Moore aims to halt beast of capitalism
Last Updated: Saturday, September 12, 2009 | 5:09 PM ET
The Canadian Press
Director/writer Michael Moore makes an appearance at the Toronto International Film Festival, where his documentary Capitalism: A Love Story is screening. (Malcolm Taylor/Getty Images)
Manifesto was one of the titles being bandied around by Michael Moore for his new movie — a fitting one given that his scathing attack on capitalism calls for nothing less than putting a "stake through the heart of the beast."
Capitalism: A Love Story examines the economic meltdown and subsequent bailout of Wall Street and calls on the audience to reject America's particular brand of free market economics in favour of a system based on the ideals of democracy.
Moore, who is promoting the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival, said Saturday that his latest work is really the culmination of two decades of sounding the alarm about the disastrous consequences for working people when capitalist greed runs rampant.
"Capitalists love their money and they not only love their money, they love our money," Moore said.
"The upper one per cent have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 per cent. Seriously, when anthropologists dig us up what do you think they're going to call that?"
Michael Moore takes on corporate America in his latest documentary. (TIFF)
Moore's documentary career began in 1989 with the release of Roger and Me, in which the filmmaker chronicles his efforts to reach the top brass at General Motors to get some answers amid the economic ruin in his hometown of Flint, Mich., which had been a booming auto town.
Focus on sub-prime meltdown
In his television show TV Nation Moore took on other pillars of corporate America and in his documentary Sicko it was his country's health-care system under the microscope.
His latest film is "really is an extension of a lot of things that I've been saying for 20 years."
A manifesto of sorts then?
"There's a point sometime back where I think that word was a potential title of this film," Moore said.
"I really set out to make this film with the sort of attitude of, 'if I was not able to make another film after this … what would that film say? What would I put in that film knowing that it might be my last film for a while?'"
Exotic investment products, like the sub-prime mortgage securities that caught much of the blame for the global financial meltdown, are a main target in the movie.
To show just how confusing these things are, Moore has Wall Street types and academics attempt to explain them.
It doesn't go well.
The complex mathematical formulas thrown up on the screen that explain such products also do little to clarify exactly how they work — at least to the average person.
Wall St. back to its old ways, Moore says
Now Wall Street is at it again, Moore says, barely one year after the mortgage meltdown. This time it involves a proposal to turn so-called life settlements — when ill or elderly people cash out on life insurance policies before they die — into financial products to sell on the market.
"The dirtiest word in capitalism is enough, there's no such thing as enough. They want more and more and more," he said.
"It's like a beast and you have to stop the beast. … You can't regulate the beast, you really have to put a stake in its heart . Otherwise it will just find a new path."
It's not that he's against people making money.
"I believe that I should make my money on my hard work and on my ideas and not sit around making money off money," he said.
The film illustrates the stark contrast between those who are being turfed out of their homes and executives of bailed-out banks who are receiving million-dollar bonuses.
"People are already upset and they're confused by what's happened, especially in the last year," Moore said. "I'm trying to speak to that and hopefully channel it toward something positive."
"That's what I'm calling for — a democratic economic system where you and I have a say in how this economy is run. That's all I'm asking for, that we just apply the democracy that we love to our economy."
The film is due in Canadian theatres on Oct. 2.
