The One Percent
- 2006
- 1h 16m
In this hard-hitting but humorous documentary, director Jamie Johnson takes the exploration of wealth that he began in Born Rich one step further. The One Percent, refers to the tiny percent... Read allIn this hard-hitting but humorous documentary, director Jamie Johnson takes the exploration of wealth that he began in Born Rich one step further. The One Percent, refers to the tiny percentage of Americans who control nearly half the wealth of the U.S. Johnson's thesis is that t... Read allIn this hard-hitting but humorous documentary, director Jamie Johnson takes the exploration of wealth that he began in Born Rich one step further. The One Percent, refers to the tiny percentage of Americans who control nearly half the wealth of the U.S. Johnson's thesis is that this wealth in the hands of so few people is a danger to our very way of life. Johnson capt... Read all
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Cody Franchetti - Italian Baron: I'm not interested in being cool. I'm interested in being served.
Johnson begins the documentary with a basic question, the question that most wealthy people do not want to talk about. Will the growing polarization between Americans in regards to wealth, affluence, and ultimately political power, either strengthen the nation as a whole or weaken it? With camera in hand, Johnson confronts the wealthy, the poor, economists, and entrepreneurs. He also interviews members of his own family who seem strangely detached from the entire subject and are largely ambivalent about the project. The most vocal opponent of the project is not a Johnson family member per se but their family's wealth adviser. Jamie Johnson explains since this man's reason d'etre is to advise wealthy families on not only how to keep their wealth but to continually expand it, he has a self-interest in being fearful of anything questioning economic disparity, especially from one of his own clients! He essentially makes money by promoting disparity. His concern seemed almost absurd considering it's not like one documentary film will cost the 3000 to 4000 wealthiest families in American billions of dollars. But he is hired to protect that money, so by definition he must be against it.
Outside his own family, one of his first interviewees is the late Milton Friedman who advocated for lowering taxes on income and capital gains as a means to stimulate the economy under Ronald Reagan. Friedman fiercely defends his economic theories, claiming that even though the richest among the wealthy, the top 1%, has shot out of the stratosphere, it has helped the poor climb up slightly. Johnson goes on to interview other economists, such as Richard Reich, former economics adviser to Bill Clinton, who has a very different view. Reich believes the concentration of wealth at the very top could have dire consequences for ultimate instability, as manifested in Hurricane Katrina which made obvious the problems of the rich verses the poor. The rich pay less and the working middle class pays more.
Johnson goes on a tour of America. He gets into a wealth conference of the wealthiest elite of America, whose average worth is approximately $400 million. One of its directors inadvertently comes off as being quite elitist about wealth implying that redistributing any wealth through social policy, such as Medicare and social security, is inherently a bad thing. Johnson meets the founder of Kinkos and Steve Forbes of Forbes Magazine. He manages interviews with two unlikely heirs who have essentially lost their inherited wealth, one the grand-daughter of Warren Buffet, and the other an heir to the Oscar Meyer company. During the course of production, the grand-daughter receives a letter from Buffet stating in no uncertain terms that she is being disinherited because of her participation in the film. (She actual works as a kind of servant to another wealthy family!) The great-grandson of Oscar Meyer actually decided to give away his inheritance, much to the astonishment of his family. He actually has the best line: "I still meet people who say it's hard to get by on $50 million."
Interestingly, a few among the wealthy, such as William Gates Senior (father of Bill Gates of Microsoft) share the view that the top 1% own too much of the assets of the entire country. But some of the most interesting interviews are with Johnson's family, whose father has reservations about the film, which did raise my eyebrow. Here's a man who has nearly never wanted in his entire life, and yet he is afraid of what might be revealed in the documentary. When he was young he helped finance a similar documentary about the poor in Africa and was reprimanded by the Johnson & Johnson CEO. It is so interesting to me that those who appear the most fearful are the ones who really have little to fear.
You have to give filmmaker and Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson a lot of credit for making a film questioning a system which has helped his family become enormously wealthy. This film, the One Percent, has created consternation inside the Johnson family, although both the father and mother seem to come to terms with it at the end. Johnson's first project, "Born Rich", was a project apparently designed as a means for the heir of one of the wealthiest corporate dynasties in America to come to terms with his own inheritance. Now, he has directed his camera more broadly toward the growing inequity of the American economic system and how it seems to unfairly favor the rich. His documentary is somewhat akin to Michael Moore's style, although he doesn't engage in the kind of publicity stunts that are the Moore trademark. The film doesn't exactly answer the self-imposed question since there are many different views about this issue, but I think the point is to open a dialog, a dialog the wealthy-elite want to avoid. Since Jamie Johnson is from this elite, he may be the only one who could facilitate this dialog. If there is one thing the documentary reveals it is this: the wealthy elite are much more fearful than I ever imagined.
- classicalsteve
- Oct 16, 2011
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- Runtime1 hour 16 minutes
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