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Political Activist Cameron Atwood contibutes the following, and notes:

“The text in the summary that’s within parentheses are comments of my own that are outside what’s covered in the film. There’s definitely a lot more to the film, but I tried to hit the highlights effectively.”

A Summary of Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism – A Love Story

The film opens with scenes by the dozen from surveillance video of bank robberies in progress. The clear message I took away from this footage was: this is what has happened to the people of our country, but on a massive scale – and it seemed that the clumsiness and brazenness of the criminals is an illustration meant to erode the veneer of respectability that our very biggest criminals have donned. Next came an excerpt from an old public school documentary “Life in Ancient Rome”, and how that society’s excesses and corruption, and the yawning gap between its social strata, lead directly to its downfall – a descent merely delayed by an official program of distraction through bread and circuses. This excerpt was carefully sprinkled with inserted scenes from modern America exactly paralleling the classroom movie’s narration about Rome.

We then are led to recall the widespread prosperity of the 1950’s and 60’s, and how the vast majority of people had good jobs with dental and healthcare insurance provided at little to no cost to them, and how most true material needs were very nearly universally satisfied across America. The point was made that, because we escaped the destruction of industries that Europe and Japan suffered, we were now the top manufacturer for many goods – notably automobiles – and this (along with college degrees paid for by the GI Bill) left us in a very prosperous position. The use of tax revenues for significant development and expansion of our highways and urban systems was also emphasized – as was the fact that, although the top income tax rate was then 90%, the wealthiest Americans could still afford a very lavish lifestyle, while much of the rest of the population enjoyed livable wages that outpaced inflation, reasonable access to higher education, and stable pensions that were safely managed.

Then the 1970’s arrived, and the impact of the excesses of corporate America – and the influence of decades of advertising and propaganda reinforcing a consumerist culture at the expense of common sense – began to be felt. Part of a speech in a national broadcast by Jimmy Carter was interjected, where - with a deadly serious face, his crystal blue eyes beckoning through the screen – he told us that the selfish direction of the culture of the United States had gone too far to be healthy or sustainable. He told us that the new defining of a person’s worth not by what they did but by what they owned was dangerous and unwise. This didn’t sit well with the people at the very top, who had by then spent decades engineering a system where cheap goods were designed to wear out and be sold over and over, and where the population was now trained from an early age to believe at their core that the purchase of a wide variety of personal possessions was the best (indeed the only) way to define and express one’s personality and demonstrate success. In other words, Jimmy Carter (a nuclear physicist and a farmer) was man of truly moral stature now making himself a serious nuisance to the ‘powers that be’.

Enter Ronald Reagan – long a corporate and government mouthpiece, lending his warm reassuring smile and calm, seemingly rational and considered tones to the sale of everything from toothpaste and soap to the fight against Socialism and Communism. He was chosen by Wall Street and Madison Avenue to be our next president, and we may recall that his folksy manner and authoritative delivery took Jimmy Carter’s style and kicked it up a notch, while telling us to believe the opposite of Carter’s urgent message - that everything is fine and that we needn’t worry. Reagan’s Treasury Secretary – and later his Chief of Staff – was none other than Donald Regan, the Chairman of Merrill Lynch.

What followed was not “morning in America”, but the wholesale dismantling of the industrial infrastructure of the United States - despite the fact that the sale of its products was still highly lucrative – in order to reap short-term profits, and to destroy the unions and freeze wages. (As we know, this began the transformation of our economy from 70% manufacturing and 10% financial services to 70% financial services and 10% manufacturing.) The top tax margin was cut by 50%, the Federal Deficit exploded, and over the next twenty years household debt grew to 100% of GDP while the average CEO’s gross pay swelled by 649%. (Over the same period, average worker pay climbed only 28% - largely insufficient to keep pace with inflation – while worker productivity and corporate profits both soared). For 35 years, GM had made more money than any other corporation on the planet, then Germany and Japan recovered – now GM is bankrupt.

The film then focused briefly on Republic Windows and Doors, a company which, just before Christmas, moved to fire its entire workforce with only three days notice, and refused to pay any back wages or vacation pay due, and instantly terminated its pension and benefits programs – all because it could not obtain a line of credit from Bank of America. Later we see more on this story.

A talking head announces, “Capitalism is the best system ever devised,” after which we hear the words “Greed, exploitation, failure.” Then we see a a brief moment about a Stockton sign-maker experiencing a rare sustained middle-class income, fully half of whose new production consists of the single word “Foreclosure”. (We learn in the closing credits that a bank forecloses on an American family’s home every seven and a half seconds.)

We are then enlightened about the privatization of the imprisonment of our youth by a company called PA Child Care. This firm built a juvenile detention facility for $8 million, and then leased it to the county for $58 million in local tax dollars. The phrase “time is money” gains a new meaning as local judges cut a deal whereby they got $2.6 million from the firm to funnel 6500 unjustly convicted kids into a facility whose employees then decided when – or whether – the kids are fit to release, and sentences were extended indefinitely… until the news got out.

Sully Sullivan – the briefly famous airline pilot who performed flawlessly and heroically, saving 150 people as he set his bird-damaged airliner gently down on the Hudson river – is now shown to us as he appears on numerous talk show and throws the ball out for a major league championship game and graces the covers of all the leading popular magazines. Then he appears before Congress to testify about the conditions now suffered inside the once glamorous and well compensated field of airline pilots. He himself had recently had his pay cut by 40% and his pension terminated. We can tell by the disturbed and uncomfortable “public servants” that this wasn’t the story they wanted to hear from the hero of the hour. (Of course, in the media frenzy that made him a national figure, we heard nothing of the fact that he and his flight crew – and the fire and rescue crews, tugboat operators and port authority workers who effected the rescue - are all well trained union workers.) After repeated concessions to the demands of the major airlines’ executives, pilots are now often paid between $12k and $17k a year, with senior pilots typically earning only $22k. On the flight 3107 that crashed in New Jersey a few winters ago, the media made much of the fact that the flight recorder revealed the pilots’ serious in-flight discussion of their careers, and how that discussion may have distracted them from their duties as the plane came down too quickly into a suburban neighborhood some distance from the airport that snowy night. What the media did not mention was that the pilots were paid less than the typical manager of a Taco Bell, and that one was holding down a second job to make ends meet – as a waitress. Michael Moore’s voice then makes the point that if someone is going to be flying a huge jet with him and a few dozen other people in it, at hundreds of miles an hour, at the height of tens of thousands of feet, he wants that person to be very well paid.

The audience then hears of a newly permissible practice among corporations of taking out secret life insurance policies on their employees – in which the firms themselves are the sole beneficiaries. Actual persons are prohibited, for example, from taking out an insurance policy on their neighbor’s house because it provides that person with a vested interest in the destruction of that house. But for years, companies including giants like Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Citibank, AT&T, American Express, and MacDonald Douglas, have bought what are privately referred to in executive memoranda as “Dead Peasant” insurance. These policies are quite often held long after the employee leaves the company, and internal memos have surface discussing the unfortunate low mortality of the covered people. According to this morbid and perverse practice, the younger the person is when they die, the higher the benefit – and young women are worth the most when they’re dead.

We then hear from various moral figures that Capitalism, in its values and its operation, is directly contrary to the common good, to compassion for all living things (including people), and to the tenets of every major faith and philosophy. This reality is contrasted with the schoolroom documentary propaganda that “Capitalism is compatible with God’s laws and the teachings of the Bible.” We then see Congressman Phil Gramm proclaiming his firm belief that Wall Street is “a holy place” (this is the Gramm of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by which the GOP in Clinton’s closing days finally overturned the last of the depression-era protections and regulations that were designed to prevent another collapse).

We then learn of a private report by Citigroup in 2005-2006 which declares to its readers that the US is now no longer a Democratic Republic, but a “plutonomy” – a political and economic construct entirely controlled by a very few ultra rich individuals at the very top – admitting that the top 1% have more wealth than all the bottom 95% combined (and that the annual incomes of the top 20% equal the total of the bottom 80%). The report draws among its conclusions that the most potent threat to this state of affairs is “society demanding a more equitable share”, and the most potent component of this threat is the persistence of the archaic mantra of “one person – one vote”. (No wonder the Bush/Reagan Supreme Court is now rushing to give corporations the new legal right to throw their unprecedented financial massiveness directly into election campaign funds, advertisements and ‘propa-mentaries’ – my expression – that back their pet candidates and issues and attack their political enemies.)

The film shows us Steven Moore of the wall street journal saying, “Capitalism is more important than Democracy,” and he goes on to say that he isn’t particularly fond of democracy, and that there are plenty of countries where people can vote but where they might have a really hard time getting enough to eat to survive. (America comes to mind.) This thinking is not uncommon in the world of big business, nor has it been common in the elite since before the founders wrote all that business about “We the People,” and forming “A More Perfect Union,” and “Promoting the General Welfare”.

We then see a couple of very rare examples of Democracy existing in the workplace. Isthmus Engineering is a truly employee-owned company where that phrase goes far beyond workers just owning a little stock. The company is divided equally among all the employees and profit is shared equally as well – and the company is very successful. How patriotic – for the firm’s founders to extend their love of Democracy to their jobs. Another example is a California company called Alvarado Street Bakery, where the line workers make $65k a year, and all decisions made by the company are the result of all-employee meetings and votes, where every employee’s suggestion is fully considered and often voted through and implemented.

Yet another positive model, that of Dr. Jonas Salk, then illustrates a further area of where Capitalism goes wrong. Salk cured Polio and gave the cure away to the public for free, rather than sell it to a drug manufacturer for a fortune. When asked by a well-known news anchor who owned the patent, Dr. Salk responded that the public now owned the cure, that there was no patent. To drive his point home, he asked the reporter, “Would you patent the sun?” Dr. Salk was very happy earning a comfortable living as a professor and research scientist, and he saw no good end in some firm charging lucrative sums to make the cure available.

The fact is, we then see, that our top math and science people no longer move to forward concerns of the common good, nor do they lend their fine talents to the manufacturing or engineering spheres. The financial sector now drains the brain trust of our nation almost exclusively, where brilliant students go to work off $100k student loans that often become $500k when finally paid.

Why the need for such brilliance on Wall Street? …They’re needed to develop the very exotic and complex derivatives that contributed so much to the pockets of a very few, and to the downfall of the rest of the country. Marcus Haupt, VP at Lehman Bros. accurately summarized derivatives, known as Credit Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations, as a sort of secondary bet – a complicated betting scheme made purposely confusing to avoid scrutiny. Haupt was unable to adequately explain the specifics, as was a Harvard economics professor who’s stammering and faltering words were aired on a national news program.

Much of the explosion of foreclosures, we are led to realize, began with Alan Greenspan – long held to be an unerring guru – as he publicly urged Americans to “Tap your home equity.” This may be seen as part of an effort to relieve people of their homes. The fiction then propounded by lenders was that homeowners own banks under their very roofs – banks that can be accessed by borrowing on their homes un-mortgaged value. The regulations were then changed to allow the banks to more easily take people’s homes and force them out if payments (including extortive and usurious ballooning interest rates) were not met. (Numerous loan companies have been also found guilty of advising holders of fixed-rate mortgages to refinance on a variable rate by offering a very low, but very temporary introductory rate.)
As this rule change took place, a prominent financial magazine featured on its cover a photo of officials and lobbyists holding a chainsaw and various other cutting implements on a tall stack of paper tied with red ribbon. With a stroke of a pen, one lawyer, and one judge, American banks could now far more readily seize the real estate of borrowers in default. As a final salted slap in wounded faces, banks are now in the calloused practice of hiring former owners as cheap labor to clean out their former homes of all those remaining possessions that they can’t take with them.

In perhaps another notably cruel irony, we discover that for years 60% of the nation’s foreclosure notices were mailed from a facility located in possibly the most economically depressed city in the USA, Flint Michigan.

Many of these predatory suddenly high interest loans were the responsibility of Countrywide. We discover, however, that while people in the margins are required to pay exorbitant rates for their home loans, a large number of loans are processed with specific high-level approval – with extremely low interest, waived fees, and sometimes even waived paperwork (that’s right, no contract) – for people known within the company as FOA’s, or Friends of Angelo, the CEO of Countrywide. One such friend was given $1.5 million in discounted loans – the 28-year Senate Banking Committee veteran, Christopher Dodd.

The FBI began warning the public in 2004 of a wave of organized bank fraud, and they have since determined that 80% of mortgage losses are directly due to the actions of lending organizations – not the poor folks who were swindled by fast talk and fine print. But of course, the junior Bush White House cut the FBI financial staff by about 500 agents to have them focus on Al Qaeda (a group run largely on cash from the decades-long close friends of the Bush family, the Saudi Royals).

Like most massive structures under growing pressure, the fall begins with a few little-noticed chinks in the armor. We have seen that the worst of these chinks began under a lame-duck Clinton, with the GOP’s Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that tore away the barriers that FDR and Congress put in place after the crash of 1929 between commercial banks (from then on backed by the FDIC) and investment banks and insurance companies. These institutions now merged and became “too big to fail”. The cracks continued to be wedged open with the shredding of those laws that once prevented the quick snatching of people’s family homes (and with the tightening stricture of personal bankruptcy law even as the business bankruptcy rules grew more lenient).

In an interesting aside, we learn that Robert Rubin, a Chicago School economist who became Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, and was key among the few champions of Gramm-Leach-Bliley within the waning Clinton White House. He then went to Citigroup where he received a whopping $115 million for his services. Other examples of woeful staffing choices are discussed, including former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson and failed New York Federal Bank President Timothy Geithner – now highly placed in the Obama administration. It is posited that the practice of hiring and promoting people who say and do absurd things is a repeated tactic by authorities to make sure they receive advice they can blame later for the resulting “failures” their backers desire.

Finally in September of 2008, the dam broke – just when a wide swath of Congress was facing reelection, we see a news conference by a slyly smirking Mr. Bush, that the threat of absolute fiscal calamity across the nation is imminent. Unlike his “Go out and shop” mantra after 9/11, this time he spoke in strident terms of a great threat facing the American people – much like his pre-war speeches about Iraq. The Bush Treasury staff contained no fewer than eleven former Goldman Sachs executives. Shortly after the crisis was announced, Secretary Paulson released his infamous three-page demand for unfettered and unseen access to the contents of the Treasury vault for a top-down bailout of $700 billion – that’s about a billion dollars for each word on those three pages.

A resulting bill was rushed before Congress, with attendant demands that there be little debate. Members were told that if they didn’t vote for the bill that martial law would be declared throughout the country. The night before the vote, Congress was flooded with calls and emails from the people of the United States against the enormous give-away of our tax dollars, and the next day, the bill failed. More fear was necessary. Then the stock market dropped by a record number of points, and fearful members of Congress knuckled under in a weak backroom compromise and the bailout passed within days. One member of Congress who fought passage said that the whole scenario seemed to her to be very carefully planned at the highest levels – almost like an intelligence operation. This member was a Democrat, and she has since urged foreclosure victims not to leave their homes unless and until their lenders’ lawyers can actually put their fingers on the original mortgage. (This a little known legal requirement that must be met by the lender’s legal representative before the lender can legally evict an owner – and most mortgages have changed hands so many hundreds of times that the original document is often nearly impossible for the lender to find and produce.)

As the actor and social historian Wallace Shawn observed, the nation had reached the point where “people in the US could become angry at the wealthy.” The new members of the wealthy class are no longer manufacturing the things the people love and want, and the people no longer believe the fiction that if they work hard and play by the rules, they might someday join the ranks of the wealthiest Americans.

Meanwhile, a person was becoming viable as a presidential candidate who just two years prior would have seemed an insane expectation to win the White House – a black man, Barak Obama. Even though Goldman Sachs was his #1 campaign contributor, there was no way for the money power to be absolutely sure what he would do if elected. Obama had said during his campaign that he thought everyone would do a lot better if the people at the top would “spread the wealth around.” The right wing immediately seized upon this as “Socialism”.

By election night 2008, a poll on political attitudes in America showed Capitalism at 37%, Socialism at 33%, and Undecided at 30% - running far too close for the comfort of the capitalists at the top.

At this point we see that the sheriff of the county in which Detroit resides has decided that his office will no longer remove any families from their foreclosed homes. His reasoning was that he always thought of the “free market” as “sink or swim”, and yet the failed bankers “sunk and cried like babies” until they got the Treasury handed to them on a silver platter. He warned, “Things get so bad that all they can do is protest, and that becomes revolution.”

Then, in another location, a group of about fifty people decided to organize and reinsert a family into their still empty foreclosed home. This home is in the sort of neighborhood where police response is not normally rapid, yet when the banks eviction specialist had arrived to discover the home reoccupied, and saw the organized crowd outside and called the authorities, the cops showed up in record time with nine police cruisers. However, the organized crowd and the family all refused to back down – the family said it was their home, and the crowd collectively shamed the specialist with comments like, “I’d rather be homeless than do what you do – how are you able to sleep at night?” In a little while, the cowed specialist moved hesitantly to the street where he had a hasty conference with the police, who themselves looked unsure of how to proceed, and within a short time the specialist and the police were gone and the organized crowd celebrated their small victory.

Returning to Republic Windows and Doors, the workers have now seized the manufacturing plant and refuse to leave. We notice a protest sign carried by one of the workers, saying, “You Got Bailed Out – We Got Sold Out.” Bank of America – now termed “Bank Robbers of America” by Republic’s defiant employees – had still refused to grant the company a line of credit even after taking the initial $25 billion (of its eventual $45 billion) TARP bailout funds, and Republic’s owners refused to pay wages owed, vacation due or pension payments contracted.

When asked about this situation, Obama responded, “What’s happening there is reflective of what’s going on in the rest of the economy.” Would workers revolt against Wall Street? As an organizer at Republic put it, people have to get from a “things are the way they are because someone said so” mindset, to a decision of “I can make it different”. These circumstances was then shown to be reminiscent of the 1936 workers’ seizure of the massive GM factory in Detroit. They and their families held it for 44 days, and then the Michigan statehouse and the FDR administration (in a fundamental shift away from many earlier government responses to such direct labor actions) sent in the National Guard to protect the workers.

What happened at Republic? Eventually, Bank of America saw that this was becoming a national news story, and apparently decided to cut its PR losses - it paid the workers $6,000 each.

Revisiting FDR, near the end of his presidency he was so ill that he did not appear before Congress to give his annual address, but instead delivered it to the nation by radio. Yet he invited a film crew to come into the White House to record for the newsreels his proposal for a second Bill of Rights to be enacted in order to establish security and prosperity for the People of America. Among these rights:

The right of all Americans to a useful and remunerative job that pays enough to provide food, clothing and recreation

The right of all American farmers to sell their crops at reasonably profitable prices

The right of all American businesses to be free of unfair competition by monopolies whether foreign or domestic

The right of each and every person in America to live in a decent home, to receive free medical care and a good education

Regrettably, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead in little more than a year after he made that proposal. It never became a reality here, but it did across Europe and Japan, where FDR’s people had a hand in helping to craft these nations’ post-war constitutions.

In closing, Michael Moore remarks, “I refuse to live in a country like this… and I’m not leaving!” He then goes on to say, “Capitalism is an evil –and you can’t regulate evil; you have to replace it with something good – Democracy.”

Scattered among the expansive closing credits, several fine quotes are in evidence. For me, two of these stood out:

“I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies.” – Thomas Jefferson

“It’s a class war; my class is winning – but they shouldn’t be.” – Warren Buffet

Several bits of information were also interspersed in the credits, including: “There is a home foreclosure in America every seven and a half seconds.”

Close to the very end of the credits, we again hear Michael Moore’s voice, sad and serious, telling us that he can’t keep on doing this, that he needs our help – and that we’ve got to do something soon.

Final notes: This summary provides only a shadow of the film’s impact. It is written and forwarded with the intent to strongly encourage its readers to see this wonderful film for themselves, and to take friends and relatives with them. We are the 95%, they are the 1% - they have the money – but, together, we have the power… together…

A fine friend of mine posited an excellent (and, I believe, crucial) understanding of our two leading political ideologies – elitist and egalitarian. Elitists feel responsibility to themselves, and to their immediate family. Egalitarians feel responsibility to our whole population, all humanity, all life on Earth.

As Abraham Lincoln observed, our nation cannot long endure half slave and half free – it will become all one, or all the other. Stand for Freedom!

Craig Shields Uncategorized