brother's birthday and we wanted to surprise in the club paper great about well and issues of social class and things like that in america you cannot film this this is really what makes a family great the center of the family what i see as a white beautiful sphere of pulsing energy inside of which all of you sit and you're all atoms growing energetically help weight and that i know i'm a lucky guy puts out energy my great grandfather started the johnson and johnson pharmaceutical company and my father inherited a fortune worth a billion dollars like the people of this character are in that first circle every year my family meets with an advisor to discuss our finances that we're looking and he usually says the same thing b and that we keep getting richer and frankly if they are that first circle in fact our families fortune is growing faster than ever we're part of a small number of american families that on most of the countries well having so much in the hands of so few can't be good for america it's a problem i've asked my father about before but he has no patience for it i can't i can't tell you i yeah just wait i have more question why i know i'm not an expert on these issues what do you want from me it's obvious that my dad doesn't want to talk to me and i think i know why when he was my age my father made a movie about poverty in africa i know it's family severely reprimanded him for making his film and that's probably why he's so reluctant to participate in mind for them shining a light on the extreme gap between rich and poor hit too close to home the wealth gap is hard for rich people to acknowledge anywhere in the world especially when it's in their own backyard today in america the disparity between the haves and have nots is worse than it's ever been now the top one percent of americans like my family and me own roughly forty percent of the country's wealth and we share an aggregate net wor greater than the net worth of the bottom ninety percent of individuals combined even though the last twenty eight years have brought america the largest economic boom in the history of finance most of the rewards have gone to those who are already at the top of the ladder and they still do average members of the one percent now and over a million dollars a year while a majority of americans earn close to thirty five thousand which is what the average c e o for less than one day of work no one has watched the rich get richer more closely than my family's financial advisor who manages the fortunes of some of the richest families and i am not against you making the movie the movie is fine for you to make it's good for you to have something to do with your life and it's a good project but you don't know what the hell you're talking about you've no idea of the scope of the impact of what you're saying it is and before you know it there has had under the consequences what you can imagine becomes bigger than you ever thought and it's taken forever to get to where we are you don't need to go blowing up the apple cart you know just crazy or just i hate to see you doing this to yourself what about the facts and figures that i'm not about what about this data you're making a fool's argument and it is just it depresses me to see you doing it and you should just do a little bit more work on i don't think ryan does really want me to do more work when i asked him for the names of other clients i could talk to he refused to give them to me so without his support i'm using my family name to enroll in one of the most exclusive wealth conferences in america where the wealthy go to discuss strategies for keeping their fortunes growing the average net worth of the families that attend our conference is confidential but it's a pretty large number  there are multibillion dollar families represented a number of them as a matter of fact according to forbes magazine we don't ask for natural statements of course when people register but we do query them to make sure that they are a sophisticated talk by family and order to attend i would say the average in the group today probably around three to four hundred million certainly some smaller than that and obviously a number of them are much much larger i mean there are people who are looking for funding for their projects that we will to get into this meeting that's right absolutely and we make sure they don't get to get in my goal as i get older for the families i serve the few that i'm still consulting to just to see if i can help them get to their fifth generations in good shape and go on from their family well the book you have in front of you is about the first three generations from the dozens of families that were turned up at this conference in the early one nine hundred ninety s there are hundreds of families here today and if you look into the numbers that represent private wealth and a large enough aggregation that you have a family office i'm sure it has to be in the many trillions of dollars there is much greater good done by the people with the wealth in creating jobs creating business opportunities and in plan to pay than otherwise and i would say that it makes more sense to me to encourage business ownership encourage wealthy to to generate that wealth so that wealth can then be shared rather  in the early eighties the american economy was rebuilt around the interests of big business and wealthy individuals with the idea that their success would eventually benefit everybody this trickle down policy was the brainchild of the economist milton friedman who got a nobel prize for it in one thousand nine hundred seventy six and now his ideas are more popular than ever thank you all very much an hour for me to be here to pay tribute to the hero of freedom milton friedman he has used a brilliant min to advance a moral vision i've studied you know the basics of your theories and i've read about your high school economics textbook tell me company so you read some my work have you in fact re ambition and drive to become wealthy people say well isn't that a selfish that you want to get ahead now in a sense if you have certain talent in a free society you should have the opportunity to discover what that talent is everyone has a knack for something and develop that talent and by developing your talent by trying to meet your goals and ambitions not only helping yourself helping others and that this idea of pop culture e c nawal the businessman's the heavy in hollywood the business man of the corporation are always evil but in the real world even if you happen on pleasant personality even if you have the kind of person that make babies cry just out for yourself you know i'm going to make make it unless you're doing something for other people and they're given all the flaws of human nature the system as it has has worked but  co workers there were always the most motivated and there's a relationship between profits and those things that that's not a sin to make it about a hundred square feet let me hear you here here here here i have a sliding window here couldn't let the customers kurdish people are saying well one day i'd like to go to the moon and look at the planet earth and say that's part of my portfolio it sounds ridiculous but paul and a few people like him really do own the world's portfolio is probably at an all time high in the united states we have reached levels of inequality that you've seen only in all darkies south america starting here with a tale of two cities what you have is a level of concentration of wealth probably never seen before nor history now of course you have tens of millions of workers who can't live on what they earn and they're earning less than inflation adjusted dollars and even neighborhood where a lot of things are changing where a lot of people are where people have been pushed to their homes by real estate value not be able to pay the taxes whatever else you know i'm trying to think about trying to think about if i were there and someone else bring here what would cause me to be resentful  the south side of chicago is one of the poorest inner city communities in america right now rich people are moving in and creating some serious changes in the neighborhood sense very thought provoking place you see the train go and you're reminded that there are other places in the country and you see what used to be housing projects are suddenly condos and you wonder what impact you're having the city who lives here who can afford to live here when such a big deal if the change weren't so drastic since buildings used to be public housing now their main taken condo sure you put in a new window police station secondly you tear out all the basketball courts and if there's a local public school the poor people tend to tear down the school  feel like your kids have an opportunity to get rich in this country  well that was good for society because we want to discourage the poor from having a lot of children and and and basically surviving that kind of social darwinist notion has stayed alive in certain quarters and i believe that it is they're behind much of the economic policies we are now seeing look there never in history then a time when the ordinary people of this world and particularly in the richer nations thank you nine states britain you're never been a time when the ordinary people have had a level of income and level living that they now do but what about the tens of there it's not perfect and there are cases and people will get hurt but that's true of any system doesn't it make you nervous when you see so many powerful an extremely wealthy individual sitting there directly influencing those politicians when we're in a democracy it's not influencing anything  they're playing a role in the political system but congress is ultimately going to be influenced by public opinion but what the public wants the public will get what the public wants a few months ago i told the american people i did not trade arms for hostages my heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not in the one nine hundred eighty s the u s government illegally sold weapons to iran and used the money to support nicaraguan rebels in what turned out to be the iran contra scandal at the center of the deal was one billionaire who had unfettered access to the secret workings of the us government dollars and they shipped equipment of the onion feed me back there is was supposed to be a hush hush operation as business people we have ways of when it polluting the government officials and they have but when you help connect the united states government the saudi government over sales of weapons what would you call that marketing system is like that it's been the case for the last twenty five years in the united states that the amount of money flowing into the system for political contributions has been a major shaper of who gets what within the economy because they always want something whether it's a tax change or it's a change in regulation or it's a subsidy or what have you and as a result their number of studies that show the people giving the money of often have the greatest benefit in terms of what happened to their stock price of their own personal fortune meet the king of sugar happy and his brother alfonso the palm beach florida critics estimate these plantation owners make an extra sixty five million dollars a year off the sugar program in american consumers the government puts the total cost to consumers  at least one point four billion dollars a year the moment in the oval office when bill clinton was confronting monica and telling her it was over he interrupted with a call from it turns out the final all final was very concerned that al gore had made a speech the day before saying that he should have to pay for the clean up their place so their inner tears bill clinton spent twenty two minutes on the phone reassuring elfie final that everything was ok that they would be true to true blue and even that al gore guy is just saying that to get elected keep giving us money so al can be nobody knows exactly what it cost to produce a pound of sugar in the everglades but it's the second most profitable crop to tobacco in the united states and it is made live on whole family extraordinarily rich the incredible thing is that for every pound of sugar grown in the everglades and we're talking about hundreds of millions of times the american taxpayer guarantees a price of twenty two cents a pound way above the of seven cents a pound the sugar program is a combination of import quotas and a guarantee that the government will buy any surplus it limits dramatically and limits to almost nothing the amount of for insurance permitted to enter the u s that means  need sugar in the u s you have to buy it from the u s sugar producers and that that results in the price being artificially raised there's a shortage usually and so the price of sugar is higher the world price so you go to canada the price of sugar  one third of the united states or mexico is one third of the price in the united states and they guarantee the price so there is too much sugar the united states the federal government will buy the sugar at the high price makes zero economic sense your country running a five hundred billion dollars a year deficit and we're subsidizing sugar production in the everglades which is damaging the same system that we're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to repair if you really think about it it's nonsensical  comical if it wasn't so hideous it really would be laughable  little family makes hundreds of millions of dollars and very wealthy because of a government program and there's no reason why the government should create a program to make the finals richer we are in effect subsidizing the fun and hurting the american public mind products that have children that one was the republican one was a democrat i think on who was the single largest contributor in florida to the clinton campaign and his brother was the largest contributor the republican bob dole campaign they had to co what we're talking about is somewhere over four hundred thousand dollars two hundred various people in contributions the republican national committee they are putting down in most of these cases their occupation is with the florida crystal's corporation that's them money doesn't decide every issue in politics but most issues it plays a major part and if you can try to understand politics and why things happen the way they do in washington you have to as they say follow the money that's an while albion pep a fan who will get richer off government programs the towns where they based their businesses sink deeper into poverty the city of bell that is a labor community because we have a lot of agriculture in the area  the figures show that every year was an average of ten workers killed and sugarcane was when the government came down as part of their review of the sugar act to see that the workers were being paid properly it found them to mechanize their sugar harvest many of the migrants who had come to work in their fields stayed in america hoping for other opportunities but they haven't made it very far do you think it makes a difference for the he's played for the colts and the raiders family lives right back here i mean that's just one of the things i mean and then there's other athletes and there are a lot of talented people in this one community it's hard to believe that just a few miles down the road from belle glade is one of the richest towns in america palm beach the contrast between the two communities is astounding but most rich people have come to accept the blatant inequality as a way of life in our country i know my father is different he struggles with it yet every time i turn the camera on his instinct is to keep quiet for the middle of the coming with the camera i really want to you know your personal sadly well you made your movie now you don't want to talk to me what is so dirty what do you think's going on what do you lose time to take this camera and your cell and do another person or another family it's not going to happen here it's frustrating because i know when my dad was my age he had something to say about social inequality and i think the subject is so complicated for him that now he chooses to avoid it at all costs is easy to understand it's preordained if you had hair at money then you feel bought it i'll get all this and somebody else's poor well got a reason for that god's never going to give you anything that you can't handle people mistake the bible as something that you put on the shelf after sunday but it is it is i guideline that you run your business by your and your family and you run your life by and you will succeed we have about two hundred sixty million dollars in sales and we have eleven hundred fifty employees it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven and back then rich people it means that god has given you a lot of assets to be stewards of and he's going to sit back and watch how you do it i think got into theaters a very very important quality you can't even write motivate people have a business of united  homeless person is playing music or trying to bettering themselves only pencils or doing something i generally don't do much in this case i thought that most genteel would also having their leaders possibly give it all it's always a ambiguous thing you should have a little bit of guilt a little bit of pride i don't know how to answer i but i made a decision to give up that we you know that these were the kids i went to school so we live we i grew up in a in a wealthy bubble but i remember thinking at that time there's something something wrong here something about unfairness that's about as much as i remember that little seed was probably planted then and then i wrote my dad a letter basically telling him that my desire intention to give away the money that i had he called me after he got the letter he said  i'm coming to boston i want to talk to you about this and he came out and he said you know you've been away from home for about ten years now i don't quite understand this decision maybe you should sort of tell me what's happened since he left home and so he listened to me for a while to talk about that and then he kind of at the very end he said ok i understand i understand what this is about you know i don't i don't think it's a good idea and my questions have to do with heavy really thought through  consequences of this like what if you have a child one day and that child has a severe disability and he really pushed me out all these what if questions all the sort of worst case scenarios for me it always came back to well i would be in the same boat as ninety eight percent of the people i know and i do meet people today who say it's hard to get by in fifty million you know i need more i think those people are sick in america some of the richest citizens are treated like aristocracy even when they go to great lengths to control how the public perceives them when i contacted warren buffet about this film he refused to talk but a friend introduced me to his granddaughter and she invited me to her home to show me what life is like in the second richest family in the world after out of school we don't get any money from our family i work for a family here and some cisco i do a lot of organizing of just things in their home organizing of toys i'm actually pretty good at looking at a very messy closet or space and making order out of chaos so that's something i'll do before the kids come home and then usually when the kids get home i'm responsible for very general things like bath time and dinner time and homework time i think it's a very weird thing to be working for a very wealthy family considering i do come from one of the wealthiest families in america and i feel that the family i work for feel a bit of humor around the fact that i am from one of the wealthiest families a welfare family that i believe they are i feel very old i feel really happy in my life i feel like i have more than what i need and definitely what i need he states that their relationship was over and that she was no longer a member of their family my family adopted you as a niece or a cousin because i was in this film you know it has made grandpa upset and said to the extent that now he's going to say i'm not israel granddaughter at the same time of nicole struggle with her grandfather warren buffett came out and announced that he was giving a majority of his fortune to charity warren buffet's reaction to the film ended up in the newspaper my family started to get nervous and they called me in for a meeting with my father and his financial advisor jim you know agree with the thesis of your movie i don't respect the way in which you documented it i don't know that you're right i mean i think this movie is taking a good direction i think so far i've learned a lot and i think if anything what i've seen suggests that some of my original thoughts about it were on the right track and i don't understand why your resistance you just you think brian's right what do you mean he's upset i can understand it i'm not sure whether he's right or wrong but i feel like this movie is a good idea and i feel like i'm gonna go forward with it either way i can't take it anymore it's too much you're behaving like a little arrogant trust a foreign come on give me a break i'm not surprised that brian is upset with this movie his job is to ensure that members of the one percent keep getting richer and for him the growing wealth gap is an indication that he and people like him are doing their jobs but not all rich people see the growing wealth gap as a good sign for some it's a problem that needs to be reversed people who have been unable to accumulate a very very large will have an indebtedness to society for having made that possible they live in a place which generates individual well creation of the micro processor the human genome research the internet none of those things would exist but for the ninety billion dollars that the federal government spends every year on basic research back in the old a she would tax passive income meaning dividend it interesting come differently than salary right now the guy making money from dividends pays fifty percent tax but a soldier over  pays a forty percent tax thirty percent impact it was december two thousand and then i got an e mail from bill gates sr the father of the founder of microsoft who said how can i help you know i'm he said i'm the idea that we i'm here talking to people in the senate about the federal estate tax bill the republicans are trying to repeal it their constituents don't like to pay the tax and they're trying to help their constituents by r like we are developing a very serious wealth disparity and the fact of the matter is that the disparity has developed even though we do have a state tax so i hate to think  i think that what we've seen in the last twenty years is reckless because of where the united states sort of as a top part of its trajectory going down we used to march on while we make too much money out of finance there's too much debt there's a recklessness and now the resources are recklessness about borrowing a sense that it's always going to be up up and away from the united states that serious study just doesn't support america has been blessed power and wealth but what did we do as a society we didn't have a revolution we didn't turn to socialism or communism or fascism we reformed ourselves the progressive era was an era of reform we adopted graduated progressive income tax we regulated corporations we busted up the big trusts and big monopolies we made job safer and we provided eventually  when i was much younger just out of college i got involved in child giving to an anti apartheid organization that was making a film in south africa involved wages and workers in certain companies when it aired on public television johnson and johnson i know was included in that and several people connected with the company started to complain to the c e o there about what jimmy johnson doing he's undermining our business my name also appeared in the film credits and i remember going down to meet with the c e o of the time and i began to realize that it was a story with two sides that the yes they didn't pay that i forget it it's going nowhere just keep going you have got you got you got what i feel and i can't give you solutions for the world well if you have a way to help you should do it if you can affect one or two lives you've done a good work  i don't think your are necessarily set the goal of changing the world because it's it's maybe beyond what what's possible i'm proud of my father for making this movie it's surprising it took him so long to tell me about it but the scolding you got from the company clearly took a toll on and it explains why he hates talking about money unfortunately many rich people feel the same way as the executives who confronted my father self preservation has given rise to the growing wealth gap in america and the bigger the gap gets the more removed wealthy people get from the world around but if you're always hiding from the problem you're never going to find any solutions