BEFORE: Another day, another documentary - and another long submission made on the IMDB about all the famous people appearing in a doc's archive footage that somebody forgot to mention. Now I've been bouncing back and forth between politics and celebrity profiles, and that's all being done to maintain the chain. If each doc had properly listed its cast, then more connections would be possible, and I could have arranged the films in a better order. But then again, it is what it is, and maybe this causes more of those little random coincidences that way. Now I'm specifically looking for them, like are there any "great moments in capitalism" that happened on this day in history?
Let's see, on this date in 1948, William Shockley filed the first patent for the grown-junction transistor - that's not nothing, especially if you're into electronics and stuff. Also on June 26, 1974, a UPC code was scanned for the first time, to sell a package of Wrigley's gum in Troy, Ohio. Not too bad.
Ronald Reagan carries over again from "Leaving Neverland" - seems appropriate, right?
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Where to Invade Next" (Movie #2,645), "Sicko" (Movie #2,646)
THE PLOT: An examination of the social costs of corporate interests pursuing profits at the expense of the public good.
AFTER: Also, on June 26 in 1934, president Franklin Roosevelt signed the Federal Credit Union Act, to establish the first credit unions. I bring this up because footage of Roosevelt appears late in this film from Michael Moore, where he proposed a "Second Bill of Rights" that would protect the workers of America, and (if you believe the hype) would have effectively served as a precursor to both the civil rights movement and the Equal Rights Amendment. But that damn slacker FDR then went and died a year later, before he could implement his lofty goals - and apparently that's why we were in such a pickle in 2009, or so Michael Moore would have us believe.
I was on the Michael Moore bandwagon for some time, like I saw his film "The Big One" at a film festival, maybe in Toronto in 1999 (?) and then a few years after that he had a TV show and was spending more of his time in NYC, and he came to a couple parties at my boss's apartment. You know, all the indie filmmakers hang out together, right? I think maybe he fell out of favor with me when I finally went back and watched "Bowling for Columbine", since I'd missed it when it first came out, and then of course two years ago I caught up with his films again, and basically he's still beating the same tired old drum, he hasn't changed or evolved much in the last two decades, but come on, really, shouldn't he have?
This film about capitalism is already 10 years old, but it kind of proves my point - he was still showing up at this corporate headquarters or that one, pretending to think that he could somehow get an audience with the CEO just by showing up, when he knows full well that every building has security guards (especially in Manhattan after 9/11) and their sole purpose is to prevent anyone from being there who isn't scheduled to be there, like him. Come on, dude, you've been pulling this crap since "Roger & Me", and every security guard in the world probably has a picture of Michael Moore next to his station with a note that says, "Do NOT allow this person to enter the building, under any circumstances." So he knows that he's never going to get into the CEO's office to interview that guy, not on his best day, not being who he is and looking like he does. But he does it anyway, and he pretends like he doesn't know that you're supposed to call first and arrange an interview, just to provoke a confrontation and kill 30 more seconds of movie time.
Meanwhile, every other documentary filmmaker knows what you're supposed to do - pick up the god-damned phone. Even if you can't schedule an interview with that crooked CEO, you can at least air the footage of you making the call, or you say, "We called Mr. Tom Shady of ShadyCorp. but he refused to be interviewed for this film." Then you know what, he looks totally guilty that way. But when you show up with a film crew in the building lobby with no notice, and pretend that you don't know the proper procedure to set up an interview, now YOU look like the bad guy. So if cholesterol doesn't get him first, I guarantee Michael Moore's cause of death will be "beaten by security guard" when he refuses to leave a building lobby some day. In the meantime, I can't really take the guy seriously as a filmmaker if he's still pulling this B.S.
It's too bad, because there was a germ of a good idea here, to get some sympathy for the regular people who were losing their houses to the banks, back at the end of the early 2000's (seriously, we STILL don't have a name for the first decade of the New Millennium?) while the big banks were being bailed out by the U.S. government for not being prepared for the housing crash, which came about because THEY THEMSELVES were speculating on a bunch of bad mortgages that THEY THEMSELVES had offered to people with bad credit. Umm, or something like that.
The film opens with an average family somewhere in middle America that's being foreclosed on, and had the foresight to video-tape the sheriff coming to the door to ask them to clear out. Later we learn that not only was this a common sight in 2009's America, but that the bank wanted to flip the house as soon as possible, so they hired the family to clear out THEIR OWN HOUSE by taking everything to storage or the dump, for which they would receive a check for $1,000 to start over somewhere else, but if they left the house dirty or with any furniture, they'd get a big fat goose egg. Much like the evidence presented in "Leaving Neverland", right or wrong, we're only getting one side of the story here, the P.O.V. of the family. So the bank, the sheriff, the judge are all terrible people (yet notably absent) and this family obviously, apparently, did nothing wrong and is unjustly losing their house. How do I know this is the case? How many payments did they miss? How long was the husband out of a job? OK, times are tough, but isn't it possible that they did something wrong? Couldn't they have raised some money some other way, like maybe sell off a portion of the husband's massive gun collection? Just putting that out there...
Then the film loses sight of the personal and tries to look at the big picture - like, what is "capitalism" and is it good or bad? (Umm, why can't it be neither?) All the religious people interviewed in this film (and there are quite a few) say that it's obviously bad, because Jesus caused a scene at a temple one time when he got mad at the money-lenders. Right, except a few things - we've got a separation of church and state in this country, or at least we're supposed to, so it doesn't make sense to apply "moral" rules from religion to the system we have of making laws and enforcing them. Is it morally right to evict someone from their home? I say the question doesn't apply - it's morally neither right nor wrong. It can be a shitty thing to do, but religion shouldn't be entering into the picture at that point. It's funny how the same people who say that religion has no place in government when you're talking about abortion or same-sex marriage suddenly want to look at the moral nature of the banking industry or which crimes need to be prosecuted.
Is it morally right that there used to be a 90% tax rate for the richest people in America, then it got lowered to 50% and now it's probably lower than that? Again, I think it's a bogus question. It's not fair, it stinks for most people that there's such income disparity and that 1% of the people own 95% of the money, or whatever, but it's neither moral or immoral, it just is. God does not have an opinion on how much money is too much or not enough, and even if he did, the people in the clergy are supposed to have taken a vow of poverty, so why are churches tax-exempt, and why is the Catholic Church still one of the biggest landowners around?
Now, that being said, it turns out that Wal-Mart taking out insurance policies on their own workers - sorry, associates - was also a shitty thing to do. Especially when none of that money went toward funeral costs if an associate died, but the company could still make a few thousand bucks, especially if a younger female associate bucked the odds and died young. We also learn that Michael Moore loved capitalism when he was a kid - but that was probably because when you're a kid, you don't have to pay for anything, Mommy and Daddy handle everything, and you just get to have fun and learn how to make home movies. Suddenly, when he's an adult, and people stopped buying his DVDs, that's when Michael Moore thinks we need a new system (also known as "why can't I get any grant money to make more rambling political films?").
Then there's an examination of some prison-for-cash scandal in Wilkes-Barre, PA, where a bunch of high-school kids needed to be "scared straight", and that should have taken like a week, but the kids were locked up for nine months because somebody was profiting from this, somewhere. Umm, Mr. Moore, have you seen "13th"? Because another filmmaker just totally put you to shame, and it turns out that for-profit prisons are all over the country, and they've locked up an entire generation of black men and are using them for free labor. But no, please go on and tell us about how a dozen white kids were inconvenienced for a while. Then there are some (white) airline pilots who aren't making as much as they'd like, and some (white, again) people who won't be able to pay off their student loans for a few years. Geez, Michael, maybe you should stop making films about white people, you're really missing the boat here.
Then it's back to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and the bailout that a lot of members in Congress didn't want to vote for. But since every other person in Washington worked for Goldman-Sachs, and that firm contributed a lot of money to George W. Bush, guess what, on the second vote the bailout of America's banks passed. I'm not saying that was right or wrong, but at least on the upside, didn't we kind of avoid another Great Depression?
It's notable to point out that this film got released soon after Obama got elected, so thankfully that all worked out, and America never needed to worry about anything ever again. Seriously, though, the movie that I eliminated from my documentary chain this year (I had one too many, after adding "Billy Elliot" last month...) was "Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden", and now I'm seriously wondering if I accidentally kept the film that was more out of date between the two.
Michael Moore then meets a young (?) up-and-coming Senator from Vermont named Bernie Sanders, and realizes that he's got some pretty cool ideas about Socialism. (and he's complaining about the top 1%, so naturally Moore got all starry-eyed over him...). And the kids sure seem to be taking to his ideas, but why wouldn't they? Free college education? Free socialized medicine, I mean, free healthcare? That probably sounds fantastic to someone staring down at a stack of unpaid college loans. But isn't the next generation entitled enough already? Here's exactly why we shouldn't give them all free college education: because they WANT IT. Then they'll be even MORE entitled if they get it. Did you ever see a kid crying because he wants ice cream? The absolute LAST thing you should do is give that kid ice cream, just to make him stop crying, you'll set his emotional growth meter back to zero. Then the next time he wants ice cream, or something else, he'll know exactly what to do to get it. Everyone has to figure out, at some point, that they need to work to get the things they want, and it's better to start them young - explain to that kid that Daddy doesn't have any money on him right now, and maybe tomorrow after Daddy gets his paycheck, and the kid behaves very well between now and then, MAYBE you can stop for ice cream on the way home. Otherwise he (and all the millennials) are just never going to learn.
Moore comes to a conclusion about capitalism (Spoiler alert, it's bad.) and says that we can fight back with its polar opposite, democracy. Hmmm, I'm not sure those words are opposites, who's to say the two forces can't work together? It's been done in the past. And technically he's right, it's very possible that the lower 95% can come together and realize that collectively, they've got 95% of the voting power in the country, but come on, look around, when's the last time that 95% of the people agreed on anything? (I think it was an "American Idol" finale...) Look, if your income is the national average, you probably believe that only the 50% of people above you should pay more taxes, and the 50% below you (including you, of course) should get a break. If your income is in the top 75%, you'd probably argue that only the top 24% of people should be taxed more, and so on. Everyone only wants what's best for the country by their definition, which is what's best for themselves. So it's never going to happen.
I'm going to check back in with Michael Moore in a few days, to see if he's grown up at all since 2009. Probably not. (And Jesus Christ, Michael, stop tying everything back to Flint, Michigan, I think we've proven conclusively that nobody cares, or they'd have clean water to drink.)
EDIT: Once again, I missed the best possible tie-in. Today was the first of several/many debates among Democratic Presidential contenders, and they've divided the 20 (?) or so candidates into 2 sets that will debate during successive nights, I think. And in the first pack was Elizabeth Warren, who appears in "Capitalism: A Love Story", even though that was filmed before she was a U.S. Senator. Back in 2009 she was a Harvard professor, and she weighed in on the malfeasance in the Senate that took place because so many government officials had ties to Goldman-Sachs. Also appearing on night 1 were NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio, Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke and...um, the rest. (Stay tuned for Night 2 with Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand et al.) But now I want to know how Elizabeth Warren did - Harvard professor of economics, Senator from Massachusetts, seems to be very smart - I think I might have to do a little more research on her, since I don't want to vote for a Socialist and Joe Biden seems likely to continue being creepy and shoot himself in the foot. He's still talking about curing cancer? Wasn't that the job that Obama gave him? Does he have any original ideas of his own, or is he just falling back on what seemed to excite people before?
Also starring Michael Moore (last seen in "Rush: Time Stand Still"), William Black, Elijah Cummings, Baron Hill, Marcy Kaptur, Marcus Haupt, Stephen Moore, Bernie Sanders (last seen in "13th"), Wallace Shawn (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Elizabeth Warren, Peter Zalewski, and archive footage of Glenn Beck, Joe Biden (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), John McCain (ditto), Michael Bloomberg (last seen in "Koch"), John Boehner (last seen in "Vice"), Nancy Pelosi (ditto), Brian Williams (ditto), Tom Brokaw (also carrying over from "Leaving Neverland"), Katie Couric (ditto), Janet Jackson (ditto), Justin Timberlake (ditto), George W. Bush (last seen in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), Dick Cheney (ditto), Bill Clinton (ditto), Arnold Schwarzenegger (ditto), Jack Cafferty, Jimmy Carter (last seen in "13th"), Martin Luther King (ditto), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Chris Dodd, Dick Durbin, Jerry Falwell, Barney Frank, Timothy Geithner, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Charles Keating, Helmut Kohl, Steve Kroft, Dennis Kucinich, Zedong Mao, Sandra Day O'Connor, Barack Obama (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Michelle Obama (ditto), Sarah Palin, Henry Paulson, Don Regan, William Rehnquist, Pat Robertson, Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Rubin, Paul Ryan, Antonin Scalia, Chuck Schumer, Ryan Seacrest (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Donna Shalala, Joseph Stalin, Chesley Sullenberger, Clarence Thomas.
RATING: 4 out of 10 food stamps
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