by Mark Weisbrot
When I first met Michael Moore more than 20 years ago he was showing a half-finished documentary to a few dozen people in a classroom in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was funny and poignant and had a powerful message. He had taken a second mortgage on his house — equipment for filmmaking was a lot more expensive back then — and raised some money from like-minded locals for a long-shot venture. We all loved what he showed us but thought he would be lucky if a few thousand people got to see it.
But the film, Roger and Me — about the irrationality and human cost of the destruction of America’s auto industry — was a smash hit and soon Moore was on his way to become America’s most influential documentary film-maker. Twenty years later, he has produced his most radical work, which was greeted with rave enthusiasm here at the world’s oldest film festival in Venice.
As the old saying goes, you either blame the victim or blame the system. And Moore is making an appeal to blame the system — big time. You know this film is going to be subversive when it opens with clips depicting actual bank robbers — caught on security cameras in the midst of their heists — grabbing their loot with Iggy Pop’s cover of Louie Louie (a special version for the film) blasting away in the background. Moral equivalence for the titans of the financial industry — and their political protectors — is just around the corner.
Capitalism: A Love Story doesn’t just go after the seamy side of the American economy — although that is captured nicely in the scenes of “Condo Vultures” feeding on Florida’s housing bust and corporations (including Wal-Mart and Amegy Bank) who take out insurance policies on their employees and cash in big when they die young. These ghoulish derivatives go by the charming name of “Dead Peasants” insurance — enough said.
But Moore has bigger targets in his sights: he is questioning whether the whole incentive structure, moral values, and political economy of American capitalism are fit for human beings. Although this will not seem so radical in Europe, where most countries have had governments in the post-WWII era that at least called themselves socialist, or in most of the developing world, where socialist ideas have plenty of popular appeal, it’s pretty much unprecedented for anything that can reach a mass audience in the United States.
But you don’t have to be a revolutionary to appreciate this film. Indeed it can be seen as a social democratic treatise, with Franklin Roosevelt’s proposed “second bill of rights” — an “economic bill of rights” that included a job with a living wage, housing, medical care, and education — as its reform program. Roosevelt is shown proposing this now forgotten program in 1944.