Guest Column
by Michael Moore
MichaelMoore.com

When someone talks about pushing you off a cliff, it’s just human nature to be curious about them. Who are these people, you wonder, and why would they want to do such a thing?

That’s what I was thinking when corporate whistleblower Wendell Potter revealed that, when “Sicko” was being released in 2007, the health insurance industry’s PR firm, APCO Worldwide, discussed their Plan B: “Pushing Michael Moore off a cliff.”

But after looking into it, it turns out it’s nothing personal! APCO wants to push everyone off a cliff.

APCO was hatched in 1984 as a subsidiary of the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter — best known for its years of representing the giant tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris. APCO set up fake “grassroots” organizations around the country to do the bidding of Big Tobacco. All of a sudden, “normal, everyday, in-no-way-employed-by-Philip Morris Americans” were popping up everywhere. And it turned out they were outraged — outraged! — by exactly the things APCO’s clients hated (such as, the government telling tobacco companies what to do). In particular, they were “furious” that regular people had the right to sue big corporations…you know, like Philip Morris.

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Guest Column
by Michael Moore

Dear Congressional Democrats:

Welcome back to our nation’s capital for your one final session of the 111th Congress. Come January, the Republicans will take over the House while the Democrats will retain control of the Senate.

But Dems — here’s something I don’t understand: Why do you look all sullen and depressed? Clearly you’re not aware of one very important fact: YOU ARE STILL COMPLETELY, TOTALLY, LEGALLY IN CHARGE! When (and if, mostly if) you wake up to the reality that you can do whatever you want for the next seven weeks, you will realize that you have two clear options:

1. You can continue your “Sit Quietly and Hope No One Hits Me” strategy and thus lay the groundwork for an even bigger ass-kicking two years from now;

Or…

2. You can actually use the power you hold for the next seven weeks and have the Senate pass the legislation that the House has already passed!

Wake up, Democrats!

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This is too disgusting for comment…

A Review of Michael Moore’s ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’

Michael Moore trying to gain entry at GM headquarters in the film Capitalism.

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).

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Guest Column
by Michael Moore

I’d like to have a word with those of you who call yourselves Christians (Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Bill Maherists, etc. can read along, too, as much of what I have to say, I’m sure, can be applied to your own spiritual/ethical values).

In my new film I speak for the first time in one of my movies about my own spiritual beliefs. I have always believed that one’s religious leanings are deeply personal and should be kept private. After all, we’ve heard enough yammerin’ in the past three decades about how one should “behave,” and I have to say I’m pretty burned out on pieties and platitudes considering we are a violent nation who invades other countries and punishes our own for having the audacity to fall on hard times.

I’m also against any proselytizing; I certainly don’t want you to join anything I belong to. Also, as a Catholic, I have much to say about the Church as an institution, but I’ll leave that for another day (or movie).

Amidst all the Wall Street bad guys and corrupt members of Congress exposed in “Capitalism: A Love Story,” I pose a simple question in the movie: “Is capitalism a sin?” I go on to ask, “Would Jesus be a capitalist?” Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the 95 percent under them combined?

I have come to believe that there is no getting around the fact that capitalism is opposite everything that Jesus (and Moses and Mohammed and Buddha) taught. All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what’s left for everyone to fight over.

Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven.

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Michael Moore asks Senator Sanders “what is wrong with American capitalism?”

Senator Bernie Sanders makes a poignant appearance in Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, highlighting precisely the deficiencies of the current political and economic climate and the way the American public is getting screwed in the process. Senator Sanders consistently defends the American middle class from the greed and abuse of the insurance companies, the bank lobby, the drug companies and Wall Street who have taken control of the decision-making within our government and our institutions.

Senator Sanders and Michael Moore Talk Capitalism