The End of Poverty? A movie produced by the Schalkenbach Foundation Premiers in New York today at the Village East Cinema and will be in many more American cities in the coming weeks.
The End of Poverty?, A movie produced by the Schalkenbach Foundation Premiers in New York today and the Village East Cinema and will be in many more American cities in the coming weeks.
Philippe Diaz, the director, takes apart the global capitalistic system, as you have probably never seen done before. The sheer matter-of-fact criminality of the whole enterprise could not be made plainer than in this movie. Comparisons to Michael Moore’s Capitalism come to mind but with more concrete statements of changes we need to make both personally and collectively.
Aside from being one of the more informative movies you are likely to see, it is also a beautiful movie. You will see much of Latin American and Africa, but not the National Geographic postcard type of imagery. TEOP? manages to be both starkly beautiful and deeply jarring in how the interviewed experts describe World Bank/IMF policies in political and technical language, and then you learn the terrible reality that those policies translate into. If you ever wondered where bitter anti-americanism in the developing countries comes from, you won’t wonder after seeing this movie.
For progressives really looking for economic solutions you might also peruse the Schalkenbach web site for some of the best old ideas that were never tried out. Did you know that there was once a very serious movement in this country to shift the entire burden of taxation onto privileges and monopolies? Did you know that taxes that fall on privileges and monopolies cause no adverse economic effects or distortions? Bet you never heard that on the evening news when they all spout (or imply) the right wing line about how evil taxes are, never bother to distinguish the issue of what is taxed. I bet you also never heard on the evening news that failure to tax privileges and monopolies is at the core of income inequality. No, that wouldn’t be important information for citizens in a country practically in a state of economic depression. Move along…..nothing to see there. Or did you know that Progress and Poverty was the number one best seller in the English language (Bible excepted) for more than 50 years? Bet you didn’t know your great-grandparents were so radical. Isn’t it interesting the inconvenient truths that get edited out of history books?
(For disclosure purposes, I am a board member of Schalkenbach.)