Portside

Two months ago I learned about the film Inequality for All when I saw a friend’s post about it on facebook. I rushed to the film’s website to find out when it was coming to Pittsburgh. But alas, there was no plan to bring it here. There was hope, however: I could submit a proposal to host a community screening. I would have to find money to pay the film’s licensing fee, but then I could show the film for free. I booked Carnegie Mellon University’s largest auditorium and started poking around the university and the city for co-sponsors. Now, I am proud to offer this invitation: please join us on Monday, November 18, at 6:15 PM for a screening of Inequality for All free and open to the public in McConomy Auditorium. Come early to meet some of the leaders of the Pittsburgh income equality movement and eat some pizza at 5:15 PM.

I organized this screening for three reasons. First, I wanted Inequality for All to be the coming out party for a new network of academics and activists in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Collaborative for Working-Class Studies. We came together this summer after a rousing session at the Working-Class Studies Association conference in Madison, WI in which Michael Zweig called for everyone in the room to return home and start centers for working-class studies. More than 40 people attended our inaugural meeting in Pittsburgh, most of them PhD students! You can join us and see what we are up to on facebook until we get a proper website.

Second, I wanted to work with other groups in Pittsburgh who have been making income inequality their central issue. Chief among these is the Make it Our UPMC campaign, which has been working for several years to pressure the region’s largest health care provider, UPMC, into being a better citizen of the city and into ending its union busting tactics and policies. Make it Our UPMC is the largest community sponsor of the film, and we will be passing the hat to support laid off UPMC workers at the screening. We are also working with the Thomas Merton center, a beacon of progressive activism in Pittsburgh, and the coalition for Great Public Schools, which recently issued a report that includes information about how income inequality is hurting K-12 students in Pittsburgh.

Finally, I wanted to bring college students, academics, activists and union members together in one room to talk about how inequality nationwide is playing out in Pittsburgh. According to Inequality for All, nearly one half of all Americans have zero wealth—no savings, no assets that outweigh their debts, no retirements savings or investments. Here in Pittsburgh, 12% of the population is living at or below poverty—an increase of 8.5% since the Great Recession of 2007. Pittsburgh children have been especially hard hit. A recent report shows that the number of homeless children in Pennsylvania has risen by 7% in the last year, from 18,531 to 19,905. Race is also a discouraging part of inequality in Pittsburgh. Compared with similarly sized cities, Pittsburgh is #1 in income inequality among African Americans.

Inequality for All is explicitly designed to help groups like mine have this conversation. It is organized like an economics lecture—in fact much of it is drawn from Robert Reich’s economics lectures at UC Berkeley—only it is the funniest, most movingly human economics lecture you have ever attended. Using well-designed info graphics, Reich’s own drawings (who knew he was an able cartoonist?), interviews with real workers, and a soundtrack that swells at all the right moments, Inequality for All has moved many an audience to laugh and cry. But Robert Reich and the film’s director Jacob Kornbluth want you to turn your laughter and tears into action. Their website gives three concrete ways for citizens to get involved in movements for greater equality, focusing on living wage campaigns, protecting and promoting unions, and investing in education.

For the most part, Inequality for All, which is being distributed by Hollywood’s powerful Weinstein company, has been embraced by the mainstream media. It won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Achievement in Filmmaking at Sundance and has earned glowing reviews in The New York Times, USA Today, and Business Week as well as many progressive outlets. The film has opened in dozens of first run theaters across the country, and in some places activists have successfully lobbied their local theaters to show the film.

One more critical review, by John Lawrence of the San Diego Free Press, calls out Reich for not being radical enough, complaining that Reich is “basically a Keynsesian who would like taxes raised on the rich with the money spent to rebuild infrastructure thus providing middle class jobs.” Lawrence criticizes Reich for romanticizing the postwar period, during which  inequality in the U.S. was the lowest on record, but which was made possible by contingencies of global history that are not likely to repeat themselves. Lawrence further argues that Reich does not talk about economic democracy, the global cooperative movement, or public banking. Reich returns to education, and, especially college education, as the panacea, at a time when few things burden the middle class more than college debt.

Others complain that Inequality for All “preaches to the converted.” But as a wise mentor once told me, most preaching is to the converted. Preachers likely spend more time invigorating their members than they do making new converts.

Long a scholar of the ways in which the disempowered can use media to promote social change, I have rarely seen a mainstream media product with this radical of a message, in this appealing of a package. If you haven’t seen it, go see it. If it is not in your city, get it to come there. This film is a unique opportunity to have a conversation about real social and economic change. Inequality for All might convert a few, but, more importantly, it will give strength to all of us who are on the front lines of reversing income disparity in the U.S. and beyond.