The Demo Site

The Phony Radicalism of Michael Moore
By Sheldon Richman
Published 10/31/09

With phony radicals like Michael Moore around, the ruling elite has nothing to worry about.

The filmmaker likes to pose as a radical critic of the status quo, but he isn’t. All the evidence you need is in his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. Sure, he rails against home foreclosures, bank bailouts, low wages, other real and imagined problems, but his solution would not disturb the sleep of any big banker, corporate bigwig, or political big shot.

The tipoff comes right at the beginning of the movie. He paints an idyllic picture of life in America in the 1950s. His father worked for a big auto company, through which the family got free medical and dental care. All was well. He realizes that a major reason things were so good was that the U.S. military had destroyed Japan’s and Germany’s competitive industrial bases in World War II. But the dominance was great while it lasted. It was a time when an alliance of big government, big business, and big labor ruled the roost. The military-industrial complex was thriving. That seems fine with Moore, which puts him in the camp of the corporatists of Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, who thought free markets and competition among independent firms were passé. The new world required big monolithic entities that sat down together and worked things out nicely. The spirit of Mussolini hovered over all of it.

Of course, Moore blasts Wall Street because it got all that taxpayer bailout money and is not being held accountable for it. That is worth getting mad about. But how would he feel if the money had been given with lots of conditions and regulations? He might have liked that....cont'd @ The Campaign For Liberty.com