Requiem for the American Dream

• 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