A stirring leitmotif punches our gut and cancers our minds from childhood: the game "Monopoly." Who hasn't played it? Here come the children, who have played the American dream game but won't grow up into it because of the porcellian savages. The film begins with stunning shots of Ennis's baby girl. Don't the wingnuts love their children?
What world awaits her? Defeated Ohio congressional candidate Hackett weeps about his six-year-old daughter's questions about headlined corruption. Will she be allowed to play the junked challenger "Anti-Monopoly"? Or live it? Ralph Anspach, creator of "Anti-Monopoly," was sued by Parker Brothers, current manufacturers of "the game," and in the course of the trial emerged the blockbuster news that these Brothers had actually co-opted Monopoly out of the public domain from its true source, Lizzie J. Magie, creator of "Landlord's Game" in 1903, undoubtedly influenced by the predecessor predators who comprised the Gilded Age. It was then that the notion of corporate personhood snuck under the carpet to hibernate and estivate until its time. Magie had meant for the game to show that monopoly among the few was a burden.
Anspach got the word out but lost the lawsuit.
So the kids' game teaches us outrageous lies that have come true, violating the Sherman Antitrust Act among other legal milestones of the last century. Square by square, card by card, as exhibited in the film, it teaches our children to bankrupt their opponents through financial greed. Its icon, the man in the three-piece suit with the white whiskers, is another leitmotif painted onto buildings and sidewalks by street artists, one master named Alec Monopoly. How else to reach thousands of people than through whose streets? our streets. Street art is vandalism, punished when the artists, who work late in the dark, are caught. Billboards belong to the steamy side, sights the kids shouldn't see but do. The "get out of jail free" card points to the corporate crime that slips into the cracks (most of the time, Jack and Scooter!) in return for Kings Dollars. Such felons who vote if they need to, welcome at the polls, the perfect demographic--rich, white, and educated--show up most often. Theirs is the leisure time while the masses work several jobs just to subsist, thus kept from voting.
Tom Noe, source of Ohio's Coingate, offers an outstanding exception to the demographic, having dropped out of college after two years to pursue his real passion and income shower, numismatics. He was sentenced to eighteen years in the slammer for taking millions from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation to fill the gap left by stolen coins worth millions, which belonged to the Buckeye State. How well qualified he was for a rare job involving his expertise. What a pity.
"You can't write a story better than reality," notes Ennis, who himself weaves in and out of the action. "Let's become our Congressmen."
Our triumphs over the Kochs & co.? In 2011, the news leaked that the Koch brothers were holding a secret convention at the Las Palmas Desert Resort in Nevada. A crowd of progressives followed them there to demonstrate outside. There is a shot of David Koch looking seasick as he watched.
Occupy's outing of high-profile corporations' membership in ALEC, a supporter of Stand Your Ground laws and voter ID, among many other nauseating causes, shrunk its roster that had included Coca Cola, Pepsico, Wendy's, Mars, Kraft, McDonald's, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
On May Day 2012, a traditional workers' holiday, Ennis assembled a group of Los Angeles street artists to create a huge Monopoly board that was spread across Broadway and Sixth Avenue in New York City. Of course the board contained the progressives' answer to the traditional squares. A party followed. Police didn't interfere--at one massive antiwar rally I had attended in Gotham the police ended up confined beyond their own barriers--I believe the one in February 2003 that attracted hundreds of thousands; the count varied but I told my daughter, crushed against the wall of a building on a side street, to go back to her dorm and I'd represent her.
And so the leitmotifs of art and activism converge with more riveting photos of Ennis's adorable child but the sweet jubilation is tempered by mention of further Supreme decisions: one that allows unfettered political donations of, by, and for a few people (McCutcheon v FEC) and the other the Hobby Lobby case (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.) that allows employers with religious scruples to withhold insurance payments from employee medical consultations that involve abortion or even birth control.
So all's not okay in the corral, but a list of demands heartens us to keep at it and never stop: Vote; Public Financing of campaigns; Full Disclosure of campaign donation sources; End Gerrymandering; Free Airtime; Constitutional Amendments; create an American Anti-Corruption Act; 28th Amendment National Roadshow; and Stamp Money Out of Politics.
For more--because there is so much more than what I've covered--visit pay2play.nationbuilder.com.
(Article changed on September 19, 2014 at 16:06)
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