Capitalism: A Love Story

As a liberal, I sometimes feel as though the right-wing has a chokehold on the national media, what with all the attention that professional entertainers like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh get. Therefore I'm appreciate of the left's own baggy-pants clown, Michael Moore. He's an entertainer, too, and throws it out there, and sometimes gets a little sanctimonious. But as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, "I know, I'm a bigot, but for the left." And Moore is a muckraker, a rabble-rouser,a provocateur, for the left. I can go see his movies and think to myself, "What he said."

In his latest jeremiad, Moore takes on what supposedly is the bedrock American system, capitalism. Although he rightly points out, during a visit to the National Archives, that's there's nothing in the Constitution that specifies our economic system. We have been led to believe over two plus centuries that the free market is synonymous with all that is good about America, and is somehow also Christian, as well. Moore says hold the phone, that capitalism should play second fiddle to democracy, and perhaps we should rethink everything.

The format is familiar. Moore comically uses stock footage, including home movies of himself as a child, to show how things used to be good and the American dream was possible(aside from details like institutional racism and an immoral war in Southeast Asia). He pins the beginning of the end on Ronald Reagan, the "spokesmodel as President," who allowed Wall Street to run amok (he includes a dire warning by Jimmy Carter that is awfully prescient, but you can understand how Carter got defeated). The financial industry in the U.S. has had a free pass ever since, with the Treasury department basically being an arm of Wall Street (this is in both Republican and Democratic administrations). Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, one of the heroes of this film, describes it as a "financial coup d'etat."

Moore also is there with the people who are suffering, and at times this edges into the overly maudlin, but most of it should get you angry. He's there when people are foreclosed on, mostly because of predatory lending. One family in Peoria had their interest rates jacked up until they couldn't make the payments anymore. He's there with two families who had a loved one die, and the companies they worked for (Wal-Mart was one) had taken out life insurance policies, collecting substantial sums while the families got nothing (these are known in the business as "dead peasant" policies). He wonders why airline pilots, who are responsible for the safety of their passengers, make less money than a manager at Taco Bell. He's there with the workers at Republic Windows and Doors, who are fired and then denied severance and vacation pay.

Some of the tacks Moore goes on are outrageous, but seem more like isolated scumbaggery than an indictment of capitalism, such as the case of judges in Wilkes-Barre sentencing kids to a private juvenile detention center and then getting kickbacks. Where the film soars is when it takes dead aim on the notion that capitalism simply doesn't work. He has some eye-opening chats with priests, including the Bishop of Detroit, who flatly state that capitalism is evil and antithetical to Biblical teachings (Moore has a hilarious bit with a redubbed Jesus film, Christ telling a lame man, "I can't heal you, you have a pre-existing condition"). He comes down hard on Alan Greenspan, no surprise, but also on Democrats like Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad, who are in the Banking committee yet took sweetheart mortgages from Countrywide Financial. He includes hopeful footage of the election of Barack Obama, but you won't feel good when you hear that Timothy Geitner and Laurence Summers are yet more stooges of the financial system who is now in a position of power.

The last third of the film focuses on the bailout, and I was for it, but now I'm not so sure. Moore equates it to a robbery, with Wall Street backing up a truck to the Treasury building and absconding with 700 billion dollars. He includes George W. Bush's fear-mongering speech that no bailout would lead to the sky falling, and I bought that. There's no way of knowing whether that scare tactic was based on reality or whether it was just politicians cutting deals with fat-cats.
The film predicts a rebellion between those who have nothing and those who have everything. A 2005 memo from Citibank to their biggest investors talks of a "plutonomy," where the society is ruled by the rich. One percent of the population own ninety-five percent of the wealth. The memo points out that the fly in the ointment of this ideal plutonomy is that we are a democracy, and the poor still have the right to vote. For now. But that makes the rich scared. I hope they are.

The film ends with Moore showing Franklin Roosevelt's 1943 State of the Union address, in which he proposed a second bill of rights. They included the right to a job, the right to a living wage, the right to a decent home, the right to an education, the right to health care. Roosevelt died a little over a year later, this utopia unrealized. At least it was unrealized in the U.S. Moore points out that all of these things have been achieved in the countries vanquished in World War II: Germany, Italy, Japan (Italy guaranteed equal rights for women in 1947). Turns out that they had new constitutions written, largely by men from Roosevelt's administration. It's therefore ironic that these things didn't get accomplished here.

In an interesting statistic, Moore shows the results of a poll that says thirty-three percent of young people think that socialism is the way to go. Of course socialism has been long painted as a dirty word, but with the far-right fringe tossing the word around as if it were equal to Satanism there has been a renewed interest in finding out just what socialism means. It will be interesting to see, if the dichotomy between rich and poor continues and the plutonomy takes hold, what future generations will decide to do about it.