'The Story of Broke': A Fable Dispelled

High-achieving environmental activist Annie Leonard—she started at Greenpeace and networked out from there—has stepped back in front of the webcam with The Story of Broke.

A follow-up to The Story of Stuff, a 20-minute film that dissected the USA’s “extraction, production, distribution, consumption, disposal” dinosaur economy, Leonard’s latest semi-animated video needs less than nine minutes to put facts to the fiction that America cannot afford to be a socially responsible society. Leonard may be preaching largely to the converted, but she gives a rousing sermon nonetheless.

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If The Story of Broke is to be believed, the United States is governed, in theory, by an institution created of the people, directed by the people, to function for the good of those people—us.

The moral of the story: Let’s turn that “of the people, by the people, for the people” theory into live-action reality.

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