Sunday’s Academy Awards were refreshingly devoid of political pontificating, save for a few jokes about news of the week and Joaquin Phoenix’s plea for veganism.
Oh, and that moment when a documentary director working for the Obamas film production company decided to embrace Karl Marx and spread an outright lie in the process.
American Factory, a documentary produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, won the Oscar for best documentary as well as a complimentary tweet from the former president.
Congrats to Julia and Steven, the filmmakers behind American Factory, for telling such a complex, moving story about the very human consequences of wrenching economic change. Glad to see two talented and downright good people take home the Oscar for Higher Ground’s first release. https://t.co/W4AZ68iWoY
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 10, 2020
But missing in Obama’s shoutout is that co-director Julia Reichert quoted the Communist Manifesto as she lied about labor in her acceptance speech.
“Working people have it harder and harder these days, and we believe that things will get better when workers of the world unite,” Reichart said in her speech, invoking Marx’s most famous declaration. But more contemptible is the falsehood that workers have it increasingly harder, when in fact, the reverse is true. Workers have it better than ever before.
In the midst of the longest bull run in history, our unemployment has hovered around a half-century low, plucking the majority of newly employed workers from outside of the labor force. As a result of this extremely tight labor market, our labor force participation rate is the highest since the economic recovery began, as is the rate of real wage growth, and disproportionately so for low-income workers. Not only that, but the overwhelming majority of workers now get to take home a higher percentage of their paychecks, which they can invest in record-high stock markets, which hold the investments of 55% of the country.
That Reichert, already a renowned director, celebrated a socialist mantra in front of a sea of millionaires is laughable enough; but her lamentation of labor is made even more so when considering that her film highlights the exploitation from Chinese cronyists, the beneficiaries of the very system Marxists seek to emulate.
I doubt we’ll hear the Obamas comment on that.
