unemployment is capitalism's way of making you plant a garden

I never saw Sicko, Michael Moore’s apparently excoriating piece on the American health care system.  In one sense I haven’t needed to, what with not being a sick American and so forth – it’s not immediately relevant to my life, so who cares*?  I was also tentative because since Bowling for Columbine, I’ve become more and more disenchanted with Moore’s populist style of documentary, with its simplistic glosses and emotionally manipulative sentimentality.

In one sense I can’t really blame him for this – after all he’s actively attempting to influence American political life, and the only way to do that these days it seems (unless you’re Barack Obama of course) is to couch the message in a form that the television addicted masses might understand**.  At the same time I find his condescension grating, his ‘everyman’ persona disingenuous and am irritated by the gaping holes left unacknowledged in his arguments.  He may be diametrically opposed to Rush Limbaugh, but that just makes him sane, not a latter day left-wing prophet.

Don’t tell him that though.  His new film, Capitalism: A Love Story (brilliant title by the way there Mike), sees the erstwhile documentarian taking on the entire American financial establishment and the system which has allowed it to achieve international power***.  His argument is simple: Capitalism has produced in America totalitarian conditions.  Rather than functioning to guarantee individual freedom, it has instead succeeded in oppressing the vast majority of people.

This is hardly a new insight, but the film does provide an extensive catalogue of some of the more grotesque injustices that the American financial system has produced in recent times.  Take a visit with the aptly named Condo Vultures for example, a company that accesses bank databases for lists of foreclosed homes, before buying them up and reselling them at a profit.  As the superbly cynical smooth-talking rep says, ‘it’s all about taking right now.’

Similarly, Moore chats with the families of deceased employees of large companies such as Walmart, who secretly take out life insurance policies – charmingly dubbed ‘Dead Peasant’ policies – on their entire workforce.  The odds are that in any given year a sufficient percentage will cark it, thus guaranteeing a return – the fact that such a scheme is not illegal in a supposedly first world country beggars the mind.

And so it goes, Moore using period ads, movies, public announcements, and news reels to selectively trace the history of American capitalism since the Second World War.  From the birth of the middle class in the neatly ordered consumerism of the 50s, he quickly moves to the alliance between corporate and banking interests, the evangelical right and the conservative political establishment under Reagan.  Ronnie is presented (quite reasonably I might add) as an empty-headed puppet, with the dismantling of American manufacturing and industry undertaken by people such as Don Regan, former CEO of Merrill Lynch and Reagan’s Treasury Secretary, later Chief of Staff, as a means of and maximising profits within the corporate sector by breaking the unions and utilising cheap labour in the developing world.

From here, Moore leap-frogs over Bush I & Clinton, to land slap bang in Dubya’s first term and the ‘greatest wave of white collar crime in American History’ over which he presided, culminating in the sub-prime mortgage bonanza and the Global Financial Crisis of last year.  This is where the meat of the film lies, in the shots of boarded up homes, the tears of those whose houses have been repossessed, the testimony of pilots forced to live off food stamps and credit cards to supplement their meagre salaries, the horror stories of teenagers sentenced en masse to privatised juvenile penitentiaries for minor misdemeanours, the tragedy of several generations of graduates, the nation’s intellectual capital, migrating from the best universities in America to self-consciously destructive professions in the ‘insane casino’ of the financial sector and the corruption of the federal regulatory bodies that made it all possible.

Into this volatile situation the bailout plan for the GFC put forward by Treasury Secretary Paulson (former CEO of banking giant Goldman Sachs) in Moore’s reasoning was little more than an old school grift, a con-job on a scale that lends weight to his description of it as constituting a ‘financial coup d’état.’

Again, this is not revolutionary stuff.  Then again, what is bleedingly obvious to some can be difficult to see for many.  The film’s strength is in Moore’s adeptness at caging his arguments in entertaining and inventive ways, his use of easily relatable references to popular culture, and his ability to elicit undeniably moving stories and statements from his interviewees.

The flipside to this of course is that he often simplifies complex ideas to the extent that it could reasonably be called ‘dumbing down’ while his style of narration and penchant for lingering on tears betrays his distasteful fondness for emotional manipulation and soppiness, as does his insistence on including the occasional rather lame stunt.

The real question is really whether all this makes the film more effective in raising people’s political awareness, or whether Moore is somehow acting in bad faith towards his audience, be it conscious or not.  His ability to produce eminently quotable grand pronouncements – ‘capitalism is an evil and you cannot regulate evil’ – ultimately smacks of impotence, while his uncritical acceptance of Obama – at a time when Obama’s slavish adherence to the principle of bi-partisanship is slowly suffocating the chance for genuine reform of the American health care system – further diminishes his opinion’s currency.

And now that that's out of the way: Go and see Capitalism: A Love Story!!  In spite of its numerous defects, it is a strident indictment of American capitalism and by extension the global financial system – and that effects everyone.

Hip happenings for a Friday Night: the return of the Flaming Lips; Cooper's Red; A walk along the harbour of a warm, windy evening.


* Actually, the state of the American health care system is vastly important to many more lives than those directly affected by it at the moment.  Obama’s ability or otherwise to pass a reform bill with some measure of muscle on it, as he is currently attempting to, will establish the tenor for the rest of his first term and shape his chances of achieving subsequent reforms in other areas of global significance such as Climate Change.  For a fair summation of the stakes involved in the health care debate that is currently raging in the States, check out Keith Olbermann in this episode of Countdown.

** Please note the irony – I think that the American public is far too often measured by its lowest common denominators by people on all sides of politics, both explicitly and by implication.

*** Sorry, ‘hegemony’.