Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

*Leonardo DiCaprio Documentary: Before the Flood (trailer) (2016) [2:53]

Before the Flood website

Before the Flood is a 2016 documentary about the effects of climate change created by award winning American Actor/producer/writer Fisher Stevens and presented by actor Leonardo DiCaprio. First revealed at the Toronto film on September 9th the film which has been executive produced by Martin Scorsese will be first shown to the public on October 31st 2016 as it airs on the National Geographic Channel.

As well as being presented by the the globally recognisable Leonardo DiCaprio Before the flood features viewpoints from people with weighted voices such as Barack Obama, Pope Francis, and John Kerry.

I talked at length with a Trump supporter I grew up around. I wanted to understand. I respected her growing up. I wanted to know why a person as kind and compassionate as I remember her is voting for someone like Donald Trump.

She was a family friend, a good person. In rural Ohio, everything was tight. Money, jobs. If you really needed quick cash, she'd put you to work doing landscaping. She'd pay fairly and reliably for the area.

She's voting for Donald Trump. I disagree with her choice, but I understand why she rejects Clinton so fiercely, and why she's been swept up in Donald Trump's particular brand of right-wing populism. I feel that on the left, it's increasingly easy to ignore these people, to disregard them, to write them off as racists, bigots, or uneducated. I think that's a loss for everyone involved, and that sometimes listening can help you to at least understand why a person is making the choices they make, so you can work on the root causes. For her, the root cause isn't racism. In fact, I remember her as one of the only people in the area who proudly hired black workers, in a place where that was a huge issue. She fought over that choice.

But that's enough background. Let me relay a bit of what she told me. She's a person who built her business from the ground up. She wasn't rich, but was very comfortable for the area. She had a nice house, a nice car, and was stable. She achieved the American dream of not having to struggle. Things changed during the housing crisis. A landscaping business requires customers who need landscaping, and people who don't own homes just don't need landscaping. In some of these neighborhoods, one in five people lost their homes. That almost immediately turns a successful landscaping business into a struggling one.

Then there was a domino effect. She couldn't pay for her lawn-care equipment leases and loans. That hurt her work efficiency. Then, she lost her car. But that didn't stop the payments. Then, she lost her house. She slowly had to let go all of her employees, until it was just her, hand-mowing lawns for cash the way you might expect a high school student in the summertime.

She told me that every week, it seemed there was another default letter, another foreclosure, another bank demanding more blood from her dry veins. To her, that pile of default notices and demands for payment looked suspiciously similar to Hillary Clinton's top donor list.

She lost everything she worked so hard for. Obama swore he was going to help. The Wall Street bailout did seem to help Wall Street. But it did absolutely nothing for her. She turns on the news and sees how the Dow Jones is doing better than ever. But that didn't bring her house and livelihood back. Liberals insist that Obama's made her life better. But, now she's driving a car that falls apart randomly while having to pay those same banks for a car she doesn't own and never will. It's difficult to convince someone whose life is objectively worse that their life is better. And it's disingenuous to try. You can break down the specifics, sure. But when someone's hungry, and you're busy silencing their complaints by telling them how well world hunger is improving, you're just going to upset them.

This is not a person who is stupid or racist. She knows Bush caused the economy collapse with his irresponsible tax policies and wars. But she saw liberals as fighting for the banks' recovery, to hell with her needs. She sees in Hillary someone who celebrates that approach. Who measures US success by the success of multinational mega corporations?--?corporations who undercut and destroy local businesses. This is a person who grew up in a town with a friendly neighborhood general store, a locally-owned hardware store, farmers' markets, florists, and auto shops. All of these businesses closed when Walmart moved into town. All their owners now work at that Walmart for a fraction of their previous wages, no benefits, and no hope for something better, something of their own. And now, she sees a free trade supporting former Walmart executive about to come in to office, and it feels like salt in her community's wounds. ...