Americonned, a new documentary featuring our own Nick Hanauer, examines the inequality crisis currently plaguing the United States. The film shows the hidden struggles of American families and dissects the elite’s calculated political maneuvers to preserve and even grow their own wealth at everyone else’s expense. The filmmakers join us to share their experience documenting the long-overdue uprising of American workers, and explain how the process of making their film gave them hope for the future.
Americonned is playing in select theaters & will be available via VOD on June 13th.
Sean Claffey is the Director, Producer, and Executive Producer of Americonned. He has more than 25 years in the film industry spanning feature films, industry documentaries and commercials.
Dave Pederson is the Producer and Writer of Americonned. He’s an entertainment professional for over 20 years with expertise in Film & Television production, development, sales and distribution.
Twitter: @americonneddoc, Instagram: @americonneddocumentary
Americonned: The Documentary https://americonned.com
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
For most Americans, things have gotten harder and worse over the last 30 or 40 years as things have gotten better and easier for people at the very tippy-top.
Dave Pederson:
I started pitching an income inequality documentary and nobody was interested.
David Goldstein:
It is not just about income inequality, but also about how we got there.
Sean Claffey:
We set out to make this, and we knew it was a problem, but we didn’t realize how big of a problem it was. The statistics don’t show the suffering.
Speaker 5:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. You know, Nick, that I take this podcast very seriously, and when we have an author on the podcast, I always try to read the book or the article that we’re talking about. And today, we have filmmakers on the podcast, and so last night I went and watched the film. And now, I’m watching, and there’s this really arrogant class traitor, billionaire on there talking about income inequality. You familiar with this guy?
Nick Hanauer:
Yes. Yeah. You discovered, to your horror, that I was in the movie.
David Goldstein:
Uh-huh. I wasn’t there when they came and interviewed you. Yeah. How’d this come about?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. My friend Barry Ritholtz, who’s a very prominent hedge fund guy, and also advocate for middle class folks.
David Goldstein:
Fellow class traitor.
Nick Hanauer:
A fellow class trader, wonderful guy, hooked me up. I think it was Barry, but also Invictus, our friend Invictus. Somehow, there was a connection there, and they wanted to see this film get made, and so they introduced me to them. And so, I was filmed a couple of times by these guys over the course of them making the film, and I’m very pleased that I got to participate in it. Did you enjoy it?
David Goldstein:
Did I enjoy it?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Define enjoy. I found it very engaging. Of course, this is a film about inequality.
Nick Hanauer:
We should tell our audience what the film is, by the way.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. Right. It’s called Americonned, and by the time that this podcast comes out, it should be available for downloading and streaming on a number of services. We’ll provide a link in the show notes. And it is not just about income inequality, the vast inequality in the United States today, but also about how we got there. But you and I, we’re well familiar with the numbers. You’re obviously featured in the film. You’re providing some of the information on which the film is based, but what we are not familiar with at a personal, guttural level is the suffering that of it causes. Of course, we know it causes suffering.
Nick Hanauer:
But it’s different than hanging out in the suffering.
David Goldstein:
Right. We’re not experiencing it, and we’re not around the people who are experiencing it. And so, you asked me if I enjoyed the film. No, because it made me very anxious and sad throughout most of it, because unlike some of your billionaire compatriots, I’m not a sociopath. And so, when I see other people suffer, I feel it too. And while they certainly make an effort at the end to give a kind of upbeat finish, and I… Not upbeat, but more hopeful closing about what’s possible… And I don’t want to give that away. It can be difficult, at times, to watch. That said, I highly recommend it, of course, not just for the information in it, but for the same dramatic reasons why we watch fiction, because most of us are human beings who get something out of other people’s emotions.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Absolutely. We’re lucky today to get to have Shawn Claffey and Dave Patterson, who are the director, producers, and writers of this new film, Americonned, with us to talk about what they did and why they did it. Let’s get to that.
Sean Claffey:
Hi, I’m Sean Claffey. I’m the director of Americonned.
Dave Pederson:
I’m Dave Pederson. I am a producer and writer of the documentary Americonned, and thanks for having us on, Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, you bet. Guys, what inspired you to make this documentary?
Dave Pederson:
Actually, Nick, this whole idea, I had this back in 2008 after the subprime crash, and it came to me through Jeff Mann, who you’ve met, who’s also a producer on the film, and he had been working down on Wall Street. He had been warning me about the subprime crash, and so I really started getting hard into economics and especially started diving into income inequality. And he hooked me onto Barry Ritholtz’s book, and so I got really into Barry, and I started pitching an income inequality documentary back in 2008, and nobody was interested.
Everyone was like, “I don’t know if this is the problem. They’ll just bail the banks out. Everything will be fine,” and no one was interested. My current production partner, weren’t interested. Nobody was interested in doing this film. Fast-forward five years, and you come out with your… The pitchforks are coming for [inaudible 00:06:00] article, and I’m like, “See? See? Here’s proof.” It’s like, “I’m not imagining this. This is a problem.” I’m like, “Here’s a guy that has all the money in the world, and he says it’s a problem.” And so, I gave that to Sean, and you guys got us fired up and started. And so, we started working on it right after your [inaudible 00:06:20]. In 2014, we started toying with it.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh, wow. That’s incredible.
Dave Pederson:
Yeah. And then, once again, we just couldn’t get support. I couldn’t get investors, I couldn’t get production companies, distributors. They just didn’t see it as a major problem.
David Goldstein:
Weird that people with money to invest in films wouldn’t see this as a major problem.
Dave Pederson:
That’s exactly… It’s exactly it.
David Goldstein:
Try raising money from those folks to change policy.
Dave Pederson:
Yeah. That was the problem. And it’s because they live in a bubble. I love entertainment. I’ve loved making films, but it’s an industry that lives in a bubble, and they just can’t see outside their New York, LA cocoons and see what we saw, especially making this film and traveling around the country, and I think Sean will attest, I think we traveled about close to, what, 50,000 miles filming.
Sean Claffey:
It was about 38,000 miles in the station wagon filled with equipment.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s great.
Sean Claffey:
We set out to make this, so we knew it was a problem, but we didn’t realize how big of a problem it was. And, the more people we talked to, the more we realized that all the statistics in the world, you could present them, but what you hear, real stories and real emotional stories, and people that are suffering in great ways in this country, the statistics don’t show the suffering.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. You wanted to make a documentary about inequality and its causes and effects, and so on, and so forth. What did you learn through the process of making the documentary?
David Goldstein:
And was there anything that surprised you?
Dave Pederson:
Oh, yeah. No. That it’s far, far worse than we ever had imagined, and that it’s this existential threat. And, if we don’t change, as Nick says in the film, we’re going to get a authoritarian government, a police state, or a revolution, and none of those things make lives better. This affects everyone, whether they’re touched by it now or if we let it go on and we have a collapse, or we have a revolution. We saw what it would look like with January 6th. There’s nowhere to hide from this. If it all comes crashing down the United States, there’s nowhere in the world that will survive.
Sean Claffey:
Oh, [inaudible 00:08:49] Nick, and two things that came to mind when we were filming with you, and you brought up one stat, and we use it in the film, and my jaw still drops every time I think about it. Where you brought up that, in the last 50 years, $50 trillion of wealth has shifted from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Every time I run that number through my head, I was like… I remember you said that, and I was like… I had heard similar things, but then I was like… Of course, we went and fact checked. I’m like, “Oh, man. Nick’s right. This is [inaudible 00:09:20],” and because people can’t fathom what $50 trillion looks like. When you tell someone a million, a billion, to 50 trillion, that’s staggering. You see those numbers when you’re traveling between the coast and stopping in all these different states to film, and you see that, and that stat you gave us I think will floor people when they see the film.
Nick Hanauer:
What states did you go to?
Dave Pederson:
We went to Seattle, California-
Sean Claffey:
That’s a city.
Dave Pederson:
Oh, I’m sorry. Washington, California-
David Goldstein:
Seattle’s kind of a separate state.
Sean Claffey:
It is, it is. Yeah. Like Austin is to Texas.
Dave Pederson:
Iowa, Mississippi, Florida, DC, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maine, Massachusetts, Alabama, and Tennessee.
Nick Hanauer:
Wow, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. It’s just obviously true that, for most Americans, things have gotten harder and worse over the last 30 or 40 years as things have gotten better and easier for people at the very tippy-top. The thing, of course, that is so important today is getting people to understand why things are worse, and what they should collectively do to make them better. And I’m wondering if, through the experience of making the film, or even just talking to folks, you guys could suss out how people thought about what happened, why what happened, happened. What do people think out there? Does that make that question make sense?
Dave Pederson:
Yes. I think that they don’t know how they got here, and if they’re, say, 40 or younger, they think this is how it always was, and some of them are very pissed off. And, if you’re working three jobs and you’re losing your place to live, and you’re going to have your car repossessed, your life is burning down, and you want to burn it all down. This is the danger. And then, you read any of the books by Anne Applebaum, or Timothy Schneider, and this is how the fascism comes into play. Now, they’re easily… They’re desperate, they’re hurting, they have no hope, and their emotions to be played with very easily to say, “This group is causing it.” Or the other, whatever that is. The immigrants, Jewish people, the Mexicans, whatever. And what happens after that is… We know what happens after that. It’s terrible.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure. For sure. This is Trumpism. Right? The objective reality of their declining economic prospects and social mobility is a fact. Right? They have a reason to be pissed off. It’s not like they’re making that up.
Sean Claffey:
They just don’t know where, because like you said, Nick, it’s like it comes down to the… It’s a propaganda play. It’s the old fascism 101, and in our film, one of the threads we use as the narrative is, we use a lot of interviews with Kurt Andersen based off of his book, Evil Geniuses, which I think he lays out how this all came to be from-
David Goldstein:
Right. Very deliberate.
Sean Claffey:
[inaudible 00:12:58] Friedman doctrine on. I think Kurt does a great job of that, so he’s heavy in our film.
Nick Hanauer:
When you were talking to these folks, was there anything you think that could give them hope?
Dave Pederson:
What gives me hope is, we came across Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer early in the film, and they weren’t thinking about unionizing or anything. They were just looking for some rights to have masks and find out information about health concerns. And those two guys with maybe 15 other supporters, close supporters, were able to… They busted their ass for two years, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and they were able to organize. And it just goes to show that a small amount of people who are highly committed can make change. We were hopeful that they would be able to organize at Amazon, but I wasn’t sure that that was going to happen, and that gives me hope. And I think that… We showed the film to mixed audiences, just like test stuff, and it does screen really well with conservatives. And I’m not talking about politicians, I’m talking about people that think of themselves as conservative, because they see that it spells out how it happens, and how they’re getting screwed, and how unfair it is, and it’s hard to look away from that.
Sean Claffey:
There’s a weird disparity too, Nick, ’cause I find this in Texas talking to some people, especially when you leave the bubble of Austin, and I find they came down to, in the last couple elections, “I was going to vote for Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.” And I’m like, “What?” And it came down to that decision, and I’m like, “That says a lot right there, when it comes down to being those two, because they can’t be more different.” But that was who they seemed to be choosing, and I encounter that a lot with people, especially outside the east, west coast bubbles. I see that a lot. Sad thing is, though, a lot of those people seem to gravitate more towards Trump, and I think it’s because of the Trumpism, the pointed fingers, being [inaudible 00:15:17], whatever is in their system.
David Goldstein:
Scapegoats are powerful, but I think it’s true. Going back to 2016, I think one of the things that cost Hillary Clinton the election was her pragmatism. She was not promising substantial change because A, she didn’t believe in it, and B, she didn’t believe it was possible. She wouldn’t support a $15 minimum wage because she thought it was too high, and she thought she could never get it through Congress. Trump was lying about the change he was promising, but at least he was promising something. And so, there were voters on the edge, and that was… Bernie Sanders believes the stuff he’s advocating for, and I think he’s smart enough to know that much of it isn’t possible over the short term, but when you’re… They had other things, but those are two things that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump had in common, is that they were promising substantial change.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, they were throwing down around things that would actually make a difference in people’s lives, and I think the biggest indictment of the Democratic Party over the last 40 years has been an unwillingness to advocate in any reasonable material way for things that would actually improve the lives of the typical person. And, as a consequence for most people, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party effectively merged on economic policy. As a practical matter, almost no difference.
David Goldstein:
And you point that out in… You illustrate that very clearly in the film, where you go from Clinton talking about the promises of NAFTA to factories being torn down, literally demolished.
Dave Pederson:
If under Bush Senior your life got worse, and then under the Clintons it got worse, and then Bush Junior it got worse, and then under Obama it got worse, you’re like, “Get rid of all these people.”
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Pretty hard to be fired up about either political party.
Dave Pederson:
Yeah. And I spoke to people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, for sure.
Sean Claffey:
The interesting thing too, Nick, with us getting to you, which our mutual friend, Barry Ritholtz, put us together, was the Fight for $15 in Seattle. Because we were like, “Okay, this is good. Nick’s saying all those things, but then he’s also in the Fight for $15 in Seattle,” which was a great laboratory test for the minimum wage. You were getting all the rhetoric of like, “Oh, every small business will fail, the city will collapse,” and all that. And then, we were watching, and we’re watching it unfolding before we even got out to see you, and we’re like, “Oh, wow. None of these businesses are failing like they said. They said every small business would fail if they had to pay everyone $15 an hour,” and you can talk to more of that than we can, but you were in the battle there for that.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. No, for sure. Here’s a fact: there are something like 9,000 professional economists employed in the United States of America, and to my knowledge… To my knowledge, not one economist wrote in favor of the $15 minimum wage when we began to do it. Not one.
Dave Pederson:
That’s amazing.
Nick Hanauer:
Not one.
David Goldstein:
Some of them wrote in favor of raising the minimum wage, but they wouldn’t stick their necks out on $15, including… and we won’t name him… a very prominent labor economist who is very much on our side, Nick and I had a conversation with, and he kept saying that he was not comfortable with $15. He thought that there wasn’t good evidence saying that we could support the $15 minimum wage, that it was just so outside of our experience that he couldn’t come out and support it, and he was proven wrong.
Nick Hanauer:
Of course, but this is the central problem, is even the academic economists who are not trickle-downers, the most aggressive position they’ll take is, “A $15 minimum wage probably won’t cause that much harm,” because they see economic cause and effect in this 19th century equilibrium way, and this is the biggest challenge that we face, although we should acknowledge in this interview that there’s more to be optimistic about than just a few places beginning to be unionized. The Biden administration has done a full break from trickle-down economics, and in the last two years, has passed more sensible economic legislation and enacted through executive order more imperatives to improve the economy for working and middle class people than the last eight presidents combined, probably. All this work is paying off.
Dave Pederson:
Yeah. No, we were definitely very, very excited about what he’s done, and what they did with… They were able to reduce childhood poverty only temporarily, but in a substantial way. And, when we were interviewing Dr. Gary Evans, and the effects of poverty on children are so destructive, their inability to form relationships, their inability to hold jobs, that these things go on for their whole lives, and they could be curtailed early with intervention, and we [inaudible 00:20:55] that. Now, whether we’ll get back to that, we’ll see, but Biden has done a great job.
David Goldstein:
You raised that point, ’cause actually, it’s one of the more depressing things of the past year or so, is that we know the lifelong harm of childhood poverty, that the best thing you can do to break that cycle of poverty is not raise kids in poverty. And, on top of that, we know how to solve it, which is give families with children money. It worked. It sounds crazy-
Sean Claffey:
Crazy, Goldie. You’re crazy.
David Goldstein:
… that maybe if they have more money, they won’t be so poor, and then their children will have better outcomes across the board throughout their lives. We know the harm, we know how to fix it, and we won’t do it.
Sean Claffey:
It’s crazy. It’s like you say these things and they make so much sense. Nick in our film was going, “If you don’t pay the people, who’s going to buy the stuff?” And it kills you, ’cause what I think… And Nick, of course, runs in these crowds more, so maybe he can understand their thinking, but it’s one-percenters, billionaires, they hoard money, they hoard cash. Lower, middle class people, they get the money, it goes right back into the economy. If you’re giving them more money, that’s going right back into the economy. They can’t afford to hoard money. It gets fed immediately back into the economy. And what we find scary, another figure that we post in our film, and I think you saw it, was 44% of Americans are making $10 and 22 cents an hour or less. 44%.
That’s outrageous, and if you extrapolate the numbers, this is what we got going on this project, is I had watched LBJs war on poverty speech in ’65, and that’s what really got me going, and I was reading Robert Carrow’s huge volumes on LBJ, and I was looking. While he was president, we have child poverty. It was over 25% by the time Nixon started dismantling all his policies in the early ’70s, it had dropped to like 11%. But I looked at minimum wage in ’65, and it was like $1.25 an hour, and I was like, “Hm. It’s $7.25 now.” That’s been 57 years now. I started extrapolating this back in 2015, and I was like, “What would that be?” And I got to the number was over $20 an hour, like $22 or something, I got at the time, and it’s insane. And Barry harps on that in our film about talking about wage and productivity, and we have a bunch of those figures in there. But that was something that I wanted to talk about, too. It’s just how wages have just been completely stagnant since Reagan, basically.
David Goldstein:
Nick and I and our audience are pretty familiar with all the numbers. What Nick and I don’t do is talk a lot with the people who are suffering from them. I’m curious, in that pretty heart-wrenching scene near the end with the single mom, independent truck driver who’s pretty much at the end of her rope at that point. And there’s a scene in there where she says that she knows it’s not her fault, but she feels like it’s her fault. In talking to people who are suffering this way, how prevalent is it, this blaming themselves for their current predicament?
Dave Pederson:
I think it’s very prevalent, and what it does to their families, the shame they feel, their inability to sleep. They just lay awake at night and worry. And what Marty says in the film, Marty Walsh, no one should disagree with the path to the middle class, and we have just shattered that path. And the people that… We just see it in the news. Suicides [inaudible 00:25:03] up. Drug abuse is way up. Drug overdoses are way up. These are all related. This has real effect on people, and they are suffering on a daily basis, and there’s no hope that…
They don’t get paid enough to make their lives better, and one little thing just spirals them out, and then boom, their car doesn’t work anymore. Now, they can’t get to work.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Now they lose their job.
Dave Pederson:
And then boom, now they’re homeless. Right? And now, try to dig yourself out of that. And then, the kids get devastated from this. It’s very, very sad, and very emotional. I cried many times making this movie, and we did our best to help them while we could, getting plugging into resources and stuff, but it’s an avalanche, and you have a shovel.
David Goldstein:
And you could see that with some of the people in the film, how hard… It’s hard work, being poor, getting the services that you’re owed, which you’re eligible for, that you’re often denied because you don’t get the right paperwork done, or people just refuse to accept the paperwork in the case of the people seeking the eviction exemption under the Covid rules.
Dave Pederson:
We saw that over and over and over again.
Sean Claffey:
Especially our shoot in Orlando. We saw a lot of that, and it’s pretty evident in the film. That was a big focus of our film in Orlando.
Dave Pederson:
Little children living without running water in mass, in these hotels that… No running water, no place to cook. Their food costs are incredibly high. It’s just this unending spiral, and the kids are devastated.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Terrible. Best of luck with the film, and hope a zillion people watch it. It would be a good thing.
Dave Pederson:
[inaudible 00:27:08] question?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Why do you guys do this work?
Dave Pederson:
My family, especially my grandfather, came from Ireland. A subsistence farmer, didn’t own a pair of shoes till he was 15 years old, was able to come to this country and build a life, support his family back home from starving, and he was able to build the American dream for my mother, who was one of the first women on Wall Street. And then, I benefited from that greatly, and I see that as being eroded, and we really want to shine a light on all these problems. They could be fixed very quickly. The solution to income inequality is to raise wages. It’s really that simple.
David Goldstein:
Crazy, huh?
Sean Claffey:
I grew up relatively poor. My dad’s an American, my mother’s from Italy, and they moved here just before I was born. And then, my dad abandoned us, and so my mom had to learn to speak English. She worked minimum wage jobs, like cleaning houses, working in cafeterias. We had to use food stamps, welfare, all that sort of stuff. And so, I grew up like that, so I understand what people are going through, and I still don’t know how my mom raised me and my sister to get through it. We both went through college, we both had really good careers. And so, it’s my way of giving back, spotlighting, trying to help people. It just feels like something I need to do. I like to tell these stories, and I’ve always been a bit of a crusader for the underdog, so comes from my background.
Nick Hanauer:
Fantastic. Guys, thank you so much for being with us. Best of luck on the film-
Dave Pederson:
Thank you.
Sean Claffey:
Thank you.
Nick Hanauer:
… and we’ll chat soon.
David Goldstein:
Sean and Dave mentioned that amongst the states they visited was the state of Seattle, which is a kind of state of mind as well as a city in a very different part of the state than much of the rest of it, and I think that’s really significant. Obviously, apart from coming out here to interview you… And I saw April Sims from the Washington State Labor Council interviewed repeatedly. The reason to come to Seattle is because it is the home of Amazon and Starbucks, two companies where there has been some success over the past couple years in unionizing, surprising successes in unionizing.
And I feel that Seattle plays an out-sized role in what’s happening today, both in the causes of inequality… Obviously, big tech city. A lot of tech millionaires and billionaires out here… but also on the retail side in terms of, a lot of the wealth that’s generated here comes from a form of, for lack of a better word, economic colonization. That is what Amazon and Starbucks have been doing around the country. They move into these markets, and it’s not just a matter of driving local retailers out of business, it’s about sucking value out of communities around the country and back into these corporations and their shareholders.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s modern capitalism.
David Goldstein:
That is modern capitalism, but I think our hometown of Seattle is such a great icon of it because it is where much of the innovation… And good innovation. I don’t frequent Starbucks all that often, and I try to refrain from Amazon, but it’s incredibly convenient, and there’s sometimes places where Starbucks is the best coffee around. Not always, but you can get it all over the place. There’s a lot of innovation, a lot of ways in which they improve our lives, but also, they are responsible for a lot of what’s going wrong in the economy, and a lot of the wealth that we enjoy… I’m a homeowner here, a middle class homeowner, and one of the reasons why my house appreciates so quickly is because these companies are here, creating wealth here, and yet at the same time, we were out at the forefront of the $15 minimum wage movement, and paid sick leave, and paid overtime, and all these other movements.
Nick Hanauer:
Not things we got a lot of personal support from Jeff Bezos or Howard Schultz on.
David Goldstein:
Right. When people out in Seattle and in cities, the very successful tech hubs, people here watch this film, I think they need to understand that this is not just something, “Aw, these poor people that the economy is doing this stuff to.” No, no. We’re benefiting from their suffering. We are Rome.
Nick Hanauer:
No, a little bit. A little bit. And, of course, the same is, of course, true for every major city in the country. Right? That’s where all the big companies are located. That’s where all the wealth that is created by those companies accrues. Walmart being a great example of a enterprise that goes into places and sucks all the value out of them, and it accretes to Bentonville, Arkansas. Right? And look, there’s nothing wrong with big companies and with innovation, it’s just that we have to find a way to raise the standards that we hold businesses to, particularly large businesses, such that there are zero people who work for these companies that don’t get paid enough by those companies to lead dignified, secure, middle class lives.
And, if they did, then it wouldn’t be colonization. If every single Amazon worker was paid enough to lead a dignified, secure life, and had a work environment that wasn’t awful and exploitive, then good on them. But the problem with modern capitalism is that it’s basically a permission to exploit people, and confers advantages onto those who are willing to be most exploitive in many ways, and that’s just not what we should have. You can have a very successful market economy that does not permit those things, and is a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom.
David Goldstein:
It grants advantages to the people who are incapable of feeling the pain of the people…
Nick Hanauer:
That they create. Exactly.
David Goldstein:
… highlighted in this film. And I don’t want to get all this moralizing, but if you are not suffering from this economy, and if you are… And I count myself in there now because I work for you, Nick. If you’re one of the winners, but you’re not working to address this crisis, you’re complicit, just like the citizens of Rome were, and the citizens of the British Empire at its heyday. You were benefiting from the colonialization, in this case, economic colonialization, and not taking any responsibility for it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yep. Yep. Anyway, I hope all of our listeners will watch the movie Americonned, which will be out soon to a platform or a streaming service near you.
David Goldstein:
Right. We’ll provide a link in the show notes. You can also go to their website, americonned.com, and watch the trailer.
Speaker 5:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.