The 90’s, episode 301: Money, Money, Money

Episode 301 of the award winning series, The 90's. This episode is called "MONEY, MONEY, MONEY" and features the following segments:

3:05Copy video clip URL “Bureau of Printing and Engraving” by Eddie Becker. Becker visits the Bureau of Printing and Engraving and talks to the bored workers. When asked about the best part of her job, an assembly line worker replies, “There is no best part. When I get bored, I stand up.” He goes to the Federal Reserve, where an interview he had scheduled has been canceled. “Everyone I have been interviewing about the Federal Reserve says the Fed prefers to operate in the shadows, in the dark, away from the scrutiny of public view. Within these hallowed halls bizarre rituals with money took place.”

9:09Copy video clip URL “Joel Kovner” by Nancy Cain and Judy Procter. At the First Professional Bank in Santa Monica, California, bank president Joel Kovner gives a brief tour of the vault. “Before the bank opened we played monopoly with real money.”

12:09Copy video clip URL Prof. Paul Nadler commentary by Skip Blumberg. Nadler explains how bank loans have changed with the existence of fixed interest rates. “Savings and loans started as a family financial center. You brought in your deposits and they’d make mortgage loans. It used to be what you’d call a 3-6-3 business. They’d take your money at 3, they’d lend it back to you at 6, they’d be on the golf course by 3. It didn’t take much talent to run a savings and loan. Basically where the money went – they were paying it out, paying it out and not earning it. They refused to admit they were dead, making it the biggest scandal in American financial history. “

15:27Copy video clip URL “Sarah Ogan Gunning” by Appalshop. Gunning, an Appalachian folk singer, sings “I Hate the Capitalist System.”

16:59Copy video clip URL “Ed Sadlowski” by Tony Judge. Ed Sadlowski, of the Steelworkers union in South Chicago talks about the economic disparities in the United States. “The real question at hand is the distribution of wealth. Look at the situation of health care in this country. It’s criminal. Yet who’s opposing it the most? The insurance companies. A few years ago if I said we needed a national health insurance program the Lee Iaccocas call me communist, socialist, everything else in the world. He’s not championing the cause. He’s on my side for a change. To share that wealth is to share power. When you start talking that way, pal, they put you up against the wall.”

18:24Copy video clip URL “Andrew Jones in Iraq.” Jones talks to us from a peace camp in Iraq where an international group of protesters have formed a human shield between armies to attempt to prevent the beginning of the Iraq War. “I’m a black American and Bush had astutely put the deadline [for Iraq to pull out of Kuwait] on Martin Luther King’s birthday, January 15. Bush was assaulting an idea – an idea of peace…it could have been January 18, January 20, it could have been any day. I was pissed off at him for desecrating Martin Luther King’s birthday.”

25:32Copy video clip URL More from Prof. Paul Nadler. “One of the problems with America is we live in a world where everything has to be solved – instant journalism, instant success. A guy makes a speech and within one minute a reporter has to analyze it…What have we done to this country?”

26:02Copy video clip URL “John Stiles” by Judith Iam. After holding up traffic with his horse and buggy, John Stiles comments on the people stuck in their cars. “It’s the lonely crowd. How lonely it must be. All by yourself, locked up in a machine, traveling through time, experiencing none of the space, with half of reality eliminated from your experience.”

27:22Copy video clip URL “Susan Cohn” by Skip Blumberg. On Broadway in New York, Susan Cohn, a career counselor, talks about American cultural domination and the people’s differing definitions of what it means to be rich.

28:38Copy video clip URL “Aos Donos Do Destino” by Joao Ribeiro. The first music video from Mozambique features the vocals of Elvira Viegas and a large cast of dancing children.

32:40Copy video clip URL Andrea Carmen speech by Robble Leppzer. “At the heart of the struggle is a conflict of world view. We could talk about the indigenous world view and the corporate world view. The indigenous world view looks at this world as something that is alive. The corporate world view sees the world as something dead, something to be used and to be used as profit. The corporate executives of the world are holding us all hostage. If somebody came into your home and pointed a gun at your children, you would act. Don’t you feel that desperation that we feel?”

34:55Copy video clip URL “Eco Rage” by Robbie Leppzer. A look at a demonstration on Wall Street the day following Earth Day, 1990. “We got the power to save the earth,” chant the protesters. They clog up traffic with trash cans and bike racks and encourage Wall Street workers to take the day off. One protester is mercilessly beaten by the New York police after feigning to stop traffic in the street.

37:12Copy video clip URL Todd Alcott by Skip Blumberg. 90’s regular Todd Alcott rants. “It used to be if you needed furniture you made furniture. Everybody had the skills they needed to survive. No one makes things anymore, they have jobs. They work at an office…not to produce a thing, but to make money to buy things. We’re disassociated from our own possessions. Can you make a shirt? I can’t. We have no connection to things and how they’re made. Consequently we have no connection to each other. Money has become the fifth element. It can cancel out the other four because it can take their place at any moment. You don’t need to tame fire anymore. You just need to pay your gas bill. The Indians used to think the earth was sacred. It was holy. Anyone will tell you today that it ‘s just capital waiting to be exploited. The whole planet is a business, Earth Inc. Assets 48 kazillion dollars. What is that?!! Is that a reason for opening your eyes in the morning?…”

40:11Copy video clip URL “Bowery Forger” by Dee Dee Halleck. Blacksmith Tovey Halleck at work in the Bowery.

40:46Copy video clip URL “Test the West” by Simone Shoemaker. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans experience a free market economy for the first time. We interview a woman who is trying a fast food hamburger for the first time. “My husband would throw me out [if I served him this for dinner].”

43:27Copy video clip URL Harry Magdoff commentary by Esti Galili Marpet. Magdoff, an economist, talks about the problem of homelessness in the United States. “There’s no reason that with the resources this country has that there can’t be homes for the homeless. When it came to the Second World War we had to build very quickly. It was achieved relatively simply and in record time, but it was for war, it was for destruction. In times of peace, the possibilities are all here.”

44:50Copy video clip URL “Built into the System” by John Schwartz and Johnnie Jones. A glimpse at the homeless situation in Denver. There are plenty of empty homes, but also a huge number of homeless people. Kathy, a single parent with two children, talks about losing her job and rapidly becoming homeless.

46:39Copy video clip URL “Ruth Handler” by Judith Binder and Jody Procter. Handler, co-founder of Barbie dolls, now produces prosthetic breasts for masectomy patients with a company called “Nearly Me.” She explains her history of how difficult it was for her after she lost her breasts while giving us a tour of the factory. Handler shows us her prosthetic breasts, literally unbuttoning her dress and taking them out of her bra.

52:38Copy video clip URL More from Ed Sadlowski. “There has never been a man who has worked for another man who was paid his due. People bitch about a ballplayer getting a million dollars a year playing second base for the White Sox. When I take my grandkid to the ballpark I don’t take him to see Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn. I go there to see the ballplayer play. Why shouldn’t the ballplayer get the dough rather than two guys sitting in a skybox somewhere?”

54:00Copy video clip URL “The Money Man Monument” by Doug Michels. A satirical piece featuring a mock meeting of fundraisers for the Money Man Monument, a skeleton in a suit placed in a tube of money on Washington DC’s Mall – “a permanent tribute to green power and the American Way.”

54:58Copy video clip URL More from Prof. Paul Nadler. Nadler talks about the change in tax laws and how 90% of Americans pay more social security tax than they do income tax.

56:13Copy video clip URL Wally Nelson by Robbie Leppzer. Wally Nelson has not paid his income tax for 42 years. He refused to fight in WWII and was jailed. “If I refused to let my body be drafted for killing, I should not let my money get drafted to pay for killing. We do not have to feel we are powerless.”

57:31Copy video clip URL Montage of images from the show to the tune of Irving Berlin’s “Can You Use Any Money Today?” plays under credits.

 

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