Writes Charles Burris: “I.O.U.S.A., the highly touted fright documentary on America’s skyrocketing national debt sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, premiered in 400 theaters across the nation Thursday night. This banal film was actually painful to watch, much worse than I had previously anticipated. Producer Sam Goldwyn’s classic quip on ‘message movies’ applies: ‘If you want to send a message, call Western Union.’ I.O.U.S.A. told the story of hapless but determined Don Quixote (former U. S. Comptroller General David Walker) and his nerdy but earnest sidekick Sancho Panza from the ‘non-partisan’ Concord Coalition. This not so dynamic duo have been thanklessly traveling the back roads of America, tilting at monstrous windmills of fiscal irresponsibility and mounting national debt, in the midst of clueless Rotarians and other simple folk of the heartland. Lots of flashy graphs, smoke and mirrors, and prestidigitation with U. S. Treasury figures did not add any luster or substance to this fiasco. The only saving grace of the movie was the brief cameo appearance by Ron Paul, verbally de-pantsing Fed chairman Alan Greenspan at a congressional hearing.
“After the conclusion of the film, the premier’s rather schizophrenic benediction was staged by panelists Walker, Peterson, billionaire investor Warren Buffet, chairman William Niskanen of the pro-Fed CATO Institute, and some hack from AARP. In their best ‘Ah Shucks, folks’ corn pone delivery, they told their assembled Omaha audience (and the multitudes in theaters coast-to-coast, struggling both to keep awake and their dinners down) that the scary bad old film really didn’t mean it. Everything is really alright with the U.S.A. We’ve been in tight scrapes before and we always pulled through. Americans simply must save more and spend less. We need to tighten our belts and cut out all that nasty partisanship in Congress. I kept waiting for Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and the Andrew Sisters to rush onstage and break out in a chorus of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah! Nothing was ever said about our draconian welfare-warfare state, its American Empire based in 130 countries, and their sinister symbiotic relationship with their enablers, the Federal Reserve, the real source of the problem supposedly addressed in the film. But then no one ever expected them to either.”
1:16 pm on August 22, 2008
