(2009) If you believe that every American has the right to a job that pays a living wage, the right to a home, the right to medical care, the right to a paid vacation, the right to an education, and the right to be free from unfair monopolies and competition, all of which President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed as guarantees within a Second Bill of Rights to the US Constitution in his State of the Union speech on January 11, 1944, most of which today belong as rights to Japanese and Europeans following World War II, then director/writer/producer/performer Michael Moore's screened screed for democratic socialism is for you.

This is Moore's least humorous and most polemical of his one-sided documentaries to date, and I've long been a fan of his pictures and diatribe. "The only thing we have to fear is greed," Harry Shearer, comedian and voice artist on The Simpsons, declared on PBS's Nightly Business Report, but he might just as well have been speaking for this film.

Moore begins by comparing the US to the decline of the Roman Empire, juxtaposing Dick Cheney's face with the statement, "emperor above the law." Next he photographs families being evicted from their homes, with the assistance of police officers, following mortgage foreclosures - Since banks don't take away domiciles from responsible owners, how does one lose one's shelter after decades or generations of living in the house unless one turns the property's equity into a personal ATM machine? Moore doesn't elaborate - before interviewing "real-estate whiz" Peter Zalewski of Condo Vultures in Florida ("take advantage of others' misfortunes"), cleaning up on foreclosures at barebones prices.

What is capitalism? Moore asks actor Wallace Shawn. It's free enterprise, which means private ownership, competition, the profit motive, and consumers voting with their dollars.

(Not mentioned in the film, I'll add from Sandra Tsing Loh's article in The Atlantic: "[In The Female Eunuch, feminist Germaine] Greer argues that what the shift from stem [multigenerational] to nuclear family primarily serves is capitalism, as single-family units represent, first and foremost, a 'controllable pattern of consumption.' How much would industries suffer, she argues, if three families shared a washing machine?" If you're old enough to remember, the popular TV programs of the '50s featured nuclear families, rarely involving grandparents, on Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, and My Three Sons.)

In the prosperous 1950s, when the United States was the number one economic and military superpower (largely without competition for the decade), the top income-tax rate in America was about 90%; nevertheless, the rich still had lavish amounts of cash to spend on luxuries. But by the end of the 1970s, President Carter spoke critically of "self-indulgence" and "consumption" in these United States, only to be replaced by President Reagan, "Wall Street's man," who made the CEO of Merrill Lynch, Donald Regan, his Secretary of the Treasury and later his chief of staff, running the federal government like a corporation.

During Reagan's two terms, unions were busted while companies laid off workers in order to make heftier short-term profits. The gap between the wealthiest and the rest of Americans has widened into a chasm. Moore returns to GM's headquarters some 20 years after making Roger and Me where he's yet again denied entry; in Flint, Michigan, with his father he revisits the site (now empty) where his dad spent 30 years of his life earning a middleclass living.

What would it take for a revolt? As long as most Americans could believe that they might one day reach the summit of financial success, there would be no rebellion. Then came the financial meltdown of 2008. "You got bailed out," the unemployed protested of the banks: "We got sold out."

The hero of the Hudson River landing, Capt Sully Sullenberger speaks before Congress about cuts to his and other pilots' salaries and pensions. Blue-chip companies take out Dead Peasant insurance on their own employees, profiting (unlike the families) when they die.

"Capitalism is a sin," avers a clergyman, contradicting the tradition that capitalism had been "compatible with God's laws and the teachings of the Bible." (Moore fails to give any consideration to the emergence of the prosperity gospel being preached in many evangelical and mega-churches today. Nor does he bring up any of the inconvenient sins of the Catholic Church when he interviews a priest, another relic of the Roman Empire now in decline.)

Far from being democracies with an eye to treating their employees fairly, companies operate more like dictatorships, ever fearful of a democratic backlash. For example, Moore presents documents from Citigroup, attesting to the bank's belief that America has become a plutocracy ruled by its wealthy elites.

The iconoclastic filmmaker offers one sterling example of a principled individual who repeatedly refused to commercialize his scientific discovery: Dr Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine. While focusing on students graduating with debt in the tens of thousands of dollars, who become beholden to the banks, with which many eventually go to work to pay off their loans, thus siphoning off talent into finance and law instead of providing incentives to enter fields of science and technology, the film largely ignores the point of consumerism's making most Americans with credit-card and mortgage debt enthralled to their employers for their livelihoods.

Certainly Countrywide and other mortgage lenders lured unsuspecting people into subprime mortgages while granting influential politicians ("Friends of Angelo," such as Senator Chris Dodd) discounted loans and waived fees in order to have favorable legislation and weak oversight of their business, but Moore neglects to criticize the millions of his fellow countrymen (and women) for their naïveté and lack of acumen ("too good to be true") when "purchasing" a home.

Meanwhile, in the nation's "insane casino" on Wall Street the financiers themselves suffered from a similar naïveté and lack of acumen when dealing with complex financial instruments (e.g., derivatives and credit default swaps) and exotic betting schemes they didn't comprehend. Just in the nick of time, another hero arises on the stage, President Barack Obama, the man of change, who will smite the mighty dragons of Wall Street, portrayed in complete contrast with George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

The film concludes with government whistleblower, expert on white-collar crime, and former financial regulator William K. Black's condemnation of Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Hank Paulson, among others, for their participation in a "financial coup d'état," employing fear to persuade the public (initially a failure) and Congress to hand out $700 billion in taxpayer funds (actually much of the money was being borrowed from China and other foreign lenders), allowing the banks to take the money ("Don't ask, don't tell") and run.

In his column in The New York Times, referring to a report by the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Nobel-prize recipient for economics Paul Krugman concurs: "So officials could have called on bankers to offer a better deal, for their own sake, and simultaneously threatened to name and shame those who balked. It was their choice not to do that, just as it was their choice not to push for more control over bailed-out banks in early 2009."

Using yellow crime-scene tape, Moore cordons off Wall Street institutions, attempts to make a citizen arrest of CEOs, and demands that they pay back the money they've stolen. But what would have happened if the federal government hadn't bailed out the banking industry? Capitalism: A Tragic Story of Catastrophe.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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