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The man with a megaphone: Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story
In the dinner party of life, Michael Moore is the uninvited guest who spends the evening hogging the hors d’œvres and shanghaiing everyone he meets into heated debates. He’s annoying and he’s often rude, but he asks the questions no one else seems to be asking, questions that need to be asked.
Moore is the cinema’s ultimate cheap shot artist. I still haven’t forgiven him for his verbal undressing of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, a man suffering at the time from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease. If he’d tried pulling that on Ben-Hur in his prime, old Chuck would have knocked him back to B.C.
But at least his targets in Capitalism: A Love Story had it coming to them. When the U.S. Department of the Treasury becomes indistinguishable from a Goldman Sachs board meeting, or when Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal makes a salary of $161 million (in a year when his company posted losses of $8 billion) while the starting pay for an airline pilot is less than $20K, something clearly isn’t right.
Still, is it really necessary to frame a George W. Bush speech against a back-projected cartoon scene of toppled pillars and raging fires? Hasn’t he done enough to make himself look foolish on camera all on his own? And it’s one thing to criticize politicians’ persistent invocations of God as a partner in their work, but by dubbing facetious polispeak over a speech by Jesus in a clip from Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, he verges on the sacrilegious.
Moore’s liberal political sympathies are no secret, but the issues at stake here go beyond partisan politics. Pretty much everyone in the bottom 95% of the country’s wealth is pissed these days that their 401(k) has been chopped in half, or that they woke up one morning and their pension had disappeared, or that the farm that had been in the family for three generations is now owned by a bank on the other side of the country.
What the hell happened? Where did the U.S. of A. go wrong? It’s easy to blame the bank CEOs, especially when they pocketed millions of dollars of taxpayer money in bonuses as part of the $700 billion government bailout. But saying that Lloyd Blankfein or Chuck Prince are the reason our country is royally screwed is like blaming ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson for the high price of gas. When a given market, such as the subprime mortgage market, spins out of control, a CEO has two choices: jump on the bandwagon and satisfy investors’ greed for inflated share prices, or sit on the sidelines and risk losing his job.
One interviewee characterizes the market meltdown as being like a failed dam, and the analogy is a good one. It starts with a small crack unnoticeable to the naked eye and pretty soon the crack has become a hole and the flow of water becomes unstoppable.
In the case of the U.S. financial system, that crack was the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, AKA the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which repealed the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that prohibited the consolidation of commercial and investment banks with securities firms and insurance companies. In essence, the Act of ‘99 allowed the creation of financial supercenters, giant Wal-Marts for money that offered one-stop shopping for all things fiscal.
With deregulation came abuse, in the form of credit default swaps and other exotic derivative products that take a team of MIT mathematicians to understand, and in the form of an unchecked subprime mortgage market, which when the bubble burst and banks began to pull back their lines of credit to mortgage companies, caused a domino effect: a mass sell-off across the stock and bond markets that rose to a panic level with the collapse of financial giants such as New Century and Lehman Brothers.
Capitalism: A Love Story doesn’t stop with Wall Street. To Moore, capitalism itself is evil – from privately owned detention centers that make a profit off of sending teenagers to jail, to “dead peasant” insurance policies, so called because they are taken out by companies on the lives of their disposable employees. In the ultimate act of corporate greed, the company collects a big death benefit payment while the deceased’s family is left with nothing but a funeral bill.
Moore claims that the alternative to capitalism is democracy, but what exactly does that mean? Last time I checked, we do live in a democracy, one in which we were able to elect the first African-American president in our country’s history. Moore champions the efforts of worker-owned corporations where each employee has a vote in company policy, but he stops short of advocating national socialism, instead using the term “democracy” as a catch-all word for a better financial system than what we have now.
It’s one thing to talk about reform, to parade around Goldman Sachs’ headquarters with a bullhorn and a roll of police crime scene tape and demand the arrest of the board of directors, but when it really comes down to it, how do we fix a broken system? What’s next?
If you’re looking for solutions, you won’t find them here.
When it comes to answers, Michael Moore is as tight-lipped as the lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Capitalism: A Love Story is currently playing at the Roxy in Burlington and the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
The trailer for Capitalism: A Love Story
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