Democracy and Capitalism Are NOT One and the Same
October 17th, 2009A Review of Michael Moore’s ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’
Michael Moore trying to gain entry at GM headquarters in the film Capitalism.
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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
If Michael Moore had arrived on the film scene as a conservative Republican activist in 1989, he might be heralded by Fox News today as a major American hero, and he might even be able to get a fair review in the so-called “liberal” New York Times.
Unfortunately for him and his message, he started making movies during the late 1980s, when the presidencies of Republicans Ronald Reagan and then George Herbert Walker Bush made them the target of his outsourcing ire. Moore first became famous for his 1989 film “Roger and Me,” a documentary about what happened to his home town of Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its automobile factories and moved to Mexico, where workers made much less.
Since then Moore has been known as a critic of the “neoliberal” view of globalization, according to Wikipedia, although that term goes right over the heads of most of the working people in the U.S. who should be watching his movies and learning something from them. That is the sad state of political dialogue in the good old US of A.
I mean here’s a regular Joe who could be comfortable drinking a beer with George W. Bush, who should be fighting side-by-side with the conservatives who oppose the big government bailout of Wall Street banks.
But because 20 percent of the country still believes somehow that Bush was an OK president, the audience that needs to see this movie the most, average working people struggling to make a living, especially in the South, will not see it because they already dismiss Moore as a “liberal” Democrat “propagandist.”
Although I did find some hope after screening “Capitalism: A Love Story” Friday night in a theater located in a Wal-mart parking lot. That’s an irony considering how Moore takes on the retail giant in his film. (See the After Matter in the end for the hope).
In the film, Moore is his usual bumbling self, just an average “everyman” trying one more time to get into the General Motors headquarters in Michigan, where he is predictably turned away yet again. His now familiar shtick also inspires him to lease an armored truck and make a futile attempt to get the $700 billion in Bush bailout money back from Citibank, AIG and other recipients to transfer it back into the U.S. Treasury.
The best gag for me came near the end, when he stretches yellow crime scene tape around Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, tying it off on the Wall Street Bull (see the photo below).
