Michael Moore doesn't mince words or rather he doesn't shy away from letting others speak for him and then communicating his sentiments via film. His latest movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," has got to be the biggest spoof-on-words in any movie title because Michael Moore, as every scene in the movie attests, HATES capitalism. He exposes so many reprehensible aspects of capitalism - never reported by the main stream media, which gives you sugar coated nightly pablum - that it's a tribute to him that his movies are still full of fun and humor. One could imagine a much drier intellectual approach to the serious subjects he deals with here, but Moore always keeps it interesting and human centered. He doesn't so much present statistics, although there are plenty of those, as he does humanize the effects that capitalism has on real life people from people being evicted from their homes to people refusing to leave a shut down workplace, Republic Window and Doors factory in Chicago, until they're properly paid.
The most significant part of the film to me is the connection Moore draws between capitalism and Christianity. He has Jesus refuse to heal a sick person due to a "preexisting condition." He has Jesus say in answer to the question 'how can I be saved' - "seek ye first the Kingdom of Wall Street." The absurdity of having Jesus mouth contemporary values in place of the values Jesus actually espoused is revelatory. He interviews three priests each of whom says that "capitalism is evil." Moore is relentless in his condemnation of capitalism, and there is no love story here at all. The title is entirely tongue in cheek. But this is the movie's strong suit. For millenia Christians have been duped into thinking that capitalism and Christianity are compatible. It is becoming increasingly obvious that they are not. In fact the Protestant reformation can be seen as nothing more than the attempt to reconcile Christianity with capitalism. Calvanism attempts to replace helping the poor with working hard and saving your money as the ticket for God's approbation.
Clearly, the essence of Jesus' teachings and hence the essence of Christianity is that the way to salvation is to help "the least of these, my brethren." Jesus told his disciples that they would be saved because they "saw him hungry and gave him food, saw him naked and clothed him, saw him a stranger and welcomed him, saw him in prison and visited him." When his disciples expressed disbelief that they had ever seen Jesus in those conditions, he said to them "Inasmuch as you've done it to the least of these my brethren, it's as if you had done it unto me." This is the essence of Christianity, an essence too easily obfuscated and disguised by hundreds of years of watering down and vitiation. All the rest of Christianity is really a bunch of fluff compared to this essence which drives a stake through the heart of capitalism.
Moore might have gone into other religions' attitudes towards money and banking, but maybe that will be the subject of another movie. Take Islamic banking, for example. Islamic banks are forbidden to charge interest. They are forbidden to deal in derivatives or other fancy, schmancy financial products that in large measure were the cause of the current economic malaise. And Islamic banks were, therefore, not affected by the current economic crisis.
As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.
Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.
This week, Kuwait's commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies. U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmet, visiting Jiddah, said experts at his agency have been learning the features of Islamic banking.
Though the trillion-dollar Islamic banking industry faces challenges with the slump in real estate and stock prices, advocates say the system has built-in protection from the kind of runaway collapse that has afflicted so many institutions. For one thing, the use of financial instruments such as derivatives, blamed for the downfall of banking, insurance and investment giants, is banned. So is excessive risk-taking.
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"In Islamic finance you cannot make money out of thin air," said Amr al-Faisal, a board member of Dar al-Mal al-Islami, a holding company that owns several Islamic banks and financial institutions. "Our dealings have to be tied to actual economic activity, like an asset or a service. You cannot make money off of money. You have to have a building that was actually purchased, a service actually rendered, or a good that was actually sold."
In the Western world, bankers designing investment instruments have to satisfy government regulators. In Islamic banking, there is another group to please -- religious regulators called a sharia board. Finance lawyers work closely with Islamic finance scholars, who study and review a product before issuing a fatwa, or ruling, on its compliance with sharia law.
Islamic bankers describe depositors as akin to partners -- their money is invested, and they share in the profits or, theoretically, the losses that result. (In interviews, bankers couldn't recall a case in which depositors actually lost money; this shows that banks put such funds only in very low-risk investments, they said.)
Rather than lend money to a home buyer and collect interest on it, an Islamic bank buys the property and then leases it to the buyer for the duration of the loan. The client pays a set amount each month to the bank, then at the end obtains full ownership. The payments are structured to include the cost of the house, plus a predetermined profit margin for the bank.
Sharia-compliant institutions also cannot invest in alcohol, pornography, weapons, gambling, tobacco or pork.
That sure leaves out much of US investment.
One of the most glaring things the movie points out is that some corporations take out life insurance policies on their employees with themselves (not the employees) as beneficiaries. This amounts to placing a bet that their employee will die an untimely death and they, therefore, will profit from it. These have been referred to as "dead peasants" insurance. For a list of companies dealing in dead peasants insurance click here. As the movie showed succinctly, a bereft family left with tons of debt from an untimey death was juxtaposed with Wal-Mart's receiving a $100,000. plus payoff on that employee's life insurance policy. It was pointed out that young women paid off more munificently on such policies than did men. This is tantamount to profiting off the misery of fellow human beings. But then that is what capitalism does so well. We should be surprised?
Whats more, the company might use this policy to pay for retirement benefits and other perks not for you or your fellow workers, but for your companys top executives.
Sound outrageous? Such corporate-owned life insurance is also big business:
- Companies pay a whopping $8 billion in premiums each year for such coverage, according to the American Council of Life Insurers, a trade group.
- The policies make up more than 20% of all the life insurance sold each year.
- Companies expect to reap more than $9 billion in tax breaks from these policies over the next five years. The policies are treated as whole life policies. So, companies can borrow against the policies (though the IRS won't let them write off the interest). And the death benefits are tax-free.
Hundreds of companies -- including Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Walt Disney and Winn-Dixie -- have purchased this insurance on more than 6 million rank-and-file workers.
One wonders how many insurance policies have been sold on President Barack Obama's life. In this casino economy anyone can bet on anything no matter how macabre. After all Goldman Sachs sold mortgage backed securities to unsuspecting clients and then took out insurance policies betting that the securities would fail due to non-payment of mortgages. When that actually happened, Goldman profited by collecting on those insurance policies making them seem more prescient than those companies who had failed to take them out.
What one has here with capitalism is clearly a moral morass. Michael Moore is not afraid of calling a spade a spade while Congress persons are intimidated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. Moore is not afraid to question the validity of capitalism and to suggest that better although as yet undefined systems might be out there. Socialism is just a name, and there are many varieties of it. Capitalism/socialism hybrids seem to be working just fine in other parts of the world. What is clear is the moral depravity of a system that causes wide spread human suffering while the top 1% have more accumulated wealth than the bottom 95%.
Citibank has dubbed the modern day capitalistic economy a plutonomy - an economy by and for the rich. In a memo, Citibank touts the fact that the rich account for most of the wealth and income in advanced economies such as the US, Australia, Canada and Britain. Citibank hails these trends and assures the wealthy that they are bound to continue as long as the world wide labor market keeps the price of "outsource-able" labor down. Their thesis is "that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand in many economies throughout the world" so why not cater exclusively to them? Citibank believes, according to the report, that capitalists (the rich) are only going to get richer in coming years as they get a larger percentage of GDP primarily as a result of globalization. According to the report: "This bodes well for companies selling to or servicing the rich."
The Citibank report notes that the growing disparity in income and wealth between rich and poor may lead to some blowback or revolt among the poor as their misery index increases. This is true not only in the US but in the rest of the world where poorer peoples are already fighting back towards the world's wealthier nations. Terrorism is but one manifestation of resentment towards the rich.
In the final analysis the astonishing fact is that Michael Moore tells it like it is at a time when politicians and media shrink from even calling capitalism capitalism much less criticising it or suggesting that there might be a better way to organize a society. The right is all too willing to demonize words - like socialism and communism - and people who dare suggest that capitalism is archaic much less downright evil.
Michael Moore doesn't do much in terms of calling for a different economic system although he does suggest that economic democracy - as yet undefined - might be an alternative to capitalism. A country that has both economic and political democracy might be called a true democracy as opposed to the economic plutonomy/political democracy that we have today in the US. And the political democracy part of the hybrid is heavily influenced by campaign donations and lobbyists so it too is essentially a plutocracy - and a democracy in name only.
