges for the wealthiest Americans. And most of their plans, which are presented as common-sense measures that will aid all Americans, would actually result in higher taxes for middle-class taxpayers and the poor. With 14 million Americans out of work, and with one in seven families turning to food stamps simply to feed their children, Republicans have responded to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by slashing inheritance taxes, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and endorsing a tax amnesty for big corporations that have hidden billions in profits in offshore tax havens. They also wrecked the nation's credit rating by rejecting a debt-ceiling deal that would have slashed future deficits by $4 trillion-- simply because one-quarter of the money would have come from closing tax loopholes on the rich.

Yet John Boehner's political machine never stops insisting-- day in and day out (do NOT follow this freak show on Twitter)-- that the very economic and fiscal policies that drove the country into the worst domestic calamity since the Great Depression is exactly what we need to... pull us out of it? These people aren't drunk-- well, in his case they are, but that's not what I mean-- they are just ruthless and assume the rest of us aren't paying any attention at all. And his "economists," the ones who back up all this rubbish he pukes out with a straight face? Yesterday Steve Benen took a little look behind the closed doors at what Boehner is trying to pass off as legitimate economists worth taking seriously.

In recent months, economists have been offered two competing approaches to job creation in the U.S. President Obama’s agenda, which is popular in national public-opinion polls, enjoys considerable support among independent economists. The Republican alternative, such as it is, has been largely rejected-- one independent economist took a look at the GOP plan and concluded that it would fail to help the economy in the short term, and might even “push the economy back into recession.”

And that leaves Republicans in a bit of a bind. How can they claim the policy high ground on jobs when annoying experts, relying on pesky facts, keep reporting that the GOP approach wouldn’t help the economy?

Yesterday, Republican leaders came up with a scheme to cloud the debate. If USA Today’s headline is any indication, the scheme worked like a charm. The paper told readers: “Economists: GOP jobs plan better than Obama’s.”

...The Republican “list stunts” never go well. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), for example, will occasionally claim to have a list of 700 “prominent scientists” who agree with him that all climate data is a communist conspiracy. When one looks a little closer at the list, we find that it features economists, some weathermen, some scientists on ExxonMobil’s payroll, and a few qualified experts who disagree with Inhofe and who’ve asked that their names be removed from his list. (He’s refused.)

The Speaker’s new list isn’t much better. One of the “economists” listed bills himself as an “anarcho-libertarian philosopher.” Another is an AEI activist who condemned First Lady Michelle Obama as “the product of lifelong affirmative-action coddling.” Another is a FreedomWorks staffer. Several were champions of the Bush/Cheney economic plan.

One is Art Laffer. Seriously.

The difference in approaches couldn’t be more different. On the one hand, we have the White House, which produced a credible plan, invited independent scrutiny, and found support from independent economists. On the other, we have congressional Republicans, who found some like-minded ideologues to tell them how right they are.

Real economics professors would give grades of F to Econ 101 students who came in with proposals like Paul Ryan's, Eric Cantor's, John Boehner's and the clowncar that is the GOP field of presidential contenders-- no really, F's.

Stephen Golub, who is teaching Econ 101 at Swarthmore College this semester, said some of the ideas floated by Presidential candidates would earn a failing grade in his class.

“I think it’s grossly irresponsible what they are saying,” Golub said. “It’s not about economics. It’s about getting elected. They are promising things that are impossible to deliver or make little sense.” [...]

Another professor who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michael Salemi, was able to identify statements from six candidates that “would earn failing grades in my Econ 101 class.” [...]

Bernard Salanie, an economics professor at Columbia University, said Perry’s simplified tax form just won’t cut it.

“It is a bit depressing to again hear the argument that we will be well on the road to recovery once our tax returns fit on a postcard,” Salanie said.

It's important to remember, this is the only thing the Republican Party cares about, aside from their own careerist ambitions-- these people:

Some Things Are Personal-- Like Your Child Drowning... Or Your Subordinates Talking Back To You

Since the start of OccupyWallStreet, a month ago, I've been furiously quoting passages by the two bards of the movement, David Korten and Corey Robin and then last night and Sunday night we showed the outstanding One Percent documentaries by Jamie Johnson. Corey and Jamie, especially, deal with the up close and personal aspect of the tenacious hold of privilege and entitlement from these people who claim they ARE America and rule by-- yes-- divine right. Monday morning I was moved to tweet this sentence from Corey's book, seeking to show just how personal it is for them:


Let's take a look at two more quotes, one from the Eric Cantor of the late 1700s and the other from a correspondent on an e-mail list. The first comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind:

"The real object" of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament in 1790, is "to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents."

And I'll leave you with this today, from an anonymous source: "I personally know of one actual billionaire. He is stunned people are focused on financial crimes. He feels personally attacked for being successful. This misses the proverbial elephant in the room: genuine populist anger with a system built to resist change. This country, our entire moral and legal code, is based on fairness. The traditional system does not provide even a hope for that. The housing/credit crash has stripped the game naked. Perversely, those responsible for the crash have been rewarded, which caused the stock market to recover, further benefiting the culprits, while forcing the 99% further into debt to pay for it. When few benefit while the 99% suffers, it's unfair. When small companies go under, without a glance from the government, while big companies get bailed out at our expense, people get pissed. It's not fair. A third of the world's wealth vanishes. Either it didn't exist in the first place or someone has it. Those someones, our oligarchs, our billionaires, do not like to be outed, for us to know their names, and how they manipulate the system to their benefit. They take that threat very seriously. And very personally. There are not that many of them, and they are known primarily to each other. They've got a lot to lose and finally, they are worried."

Born Rich-- A Fraction Of The 1%

Sunday night we watched Jamie Johnson's second movie, The One Percent, right? Two years earlier he made Born Rich, above, which got a couple of Emmy nominations. Worth watching? Absolutely! But I'm such a crybaby. You can't take me to a tear-jerky movie. When this one young heir in the film said the thought of losing his inheritance would be like losing a parent or a sibling I just started crying. I felt less badly for him when it turned out he tried suing Jamie for defamation. The judge threw the "case" out of court.

Aside from making films, Jamie writes a column on the 1% for Vanity Fair. Last May he did one on how female members of the 1% can be as gross as their male compadres.

Traditional stereotypes depicting billionairesses as defenders of proper etiquette and good taste can be downright false. In truth, money tends to animate the wolfish side of women. It arouses their predatory instincts and makes them every bit as sexually domineering as well-to-do men.

Consider, for example, an heiress I know who has always kept track of her erotic conquests by photographing the unsheathed swords of all the squires to have visited her bed. The collection of images functions as a trophy case, celebrating a lifetime of seduction and feminine élan. Maudlin sentimentality has no place in this X-rated autobiography. Instead, emphasis rests where it counts-- on both the number of companions in her legion and the size of their sporting equipment. (Besides, a conventional deference to social mores has never been her preoccupation.) Possessing a sizable fortune simply has given her license to pursue her own desire, free of inhibition. She’s managed to maintain a thriving marriage and raise a family without ever having to ignore the drive of her own carnal appetites.

It’s common for women with extraordinary wealth to choose relationships that completely dismantle typical gender roles. Ladies of the manor usually prefer to control their lovers and preserve their own right to do whatever they please. There’s a reason why so many vastly rich women either decide never to marry at all or systematically breeze through multiple husbands. Staying forever single guarantees absolute autonomy, and marriages are short-lived for women who want to rule the roost exclusively.

In the film you'll no doubt enjoy the bit where some of the heirs giggle at the very idea of dating people from the 99%. The next month he investigated the 1%'s preference for Coke over Pepsi.

“When have you ever heard someone order a Pepsi at a country club?” he asked. I hesitated for a brief moment and then realized my answer implicitly proved his point: “Never,” I conceded.

...Affluent devotees of the original cola like its history, its pedigree, and its aesthetics-- especially the quintessentially American drink’s glass-bottle version. It’s part taste, part snobbery: rich people genuinely believe the cane-sugar Coke in bottles, often made in Mexico, is more delectable and satisfying than the U.S.’s corn-syrup version in the cans. That preference encourages the pretension of sipping from those charming little glass vessels—and what a sight awaits the guest who opens a host’s fridge to find entire shelves of foreign-version Cokes, their exotic bottle labels neatly facing forward. It’s a small expression of the kind of extravagance reserved for those who aren’t required to balance a budget, or worry about stocking their own kitchen without professional help.

And this past July he asked Where were your kids this summer?

In wealthy circles, how a person spends his or her summer says everything about social class. Having family ties to a prestigious resort enclave and country club provides crucial cul-de-sac cred, the assumption being that those who vacation in the best spots have the necessary prerequisites for American aristocracy: money, access, and taste.

This implied measure of status is now being used to define the structure of life for affluent children over summer vacation. The Times article cited well-to-do parents pressuring summer camps to do a better job of providing services that will help kids “pad the high-school resume.” The traditional camp experience isn’t enough, according to this view. Now families are demanding that their children’s summer-camp programs focus on activities that will get them into Harvard, such as brushing up on their studies or training with premier golf and tennis coaches.

When I was young, the camp you went to said something about your background. Rich kids from the Northeast (at least the ones I knew) all wanted to go to the Windridge Tennis & Sports Camps-- the St. Tropez of camps for a network of preppy children who were just beginning to understand the value of having the right friends.

Back then, strategic social positioning was still in the early stages of development. Aside from being able to say their kids went to a prestigious camp, most parents didn’t care how their kids behaved there or whether they learned anything at all. It was enough that they were with other members of their high caste, and that the burden of parenting had disappeared for a while. I remember one old friend of mine running away from Windridge and making it all the way to the neighboring town before anyone noticed, which was quite a long distance to travel over the rural hills of Vermont. Remarkably, his rogue escape didn’t seem to disturb anyone. He simply was allowed to go home, after which the routine life of camp resumed.

Today, by contrast, such acts of rebellion would have repercussions, because they’re not in keeping with the Ivy League manner rich adults have come to expect from their offspring. Vacation months for posh adolescents are filled with status-conscious enterprises designed to guarantee prestige from the outset. In addition to increasingly refined camps, kids are encouraged to master skills that will prepare them for the boardroom.

Not too long ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article on a program for affluent children that’s taking place this summer in New York City. With the lofty name Global Fellows in Social Enterprise, it’s designed to educate the scions of high-net-worth families about important financial issues. It’s anyone’s guess if this kind of exercise will help kids learn much, but for sure it will instill in them an awareness of their rank, and provide a stark contrast with the comparatively ordinary jobs that middle-class kids can look forward to.

Over the weekend, longtime plutocrat suck-up Peggy Noonan warned that if taxes go up on the rich, they'll leave America. Hopefully they'll move to the libertarian paradise of Somalia. But where they go is their own choice. There are no countries offering that super-rich a better deal than the U.S. More to the point, though, is that if every single one of the young heirs interviewed in Jamie's film were to pack up and leave tomorrow, wouldn't America be far better off? Is there a single thing of value any of them have to offer to our society? Do you really want Trump's daughter staking out spots in the New York skyline to blot out with badly constructed buildings? These people are a living testament for increasing the estate tax to 90%.

In his introduction to The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin writes extensively of the fear conservatives have of equality, something Johnson also deals with very graphically in his film. "When the conservative," writes Robin, "looks upon a democratic movement from below, this (and the exercise of agency) is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power. Witnessing the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Theordore Sedgwick lamented, 'The aristocracy of virtue is destroyed; personal influence is at an end'."

Sunday Night Movie-- Meet The 1%: The Story Of America's Plutocracy

Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune made a documentary in 2006... and it's really engaging and well-done. The first of eight YouTubes of it is above and that one will allow you to find the other seven. These people Jamie talks with don't want to sound crass but they sure like that whole trickle-down theory they get their bought-and-paid-for shills like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor to regurgitate for them.

It's worth watching this film, especially in light of the beginnings of an uprising against the dominance 1% that we're seeing today at the heart of the OccupyWallStreet movement. After he first did the film, the Wall Street Journal called Jamie The Rich Man's Michael Moore.

Brian McNally, the Johnson family's financial adviser, chastises Jamie on camera for his behavior.

"You're behaving like a little arrogant trustafarian," he tells him.

Milton Friedman, the famed economist, was equally impatient with Mr. Johnson's questioning. During his on-air interview-- among Mr. Friedman's last before he died-- he accuses Mr. Johnson of advocating socialism and abruptly ends their talk.

Mr. Johnson insists he's not opposed to wealth-- including his own. Wealth, he says, has given him a great education, freedom, chances to travel and, best of all, the resources to do films about wealth. He says that while his documentaries are profitable, they wouldn't pay for his lifestyle.

Yet with The One Percent, Mr. Johnson wanted to show how the rich have gone too far. Through interviews with economists, policy experts and environmentalists, Mr. Johnson argues that today's wealthy have become an increasingly isolated elite. He says rather than using their wealth for good, they have used it to restructure the economy, lower their taxes, cut social programs for the middle and lower classes, and amass ever more wealth.

Mr. Johnson says finding willing subjects for The One Percent was difficult, and not just because of his reputation. He sent out more than 100 letters to wealthy people asking for interviews and most said no or failed to reply. Even George Soros, the billionaire financier who often argues against inequality, refused.

"We have an aristocracy in this country that has convinced everybody else that they don't exist," Mr. Johnson says.

Rejections by his fellow elites won't be a problem for his next film, however. Says Mr. Johnson: "My next projects are fictional."

When you watch the part about Milton Friedman, remember how the reactionary mind defines "freedom." It's very proprietary and it's very much about their freedom, not our freedom, which could only impinge on theirs. And, yeah, the Steve Forbes part about the talent for greed, selfishness, nepotism and unrestrained acquisition is a perfect explanation of that kind of freedom; it's "a moral system." Did you read A Take Of Two Cities? Jamie's documentary is like an update-- you tear down all the basketball courts (and the school) and build a giant police station. Just remember... "you can't make an omelette without breaking an egg"-- and "the public will get what the public wants." Oh... and when you get to the part about Alfie and Pepe Fanjul, please keep in mind that these fellas have helped finance the political career of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

And remember this too: the 1% believe-- or say they believe-- that God made them rich, just the way monarchs pushed all that claptrap about divine right. And taxes on inheritance, according to the 1%, are criminal and unethical. Right?



And this is Jamie. He did another really cool movie, Born Rich, which I also enjoyed and will try to show here at DWT Monday night. If you watched this one all the way through you surely saw Milton Friedman accuse Jamie of being a socialist, ripping off his mic and haughtily ending the interview, one of the last he granted before dying. David Korten doesn't name him specifically in this paragraph from Agenda For A New Economy but who else could he have meant?

[H]uman future is now in question and the cause can be traced, in part, to economic theories that serve the narrow interests of a few and result in devastating consequences for all.