Posted By Becky Bisbee

Capitalism: A Love Story
A Film by Michael Moore

Reviewed by Andrea Gabor

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist, as Michael Moore is, to be troubled by the revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the past three administrations or to squirm at the specter of Christopher Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, (and others) accepting VIP mortgages from Countrywide Financial.

Conspiracy theories and truth-to-power confrontations abound in Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore’s new documentary. In one scene, the shambling, baseball-cap wearing muckraker festoons the New York Stock Exchange with yellow crime-scene tape. In another, he backs an armored truck up to AIG headquarters to recoup taxpayer bailout funds and tries to make a citizen’s arrest of its board of directors. He captures Ohio U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, accusing Wall Street of engineering a financial coup d’etat.

After targeting the health care industry in Sicko and General Motors in Roger and Me, in Capitalism, Moore tackles the corruption of the economic system itself. Moore began his movie before the financial meltdown as a broad indictment of what he calls, “a system of taking and giving, mostly taking.” He does present a rogue’s gallery of culprits who set the stage for the Great Recession, from Reagan-era deregulators to the “Government Goldman” of the Clinton and Bush administrations.

But Moore can’t resist digressing and much of the movie is a scattershot attack, some of it heartrending, some of it hilarious, on capitalist greed. Moore delves into the fine print of “dead peasant’s” insurance, which allows companies to profit from the death of their employees. He lambasts airlines for lowering pilot pay and endangering passengers; in one poignant scene, “Sully” Sullenberger, the U.S. Airways pilot who landed a plane on New York City’s Hudson River, is shown testifying before a sparsely attended Congressional hearing on how his pay and pension have been cut.

Cameo appearances include a dubbed Jesus (from an old Franco Zeffirelli miniseries) espousing banking deregulation and, in one of the weirder moments, the actor Wally Shawn explaining capitalism. The most surprising subplot is religious; several priests assert that capitalism goes against the teachings of God, and Moore reveals that, as a teenager, he too wanted to be a priest.

The movie’s best moments – and the reason some viewers may wish that Moore had focused more sharply on the meltdown – are of ordinary Americans fighting the system, like the Wayne County, Mich., sheriff who puts a moratorium on foreclosures. Most affecting of all are the workers at Republic Windows and Doors, in Chicago, who organize a sit-down strike to recoup $6,000 in back pay, and the Chicagoans who come out in the cold to feed them.

Strangely, the least convincing scenes are of those little guys – the ones Moore wants us to care about most – who have lost their homes to foreclosures. Some of the interviews feel scripted. And financially savvy viewers may wonder about the judgment of some borrowers, including a Peoria, Ill., couple who mortgaged, and lost, a property that had been in the family for generations.

Moore’s movie is a call to rebellion. “Capitalism must be replaced by a new system, democracy,” he intones. Yet, Moore isn’t really anti-capitalist at all. He offers a nostalgic tour of a pre-Reagan utopia in which the rich paid a top marginal tax rate of 90 percent (and, Moore implies, didn’t kvetch about it), kids went to college without taking out crippling loans, and the U.S. auto industry and unions flourished.

The coda of Capitalism is paean to FDR and his call for a “second Bill of Rights” that would ensure, among other things, a living wage and universal health care. At a time when fascism was ascendant, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made America safe for capitalism by mitigating its excesses and using sunshine, via new institutions like the Securities and Exchange Commission, to cleanse the system of corruption.

But Moore doesn’t get into the nuances of capitalism, then or now. He is having too much fun going after the evildoers.

(Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College/CUNY in New York City and the author of several books, including “The Capitalist Philosophers.” She can be reached at AAGabor@aol.com.)