- Title: Requiem for the American Dream
- Duration: 73 min
- Country: United States
- Director: Peter D. Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, Jared P. Scott
- Script: Peter D. Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, Jared P. Scott
- Year: 2015
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyFSvnLnCZ0
- Synopsis:
REQUIEM FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM is the definitive discourse with Noam Chomsky, on the defining characteristic of our time - the deliberate concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a select few. Through interviews filmed over four years, Chomsky unpacks the principles that have brought us to the crossroads of historically unprecedented inequality tracing a half century of policies designed to favor the most wealthy at the expense of the majority - while also looking back on his own life of activism and political participation. Profoundly personal and thought provoking, Chomsky provides penetrating insight into what may well be the lasting legacy of our time - the death of the middle class, and swan song of functioning democracy. A potent reminder that power ultimately rests in the hands of the governed, REQUIEM is required viewing for all who maintain hope in a shared stake in the future.
'Banking and Finance' in the film
The
concentration of the Well-being and the Power Chomsky along the
documentary explains to the spectator what has come in naming, "Ten
beginning of the concentration of the Well-being and Power ".
Hereby we will see the motives of this social gap that one translates
in one, every major day, inequality between wealthy classes and the
workers. Chomsky will sustain his argumentation on thinkers as the
philosopher Aristotle, the economist Adam Smith or James Madison,
creating a forceful speech, a lucid thought in that certain things
are of surplus known, because once again, there is nothing new under
the sun. Little by little we will be present at the decline of the
concept of democratic company. Managing to reduce the concept until
it seems that it loses totally the sense.
The
accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of power are two factors
that go of the hand and that turn virtually impossibly a balance in
the scale between " the powerful ones " and the common
people, who lacks royal instruments to defend his way of life and his
work, mentally ill one of for yes.
Another
factor important to explain the inequality that today happen in The
United States is the almost systematic destruction of the unions that
happened under Reagan's presidency. The agent chief executive,
according to Chomsky, gave total freedom to the companies in order
that they were treating the labor organizations as illegal
instruments. The sequels of this mentality persist in the 21st
century: nowadays only 7 per cent of the workers of the private
sector they are affiliated to an union, "the great barrier
against the corporate tyranny.
The
intellectual thinks that the foundation of The United States the
presidential choices have been influenced by economic groups and
private interests, also he thinks that in 2009 the Supreme Court of
his country took one of the worst decisions of his history. The
decision known as 'Citizens United' concludes that the right of
freedom of expression of the corporations cannot limit, and that for
ende these can spend what they want financing electoral campaigns.
Chomsky
considers a fifties and sixties the golden epoch of The United
States. It was a question of a period in which there was a continuous
growth in all the ranges of the company. The income of the poorest
raised to the same pace that that of the wealthiest. A fact that it
had to see, for the academician, with the Welfare state that I
implement the president Roosevelt during the years of the Great
Depression. Being based on the network of social safety that FDR
created, in the fifties and sixties a black could manage a good work,
to buy a house, to have a car. For the intellectual one, in the
seventy USA it started turning into an other period, an economic
system that is significantly influenced by the high class.
The
change was effected especially by the creation of a new tributary
politics: it was re-designed in order that them of above they were
paying less and the thickness of the population was paying more. How?
Raising the taxes of wages and consumption (that affect the whole
population) and reducing those of dividends (that principally affect
the rich ones).
The
seventies both the right and the left side looked for the way of
reducing the democratic advances of the previous decade. The right
with the Powell Memorandum of 1971, in which the attorney and future
judge of the Supreme Court Lewis Powell did called the corporations
in order that found ways of suppressing the advances of the sixties.
Of this memorandum there were born powerful institutions like The
Heritage Foundation, The Manhattan Institute, between others, which
were seeking to influence the public to reject the increasing power
of the government in his lives. A philosophy that was implemented by
all rigor in Ronald Reagan's administration, in which one reduced in
an ostentatious way the taxes to the high class, but not so much to
the rest of the population.
Personal commentaries
Noam Chomsky documentary's American activist against contemporary
capitalism and US foreign policies, which try to explain the
inequality between rich and poor, which increasingly is becoming more
pronounced.Noam Chomsky documentary's American activist against
contemporary capitalism and US foreign policies, which try to explain
the inequality between rich and poor, which increasingly is becoming
more pronounced.In addition, I want to focus in point 3 of the
Decalogue, in which he talks about the redesign of the economy, which
mainly makes a complaint about globalization, being contradictory to
his thinking on inequality, since it does not accept inequality among
Americans, but he does accept that Americans may be richer than
others.
Eduardo Herrera
The documentary offers us a look of the future that waits for us (if
we are still passive) to the resignation of the beginning of
equality, freedom and brotherhood. In addition, a follow up of which
those that are governed are those who really have the power in his
hands.
Actually,
in The United States 1 % it controls almost the whole wealth of the
country. I think that this not only is unjust if not that in addition
is a low blow for the Democracy and it has negative effects for the
company. In a functional democracy, the public opinion influences the
politics. But the excessive concentration of wealth leads to the
excessive concentration of power, which in turn is used to favour the
few ones of above and this way all that continues in a vicious circle.
Adrián Afonso
