Just imagine the howling chorus of vituperationagainst Moore from the hissing gargoyles of FoxNews and the bellowing blowhards of Limbaugh Land, crying as one:“Stone him! Greed is good!”
Moore’s latest film is funny and angry, braver thananything he’s ever produced because it attacks what for many Americans is theunexamined foundation of their beliefsthe essential goodness of capitalism,seen by them as the core Americanvalue. Mooreeven captures an editor of TheWall Street Journal in an honest moment:Democracy isn’t such a hot idea, the editor says, but capitalism, for him, isthe light of the world.
Evil? The rectitude of capitalism is an object offaith for University of Chicago economists andcargo cult Christians, for the gnomic death mask called Alan Greenspan andpoliticians from both ruling parties. For a moral perspective Moorevisits the Roman Catholic priest who married him, along with the bishop of Detroit, who say what thepurpose-driven pastors of megachurches could never admit: Capitalism aspracticed nowadays is a sin, an injustice.
Using home movies from his own childhood, Moore illustrates avision of American capitalism in better days. Back then, households needed onlyone wage earner and salaries kept pace with inflation, pensions were guaranteedand health care was affordable. The triumph of trade unions after World War IIresulted in the largest middle class Americahad ever known, Moorereminds us. But with the ascendance of corporate mouthpiece Ronald Reagan,unions were diminished, taxes slashed for the rich and the economy deregulatedand placed in the paws of cunning rats who saw the world as a giant Monopolyboard, spread across oceans and continents.
The result, even before the economic catastrophe of2008, was unfathomable wealth for a few and precarious times for the majority.Wages were stagnant as prices crept higher, “productivity” (i.e. more work forless benefits) rose, along with enormous college loans and other debtaggravated by hidden clauses in the fine print. Greenspan, once considered thewizard of Wall Street, encouraged Americans to refinance their homes at highinterest rates as a source of spending cash. Investment schemes that might havebaffled Einstein were encouraged. The stock market became a casino run by crazypeople, and when the house lost, they came to the American taxpayers, holdingout their hands for a loan.
Moore pulls a few of hispatented stunts, including renting an armored truck and driving up to GoldmanSachs, demanding that its executives return the money they borrowed (or was itstole?). But the most poignant moments, aside from interviews with folks wholost the homes they had lived in for decades from mortgage chicanery, was thedirector’s visit with his dad to the site of the old man’s workplace back inthe ’60s, AC Spark Plug in Flint, Mich. Once a thriving enterprise, the factoryhad been outsourced overseas long ago, leaving a desolate field covered inrubble. Moore’s message is that Americans willneed to fight for their right to jobs and security before the entire nationresembles the boarded-up, abandoned districts of Flintand Detroit.