Laborfest: Movie-Waterfront-Destruction of Michigan Birthplace of Union Jobs

This powerful film by Elizabeth Miller tells the story of the destruction of Highland Park, Michigan, the birthplace of mass production and good paying union jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers. The destruction of this industrial powerhouse leads to corporate schemes to save the city by privatizing the water system. Homeowners start receiving bills for thousands of dollars and face the shutoff of this basic necessity. Some bills reach $10,000. The film follows Vallory Johnson who turns her anger into organizing a grass roots campaign for affordable water as a basic human right. This literal criminal destruction of tens of thousands of homes in the Detroit area is common throughout American history, starting with the destruction of the homes of Native Americans, to establish a capitalist, private profit state, continuing with the destruction of whole workingclass farm and labor communities, including but not limited to coal miners' homes in preventable floods, "urban renewal" gentrification projects, arson fires perpetrated by sumlords, deliberate destruction of productive farms and homes in the "Dust Bowl" to allow for corporate agriculture in the 1930s as in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and the ongoing destruction of the homes in the Mississippi River Valley from New Orleans to Cedar Rapids. Obviously there is no oil in Detroit, just human beings.

Liz Miller is a documentary filmmaker, community media artist, and professor with an MFA in Electronic Arts from Renssellaer Polytechnic Insitute and an BA in Social Thought and Political Economics from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst

Awards for this movie:
--Ramsar Medwet Award at the Ecofilms Rodos International Film and Visual Arts Festival, Greece
--Katherine Knight Award, EarthVision Environmental Film Festival
--"Best of Fest" at 2008 Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival
See also:
http://www.thewaterfrontmovie.com/node/16
http://www.aboutus.org/The_Water_Front_Movie
http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/30378/38006
and
http://www.laborfest.net/2008schedule.htm