Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[pulsing drums]
[dramatic music playing]
[Kurt Andersen] If you look at the United States today,
we still are one people.
We still have a heck of a lot in common.
We still actually like one another when we meet one another.
But what I worry about in America
is this total divide or bifurcation.
And I see two different Americas.
These giant steeples of wealth,
and then just mass homelessness and mass poverty.
It's as if the middle of our economy
just got eviscerated.
We're just trying to not lose our home.
And these people, they use the law as a weapon.
I mean, our middle class is, I don't wanna say it's gone,
but it erodes every single day.
[singing "Happy Birthday"]
The lockdown of the pandemic
is both the cause of certain problems,
and the revealer of a lot of other problems.
[Chris Smalls on megaphone] Richest man in the world
failed to protect his own workers.
We're in a fucked up time in this country.
[Christina] Look at everyone out here in these states and these towns,
and hundreds suffering.
And the system is just so broken.
What are you doing for us?
[electronic music playing]
Elon! Elon!
[Nick Hanauer] People have to begin to understand,
they have been bullied and conned.
How can it be true that raising wages kills jobs?
A job killer.
...that would cost as many as a million jobs.
3.7 million lost jobs.
If nobody has any money, who will buy the stuff?
[crowd chanting]
Whether they're from the Democrats or the Republicans,
everyone's made a dime on workers' backs
[Stacy Mitchell] Fewer and fewer people have a shot at realizing the American dream.
It's a rigged system.
[man] Everything hinges off of people
being able to support themselves and their families.
If we lose that, we lose our identity and we lose our country.
I pulled myself up by the bootstraps so many damn times that I ripped them off.
At some point,
there's got to be a breaking point.
[man] This is the moment that everybody needs to pay attention.
[Janet Gornick] As we look back at American history,
we do see explosions of growth of social policy
following times of hardship.
There is absolutely no reason that we can't create such a moment again.
And now is the time.
[Chris Smalls] I need all y'all.
Are you going to get in the streets and do something
or are you going to sit back and do nothing?
[speaker's words echoing]
[dramatic music playing]
[Chris Smalls] What do y'all wanna eat for dinner?
Get some pizza, da-da-da.
Every time we come here, we eat the same thing.
Y'all want pizza, pizza, pizza.
I said I don't know.
- Chicken nuggets? - No, pizza.
That's the second thing y'all always want.
Chicken nuggets or pizza.
- No you're not. - You remember the handshake?
No.
Back up.
You know, I love my kids
more than anything,
There you go.
For me, I always want to be a strong role model for them.
Somebody that's always like, you know, Daddy's going to take care of things.
They may not understand completely what's going on,
but they understand that, you know, their dad got fired
for speaking out against Amazon.
- [boy] Daddy? - Yes.
[boy] Wanna take a walk?
[Chris] When I grew up, I didn't have the luxury
of having both parents, you know, a single parent home.
My mother, a strong black woman.
Walk on this side.
I really had to learn and earn the things that I have in life.
Come on, man. You gotta look presentable.
[Chris] Mmm. Hmm, hmm.
- Daddy! - [Chris laughs]
Seriously, you have to eat off your golden teeth.
Everything that happened to me is for them.
I want them to be able to grow up in a society
where they don't have to struggle as hard as we do.
That's what we need to fight for.
Christian Smalls helped to organize Monday's walkout
by workers at Amazon's fulfillment center on Staten Island,
protesting the company's response to the coronavirus crisis.
We've got 10 cases in the building.
They didn't let my people know.
My people are still in there working.
We are joined now by Chris Smalls.
- Christian Smalls. - [Lesley Stahl] Chris Smalls,
an assistant manager,
was the first to organize a walkout in the United States.
Tell us what happened to you after the protest.
I was terminated two hours later.
Leaked notes showed the company's leadership discussing plans
to make Smalls "the face of the entire union organizing movement,"
since he is "not smart or articulate."
Which... holy shit!
A union agitator.
If they're not going to take care of their employees, somebody has to.
Oh, look who's here!
Christian's here!
[Chris] Hey! What's up my brother?
Every time we do these events, we gain more support,
and a lot of people are joining us, so it's picking up momentum for sure.
We stand in solidarity with the workers in Alabama right now
that has a union vote on the table.
We know that this is going to be history for all of us
if they do, or are successful in unionizing the building.
What the hell?
I never seen that before.
[laughs] It seems like he paid the whole precinct off today.
All we're doing is advocating for wealth tax
on all the billionaires, starting with the richest man in the world.
[people chattering]
We're talking about corporations that have enriched themselves on the backs of working people.
We've got to get out of the mentality of scarcity
and this idea that there is not enough money to go around.
We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
And at the same time the wealthy elite
are walking away without paying any sort of taxes at all,
while the rest of us bear the burden
of making sure that we have a government that functions.
They may try to blame the pandemic for their failures,
but they're really just exposing the cracks in our system.
I would say they should check their history.
Maybe read a book.
Because the labor movement was born in times just like these.
In our day, certain economic truths
have become accepted as self-evident.
A second Bill of Rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity
can be established for all,
regardless of state or race or creed.
The right to a useful and remunerative job,
the right to earn enough,
the right of every family to a decent home,
the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age,
sickness, and unemployment.
All of these rights spell security.
Every economy, and certainly an economic system
as complicated and large as this one,
is designed.
It's a matter of a million choices, both by individuals
and by communities and by national governments
of how it's going to work and how the economic pie that's baked every day
is divided.
The last time in our history income inequality was this high,
big corporations were a new thing,
and shareholders and their wealthy friends rigged the system to their benefit.
So workers got together
and fought back against what was essentially a ruling class.
They formed unions.
The power of unions allows workers to come together
and negotiate higher wages, better health care,
sick days, overtime, pensions and protections,
so that abusive companies can't fire people for any and no reason at all.
And that's how we started to change the growing
income inequality in this country,
by giving workers something to fight for,
someone to stand with,
and a reason to stay in this fight.
We also created laws
to control the power of big business.
Government, combined with union power,
created a web of countervailing forces
that was in relative balance.
[Kurt Andersen] Our economic system, which used to work
for everyone in the sense that rich people got richer,
but middle class people and poor people were also rising at the same rate.
Those lines for 40 years, just, they were parallel.
And then suddenly, in 1980, economic growth continued,
productivity continued, but the median income
and the wealth of 60, 70, 80% of America stopped.
[dramatic music playing]
[Christina] Go ahead, go get apples and bananas.
Go sit on your lion chair.
[water running]
[children chattering]
[Christina] Guys, you want rice?
[boy] Yes, Mom.
- [Sean] Yes. - [boy] No!
- [girl] Mom, mom! - [Christina] Yes baby, yes baby.
- [girl] Two? - [Christina] Two.
- [Sean] Two. - [Christina] Are you turning the grill on?
[Sean] I don't know how to turn it on.
Is the propane on already or...
[Christina] It's on already. You just got to turn it.
You've gotta push it in and turn it.
You've got to keep clicking it until you see the flames
- Oh. - go on.
[Christina] We don't usually eat a lot of steak because it's pricey.
[chuckles] We usually eat a lot of chicken.
[boy] Yeah.
But in order for the kids not to really lose their mind,
I try to get at least a piece a week
so they can have a little something different.
I had a bit of a fight, getting help with food stamps when I lost my job.
Her exact words on the other end were,
"Well, you drive a truck,
so you can go find something else to deliver."
And it was when I told her, "If you feel that way, I want to come to your office.
I will drop off my children, and I will take your job
and you can come and find something for my job."
And it was after I told her that that she said, "OK, I'll send you an application."
And the kids heard that conversation, too,
so that was exciting to try to explain that to them.
You go from having everything that you need,
your kids have a roof over their head.
Everything's going to be okay to...
You don't know where your next meal is going to come from.
And this is like an everyday thing for a lot of people.
- Mom! - [Christina] Yes baby.
- Cook! - [Christina] You want to cook?
[food sizzling]
- [Christina] Don't touch, okay? - Hot!
- [Christina] It's hot. Very good. - [girl giggles]
[Christina] Okay, so we don't touch.
The vast majority of families that are poor work.
And this kind of, you know,
Reagan invention and Newt Gingrich invention
of the "welfare queen", and that these people are ripping off the system,
that's just, that's wrong.
That's, you know, it's just incorrect.
It's not accurate.
We need to just have a much more
honest and open conversation about what is the reality,
what do we actually know?
One out of four babies are born at the poverty line or below.
Right now, one out of four babies in the United States are born below the poverty line.
That's the reality.
- [girl] Hi! - [Jenny DePaul] Hi!
[Christina] Where are you going?
So really, employment and housing are the two things...
That's the two things that I just want to figure out.
Everything else, I can do it.
on the weekends and get it planned.
But those are the main things.
What are we looking at as far as bills go?
I don't want you to, or even if you have an idea,
It doesn't, you don't have to go through every bill.
No, but I can write it down and add it up
- because I'm not good with math in my head. - Okay.
- [girl babbles] - [Sean] Shh, quiet.
That's a little break about right now, just with this, it's about $5,000.
OK, so we're going to try to, you know, get some donations coming in.
So we need we need to raise money.
I feel like it's a lot easier to become homeless than it is to get out of it.
Okay. So, it's possible that what I don't have in the store is because it's gonna fall out.
One of the main problems is people think they need to solve someone's whole problem.
But I don't believe that we need to know all the answers.
We'll just share like what we have.
But the resources are really scarce so people aren't able to get what they need.
[gentle music playing]
Where's Snoopy?
Snoopy's helping me. I got it.
- You want these shoes? - [man translates]
If you're just depending on the system that's in place,
there's just a huge lack overall.
For now, I think we should all be doing our part.
But there needs to be changes.
One of the most important elements of social policy in the US today
is that the system of support
for people and for families is developed into two tiers.
Social Security and Medicare,
on the one hand, these quite favored programs,
and then all of the anti-poverty programs on the other hand.
And that lower tier is very weak.
- Thank you. - You're welcome.
A lot of nonprofits do help, but that's not a solution.
This concept of deserving and undeserving, that's very deep in the United States.
And it's important to note that it's a socially constructed concept
and a population can go from deserving to undeserving.
And that's what happened in this country with single mothers,
Back in the early day, when most single mothers were widows,
and when women's employment was not the norm,
they were treated with great sympathy
and that the cash benefits that were given to them,
it was viewed as replacing the absent breadwinner.
And they were viewed as worthy.
In the 20 years after the Social Security Act passed,
single mothers were slowly converted from deserving to undeserving,
as they were more likely to be never married,
less likely to be widowed
as women's employment became more the norm.
And they became a very disfavored and stigmatized group.
And it's partly for that reason that we have
among the highest poverty rates among single-mother families
and among children of any country in the affluent world.
[gentle music playing]
[reporter] Here at Riviera Apartments along Mercy Drive,
tenants, mostly women and their children, describe deplorable conditions.
[tenant] I have roaches, palmetto bugs.
I don't have nowhere else to go.
My apartment, it floods.
[tenant]
I told them I said, "Listen, y'all not fixing nothing in my apartment.
Why am I paying y'all for y'all not to fix nothing?
[male tenant] ...their mama or their kids or their daddy was here,
they wouldn't be trying to board their motherfucking apartment up.
He's sitting there waiting for the camera people to leave so he can come
board these people's shit up
because he don't want to do it while the camera people are here.
You don't want to see these kids getting put out in the fucking streets.
[man] You put it official.
Hiya Judy.
It's easier said than done, just getting up and moving.
I mean, I looked at a house and they're asking for like
$2200 up front before you can even move in.
It's hard to just say, "OK, I'm going to get up and move and that's the end of story."
I wish it were that easy.
[child squealing]
[Stephanie Porta] Specifically around housing,
we're at a crisis level in this state
and it's only gotten worse.
We have the fewest tenant protections in the country,
and what the market is doing is crushing communities and families.
- Thank you. - You're welcome.
[child babbling]
- Do you have any questions? - No sir.
Thank you so much. Have a good day, okay?
- [police office] You too. - [woman] Thank you.
[newscaster] The CDC has extended the moratorium
to protect renters from getting evicted during the pandemic.
[reporter] Evictions are legal if the tenants do not sign a declaration.
It's incumbent on the tenant
to give that declaration to their landlord
in order for those CDC protections to take effect.
So in February of this year, they were Realsource Property Management.
And that was February 19th of 2020.
The reason that I point that out is because literally a month,
March 19th 2020, they changed their names again to Orlando City Apartment.
But on my on my eviction, it says 7M.
So that's what I you know, filed it with, 7M.
So my concern now is, will the declaration
still be valid even though they're changing company names?
I don't want to get kicked out.
Because I have my kids, you know, I don't want to be in the street.
[voicemail] Please leave your message. [beeps]
[Ana]
[phone ringing]
[Stephanie Porta] This is something we learned during the foreclosure crisis.
Our systems, our culture, our everything is set up
to make people feel guilty.
And one of the powerful things about organizing is
having people who are at risk of foreclosure or eviction
realize that they're not alone, that there are systems
that are set up to cause this,
and that we have to band together
to fight back against these attacks on our rights.
- [man] - [crowd] Power!
- [man singing] - [crowd] Power to the people!
[Kurt Andersen] During the late 1960s,
many of people in the establishment of the time
really thought that there might be this revolution brewing,
that socialism was finally going to wash away the American free market system.
Ho Chi Minh is going to be riding into the United States essentially.
And so there was this paradigm shift that happened
during the 1960s and then certainly in the 1970s.
Milton Friedman was an incredibly important figure.
He was at the University of Chicago, where he was
at the center of this group of libertarian economists.
And they were really outside the mainstream.
Personally, of course, I would get rid of Social Security.
I've always said it was one of the great miracles of Madison Avenue packaging.
What would you do about the minimum wage law if you could?
I would abolish it.
Then, in 1970, The New York Times Magazine
invited him to essentially summarize his beliefs
in an article that they called "a Friedman doctrine."
Please welcome the Nobel Laureate in economics, Milton Friedman, right here.
[applause]
He was making the case that for businesses, nothing mattered but profits.
Not the well being of your employees,
not the well being of your communities,
not the well being of the larger society.
All that mattered was your profits, period.
He was making a claim about how human economies worked,
that the more selfish business executives were,
the better it would be for everyone.
And that's what people bought.
The "trick" in trickle down economics is not believing
that when the rich get richer, that's good for the economy.
The evil part is the belief that when the poor get richer,
that will harm the economy.
And that has been the basic message
of our nation's economic system for the last 40 years.
[train whistle blows]
[man] What began as an attempt to prevent a kind
of anti-business tide
became this new anti-government movement
of extreme free market-ism carried to the max.
The future belongs to those countries
that don't straitjacket the initiative of their people.
Free markets must be our goal.
Historically, we've thought of government as a force for equality.
But over the last generation, there's no trickle down occurring, right?
It's really a story of trickle up.
[chattering[
Look at the minimum wage over the past 30 years against profitability,
productivity, inflation, executive compensation.
The minimum wage today is far, far below where it should be relative to the mid-'60s..
And if you adjust it relative to productivity,
minimum wage should be over $20.
[Art Cullen] Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois,
they all rely on heavy manufacturing and agricultural exports,
and those markets have been absolutely destroyed.
Wages have dropped in half since 1975.
You can't buy a new house on $16 an hour.
You just can't.
When I decided to move home several years ago,
I looked at my hometown paper for a job for about a month,
and the best job I could get is $15 an hour and no benefits.
It just, it's getting harder and harder to live in rural America.
Whether it's a McDonald's or a Dollar General or whatever,
they hire people for $10, $12 an hour,
and the profits go out of the district.
That's not benefiting our society.
That's not benefiting our communities.
The economy isn't working for here.
It benefits these multinational corporations.
[Tucker Carlson] At least one person has become
extremely rich, richer than any man in history
from all of this, including a lot of the suffering.
That would be Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos just yesterday made $13 billion.
Income inequality is just the tip of the inequality iceberg,
because wealth is kind of the resource that gets translated into political influence.
Billionaire donors have billions and billions of dollars that they can devote to politics.
Money to get power, power to get money.
Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table.
[newscaster] Congress today approved a $1.5 trillion tax cut.
Let me talk about the tax proposal
that was pushed very hard by Senator McConnell
and the Republican leadership in that bill.
Amazon paid nothing in 2018 in federal taxes.
But then, on top of that,
they received $129 million as a tax rebate.
That is socialism for the rich.
[dramatic music playing]
[numbers ringing up]
[Chris Smalls] We gotta take care of ourselves.
We can't rely on the government.
We can't rely on the Democrats, the Republicans,
and we damn sure can't rely on the 1% class.
[Nick Hanauer] I am a big believer in capitalism,
but it is ridiculous to both believe that capitalism is a good economic system,
and to simultaneously believe that the whole system will come tumbling down
if businesspeople are required to pay people enough to live without government assistance.
It's either a good system or it's not.
That is the minimum standard we should hold capitalism to.
[crowd chanting]
And together, we all have to be David versus Goliath.
[crowd singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"]
[helicopter blades whirring]
[chattering]
We need a fork for here.
[James] Have you heard about the cello-something?
It has, like basically a fish with human legs.
There was a David Attenborough documentary.
David Hadenborough?
- No, hat-and-bra. - [Lucas] Hat-and-bra?
[Melissa] I'm proud of all my kids, they're so different.
Avery is interested in marine biology and engineering,
and Lucas wants to be a doctor.
James is the wild card.
You know there's such a thing as a blue axolotl?
[Melissa] I teach art, I teach yoga.
With three children at home,
I'm just scrambling to find more work.
Do not be afraid, I am the cure.
But in Marin County, there's no rent control.
And now that 11% of San Francisco, I believe,
has moved out of the city since the pandemic,
the rents have skyrocketed here.
We were given a notice that we have 60 days to find a new place.
[gulls squawking]
It's been really stressful on my kids.
But I'm trying to make it all work.
[waves rumbling]
Art really has a lot of healing potential.
It's just a great excuse to be in nature.
That was sort of mean of Oracle to have that global reduction in workforce
like right the week of the shutdown.
That was sucky, you know?
They could have kept people on through the pandemic.
They could've.
But they don't care.
Jeff got three three months' severance.
That's nothing.
Puts a monkey wrench into a family's life.
I think people have to understand that in so many ways
over the last 45 years in the United States,
the system has been re-engineered
to make it harder for most Americans.
And I'm not just talking about poor Americans.
75, 80% of Americans
to keep their heads above water economically.
[auctioneer calling out numbers]
The achievement of the economic right during the '70s and '80s
was to make people think that it was just this
beautiful, pristine thing, the free market.
That the government only fucked up by getting too involved.
But how did we get there?
In 1972, '73, the Business Roundtable formed,
which consisted of the CEOs of the 200 biggest companies,
lobbying personally in Washington on behalf of the free enterprise system.
And moreover, there are these rich billionaires, Charles Koch and his brother David,
being most famous among them, who understood that they needed
to change the nature of the public discourse.
We advocate less government intervention into our personal lives,
less government intervention into our economic affairs.
So I think that the marketplace is right for us.
The public is ready for our ideas.
We have the right product.
All we have to do is go out and sell it,
and we're going to be very, very successful.
[applause]
[Kurt Andersen] And how do you do that?
Well, they began funding these think tanks.
[Jacob Hacker] The Koch brothers have created this vast network of organizations
that try to lobby for more conservative policies.
In one sense, what the Koch brothers created was a rich people's movement.
Thank you very, very much.
[Kurt Andersen] In the 1970s, the number of political action committees,
these groups that donate to political candidates,
went from being, you know, half of them were union PACs,
half of them were business PACs.
Okay, it's a fair fight.
And then this new project of the right
began to fight harder and sort of created, organized capital
to fight organized labor.
By the '80s and '90s, it was overwhelmingly business PACs and trade association PACs
and a tiny fraction were unions.
[Nick Hanauer] What that amounted to
was a protection racket for the very rich.
It's just bullshit and it has been a catastrophe
for everybody but the top 1%.
And it resulted effectively in an upward redistribution of about $50 trillion
from the bottom 90% of Americans
to the top 1% over the last 40 years.
[dramatic music playing]
[Eaine] Boston is, it's tough.
My parents are both immigrants from Haiti.
They'd just go to work, come home, go to work, come home, go to work.
I was a rebellious teen who
just made a lot of negative choices.
Some stuff you just don't talk about after a while.
One of my best friends was shot
on his front steps, sitting outside.
When that happened, I was looking for something.
I needed something to keep me going and I did have a few
different jobs and it still wasn't enough to make it.
Like, what can I afford this week?
What bill am I going to try to pay this week?
What bill am I not going to pay this week?
You know, my overdraft in my account.
Those struggles are... [sighs]
they're, that's a hustle on its own, to be honest.
It really is.
[dramatic music playing]
[Marty Walsh] Boston's a great city.
You know, there's a lot of development going on in every neighborhood in the city.
But it doesn't mean we don't have inequality.
Inequality is everywhere.
We're not equally across the board rising all ships.
And I look back over the last 50 years,
and, you know, in the '50s and '60s,
there were more people in the middle class than today.
My parents are from Ireland, they met here in Boston.
My father joined the labor union, Local 223.
Being in the labor moment, it gave us everything we had.
I mean, we weren't rich, but we had,
we had everything that we ever needed.
When I was a kid, I used to go to political rallies
and my father would be always holding a sign for somebody.
And I just fell in love with the concept of people helping people.
We owe it to the young generation right now to make it better,
so as they get older, go to school or get trained, go into the workforce,
that they're doing better than their parents.
That's what our country generally has been,
and that's what we want for our kids and for our society.
[chattering]
[Eaine] I'm not sure what my future looks like.
I really don't want to go back to what I was doing.
But I don't want to work three jobs.
Nights, weekends, I want a life.
[dramatic music playing]
When this project of the economic right
began in the '70s, getting rid of unions was key.
[Ronald Reagan] This morning at 7AM, the union representing those
who man America's air traffic control facilities called a strike.
If they do not report for work within 48 hours,
they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
[Kurt Andersen] When Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic control workers,
it was the green light for big companies to start
crushing workers whenever they dared to strike.
And that took apart one of the big legs of the stool
on which this system of checks and balances
among all the various players in the economy had stood,
and stood well for 40 or 50 years.
And then when NAFTA was being proposed,
workers effectively didn't have a seat at that table.
[Peter Jennings] The North American Free Trade Agreement is designed to create
a free trading zone involving the US, Mexico and Canada.
NAFTA to me is loss of a future.
[Bill Clinton] We cannot stop global change,
we can only harness the energy to our benefit.
Today, as I sign the North American Free Trade Agreement into law,
I do so with this pledge.
To the men and women of our country who were afraid of these changes,
the gains from this agreement will be your gains, too...
[voice on radio] 3, 2, 1, fire it!
...because NAFTA means jobs, American jobs,
and good paying American jobs.
[Kurt Andersen] Capitalism went global,
and things could be made and done more cheaply elsewhere.
[reporter] Trade between the US and China cost Americans 3.7 million jobs.
[Kurt Andersen] And that happened in other countries, too.
But what other countries did is expand its social welfare cushion
to take care of those people who were displaced
by those changes to retrain them, to get them new jobs.
To take care of them.
The United States really didn't.
- [truck horn honking] - [Christine] Come on, guy.
I'm surprised I haven't had a heart attack yet.
I ask Mommy this question all the damn time.
If you have a heart attack,
then who's going to take care of us?
That's why I try to relax, Lito.
- That's why I try to... - But I keep asking her that question
and it's like you want to die already.
I keep asking you that question,
who's going to take care of us? Who's going to take care of us?
Well, don't worry about it. I'm alive, aren't I?
[boy] I ain't being homeless.
And we are here.
[boy chattering]
[door slamming]
Well this year have been different for me.
Very different.
It can be stressful on Mom,
because she needs, you know, two jobs to get a lot of money.
You know, if I become rich or just a comedian that has money,
I'll buy like a, not a big mansion,
just buy a little house just like other people.
That would help my mom to stop getting all these jobs.
She should get paid, you know, like $200, $100,
or $4 million, that would be good.
Because that's a lot.
[Janet Gornick] When we talk about work foundling policy,
like child care and paid leave, I often say
that's when the US is exceptionally exceptional.
We invest much less in public childcare
than almost any other rich country,
and we leave the regulation of labor market almost,
it's like the Wild West, it's almost completely silent.
Employees are at the mercy of their employers.
You know, this new gig economy and this idea of these at-will employees
allows the employer to get all of the profit, right,
to all of the reward and all of the profit and take none of the risk.
So now suddenly the risk is on the workers who are the least able to manage that risk.
I think it breaks the social contract that we have between employer and employee.
And I think it does not provide any of the protections
that employees deserve.
[Jacob Hacker] You know, we don't talk about risk enough.
Especially as this pandemic has hit so many vulnerable Americans,
we've all become really familiar with the risk of economic loss,
with the risk of getting sick and over the last generation, more and more risk
has been shifted from government and from corporations onto ordinary Americans.
One of the things that is so important about government
is that it has the ability
to pool risk in a way that even private insurers can't.
That's why Social Security works.
That's why Medicare is so popular, because government
has this unique ability to pool risk across people
with differing incomes and different backgrounds
and different risk of needing health care
or retirement savings,
and to do so in a way that is more generous for low and middle-income Americans.
And so, as government has pulled back in these areas,
the system has become both more risky and less equal.
But it's partly because Americans have gradually come to accept a kind of credo
of personal responsibility that says,
"If you are facing troubles, it must be your fault,"
rather than thinking about the ways in which public policy
and public officials have failed them,
we need to restore that basic sense of shared fate.
[Jenny DePaul] Hi everybody.
I got you shoes. Yes, they're for you.
[Jacob Hacker] And we need to tell people who are facing economic crises
that they need to be given the tools and the resources
to cope with problems that Americans cannot cope with on their own.
[slow music playing]
[banjo music playing]
Probably on their way to Alabama, too. [chuckles]
We're on our way to show some solidarity with the union.
Amazon workers at a warehouse in Alabama have been voting by mail on whether to unionize.
If successful, it would be the first union at any Amazon facility,
and it could spark a labor movement across the country.
What you're doing in Alabama, it is the most important story that nobody is discussing.
[Chris] Oh, Birmingham DSA just followed me.
[Olga Miranda] The rebirth of labor is happening right now as we speak.
Unions have been attacked for so long that now our young people
are sharing their information about why it's good to join the union.
The future is promising,
if we continue to fight and educate more.
But we're all going to fail if we're not supportive
of this generation and the demands that they're making.
[Chris] We're outside Amazon facility in Bessemer.
There's a change of shift right now, I want to get some workers over here.
Hey, man, you work for Amazon?
You do? How do you like it?
- I just started. - Oh, you just started working?
Oh, three weeks.
Hey, ma'am, can I ask you a question real quick?
All right. Thank you.
We want to make sure y'all get it so we can unionize.
[woman]
Yo bro, you work for Amazon?
You gonna vote for that union?
Man, a lot of, one of the workers,
she outright just said, "I want no part of it.
I don't want anything to do with it."
And...
the other worker, he said,
he said he might.
So a lot of them are on the fence.
It's really a 50-50 chance right now.
50-50 chance.
In the issue of working conditions,
I'm very proud of the wages that we pay.
So we don't believe that we need a union.
[guest] The workers have no contracts.
They are at, real workers can be fired for any cause.
You don't want to go to work every day and feel unsafe.
[woman] You know the work is hard, it's gut wrenching,
and that they're under constant surveillance.
[clock beeping]
[man] We're not treated as human beings.
We're not even treated as robots.
We're treated as part of the data stream.
[Krystal Ball] If you leave your space
and go to the bathroom, your time is getting docked.
That leads to termination.
[man] Amazon is basically on this mission to drive price down as much as possible
and squeeze as much out of their workforce.
[mayor] Less than 10 years ago, Bessemer was truly at the brink of bankruptcy.
Amazon is the largest single investment in the city of Bessemer.
[Randy Hadley] Amazon hired a group of union buster consultants,
and they paid each consultant $3200 a day.
[reporter] And Amazon made typical anti-union threats.
You're going to lose your wages.
You going to lose your benefits.
We're going to shut the company down and move somewhere else.
[Steven Greenhouse] Union organizers are not allowed to set foot on company property,
whereas the company can talk to the workers 24-7,
with videos, with speeches, with mandatory meetings.
[Chris Smalls] That's what they're giving them.
In these meetings, they're giving them this shit.
[man] "But of course, at the end of the day, it's always the employee's choice."
[man] Yeah, this is crazy.
This is union busting 101.
You know, if you read this website for the first time and don't know anything about it,
- You're just scared. - So it's telling you to vote no.
It's not even giving you the options.
- It's not neutral. - And they try to confuse you right there.
They're going to spend millions of dollars just to stop that.
And then people just realize, sit back and think like,
you know, why are they fighting so hard to not have it?
[Chris] You know, I just hope people understand that.
[tense music playing]
[Kurt Andersen] The very deliberate crushing of unions
was a huge change in our politics.
But you could still have regulations to try to keep
this incredible juggernaut of lobbying by the rich and powerful in check.
So how do you change things permanently?
Well, you change law.
You change the way the judiciary interpret
what is constitutional or not.
A big way that changed is by billionaire right wingers,
giving $50 million or $100 million each to all the best law schools.
And, oh, by the way, let's also start this fraternity mafia, whatever you want to call it.
[newscaster] So what exactly is the Federalist Society?
[Eric Lipton] The Federalist Society got started through law schools,
and it's grown into an organization
incredible influence in the United States.
Getting conservative judges on the bench has been a project for multiple decades.
Once you get both the law and Washington lawmakers,
you could make sure that those laws
were going to be declared constitutional or not by judges
you will have essentially bred in your laboratory through the Federalist Society.
What protects us against big mistakes being made
is the structure, the Constitution, the institutions.
[Keith Olbermann] Today, the Supreme Court of Chief Justice John Roberts
declared that corporations had all the rights of people.
[Bernie Sanders] What you have right now
is the undermining of American democracy as we know it
as a result of the Supreme Court's five to four Citizens United decision.
There are now no checks on the ability of corporations to decide our elections.
None.
[Kurt Andersen] Citizens United was this 2010 decision by the Supreme Court
that said money donated to politicians is free speech,
which made any kind of campaign finance regulation unconstitutional.
It allows the financial corruption of our democracy.
That's the most misguided, naive, uninformed,
egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court,
I think in the 21st century.
[Mae Frasers] This is something that's got to turn around
or else we won't have an America the way we knew America to be.
[Kurt Andersen] These people keep their eye on their prize.
And that is the through line, beginning with the zealotry of Milton Friedman
through the Kochs, through Mitch McConnell.
They won.
A pandemic-related ban on evictions has been overturned.
A federal judge ruled the CDC's national moratorium exceeds the agency's authority.
The ruling could affect millions of struggling Americans.
[woman] Koch Industries is involved in that.
In February, the organizations they've worked with convinced a federal judge in Texas
to declare the CDC's eviction moratorium unconstitutional.
[David Sirota] Those cases have been brought by a trio of groups
that have gotten a lot of money from the Charles Koch Foundation,
about 7.7 million dollars.
Koch Industries sees a huge opportunity
in the housing market.
[Stephanie Porta] Corporations learned from the last housing crisis
that it was better to invest by just buying the homes
instead of making money off the mortgage and selling it.
55% of home sales right now in Orlando are being bought by corporations.
And they are buying houses
at 20% above asking rate.
How does anybody compete with that?
[David Sirota] Now you could argue, listen, that's capitalism.
But that's the whole point of the eviction bans.
They are designed to say that at least in the middle of a pandemic,
in the middle of an economic crisis, we can't just allow landlords
in a mass way to throw people out on the street.
- All right, turn it straight. - Turn it straight, turn it straight.
[warning beeping]
[chattering]
They evicted us after we gave them a paper that told them that, you know, we weren't
supposed to get evicted until December 31st and they still evicted us.
That doesn't make sense. It don't.
[man] And these people are robbing them, and then they are putting it to the last.
It's sad that these families and these young kids
and during a pandemic are being put out on the street.
This cannot be allowed.
Where the fuck them kids gonna go at?
Pretty much, we're going to just finish getting everything out of the way.
Go to a storage and move everything into the storage
and go to a hotel room.
We're just going to do what we need to do.
I'm looking for storage units.
Next door yesterday they put my friend out, my neighbor,
and they had what I thought was a legal document, you know, to help them, you know, stay.
But unfortunately, the sheriffs nor the management company would accept the paperwork.
And they, you know, they kicked them out.
And I don't want that to happen to me.
[dramatic music playing]
[drill rattling]
[solemn music playing]
I know that there's sufferings that I won't be able
to prevent my children from having to experience,
like the fact that the middle class is being eliminated.
There are super-wealthy, and then
there just doesn't seem to be a place for people that aren't
financially well-to-do.
Society doesn't value taking care of me as well.
[wind rustling]
[Melissa]
[soft music playing]
Hello, hello. How are you?
How are you señor?
[Melissa] We've been here for 12 years.
The school has been here for twelve and a half.
So it started out here with just two bathrooms,
this little hallway, and this room.
The idea that people should just pick up and move to a cheaper market somewhere
overlooks the fact that human beings are social creatures.
And we need and thrive on that community.
Just as a joke. I asked if I could paint sardines in the boy's bathroom.
Being very close to the water,
my children love the ocean.
We're on a really lovely, lovely swim team,
And Jeff's on the board of the swim team.
You put people in a situation where they know nobody, where they have no connection,
where they have no prospects, and they're not going to succeed.
[dogs barking]
There's a little one right here. What about this guy?
- That's the perfect one. - How much is it?
How about we do $100?
$100?
[interviewer] Do you think you'll be able to stay here?
Uh, I don't know.
There's lots of beautiful places in the world.
Right, I am not sure.
[Melissa] We're trying to put our nice ones,
it seems like our ornaments have dwindled.
[James] Because they get lost.
[Melissa] No, they get broken.
My family can barely afford to live here.
[Melissa] James, come on, let's decorate the Christmas tree.
[Avery] Most of the people who live here are lawyers,
like businessmen, stockbrokers, but not really any
like other professionals that are kind of, I guess,
in the lower income bracket of the middle class.
We have to move and we don't know where we're going to go.
[interviewer] Do you think they're going to build any affordable housing here?
Oh hell no. Under no circumstances.
No, no, no, no.
Yeah, that's just, that's just not going to happen.
[Kurt Andersen] We're never going to divide everything absolutely equally.
But if you did divide everything absolutely equally in the United States today,
the average household would have almost a million dollars in wealth,
and the average household would have some decent six-figure income.
Everybody would be what we think of as upper middle class.
Everyone.
It's crazy to me how much we have here and how much more
we're going to have as a society as AI does
the astounding things that AI will continue to do
in terms of being able to produce things cheaply, you know?
We need to begin getting the system
more fair again before AI and robotics and technology
really takes off, because there just won't be enough good paying jobs
to give all Americans a decent, livable wage.
With AI, lawyers' jobs, teachers' jobs,
all these white collar jobs will continue to be affected.
It's not going to stop.
Technology is a neutral thing.
It can kill jobs, it can destroy livelihoods.
It can also create prosperity shareable by all.
It won't end well
unless we make it fairer now.
[plastic rustling]
Gonna be sign planting today, baby.
[April Sims] Giving workers the power that an active trade
union movement gives them is a piece of the solution.
It's just not the whole thing.
It's not just about wages, benefits and working conditions,
although that is an important part of what we do.
We have to start figuring out ways to tilt back the scales that were so badly tilted
with the attacks on workers' rights and our right to join unions,
[slow music playing]
- Who are we? - The Congress of Potential Workers.
[April Sims] You can't lose heart.
It's a long march.
[group chanting]
Shut. It. Down!
[Christina] So what part of the lesson was most difficult for me?
Trying to remember the higher numbers because we had to keep
going back and cross referencing the others.
- I don't know how much more... - I don't care.
about you to follow directions when I tell you to do something.
- You're everything to me. - Yes, that's right.
Pretty soon you have to be out and get a job, too, and you'll have to follow directions.
Scroll up, turn in. That wasn't hard, was it?
- No. - Get back.
All done, all done.
Very good.
[clears throat]
[Christina] I mean, it's given me a good run, I had the truck for five years,
and you try to fix little things here and there to keep it going,
but with this job, I'm not making enough.
I've tried to apply for a loan through the SBA.
That's a nightmare.
I tried to apply for the PPP.
They denied me for that because it was not the accurate information.
I did reach out to Bergen County three months ago for child care help,
and it's been three months since I heard from them.
You just...
I really want to give up,
because I'm just so tired. [sobbing]
I don't know. I don't, I don't sleep much at night.
So I just lay there and I think, and I think and I think
and I think and I know that
I can't rid myself off of the world
because there's no one for them to take care of them.
So obviously, I know I can't go anywhere.
But it hurts to know that you're going to wake up
to try to go do the same thing you're doing every day
sitting here, and getting nowhere by the end of the week.
But I blame myself because I can't figure out a way out,
and I've always been able to figure a way out.
And I can't.
My kids literally hate me because I can't fix the problems of the world.
So that's why I blame myself, and I know it's not my fault,
but there's no way out and we're still here.
You're still in the same fucking position.
I don't know what else to do.
[sniffles]
[solemn music playing]
[helicopter blades whirring]
[sirens blaring]
[people chattering]
It's important to understand that those same forces that have radicalized
the Republican Party have cross-pressured the Democratic Party.
[cheering]
[man] The Democrats, starting in the '70s and certainly by the '80s
and '90s, abdicated responsibility for a distinct left vision
on the economic front.
We have to change the way the government works.
Let's make it smaller, less costly and smarter.
Leaner and not meaner.
[cheering]
[man] That's where the Democrats dropped the ball.
[Jimmy Carter] Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy
or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy.
[Barack Obama] Our most urgent task upon taking office,
was to shore up the same banks that helped cause this crisis.
[Kayla Tausche] President Biden pounded the podium in Georgia today,
advocating to pass two voting rights bills.
Many activist groups were absent, demanding less talk from the president, more action.
[Jacob Hacker] I think one of the most important things
that we should recognize is that if you're going
to have wealthy people using their financial resources
that you have to give the rest of Americans the ability to use the one
political resources they have, which is the right to vote.
[Anderson Cooper] Georgia's governor, late this evening,
signing draconian new voter registration measures into law.
[bell dings]
There being 81 ayes, 64 nays,
SB7 has passed the third reading.
[commentator] They set up the circumstances under which
a vote can essentially be nullified or overturned.
[Jacob Hacker] Democracy works when it works because of the idea
that political elites have to be responsive to the citizens.
The tilt that's taken place isn't just about government helping out the rich.
It's also that government is doing nothing.
[woman] It's been almost three months without me having a home.
It's so hard to try to hold it together.
It's really hard, there's so many people out here now.
[man] They don't invest in us.
They don't show us the resources.
[woman] You can't win. The game is fixed.
So the social contract is broken.
We're going to see increasing inequality, and growing numbers of people
who cannot make ends meet and more destructiveness in our politics.
I swear to God!
You're ignoring the people you're supposed to protect!
[Nick Hanauer] There is no example in human history where if you let a society
become as unequal as ours is, the society will not fall
into authoritarianism, a police state or a revolution.
It's just not sustainable.
The system is going to collapse.
[yelling and banging]
[loud thumps]
[Jacob Hacker] The January 6th Insurrection is a symptom of a political system
that is being undermined by right-wing demagoguery.
And this might seem like it's just a bunch of people who got really angry,
but this is the first assault on the capital since the War of 1812.
There is no greater sign of democratic fragility
than a mob attacking the seat of power in Washington.
[dramatic music playing]
We've faced big challenges to our democracy before, the Civil War,
the twin threats of the Great Depression and the World War.
This is the third great challenge to our democracy since our founding.
And it could turn for the better.
Or it could turn very much for the worse.
[tense music playing]
As long as the Republican Party can win through division and undermining democracy,
it will not be pressured to try to respond
to the felt economic concerns of those who vote for it,
or, much less, those who don't vote for it.
[men yelling]
[police yelling]
We need to recognize that at the root
of the crisis we face today is runaway inequality.
Runaway inequality leads to the kind of anger and radicalization
that we see in what happened on January 6th.
And until we provide a stronger economy for all Americans,
we'll be vulnerable to this kind of radicalization.
[crowd] USA! USA! USA!
[wind rustling]
It was a hard winter.
[turn signal beeping]
The number of people out here experiencing homelessness has increased for sure.
I would say like 40%.
I mean, I serve a lot more people than I ever had.
You're here again.
Do you want this? I know.
It's not a blanket, but it's a big like...
[Jenny] Sometimes when you see this need, that looks so overwhelming,
I think maybe it's just easier to look away, right?
Because it's easy to get discouraged.
- Oh, you all right. - Okay, tell them,
- you tell them to call me at this number, - I surely will.
And if they need a mattress, I will get you a mattress.
- Yes ma'am. Thank you so much. - Okay?
- I love you. - All right, I love you too.
I think if we just take a second and look around and connect
with the people around us,
you just never know what's going to come from that, and that's kind of how I started.
We're all, I mean, I know I am, you know, one paycheck away from becoming homeless.
Hi.
Do you want a drink?
It's easy to get here, it's really difficult to get out of it.
[soft music playing]
[waves hissing]
[Avery] I've wanted to join the military for a while,
and I kind of finally decided on the Navy this year.
It's a guaranteed job, like, and those are kind of hard to get nowadays.
And I'll be able to like tour the United States.
I'm just really excited.
[Melissa] Everybody please, come and sit down.
[Avery] Delayed entry program, got to graduate high school and then...
But you want to go, right?
Yeah, the four of them signed my contract.
[windchimes tinkling]
[dramatic music playing]
[water gurgling]
[Melissa] I needed a little metal container.
I had something from my felting.
[Jacob Hacker] The pandemic sent a clear message that all of us are vulnerable
and we need to work together to deal with this.
But the fact that the stock market was booming and that many companies
were pulling in huge profits even as they were laying off workers
sent a very different message,
that well, some of us are vulnerable, but some of us can opt out.
What I think we need to scream to elites first and foremost is that this is not sustainable.
We cannot go on with a democracy and economy that works as badly as ours does.
We need to fix our democracy and fix our economy together.
We can't fix one without the other.
[engine turning over]
[soft music playing]
[wistful music playing]
Touching history right here.
I like this quote.
"If you see something that is not right,
you have a moral obligation to do something about it."
John Lewis.
That's what we've been doing.
Getting into good trouble.
[applause]
[John Lewis] My friends,
let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution.
We march today for jobs and freedom.
Those who have said, "Be patient and wait,"
We must say that we cannot be patient.
We will march with the spirit of love
and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.
We must wake up America, wake up.
For we cannot stop and we will not and cannot be patient.
[crowd cheering]
[Kurt Andersen] I am a believer in cycles, and so I get hopeful if I imagine that we're
at the beginning of a new cycle where people wake up and go,
"Yeah, this isn't the way it's supposed to be,
and shouldn't society be fairer?"
[Marty Walsh] Right now, as I sit in front of this camera,
the unemployment rate in America is 6.1%.
The unemployment rate for the black community is 9.7%,
the unemployment rate for the Latino community is 7.3%.
Whenever this film is shown,
the numbers might not be that high.
But I will tell you one thing.
The discrepancy between white and black and Latino will be the same.
If we're going to be serious about those issues and truly want to be equitable,
we need to make sure we continue to work together.
You know, as mayor of the city, probably one of the things I'm
most proud of is Building Pathways.
It's a pre-apprentice program that was started through the building trades.
We worked together with businesses, with industry.
How's the side going, is that going good?
[Marty Walsh] We brought everyone to the table to address the problem.
Marty is a great guy, and he is the reason why Boston
is a very strong union city, probably the strongest in the country.
Thank you sir.
[Leonard Monfredo] I'm successful,
but everyone that works with me is successful as well.
I am a prefab welder.
As you're an apprentice, there's like things you kind of just do.
Like you get a new car when you're a second year,
you buy a house when you're either a third or a fourth year.
So I bought a house at 24.
[Leonardo Monfredo] And so at the end of the day, the only thing I can do
for anyone is give them an opportunity.
But he or she has to make that opportunity themselves.
[machinery rumbling]
[workers chattering]
[Eaine] People ask me what I do, I always say I'm a union plumber.
I'm proud to say that.
I feel like if you're not union, you're selling yourself short.
Working a lot less hours, bringing home a lot more, just focusing on my family.
[birds chirping]
[baby babbling]
I don't know. I mean, it's like all the stuff you hear about,
you know, people will tell you, oh, when you have a kid, you know, things change.
You have something to live for.
You have it, and it's absolutely, it's indescribable.
Everything I had to go through,
I don't want him to have to go through any of that.
I want him to just not have any worries in life.
Oh yeah, you like that one?
Look at you.
[baby coos]
Replaced a few things from the cabinet.
Replaced a lot of doors, a lot of windows.
I'll show you guys the real fun of the houses though.
So these were originally chicken coops.
Put some siding on and a new little roof.
This is the dream, they say.
[laughs] They don't tell you about the cleanup.
A lot of work, still not over. It does have a long way to go.
But goodness, one day at a time.
[Marty Walsh] I don't know any family in this country
that can raise their family on the minimum wage.
We have to get people paid good wages and good benefits to build back the middle class.
And hopefully we can put aside political differences.
We can argue about social issues, but there should be no argument
about creating pathways into the middle class for people in this country.
Oh, it smells so good in here.
It smells like new...
[Stephanie Porta] When we do see successes,
it's through communities organizing.
And right now there's a lot of organizing happening
across the state of Florida for access to affordable housing.
We're trying to build and support
and connect people from all across the state of Florida
who really just can't afford to live here.
In this last year our renters across the state have worked together
with legislators to introduce the Renters Bill of Rights.
Why does he look like he just got kidnapped?
[Stephanie Porta] It's not enough just to elect a legislator
and send them off to do what you've asked for.
We need people who are directly impacted to help write those laws.
We need everybody to join a grassroots organization now,
use that community building to build power for our people.
[Ana] Go see your room!
Oh my God, oh my God! God, it's incredible.
Oh my God, I have lost them both.
I've lost them both, they're never gonna come out of their rooms.
[Ana] I'm going to read you the email, okay?
"National Rally Day.
Hi, Anna. Again, I am so happy to know that you've agreed
to join this fight and be the face of our organization
and for the state of Florida."
When I read that, my heart went to my stomach.
They want me to speak at the rally
with Organize Florida?
Oh God, I'm really nervous about that.
I honestly wasn't trying to be the face of anything.
I just, I just wanted my apartment fixed.
That's really all I wanted.
Workers unite! Workers unite!
Workers unite!
[crowd chanting]
[female speaker] We built the whole thing, and we can shut the shit down too.
That'd be you, the working class.
[man] Where's my union leadership?
All right now, we are here.
One year ago, we started this.
We all know what happened in Alabama.
Don't take it as a loss.
We know Amazon spent $25 million to stop that warehouse from unionizing.
But let me tell you this.
We are beginning our efforts in Staten Island.
There you go, sign up there, then grab some food.
[woman]
[newscaster] In the vote to unionize,
national labor officials say Amazon violated labor laws.
Amazon workers in Alabama get a do-over.
[April Sims] The labor movement wasn't born in times of comfort.
We were born when income inequality was at an all-time high,
when work was precarious, when times were uncertain.
At various points in our history as Americans,
we've had to reclaim our democracy and fight back
the forces of corporate concentration and capital
being in a few hands.
And we're at a point where we're going to have to fight it again.
But the payoff is huge. It means getting our country back.
It means getting our shared prosperity back.
And it offers us the opportunity really, to create true inclusive democracy.
Amazon workers on Staten Island are voting to decide if they want to form a union.
If the efforts succeed, it would be the first time Amazon
has had a union since it began 27 years ago.
The voting wrapping up on Wednesday.
Now, employees are waiting on results from the National Labor Relations Board
in a decision that could affect the lives of thousands of Amazon workers.
But you know Amazon's pulling the same tactics that they did in Bessemer.
The same union-busting firm that was in Bessemer
is up here in Staten Island.
Now Chris, your campaign has had a lot of false starts.
Is that, were you at all that a harder,
more aggressive approach might be taken by the company?
I don't see how much more they can go.
Yo, we gotta go.
[Chris] I don't know what's going to happen when the count is over.
The people in power are not worried
about what happens when housing becomes unaffordable for the masses.
They are not worried about people not being able to feed their kids.
They are not worried about the future generations.
They will use every tactic to divide us and pit us against each other,
because they know that's the way that they stay in power.
You know, people talk about how there's this polarization.
Yeah, in some cases, on some issues.
But on economic issues, Americans are incredibly aligned.
[crowd cheering]
[man] Do you hear that Blackrock?
Give us a fair contract,
and we'll go back to work where we should be.
[Nick Hanauer] The most important thing for American citizens to do
is to forcefully demand that both Republicans
and Democrats deliver a good life to every citizen
who is willing to work hard and play by the rules.
Full stop.
And if the political leaders won't deliver on that, then they should kick them out
and find others that do.
[Janet Gornick] So let's remember that in this country
we have the opportunity to vote, at least for now.
I think this is a time for people to think really carefully about who they're voting for,
and who will support the kind of progressive social change that this country
has so dramatically needed for the last several decades.
[opening bell dinging]
[Kurt Andersen] I am worried about us becoming a country with shameless oligarchy
in gated communities that don't give a shit about the peasants beyond the gates.
And you know, the people with pitchforks and torches,
they're going to come and get them unless we make this a fairer deal.
The deck has been so stacked that proposing to put it back
into some kind of proper, fair, balance looks kind of radical.
But when you take away the boogeyman of socialism,
this radical model is the way things were when I was young.
You know, which isn't that long ago.
This is the challenge of our time.
The next step is coming together around the idea that inequality is an existential threat.
[dramatic music playing]
[chattering]
Yeah! Well done!
Here, toss me one.
[Jeff Bezos] I want to thank every Amazon employee
because you guys paid for all this.
So seriously, for every Amazon employee,
thank you from the bottom of my heart very much.
[Nick Hanauer] Fuck the rich.
In a democracy, you don't need people like me and my pals on Wall Street
to agree with you
that taxes on rich people should be higher.
[J. D. Scholten] When are we going to step up and say, "You know what?
enough is enough?" When is this government going to get back
of the people, by the people, for the people?
Now is the time and we will live.
This is our moment y'all.
[Danica Roem] You're well qualified for office.
Bring those ideas to the table because this is your America, too.
I cannot wait to get to Congress and cause problems.
[crowd chanting]
It just takes a worker in one of these plants to get organized and suggest
that they get the signatures required to trigger a vote.
We've got details, just a second, we've got details.
The election at Amazon's JFK8 Fulfillment Center
in Staten Island wasn't close according to the reporting I'm reading here.
[Chris]
[crowd cheering]
[crowd chanting]
[reporter] An unaffiliated, totally grassroots campaign
organized the first ever union in an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York.
It may be one of the biggest wins for organized labor in a generation.
[man] It really marks a milestone in American labor history.
[reporting in various foreign languages]
We got the tally right here!
[Chris] We beat them fair and square.
I'll pop it for y'all.
That means that we are the first official union for Amazon in American history.
Started off with two tables, two chairs in a tent and that's it.
Unionized.
Reach out to us, we'll help you.
[reporter] The so-called year of the worker presses on into 2022.
Americans' approval of unions is near record highs.
[male reporter] Over 140 Starbucks stores have filed for a union election.
[female reporter] The longest nurses strike in state history may be over.
We're looking at the future of work here at the Department of Labor.
And when I say the future, we're talking about tomorrow.
[Janet Gornick] If you've ever in your entire life
thought that you wanted to get involved with an organization,
support a political cause, join a march, this is the time.
And as Martin Luther King said, "You don't have to see the whole staircase.
Just take the first step."
[Olga Miranda] Don't stand on the sidelines, it's time to rise.
It's really time to rise and fight.
[woman] Jobs, justice, peace. Let us not have to do this again for our children.
[Mya Middleton] We are the voice for change,
we are the pieces to fix what America has fallen short on.
Make it happen!
[crowd cheering]
[upbeat rock music playing]
♪ I use the change From my kitchen drawer ♪
♪ To buy an off-brand soda From the corner store ♪
♪ Well, I've been Pinching every dime ♪
♪ I squeeze so hard That it buys me time ♪
♪ I'm afraid To check the mailbox ♪
♪ Between the bills Collectors hide ♪
♪ Of promises and giveaways
♪ They tease me With their credit lines ♪
♪ I'm preapproved, pre-denied
Just how stupid do you think I am?