Is Bob Iger ruining Disney with his political agenda?

https://www.quora.com/Is-Bob-Iger-ruining-Disney-with-his-political-agenda/answer/Johan-Torres

This is the story of how Michael Banks, the son from the original Disney production Mary Poppins, has grown up and now has three children of his own. After his wife’s death, Michael took out a loan to pay for funeral expenses. However, after failing to make payments on the loan, the Banks house is now in danger of being repossessed. Michael and his sister Jane decide to sell off the stock in the bank that they inherited from their parents, but they can not find the share certificate to prove they own the stock.

William Wilkins, the chairman of the bank, is hoping to repossess the Banks home in order to resell it for a hefty profit. And he destroys the documentation at the bank that would prove the Banks family really does own stock. Thus the entire movie takes place under a ticking clock as the Banks family is about to lose their home.

This is a dark, weird storyline to stick into what is ostensibly a kids movie musical about a magic nanny. Is the average child going to understand the concept of selling stocks to pay off a mortgage? But what makes this storyline fascinating is that it not merely cleanly echos the recession.

In the recession there was actually quite a lot of fraud, where banks illegally foreclosed on people’s homes. They used ridiculous courts like Florida’s notorious “Rocket Docket” where judges would rubber stamp foreclosures without reading the paperwork, with the goal of resolving 25 cases per hour. Then there is the robo-signer scandal where banks would employ temporary workers to sign off on paperwork they often didn’t understand, but assumed to be correct. This is sort of the tip of the iceberg for all the nasty fraud that the major banks perpetrated both leading up to and resulting from the recession[1].

A Disney movie about a magical nanny is sort of a weird place to address all of this, but they have to address it, it’s a major plot point. Oh, no wait, they don’t. Instead addressing the issue that multiple firms and hundreds of people collaborated with all too willing government bodies to perpetrate fraud on a truly massive scale… in Mary Poppins Returns everything is just down to one single bad guy.

A single bad guy who could simply be fired by a good guy, in this case Dick Van Dyke, who can show up at the last moment and reveal that not only do the Banks not have to sell their stock, but they are actually rich because the bank wisely invested a single tuppence twenty to thirty years ago. And everyone can celebrate because the problem has simply gone away.

The political agenda is to assure the audience that anytime anything bad happens, it is the result of a single bad individual pursuing bad goals and is never the result of a political and economic system that creates perverse incentives and toxic outcomes. All that needs to happen is for the single bad individual to be removed from power and everything will be fine. In fact, everyone will be better off. And it is never particularly difficult to remove that bad individual nor are there ever any consequences for his (it is almost always a him) removal.

They made Jane a labor organizer and never had her actually organize labor. She never even points out that it is a bit weird for an economy to require a mortgage to pay for funeral expenses and then fail to provide an adequate job to pay back that mortgage. A job at the very bank that provided the mortgage in the first place. It seems like that bank would, in fact, need some labor organizing.

Also given Disney’s history with labor practices, it is a bit rich to even include a labor organizer in the first place.

But this is Bob Iger’s political agenda across all of Disney. Anything bad is simply a result of individual bad people who can simply be replaced and everything will be absolutely fine. While as an individual movie, Mary Poppins Returns is the most political movie he released, you can see it more clearly in the patterns of Marvel. Where there is one principal villain.