Overview

The Peace Studies Professor's idea about a movie about Dr. Reuschlein being the next step was worth some thought.  Perhaps he did not know there already is a movie about Dr. Reuschlein's Peace Economics, made in 2010 by Film Studies emeritus Jackson Tiffany of the University of Wisconsin Madison.  This is a great film to help people break out of the two dimensional thinking of 1) politics and 2) money about military spending and begin thinking through the 3) third dimension of the economic usefulness of military spending.  The 4^th dimension would be the whole empire concept and the 5^th dimension would be the long term 54 year cycle.  In short term thinking America, the last two dimensions are a hard sell.  In fact, military spending does not create consumer products of any kind, making it a black hole of lost manufacturing and construction in the economy, leading to profound consequences other scholars have failed to analyze in any depth at all.  This amazing new perspective is studied in eight key dimensions explaining the rise and fall of empires.  This film completely changes the way we should look at the economy since World War II, especially the Great Recession and subsequent events.  This 40 minute film is available from the realeconomy.com website for a $20 check, postpaid, including all shipping and taxes

Beginnings

Every Monday at noon peace activists in Madison Wisconsin meet at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Doty Street.  This is a good location one block away from the State Capitol and between the City and County buildings.  One day I was downtown and decided to pass out some of my own flyers and ended up in a conversation with a bearded grey haired fellow with a hat that I had seen before at the Friends Meeting House.  He had enjoyed one of my lectures a couple of years before on the "Twelve Stages of Empire" at the downtown public library.  He had asked for a copy of the tape of that lecture and I had not gotten around to giving him that.  This time he had an offer for me.  He offered to make a ten minute video about my ideas, something he had done for other organizations.  I agreed saying it needs to be fifteen or twenty minutes to get the material across well.  He agreed to that.  Little did I know I was going to be working with a retired Film Studies Professor from the University of Wisconsin.

Tapings

I called him later and agreed to come over to his house with eight of my best charts to begin taping.  He started realizing the magnitude of the issues of Peace Economics, and agreed to more and more inclusions.  He nixed one of my charts that he thought would be too hard to explain, but accepted the rest.  We soon realized it was going to take longer and ended up with a forty minute dvd.  Since most of the material had been accumulated over three decades, I agreed to a summary taping that would explain the twenty-first century part of the story, as the taping was completed in the summer of 2010.  Jackson then added titles and other polish to the film.

Distribution

Jackson had a good idea who could produce the film economically.  I could have a dvd in a packet with a dust cover for about 1000 for $1000.  That made it very economical, but I wanted more.  I decided to double the cost and include a 24 page booklet.  The booklet has all the seven charts of material of the dvd on sixteen pages.  Another eight pages of important ideas left out of the original film were added.  This gave a cliff notes version of the ideas for easy review and to show others individual points.  The structure was such that a chart could be on the left hand side of the fold and an explanation of the chart on the right hand side of the fold.  Had I consumer tested this more, I would not have started with World War Two.  Even though I refute the idea that the war pulled us out of the Depression, the conventional wisdom propaganda is too hard to overcome for some.  I should have started with the next two charts instead, then eased into WWII later on.  The 2011 dvd has never taken off like the paperback Peace Economics of 1986.  Distribution of the dvd is only about 200 so far compared to the 3000 of the paperback.  It is much easier to get a book into a book store than a dvd.  But the newer work has much more new material than the original.  It seems people want more words and less numbers and charts.

Actual copy of 24 page booklet enclosed with each video:

https://www.academia.edu/4108656/BOOKLET_for_Peace_Economics_11_charts_24p._2011