SubVerse

THE ONE PERCENT
Director: Jamie Johnson
Film website: Tribeca Film Fest
Johnson Interview: Filmmaker Q&A

FROM DUST
Director: Dhruv Dhawan
Film website: From Dust Press Notes
Both films viewed at: 2006 Tribeca Film Fest

“No great society has survived such a massive wealth gap;
who knows if ours will?” – Nancy Schafer

An extremely simple and personal film, The One Percent is a documentary that transcends its limits to become increasingly universal and political. Continuing in content and style from his first doc, Born Rich, director Jamie Johnson – an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune – reaches significantly further this time. Beginning as an exploration into his own class guilt over his inherited riches – the films uses diverse interviews with everyone from Steve Forbes to Ralph Nader to Katrina victims to Milton Friedman, the economist who coined the Regan-era term “trickledown effect” – to expand out into a powerful indictment of the stratification between the 1% of the population who own 60% of the wealth, and everyone else in this country.

Beginning with a surprisingly self-aware but obliviously wealthy friend who’s just bought a vast, light-filled loft across a parking lot from Chicago’s down-trodden Cabrini green housing projects, Johnson moves down to the streets. And in interviews with residents of Cabrini Green, we learn how Chicago has gone about gentrifying this neighborhood – by simply closing the schools and the hospitals and public services. Playing on the fear of crime and drug dealers as an excuse, the moneyed class running Chicago’s planning boards have gotten support to “clean up” these old neighborhoods. But Johnson’s interviews reveal a neighborhood where a generation of families have been raised – hopeless of getting out, but in harmony with each other – and where drug dealers are only one percent of the population.

But it’s the richest one percent of the country that’s making all the choices about who gets what. And this shocking little factoid, about Chicago’s closing schools to isolate and abandon the poor, seems like just a small metaphor for what the Federal government at large is up to. Johnson shows heart-rending imagery of the millions abandoned in Katrina, and makes good use of some Michael Moore-type animation to show how and why the country has changed since the days of the New Deal. How a process of governmental redistribution of wealth, that began with Reaganomics in the 1980s, has dramatically changed the direction this country is going. And Johnson’s film, with his incredibly intimate access to the richest of the super-rich, lays bare exactly how they work to preserve their monetary dominance.

But, in one beautiful sequence from the other end of the spectrum, Johnson takes a ride with an enlightened taxi driver caught up in the unfair economics of the Florida sugar industry. When Johnson admits he’s from one of the richest families in the world, the taxi driver takes it in stride. Then smiles a big smile and says:

“You may find this funny, but so am I… Except, not with money.”

Another film that struck a similar chord at this year’s fest was director Dhruv Dhawan’s shot-on-video doc, From Dust. The film exposes what’s happened to millions of inhabitants of Sri Lanka’s seaside villages that were destroyed in the December 2004 tsunami.

Right after the disaster, the government invoked a decades-old, never-before used law, saying that nobody could rebuild their homes within a hundred meters of the beach. The supposed reason was to act as a buffer zone against future tsunamis – even though the tsunami traveled many miles inland, not just a hundred meters. And everyone was supposed to be granted free new land and assistance to build on it – which was nice in theory, except that the land was up in the mountains, and these were fishermen who were feeding their families from their daily catch.

Now, well over two years later, none of the families filmed have even been given new land. And the beach-side properties that were taken away from them – living up to filmmaker Dhawan’s worst fears – have been opened up to development as tourist resorts.

In other words, the government used devastation of biblical proportions as an excuse to clear poor villagers from their land, and turn the beaches into profit-producing industries. (This is one of the exact same motivations the Bush administration has been accused of in not letting Katrina victims in New Orleans’ 9th Ward rebuild their homes.)

Of course, I understand, it can certainly be argued that using the beaches for tourism will bring in millions of dollars and may, in the long run, help the entire country’s economy. But, in order to get there, millions are being disposessed of their homes, their lives, their livelihoods.

As a film, From Dust is very slight, in a way that The One Percent is not. It focuses on just three main characters, and favors quiet poetry and long takes of social realism over delving into the political questions it raises.

But in conjunction with The One Percent, it reveals a trend that’s spreading all over the world – call it the ugly side of globalization, America exporting our “trickledown theory.” The wealthy class increasingly have their hands in the pockets of democratic governments everywhere, and are using invisible under-handed laws and sub-committees to redistribute land and wealth and power into the hands of the few.

This is certainly nothing new.

But it is ugly, and it’s happening during my lifetime. And I’m waking up to it.

One of the reasons The One Percent has stayed so strongly with me, is because – unlike so many other angry liberal films of the past six years – it actually offers an idea. A way out, a model, a road map for how to save this country.

At the end of the film, Johnson talks to Kevin Philips, author of “Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich,” a very humanist economist who reminds us of the Progressive Society that came into place after the Depression.

At a time of vast poverty, our country didn’t rise up in rebellion. We didn’t turn Communist or Socialist, as so many feared. Instead, for a brief period under FDR, people came together to help each other. A progressive government began building systems to redistribute the wealth through social services meant to help everyone out. A progressive government – i.e. a “big” government designed to help the 99% of the country that collectively share only 40% of the wealth.

If our country is ever going to climb out from under the current regime that’s controlled by and caters to the richest 1%, our society is going to have to wake up and become Progressive again, all on our own. And all together.

I personally think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, a lot more people are going to have to suffer before enough people get angry enough to change things. But it’s good to see a film come along to remind us about the New Deal and the Progressive era as a model for what we could once again become.