“At the root of our crisis is runaway inequality,” insists Jacob Hacker in the hard-hitting documentary “Americonned,” which opens with a montage of contemporary America from coast to coast. The Yale political science professor warns that until the chasm between the haves and have-nots is resolved, Americans are vulnerable to radicalization.
Richard Florida, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, laments that “I see two different Americas: The giant steeples of wealth and the just mass homelessness and mass poverty,” as the screen shows images of high rise apartment buildings juxtaposed with people living in tents on city streets. Kurt Andersen, author of “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History,” comments on “the shameless oligarchy living in gated communities” and describes “the people with pitchforks and torches [who] will come get them.”
Instead of bogus so-called culture wars, director Sean Claffey’s compelling, thoughtful, compassionate “Americonned” zooms in on class struggle in the United States as the source of our current great divide. In addition to trenchant commentary offered by various observers, including former US Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, Claffey unfolds his saga of division by following ordinary people of diverse ethnicities struggling against an economy rigged to serve the super rich at the expense of workers. The film is further enlivened by black and white archival footage illustrating America’s often tumultuous labor history.
Christina is a middle-aged, East Coast truck driver on a never-ending treadmill of trying to provide for her family. Melissa is a yoga and art teacher married to Jeff, a laid-off Oracle engineer, desperately striving to maintain a middle-class lifestyle in high-priced Marin County, California, as their son Avery prepares to join the military as an economic draftee. Haitian immigrant Eiane is a cab driver in Boston trying to make ends meet. Evictions are among the trials and tribulations that loom in the background for these and other everyday folk depicted in the film.
“Americonned” traces “extreme free marketism” where, as Andersen states in the film, “nothing mattered but profit” to Milton Friedman, the patron saint of the “Chicago School” of economics. Friedman is shown with President Ronald Reagan, whose “Reaganomics” turbocharged Friedman’s dream of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, in large part through union busting—by, for example, the vicious firing of striking PATCO air traffic controllers—and led to the concentration of more and more wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Art Cullen of The Storm Lake Times Pilot contends that “wages have dropped 50% since 1975.”
As “capitalism went global, the United States lost 3.7 million jobs and nobody cared for the displaced workers,” grouses Andersen. Political Science Professor Janet Gornick of the CUNY Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality asserts that as part of this process, the United States “invested less in the safety net.” As April Sims, president of the Washington State Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, explains, this streamlined, cutthroat capitalism not only weakens but “breaks the social safety net.” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is glimpsed in a black-and-white newsreel advocating for his “Four Freedoms,” but Roosevelt’s New Deal ethos of economic justice and security seems almost otherworldly in today’s brave new world of unfettered free enterprise at all costs.
Although “Americonned” mostly takes aim at Republicans, centrist Democrats who backed NAFTA trade deals and other corporatist policies—including Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden—receive their fair share of criticism, as well. But the documentary holds a special ire for the new breed of billionaires, who—as Senator Bernie Sanders points out—not only often pay no federal taxes but, indeed, receive millions in tax rebates from the government as a form of “socialism for the rich.” As far as this film is concerned, the hottest seats in hell are reserved for the Elon Musks and Richard Bransons of the world.
Cowboy hat-wearing “astronaut” Jeff Bezos appears in a news clip after a short space flight gloating: “I want to thank every Amazon worker. You paid for this.” The film cuts to somebody shouting “F*** the rich!”; an effigy of Bezos at a rally labeled “Union Buster-In-Chief” flashes on-screen while entrepreneur Nick Hanauer of the podcast Pitchfork Economists insists that the wealthy must be taxed.
“Americonned” is not without hope, and its working-class heroes, including Chris Smalls, whose story is interwoven with that of Christina, Melissa, Eiane, and others. Smalls helped spearhead the first successful union drive in Amazon’s 25-year history. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dubs this “the biggest labor win in years.”
The documentary clearly poses unions as the key alternative to the dog-eat-dog-capitalism of the 1%. Other drives to organize workers, including at hundreds of Starbucks stores, are also shown. Stephanie Porta of Organize Florida declares: “We need everyone to join grassroots community organizations.”
I enjoyed this well-made, sincere film that intersperses its thoughtful experts dispensing social commentary and wisdom with the hard luck stories of Americans scraping to get by. The film covers lots of ground in 96 minutes, and some of it has been trodden by other filmmakers such as Michael Moore.
But the most powerful statement in the film comes from Andersen, who makes an astounding argument in favor of wealth redistribution: “If we divided everything up equally, the average household would have $1 million. Everyone would be upper middle class” in America. Imagine that: The strongest argument in favor of taxing the rich, redistributing wealth and income equity isn’t merely moralistic. It’s simply a matter of sound mathematics—if wealth is leveled instead of concentrating poverty, homelessness, and other social ills will be gone with the wind. It’s the arithmetic of equality and ethics, an economy that works for all, instead of the few.
“Americonned” opened theatrically in New York (Cinema Village), Los Angeles (Laemmle Monica Film Center), and other major cities on June 9 with a Video-on-Demand release in the United States and Canada following on June 13 on major platforms.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2023
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