Review of Capitalism: A Love Story

Michael Moore’s latest documentary is of course anything but a love story. From the first seconds of the film to well into the last reel, Moore pulls no punches. As is usual for a Moore film, sob stories are intermixed with sobering visuals and powerful factoids. One moment we are witnessing a girl sobbing over her dead mother and the money Wal-Mart made off of her death (more on that later), and the next moment we are looking at what looks like a PowerPoint presentation showing us how the middle class has been deteriorating over the past few decades.

Criticize Michael Moore all you want, but this film clearly demonstrates countless hours of research. While many, including myself, don’t agree with how Moore interprets some of his research, his data is very sound. Moore also does a wonderful job interviewing famous and not-so-famous individuals. For someone that does a lot of qualitative interviewing, I respect his ability to conduct such high quality interviews no matter how many takes he may have had to get it right. There are several memorable takeaways from this film including how derivatives are extremely complicated, dead peasant insurance is  immoral, and FDR would have rolled over laughing in his chair (ROLIHC?) if he heard people calling Obama a socialist.

On derivatives, Moore does a nice job of demonstrating how industry insiders who made fortunes off of these fuzzy devices can’t even begin to explain them. As one insider who couldn’t put derivatives into words put it, “you could put a derivative on anything.” After satisfactorily demonstrating how screwed up capitalism has been over the past few decades, Moore then comes to a fairly odd solution to this problem. Instead of saying that communism or socialism was the answer to a failed system of capitalism, Moore posits that –surprise–wait for it–democracy is the answer. All plugs aside, he might just as well have offered off demockracy as the solution.

First of all, offering a political system as the answer to our economic problems seems like a bit of a cop out to me. In addition, he offers a political system that we’ve never even had in this country. Technically speaking, we live in a republic, not a democracy. While Moore is 100% right in his critique of the abuses and the absolute failure of unchecked, unregulated capitalism in recent years, I expected a more nuanced solution from someone of his supposed intellect. There is no one right answer here. One could argue for a little more regulation under the same basic system, fundamental changes in regulation in the same system, or even a move to more of a redistributive system. Those, at least, would have been largely economic arguments that would have forced one to defend his or her version of utopia against the status quo and other available alternatives.  Instead, Moore essentially says that world peace is the solution to our health care problems. Who can be against world peace? Democracy? What was the problem again?

On dead peasant insurance, Moore brings up an issue so unscrupulous and  immoral that millions of Americans undoubtedly shook their heads in disbelief that they had never heard of this before (I was one of them). In a nutshell, dead peasant insurance is the insider name for insurance policies that companies take out on young largely lower-level employees (hence peasants) that name the company (and not the families of the employee) as the beneficiary if the employee is to die (hence dead) while in their employment. Essentially, the company earns money the more seemingly healthy young employees die prematurely in a given year. While in many ways this type of policy may be fundamentally no different than many other mechanisms that companies use to diversify risk (derivatives?), the utter lack of transparency around these policies make us all rightfully assume the worst. The interesting thing is that Moore shows evidence that these policies aren’t limited to one sector or to a bunch of fly-by-night companies, but rather are seemingly pervasive among many blue-chip corporations. If anything comes of this movie, it will hopefully be pressure on corporations and other companies to at the very least be transparent about these seemingly gross bets. If they’re not as bad as they seem, fine, open up your books. Sunlight is always the best disinfective.

Finally, the film ends on a poignant note showing us FDR’s 1944 fireside chat where he proposed a second bill of rights that was largely economic in nature:

As shown in the video above, these rights included:

1. The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
2. The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
3. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
4. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
5. The right of every family to a decent home.
6. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
7. The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.
8. The right to a good education.

While a few of these may be a bit antiquated, on the whole they seem like largely “reasonable rights,” most of which have yet to be achieved. Above all, this speech is a clarion call to those who are proud to call themselves liberals or progressives. In this light, it seems ridiculous that anyone call the current President, who has yet to be bold enough on any of these issues, anything more extreme than a moderate. The movie also reminds us that despite being extremely popular with the majority of the populace, FDR was a big threat and thus largely hated by much of the top 1% of this country and many of those who believed that they were destined to be in the top 1% someday. Despite the triangulation of recent Democratic presidents, FDR realized that people hating you was a pretty good indication that you were actually getting something done. In fact, FDR makes this final argument of the film better than Moore could have ever made it himself. For that, I give Moore credit.