Michael Moore asks whether our days as a democracy are over.
Michael Moore’s new movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” opened this weekend. Maybe it was just with the proper dose of cognitive dissonance that, in Spokane, you got your choice of which shopping mall to wade through in order to take your seat. I chose Northtown, figuring the parking is safer and cheaper.
What I found most surprising is that there weren’t more people in the theater. Although 
Moore’s movie was among the most popular this weekend it didn’t crack the Top 5, nationally, and the matinee I chose had only a smattering of customers, maybe two dozen at most. I’ve learned not to underestimate my naiveté when it comes to the kinds of things that interest other people. And still I want to think the reason “Capitalism” the movie didn’t do better this weekend is that people flocked by the millions into Woody Harrelson’s “Zombieland,” by mistake, thinking it was Moore’s film.
Okay, I jest. But I’m still baffled. It’s only been a year since the bus of our economy broke through the guardrails and teetered with two wheels over the chasm. If there’s a recovery underway, it’s anemic at best. Unemployment, already at its highest in a quarter century, is still rising and those who think this is a garden variety swale in the business cycle are either not doing their homework or are congenital optimists. Perhaps both.
I half expect that most of the commentary on Moore’s film will be in the nature of film criticism. In that vein, it will be fair to note that his antics with bullhorns outside of buildings are a bit of a cliché by now. Even so, I thought wrapping the large investment banks in yellow crime scene tape was pretty funny, a delicious gag.
But it’s the substance that matters. “Capitalism: A Love Story” skillfully indicts capitalists for the social and moral destructiveness of their greed. And yet it also indicts the rest of us for succumbing so blandly to the marketing geniuses who wrapped capitalism in the flag and sold it to Americans as if it were the very core of democracy. And a democracy that we mistakenly think we control.
For starters, Michael Moore’s reporting on former Wayne County Sheriff Warren Evans is not a gag. No bull horns for this scene. He left it to a matter-of-fact law man to cut to the central moral and foundational disconnect that occurred, in plain sight, when the government (including the Federal Reserve) quickly dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the deposit boxes of the nation’s banks.
This remarkable chest of golden life rings was tossed to the banks to save them from going under in the flood of losses caused by defaulting sub-prime loans. As I’ve noted before, most people still don’t understand how recklessness in the Wall Street “derivative” casino greatly amplified the banking crisis, leading the government to bail out not just failing banks but the insurance giant AIG which had sold unregulated “credit default swaps” to banking titans like Goldman Sachs.
In any event, what Sheriff Evans saw was that it violated the social compact for the plutocrats who’d made their mistakes to be bailed out by taxpayers, while no help and no quarter was being given to poor people who were being foreclosed upon. So Sheriff Evans simply refused to participate in tossing people and their belongings into the street.
Sheriff Evans got it. If, for the sake argument, capitalism is morally acceptable, it only has a moral foundation (and any claim for benefitting society) if the risk takers absorb the consequences of their bad bets. If they get to hand the bill to the rest of us, then what we have is not a system, but a scam.
Sheriff Evans’s revolt and other stories from the front lines of the foreclosure battles, set the stage for Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. From the floor of the House, Rep. Kaptur rails against the strong-arm lobbying behind the bailout. In an interview for the film she says she agrees with Moore’s assessment that the bailout was a “financial coup d’etat”–by which he and she mean to be the capture of the government by Wall Street.
I’m sure “Capitalism” will again inspire as much debate about who Michael Moore is and what motivates him, as it will about the issues he raises. But just as his last film, “Sicko,” squarely hit the nerve running through the continuing debate over health care in America, this one hits the nerve not just on the question of who runs the country, but about whether America’s days as a democracy are over.
–Tim Connor
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