The Big Sellout

“Modern warfare has tried to dehumanize people, to take out the sympathetic element. When you drop bombs from 50,000 feet, you don’t see who they’re landing on, you don’t see the damage. It’s the same thing in economics when you talk about statistics and don’t think about the people that lie behind those statistics.”

- Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize Winner, former Chief Economist at the World Bank in The Big Sellout

The Big Sellout, challenges current economic orthodoxy by contending that the dogmatic claims of the international business establishment for neoliberal development policies are not supported by modern economic science. More importantly, it dramatically demonstrates how the implementation of these policies has had disastrous consequences for millions of ordinary people around the globe.

Traveling throughout both the developing and industrialized worlds, The Big Sellout brings us face-to-face with the architects of the reigning world economic order, as well as with the people bearing the brunt of their policies.The film shows how international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, demand draconian cuts in public spending, the privatization of public services, and market liberalization as the only path to economic development. It tests these claims against actual case studies.

The film takes us to the Philippines, where we watch a desperate mother race against the clock to pay for her son’s kidney dialysis, a weekly procedure he needs to live.Similarly, we encounter a patient whose relatives must continuously pump air manually into her lungs because they cannot afford a ventilator. The film explains how the public health budget in the Philippines underwent massive cuts beginning in the 1980s, moving relentlessly toward a private health care system. As a result, those without resources are denied access to the vital procedures and medicines they need to survive.

South Africa and Bolivia have suffered similar traumas, as their most vulnerable populations have faced exclusion from such basic services as water and electricity. We watch as activists in Soweto, the sprawling Black township near Johannesburg, regularly risk their lives reconnecting electricity for people, many of them elderly, unable to pay the rising prices resulting from the privatization of the formerly public owned electric company. Similarly, citizens in Cochabamba, Bolivia organized enormous protests in 2000, following the decision by the Bolivian government to sell the public water company to a private corporation, which would have made water cost-prohibitive to much of the population. The Big Sellout shows how ordinary people are fighting the neo-liberal commodification of basic public goods.

Industrialized countries, the film demonstrates, are not immune to the deleterious effects of these same neoliberal policies. Great Britain’s national railway system, privatized by the Tories in the 1990s, suffered severe service disruptions, declining safety standards, and crippling low morale among its labor force. Simon Weller, a railway worker from Brighton, recalls that the British rail system used to be one of the most efficient in the world, but after the government dismantled and sold off its components to private corporations, conditions for both employees and customers declined precipitously. Such evidence challenges the pervasive neoliberal myth that private companies inevitably function more efficiently than public ones.

The United States has likewise felt the effects of this economic paradigm on daily life. The documentary examines a private health insurance system where corporate profits often eclipse community well-being, alongside criticisms of market-based structural reforms in public education, such as voucher programs supporting private, for-profit schools. Furthermore, everything from correctional facilities to logistics and security operations has been outsourced to private corporations. The film highlights how public funds targeted for infrastructure recovery and state contracts were frequently squandered on severe overcharging, administrative bloat, and abandoned projects subcontracted to politically connected entities.

While national and international economic discourse is frequently fixated on aggregate efficiency and growth, The Big Sellout reminds us that there are human faces behind macroeconomic statistics. It raises serious questions about the neoliberal credo that governments best serve the public interest by becoming servants to corporate interests. By spotlighting brave individuals standing up against these systems, the film offers a powerful critique of a prevailing economic model that it reveals to be as unsustainable as it is unjust.