Michael Moore was on Democracy Now! today for the full hour. You can watch/listen or read the whole transcript here. But I just want to excerpt the very end of what he had to say, in part because it continues the spirit I wanted to evoke this Independence Day.
In particular, what he suggests--which I think is really true--is that if we just had the courage, as Americans, to act on what we really already are and believe, rather than acting out of fear, as conservatives always want us to, then we really would be every bit as great as we like to pretend we are, even while not-so-secretly knowing that we're not.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, Michael, the war-the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is your solution that you think should happen now?
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, it was-I think it was-was it last week or a couple weeks ago? We just-the Afghanistan war surpassed Vietnam as our longest war. I think we should start referring to it as what it is: it's Obama's war. Just as Johnson's war became Nixon's war, this is his war. I don't know why he'd want a war. This is a completely unwinnable-I don't even want to use that word, because what are we trying to win? I mean, it's so absolutely crazy....
I just--I think that there's so much good that we could do. You know, if you travel the world, you know that people like us as people, as individuals. There's something charming about our naïveté and our, you know, right? I mean, you know, "Hey! Hey! How ya doin'! Hey, yeah! I'm from Detroit! Yeah!" They could spot us coming. But I think we're capable of a lot of good. And when you have a billion people on this planet that tonight cannot drink a cup of clean water, two billion who don't have clean sanitation, what if we used our money to do that? I read this crazy statistic-and I have not fact-checked this, I'll just throw this out there-but it was something like, for $15 billion or something like that, we could dig so many-x number of wells in the third world that would greatly reduce that number of how many people don't have clean water. And I'm thinking, $15 billion is what we've been spending almost most every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don't have it? Wouldn't you rather be known as, you know, a citizen of a country that a child 10,000 miles away, while growing up, drinking clean water, saw that plaque on that well that said, "Brought to you from your friends in the United States of America"? That's how I'd like to be known.
There are many people who lament the end of the '60s and complain about today's self-absorbed, materialistic youth. Now, I'm a teenager, and I can tell you that there's a grain of truth (maybe a boulder...) to those complaints, but there's also a vibrant political culture among those of us whippersnappers who do care.
Well, we all know Dylan, Lennon, and Young. But what about Francis, Folds, and Morello? If you take a look at the music scene today, it's apparent that there are a lot of young people who care. There's currently a lot of music in the same spirit, if not the same style, as the classics of protest music.
After seeing Capitalism: A Love Story today, I thought I'd give my own review in response to the one by metamars.
Two big criticisms are made against the otherwise excellent film, only one of which stands up under scrutiny. Yes, Obama is left virtually unscathed by Moore's damning critique of Congressional acquiescence to Wall Street's fear-mongering. As we all witnessed during last year's debacle, Obama was one of the chief proponents of the Wall Street bailout in the U.S. Senate, pushing for the no-strings-attached version that ultimately passed. That Obama is as responsible as any other player in the nation's economic meltdown and the massive swindle that accompanied it cannot be ignored or denied, and Moore's acknowledgment that Wall Street contributed heavily to Obama seems like a punch undeservedly pulled.
The second big critique is that while the film's message rouses outrage, little or nothing is given in the way of what can actually be done about all of it. Having now seen the film myself, I can see all kinds of ways in which We the People can fight back - not the least of which is using the power of the vote. But there's more, much more, that can be done, and Moore illustrates them with great relish.
Factory workers denied their final paychecks when the company shut down its site took barricaded themselves inside and refused to leave until they got the money owed to them.
People whose home was foreclosed upon found aid in the form of an organization formed to keep families in their houses by way of squatting. Police were called out, only to leave without enforcing the order to vacate after it became clear that no one was leaving.
I saw a bread-making factory, a co-op, meaning that each employee owns a piece of that factory and helps run it through a democratic process. The CEO has no more or less say in how the company is run than anyone else, and surprisingly (or so Moore depicts) everyone makes at least a somewhat decent wage.
Last, and by no means least, is the power of the ballot. Moore calls for a democratic revolution in Capitalism: A Love Story, the kind expressed at the ballot box. Yes, We the people do have the power of the vote, and therefore wield far more power collectively than the top one percent of Americans. Why else do you think there is such massive effort expended to disenfranchise us at the polling station? Why else do you think we are encouraged to self-segregate ourselves along racial, religious, and class lines? Why else do you think we are discouraged from even mentioning forming and using third political parties as a means of reshaping the two major ones? It's because the powerful know that if We the People were to truly rise up at election time and vote in genuine representatives to replace the corporate whores, their days of power would be over. Sure, they have the military and gobs of money, but if they were to drop the pretense of democracy by going all-out in their war against us, the rich would lose their only real weapon: our compliance.
Resistance through noncompliance worked for India. It can work for us - if we have the will to use it.
I saw Michael Moore's new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story last weekend. It did not disappoint.
In one way, Capitalism is like Moore's other films. He frames his arguments with witty Cliff's Notes-style history lessons, highlights personal stories that are at turns devastating and inspiring, and sprinkles satire over the whole thing. You're clinching your teeth, ready to storm the barricades alongside some of the people on the screen, then your laughing out loud at the utter ridiculousness of the thing he's criticizing. That's his brand, and he does it well.
But Capitalism is also bigger, scarier, and more exhilarating than anything else Moore has done. From the start, you get the feeling that he's playing for keeps. You get the feeling that people will leave the theater and take action, that stuff might happen.
Moore describes Capitalism as the culmination of all his other films. It might be more accurate to say that he finally makes the intellectual leap and chases down the logical conclusion of what he's been getting at all along. Finally, we're not just talking about the gun lobby (Bowling for Columbine), or the military industrial complex (Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911). We're not just talking deadly insurance companies (Sicko) or a lying president (um, all of his films, I think). As powerful and necessary as a single-issue focus can be, it's too often just a game of "whack-a-mole." Whack the gun lobby and mercenary corporations pop up. Outlaw the mercenary corporations and we're suddenly in a death spiral toward war with Iran. Get out of Iran and Goldman Sachs operates the Treasury Department.
The media, and the permanent political class in general, tend to treat these things as separate, unrelated issues. To the extent that they acknowledge them as problems at all, they cast them as individual cases of "a few bad apples." Well, dare we ask why we're sitting beneath this tree eating these crappy apples?
With Capitalism, we're finally stepping back to examine the sick tree--the tree that gives us Enron, Blackwater, and Gilded Age inequality for its fruit.
What's Moore's diagnosis? He says the disease is capitalism itself. In nearly every area...
Too few people have too much power.
Shrug it off as some hackneyed radicalism. Laugh it off as a lame echo of the Sixties. And then read it again, because it's not going anywhere. (And it's going to get louder.)
Too few people have too much power.
How is this possible if we are a democracy, with "one person one vote?" Because too few people and too few corporations have too much money. And money means power. And people abuse power. The idea that we can have political democracy alongside economic royalism is folly. One will always eat the other. Perhaps the most inspiring thing about this film is the suggestion, hinted throughout the picture, that the royalists have gotten fat and lethargic and the democrats are hungry.
So what's Moore's cure for capitalism?
Democracy.
And this is the strongest aspect of the film. "But wait! One's an economic system and the other's a political system," critics will object. Well, maintaining that artificial division has been an important strategy for the capitalists. "You can keep your democracy over there," they say. "Just don't touch the good stuff." We are allowed to elect American Idols while they decide what the richest nation in the history of the world does with its money. The truth is, democracy is a decision-making system. And it's the system that distributes power as evenly as possible over the widest group possible. It's the perfect medicine for what's killing us:
Too few people have too much power.
But isn't a democratic economy some form of SOCIALISM?!?! And here's where the whole discussion could devolve into a battle of competing definitions for words like capitalism and socialism. (One of these words make us think of Stalin and Mao!) Moore does a good job of navigating this minefield. He removes the mystique of the S-word by interviewing a real, live socialist sitting in the U.S. Senate. He pokes fun at how the word has been used recently. He looks at what made America a strong middle-class nation in the middle of the last century and then at how our broadly-shared prosperity was systematically dismantled.
Then, somewhere in the middle of the movie, it strikes you. This thoroughly radical movie--rebellious in the true sense of the word--is playing on thousands of screens across the country. How did this become possible? Then you'll see a scene of George W. Bush giving an awkward speech defending capitalism itself. And this is when you start to wonder, does Moore's movie say more about where we are heading or about where we already are? Then cut to scenes of families squatting in their own homes to fight eviction, of radical labor activism, of prosperous democratically owned and operated factories. You start to think, it's not just that stuff might happen. Stuff IS happening! Democracy is rising up against capitalism all over the place. And we can be a part of it. We have to be a part of it.
I saw it Friday night. I considered it important to see it on the first weekend rather than wait until it came to the $2.00 movie house. It is important to show our solidarity with him.
And then I had all the mixed feelings afterwards. Not feeling sorry for people who used long time family homes as an ATM machine. Particularly when one family had pictures of Bush on the wall. People suffering need to know that their vote has consequences.
The pay of pilots under $20,000 astonished me. And just barely in the $20,0000 was not less so. I knew about the juvenile detention center before and was relieved to see it included. And the Wisconsin coops were a wonder.
Nothing better symbolizes the corruption of the debate about healthcare reform than the rhetoric about "government-run" healthcare. Or, for that matter, the related argument that we need a "uniquely American" solution which precludes a public system like Medicare for all.
Two reports that notably received scant coverage from either the media or even those advocating the public plan "option" in Congress, reveal the seldom told truth.
Medicare is a "uniquely American" solution, and it works.
It may look like a long way down the power-packing food chain from Director of National Intelligence to Surgeon General, but Obama's Surgeon General pick, Sanjay Gupta, reveals the same fundamental problem as Admiral Blair: he's part of the problem, not part of the solution, and promoting him in the name "competence" merely serves to expose the rhetoric of "competence" for the hollow shell it is, when, after 8 years of utter incompetence, it ought to be something real, concrete and capable of unifying Americans across the boards.
Like Blair, Gupta utterly fails that test, despite a considerable skill set. Technical skills without integrity and without a commitment to the public good are not enough to qualify as competence for high-level public office, no matter how impressive those technical skills may be. And, in fact, a closer look at the skill set reveals some real deficiencies there as well. Paul Krugman raised the red flag on Gupta earlier this week, and now John Conyers has issued a " Dear Colleague" letter seeking support in opposition to Gupta's appointment.
On his blog, "Conscience of a Liberal," Paul Krugman kicked things off when he wrote Jan 6 ("The trouble with Sanjay Gupta"):
So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN's Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don't have a problem with Gupta's qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don't have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore "fudged his facts", when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he's uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It's sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less "serious" than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it's a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.
George Washington couldn't tell a lie.
Richard Nixon couldn't tell the truth.
And Ronald Reagan couldn't tell
The difference 'tween the two
The Friday before the election--Halloween--Michael Moore appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. Among other things, she went through his ten proposed decrees for a new administration's first ten days in office, one which was this:
AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your sixth presidential decree for the next president's first ten days is to defeat al-Qaeda and the next generation of America-haters by building wells.
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, there's over a billion people on this planet that don't have access to clean drinking water. You know, what if we made it an American mission to make sure that the entire third world had clean drinking water? One of the statistics I read was it would cost about $10 per person in the third world of people who don't have the clean drinking water right now. So, that's--geez, that's $10 times a billion people? $10 billion. That's just October in Iraq. For the money that we're spending in Iraq in October, we could provide clean drinking water to most of the people that don't have it. And I, as an American, would rather be known by the people who are struggling to survive in the third world as the country that gave them clean drinking water or gave them other things that they need to help them in their daily existence to survive. I think most Americans would rather be known for that. Instead, we're known as the invaders and the occupiers and the people who prop up the regimes in these countries, and I'm tired of that. I'm really tired of it.
This proposal is, quite frankly, an act of genius--defending America by drawing on our deepest and truest strengths, rather than responding exactly as al Qaida would have wanted it, destroying our freedoms as well as our good name. If anything could show the way out of the terribly self-destructive path Bush chose in response to 9/11, it is precisely this sort of sweeping, simple, yet visionary act. If he has the wisdom and courage to take Michael Moore's advice during his first days in office, Barack Obama will almost certainly be well on his way to fulfilling some of the most extravagent hopes that he and his election have inspired.
We have been busy, these past two weeks...and we deserve a bit of a break before we get right back at it tomorrow...so to that end I have two "mini-stories" for you that will give you a chance to be ahead of the curve, to jump in on something new-and in one case, to help pull a major public prank.
Along the way, I have some "don't miss" video for you to see-including a 1960s classic that is utterly and completely disconnected from politics in every way...but is still the perfect thing for a Monday.
And just to show what a help I can be, I'm even going to leave you with a story idea you can run with that has been almost entirely ignored by the larger media.
"The AP-Ipsos poll found 22 percent of liberals and moderates said they had not read a book within the past year, compared with 34 percent of conservatives."
- An Associated Press story last week
"Obsfucation usually requires a lot more words...so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals."
White House Spokesperson Tony Fratto, in response to that story
Despite our First Lady being a librarian, reading hasn't been a high priority of the Bush Administration - nor, apparently, of the larger conservative base despite the attempts by right-wing publishing houses such as Regnery. Forget morbid jokes about what Bush hasn't read or what he has -- this is about more than the President's dislike of "book-learning." This is about an administration that, if the previous quote by its spokesman is to be believed, is doing its darndest to keep Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism In Public Life continually relevant. (A great read, by the way.)
Liberals love words. We love words because we love discourse. But our love of books goes even deeper: reading is intrinsically a revolutionary act, as figures as disparate as Thomas Paine and Franz Fanon might tell you. And literacy is a powerful - and therefore threatening - source of liberal activism.
With Torture Like this, who needs Healthcare
by Katie Halper
When I read that a Pentagon spokesman didn't want to release Guantanamo Bay inmates without getting "credible assurances that they will be treated humanely" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Then I thought about SICKO. I love Michael Moore. And I loved SICKO. Like no other mainstream film, it exposes the sick state of American medicine, diseased and deformed beyond recognition by the invasion of corporate parasites. A man with cancer dies because his insurance company denies him the conventional therapy of bone marrow transplants, which it deems experimental; a mother loses her infant febrile daughter when their HMO insists she be taken to a distant ER for treatment. 9/11 rescue workers cannot afford medicines and treatments to alleviate debilitating conditions resulting from ground-zero. Moore shows us universal health care in Britain, France, and Canada. I'm touched, outraged--and grateful to Moore for rallying the troops to march for universal healthcare for all, here in the wealthiest nation on earth.
As usual, Moore's new film has provoked criticism, accusations of lies or at least omitting and distorting the facts. So he doesn't show us the lines that our northern neighbors must sometimes wait on but he gives us the big picture of universal healthcare. So he romanticizes the European welfare state, overlooks the absence of British dental care, but it allows him to show us the ultra greed and ruthlessness of our flawed system. I'm used to defending Michael Moore against criticisms. He is not dishonest. He does not lie. Sometimes he omits. But just to make the bigger point to an ADD American public used to sound bites and MTV montages. And besides the overall message is a truthful one. These systems are not perfect, but they are still much better than our own healthcare system.
So it's really surprising that out of all these critical reviews, I couldn't find one that addressed the biggest and most problematic omission. Through his representation of Guantanamo Bay, Moore does not lie, he lets liars lie, and asks us to accept their word as truth. GTMO, Moore says, is the "one place on American soil that had free universal healthcare." A montage of politicians including Rumsfeld and Frist testify to the high-level health care, that high-level terrorists receive at GITMO. And thus with the rescue workers in tow, Moore sails to Guantamano, to get the quality government healthcare denied them and bestowed on "evil-doers."
Michael Moore was on CNN arguing with Dr. Sanjay Gupta about Sicko, claiming that Americans shouldn't be hurried along the path of bankruptcy and death because of a horrible health care system. Gupta argued that in Canada and England, people have to wait in line to die.
Michael Moore was on CNN arguing with Dr. Sanjay Gupta about Sicko, claiming that Americans shouldn't be hurried along the path of bankruptcy and death because of a horrible health care system. Gupta argued that in Canada and England, people have to wait in line to die.
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