With all due respect, past and present, and without further to do:
1) Rural white people are batshit.
I don't know if this was on purpose or not, but Capitalism contrasts two scenes of people dealing with foreclosure - a black family who, with the help of their community, squats in a house that had been boarded up, and a white getting kicked out of their farmhouse in Peoria, Illinois, the town where Richard Pryor is from, which is not too far from here.
The scene with the black family is uplifting. The rest of the neighborhood is there to support them, and help them move their pissy-looking mattresses into the house. When upwards of 10 cop cars show up, they assemble on the lawn and sing retarded hip-hop versions of civil rights anthems. The cops end up just saying fuck - though you get the idea the scene would have been way different, if Michael Moore and his cameras weren't there.
The scene with the white family, on the other hand, is some sad shit. At one point, the old man explains that, while he's not about to get into a Downtown Owl-style shootout with the police, he can see how that sort of thing happens. He looked crazier than a motherfucker. I wonder if that scene would have been way different, if Michael Moore and his cameras weren't there. The thing is, these people kinda needed to lose their house. The mortgage was something like $2,700, but the guy had been on disability since the '90s, and his wife, who weighed like 600 pounds, was a part-time janitor or some shit. The house had been in her family for over 40 years, but it had yet to be paid off. Hmm...
2) The BGM might have an insurance plan out on me.
The saddest scene in Capitalism by far is the scene where a family sits around a kitchen table and talks about their mother, who died at the ripe ol' age of 26, from epilepsy or some such. (I drank a bottle of Yellow Tail before I saw this the other day, so my bad about some of these facts.) It turns out Wal-Mart had an insurance plan out on her, so they received some ridonkulous sum, while the family got stuck with a mountain of medical bills, plus the $600 or whatever it cost to bury her.
Honestly, I don't see what's the big deal about an employer taking out an insurance plan on its employees. You've got a lot of money invested in these people showing up to work every day, and you want to be covered if they don't. The real crime would have been if he could have shown where these companies take out insurance plans on their employees and then somehow contribute to their employees' deaths. My bad, if I just gave Wal-Mart an idea.
Worse than the fact that so-called dead peasants insurance is kind of a non-story is that it was the closest thing to novel information in Capitalism for me personally. I'm sure a lot of people might actually learn quite a bit. But if you're like me and you've read the stories by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, seen the episodes of Democracy Now! with Ralph Nader, heard the Planet Money episodes of This American Life, and all of the other shit you do when you're too broke to do anything other than sit around in your underwear and you consider it America's fault, you wish Capitalism would have gone way deeper.
3) Michael Moore didn't get the memo re: Barack Obama.
Maybe 3/4ths of the way into Capitalism, it goes from being a film about how this country is officially fucked the fuck up to a film about how Barack Obama is here to save us all, as if he's Chino XL. He may be ethnically ambiguous, and I've heard Barack Obama rhymes on the new Chino XL album (no really, I've heard this), but Barack Obama isn't about to save us any more than he's about to bring the Olympics to Chicago.
At precisely the moment when Capitalism becomes a gay love letter to Obama, I heard a barely audible groan ripple throughout the audience. And these weren't the kind of people who are ignorant enough about economics to think Barack Obama is a socialist. Probably everyone in this damn theater except yours truly voted Obama this past November, but now they're fed up with his shit. If they weren't already aware that Obama hasn't done shit to fix the economy other than hire and bail out the people who fucked up the economy in the first place, they could have gathered as much from the first 3/4ths of Capitalism.
Which makes you wonder why Michael Moore included the bit with Obama as Chocolate Jesus in the first place. It's probably because he did the bulk of the work on Capitalism in '08, when the US, nay, the world was wrapped up in Obama fever, as if it was the swine flu. I've seen Michael Moore on Real Time with Bill Maher and pretty much every other show on TV now talking about how he honestly believes Barack Obama, the Harvard grad who went to work as a community organizer in Chicago, will do the right thing, but I'm not buying it for a minute. This is just like when he threw Mumia Abu-Jamal under a bus, and when he went on Real Time to beg Ralph Nader not to run for president. He's playing himself. And the sad thing is, it's not gonna do any good.
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