Molly Crabapple Job Guarantee Animated Video

With the funds raised the Job Guarantee Action Project will commission Molly Crabapple's production company "Sharp as Knives" to make a short video bringing the fight for a Job Guarantee to a mass public audience. The video will tell the story of Coretta Scott King's campaign for such a program in the 1970s, and how close she came to succeeding. 

The narrative will highlight the fork in the road that we faced in the late 70s on the eve of our descent into de-industrialization and all that would come with it: the escalation of the War on Drugs, the rise of mass incarceration, and the collapse of the American middle class. The video will present the alternate path laid out by Scott King as the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement, the antidote to mass incarceration, and a critical measure to reinforce the American middle class in the face of de-industrialization. 

But most of all it will present Scott King's vision as the future we could have had, but let slip through our fingers. The narrative will make the case that with the benefit of hindsight, having seen all the havoc wrought by our failure to heed Scott King's call, it is time we return to that fork in the road to take the path we declined to take in the late 70s. 

The video will highlight the ways the Job Guarantee would address many of the most salient and intractable problems we face, from crime and mass incarceration, to income inequality and deaths of despair, to homelessness and economic instability. Finally, it will sketch out the basics of the vision, and make clear the impressive popularity of the idea, so as to get across that a Job Guarantee world is within reach.  

The video is intended for maximum virality and to create as compelling an onramp to Job Guarantee support as possible. We hope it will be a powerful tool for subsequent fundraising on behalf of Job Guarantee advocacy. But also it is meant to model for public figures how to talk about the Job Guarantee. 

For more detail on the Job Guarantee Action Project or the Job Guarantee itself, see our website at jgaction.org. Job Guarantee Action Project is a fiscally sponsored project of Peace Development Fund.

Below are some examples of Crabapple and Sharp as Knives' work: