Michael Moore's New Movie

[Yes_No_Maybe_Confused]

In the documetary "The Corporation", he was just a guest speaker, but he did mention that he uses capitalism, and corporations, for that matter, to make money as much as any other director or writer. The corporations fund him because he sells. I think he's just as caught up in his delusions as half of America-he think's he's bring down capitalism, but in effect, he is being as coruppted by it as the people he condemns.

[Template]

In the documetary "The Corporation", he was just a guest speaker, but he did mention that he uses capitalism, and corporations, for that matter, to make money as much as any other director or writer. The corporations fund him because he sells. I think he's just as caught up in his delusions as half of America-he think's he's bring down capitalism, but in effect, he is being as coruppted by it as the people he condemns.

Everyone uses capitalism.  That's capitalism.  Capitalism isn't automatically "corruption".

[LMNO]

I think on NPR, he mentioned that it was unfettered capitalism he didn't like.  He mentioned that when he was a kid ( ), there was a social contract between the workers and the company, that if the company did well, the workers did well; but this is no longer the case, corporations are bastards, yadda etc ad nauseum.

[Captain Utopia]

One thing I really like about Michael Moore, is that for his previous movies, he has encouraged people to pirate them in order to get the message out. I find his stunts infantile and his logic barren, but I also find somewhat endearing the degree to which he really believes in the message - he does seem to be motivated primarily by compassion.

[Cramulus]

I watched his plug for the movie on Bill Maher's show. Very well spoken, but still kind of confusing. Moore says he wants to replace capitalism with democracy. Maher pointed out - um, but democracy in itself isn't an economic model?

The first thing Moore says in the interview is that part of his goals are to defect hate away from Obama. Give the right wing something to focus on other than the president. I gotta doff my hat at this sentiment. Why is the left wing sitting with their hands folded in a defensive position? Win lose or draw, I'm glad someone is making a ruckus.

The movie seems to be about how in the olden days (good capitalism), you used to be able to work hard and get rewarded for it. Now you work real hard and barely break even. Something about how the richest people engineered the system long ago, and we're now feeling the eventual conclusion.

Best part of the interview was at the end, where Maher says goodbye and "I hope your movie makes millions of dollars". Moore laughs. Of course he's here to make money off his Anti-Capitalism movie.


So I'm not going to pay Michael Moore for an anti-capitalism commercial. But I AM going to pirate it.  

[LMNO]

I think what he meant by "democratic capitalism" or whatever you want to call it, is the idea that while companies should compete on the free market to make money and all that, there should be more equity among the people who work for that company.  Almost like the companies are socialist nation-states in themselves.... No more billion-dollar wage gaps between the CEO and the cubicle rat.


Exactly how he goes about doing this, or even if it's a good idea, I have no clue.

[Cramulus]

maher asked him, "so what exactly do you want us to do? You talk a lot about 'rising up', but what's better than what we've got now?"

Moore kind of dodged that one.


Maher pointed out that it's not like the rich are exclusively the greedy folks in this country. Every single person you pass on the street would be a heartless tycoon if you gave 'em the chance.

[LMNO]

Yup.  Moore seems to be working on a premise just as faulty as most economists, only instead of "a person will act rationally given enough information," he believes "a person will act compassionately if given economic control".

[AFK]

Well think about it though.  Pretty much anyone who was born and raised since the late 70s/80s has been living in a world where consumption is king.  People say the 80's were the Me-Decade but I'm not sure that ever really ended, and the damned housing bubble is how that shit blows up.  Poor people wanting to own a house they had no realistic opportunity to afford offered some Madoff-quality mortgage and they sign their damned names, not thinking that it would come back and bite them ino the ass.  Except, it bit EVERYONE in the ass.  The one good thing that might come out of this recession is to tamp some of that shit down.  But I'm not too optimistic about that one.  If and when the good times get rolling again, I fully expect us to be in this same place 20-30 years from now if not sooner. 

[fomenter]

Yup.  Moore seems to be working on a premise just as faulty as most economists, only instead of "a person will act rationally given enough information," he believes "a person will act compassionately if given economic control".

same old same old, we talk about how Communism and libertarianism fail for the same reason  "not accounting for human nature" 

[Template]

Yup.  Moore seems to be working on a premise just as faulty as most economists, only instead of "a person will act rationally given enough information," he believes "a person will act compassionately if given economic control".

same old same old, we talk about how Communism and libertarianism fail for the same reason  "not accounting for human nature" 

Guess we're left with Leviathan.  The crime is getting caught, and few crimes are actually going to get dealt with.

[Cain]

The movie seems to be about how in the olden days (good capitalism), you used to be able to work hard and get rewarded for it. Now you work real hard and barely break even. Something about how the richest people engineered the system long ago, and we're now feeling the eventual conclusion.

John Robb has been hammering away at this point for ages.  As far as he's concerned (and I actually tend to agree) the defining point where things changed was the transfer from Keynsian economics to a more neoliberal model and all that implied.  In other words, Thatcherism/Reaganism (though in actually this started a few years before they came to power).  Since then, real wages haven't changed very much at all, and consumption has been fuelled by massive amounts of credit.  More women entering the workforce and cheap credit have been able to sustain the impression of improving conditions of life for the middle class, but its not really the case.

Here is the sort of thing he has been writing recently

This is hilarious -- in that a set of indicators that clearly delineates a prolonged and precipitous decline of America gets so little coverage, zero outrage, and generates complete inaction. Where's the patriotism (or is that now only defined by a willingness to engage in foreign misadventures or a burn money on boondoggles from outrageously overpriced defense contractors?), a concern for the collective us?  Where's the worry about our kids and our futures?  Nah, that kind of thinking doesn't work anymore.  As I said before:  Hilarious.   

The Census Bureau reported that median household incomes slid over the last decade.  Of course, this new figure also means that household incomes only increased ~$5k (inflation adjusted dollars) or ~11% over 35 years!  All of this so called gain has to do with improvements in the household's second income.  Given that median male incomes are lower than 35 years ago, it's likely that in order to produce this gain, households as a unit, worked much harder (I suspect that the total number of hours worked by the family went up much more than 11%). 

Worse, this 'gain' occurred during a time period when the educational requirement necessary to get a middle class (or median) income in the US expanded to include a college education -- which is entirely funded out of pocket (so much for the idea of the level playing field).  If you factor out the rising (at many multiples of the rate of inflation) cost of college for a family's two workers, what does this picture look like? 
A lost generation (or two) doesn't even seem to cover the magnitude of this failure.  That characterization implies stasis and it is much worse than that. On the income side alone (counting education), it's a glide path to failure.  Add in rising household expenses (health, housing, autos, etc.) and debt (over leverage) -- the term collapse comes readily to mind.

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/johnrobb/2009/09/a-lost-decade-for-us-households-try-a-lost-generation-or-two.html

[LMNO]

Holy shit.



I'm always shaken when it's put in so succinct and blunt a fashion.

[Cain]

Also this:

The implications of this chart are staggering....

This might be one: 

There is a strong line of reasoning that the USSR collapsed when the nomenklatura (bureaucratic elites, the most important people in a government run economy) decided to work against the state.  In short, the non-financial benefits of being in the bureaucracy were in decline as attempts were made to reform the Soviet system.  So, when a window of opportunity arrived (the attempt to privatize sectors of the economy to improve economic performance), they jumped at it.  A trickle of privatization turned into a flood as the nomenklatura looted the state of anything/everything of value.

I think that this is a more plausible reason for the decline of the USSR than anything else that I've heard.

How the mechanism that collapsed the USSR (per the above) applies to the US has yet to be seen.  But, as the chart above shows us, something very, very wrong is in motion.   It goes beyond Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal, public/private, and all of the common methods of division or debate.  It's systemic. 

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/johnrobb/2009/09/no-rising-tide.html

And this one:

Over the last thirty years, the social compact that divided value produced by productivity improvements between workers and corporate/financial interests broke down.  All the value from improvements (they were mighty) in productivity went to corporations/finance.  Median incomes stagnated for 30 years and the illusion of growth was produced by the extension of cheap debt.  It was also the driver behind the ahistorical rise in the stock market and ultimately the recent financial meltdown. 

That would be bad enough, but it's getting worse.  Median incomes are now on a downward track to give corporations the ability to return to profitability through increases in productivity (a massive 6.4% rise in the last quarter). 

This could be an interesting trend line.  Rather than keep median wages at status quo levels (as we have over the last thirty years), this is one where corporate/financial interests claw back on the gains in median wages between the end of WW2 and the mid seventies.  In that direction lies complete and utter failure.

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/johnrobb/2009/08/more-breakage.html

[hooplala]

Why do people always equate capitalism with Corporate Capitalism?  Isn't a mom and pop owned shop part of the whole so-called capitalism racket?

I doubt Michael Moore would shit all over a mom and pop shop.