Heist tells the story of how Wall Street orchestrated the greatest theft in history -- the robbery of Americans’ prosperity, savings, and retirement security. Heist exposes how free-market extremists steadily dismantled the regulatory protections that the New Deal had built to prevent a repeat of the 1929 Wall Street crash. The film will show who unleashed financial greed and chicanery, and how they brought us to the edge of a new Depression.  

Today’s news blames Americans’ devastated 401(k)’s and collapsed home values on financial-market earthquakes within the last two years. But we will trace these seismic shifts back to their roots in the early 1970s. We will see how large corporations -- acting through lobbying organizations like the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- began a political mobilization that would propel the largest transfer of wealth in history. The winners were the top 1% of our population. The losers were ordinary Americans, whose real income has barely increased since 1973. 

Heist will reveal how wealthy right-wingers founded conservative think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, that provided intellectual justifications for redistributing wealth upward. Their free market economists insisted that the only way out of the 1970s’ crippling “stagflation” was massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and broad deregulation of the economy. After years of constant repetition, this fringe prescription would become economic accepted “wisdom.” 

The film will show how Ronald Reagan’s presidency radically reshaped our government, and unraveled our social compact, to match these right-wing prescriptions. Corporate executives took over the very regulatory agencies that had overseen their own industries. Markets were opened to a flood of imports from low-wage countries, decimating U.S. blue-collar jobs and labor unions. Congress complied with a dramatic transfer of wealth, through tax changes, to the wealthiest tip of the population. 

As our manufacturing sector was being outsourced, Wall Street successfully lobbied Congress and successive presidents to drastically deregulate financial institutions and transactions. This fueled the 1980s’ mergers-and-acquisitions boom, leveraged buyouts, risky junk bonds, hedge funds, and exotic“derivatives” that promised high returns on minimal underlying assets. 

Corporations tore up jobs and communities in order to show profits that matched Wall Street’s new short-term horizons. Meanwhile, secure pensions evaporated, as middle-class Americans were sold on an illusion of democratized wealth -- a mirage of an ever-rising stock market in which everyone could be a millionaire.  

Leading indicators of trouble soon appeared: the stock-market crash of 1987, and the savings-and-loan and housing collapses of the late 1980s. But still another round of deregulation in the 1990s facilitated the paper fortunes, and rapid losses, of the dot-com bubble. 

This would all be dwarfed by the current financial crisis. In 2001, Wall Street’s newly titled “financial engineers” invented their newest and most lethal financial instruments: derivatives based on sub-prime mortgages. By 2007, these worthless securities had become the radioactive substance at the core of the great Wall Street financial meltdown. 

Why did decades-old Wall Street firms risk their reputations, and in some cases ultimately destroy themselves, over such precarious gambits? First-hand participants, like former Wall Street manager Nomi Prins, will reveal the mindset of these onetime Masters of the Universe. Their gambles were made with (quoting the title of Prins’ bestselling memoir) Other People’s Money. 

Where were the regulators while these speculative frenzies were unfolding? Heist will show how Alan Greenspan, the high priest of free market fundamentalism, ran the nation’s key financial regulator, the Federal Reserve Bank. Greenspan’s Fed not only failed to regulate -- it enthusiastically enabled Wall Street’s transformation into a speculative casino. Greenspan stopped enforcing post-1929 reforms, like requirements that investment banks directly own a significant percentage of the assets they risked.

Why did Congressional Democrats, and even a Democratic presidential administration, play along in this risky business? Our film will show how, once organized labor collapsed as a populist political force, politicians of both parties became dependent on Wall Street and corporate campaign donors -- and learned to dance to those donors’ tunes. 

And why did our media fail to inform us about this historic, and precarious, transfer of wealth? Media critics such as David Brock will tell us on-camera, how media companies themselves were being merged, consolidated, and transformed into toothless cheerleaders for market mania. 

Finally, how might we have avoided this disaster -- and how can we rebuild sound prosperity? Heist will foreground some of the shrewdest observers of the American economy who were sounding alarms all along. Interviewees like Prins, law professor Lawrence Mitchell, and economist Robert Kuttner will show us who stole what, and where the bodies are buried. The film will point Americans to solutions based on a sustainable, green economy, the restoration of good paying union jobs, and a fair trade policy for the 21st century.