Will Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story be an affair to remember?

The self-proclaimed defender of ordinary Americans is back to take on the bankers, but his confrontational documentary may be too hastily thrown together to deal a killer blow

Capitalism: A Love Story ... Michael Moore hunts for America's missing money So, he's back ... the chubby defender of the US working class is lighting the touchpaper on a new Molotov cocktail to be hurled, this time at America's ruling class. Capitalism: A Love Story is the latest film to bear the Michael Moore imprint, and is aimed squarely at the Masters of the Universe who brought the banking system to the edge of ruin last year. (The fact that Moore is hurling it from the Venice Lido, where it's due to premiere, rather than, say, Detroit, may lessen its impact somewhat.)
Nevertheless, this trailer shows Moore up to his usual (and strangely admirable) shenanigans, taking empty moneybags into merchant banks and asking a congressional regulator the most basic of questions: "Where's our money?" Marching boldly into insurance giants AIG gleaming HQ and demanding to make a citizen's arrest is the kind of thing many newspaper columnists sound off about, but never put into practice. More to the point, perhaps, is the revolutionary sentiment expressed by the pickup-driving gun-owner – the kind of person, you'd think, who'd normally be sitting patiently waiting for their portion of trickle-down.
Moore is someone who divides people, but one thing he deserves major credit for is putting unashamedly activist film-making into the wider culture's most mainstream areas. Before Fahrenheit 9/11, incendiary documentaries were confined to right-on discussion groups and late-night TV screenings. Moore, against all expectations, put politics into the multiplex. Then, the Bush family's connections with al-Qaida were the target; here, he'll no doubt be gunning for Bush again. Will he succeed? The suspicion is that it's all been thrown together a little too hastily to score many killer blows (the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was less than a year ago) - but here's hoping ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2009/sep/02/michael-moore-capitalism-documentary

VENICE (Reuters) – Capitalism is evil. That is the conclusion U.S. documentary maker Michael Moore comes to in his latest movie "Capitalism: A Love Story," which premieres at the Venice film festival Sunday.

Blending his trademark humor with tragic individual stories, archive footage and publicity stunts, the 55-year-old launches an all out attack on the capitalist system, arguing that it benefits the rich and condemns millions to poverty.

"Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil," the two-hour movie concludes.

"You have to eliminate it and replace it with something that is good for all people and that something is democracy."

The bad guys in Moore's mind are big banks and hedge funds which "gambled" investors' money in complex derivatives that few, if any, really understood and which belonged in the casino.

Meanwhile, large companies have been prepared to lay off thousands of staff despite boasting record profits.

The filmmaker also sees an uncomfortably close relationship between banks, politicians and U.S. Treasury officials, meaning that regulation has been changed to favor the few on Wall Street rather than the many on Main Street.

He says that by encouraging Americans to borrow against the value of their homes, businesses created the conditions that led to the crisis, and with it homelessness and unemployment.

Moore even features priests who say capitalism is anti-Christian by failing to protect the poor.

"Essentially we have a law which says gambling is illegal but we've allowed Wall Street to do this and they've played with people's money and taken it into these crazy areas of derivatives," Moore told an audience in Venice.

"They need more than just regulation. We need to structure ourselves differently in order to create finance and money, support for jobs, businesses, etc."

GREEN SHOOTS?

Amid the gloom, Moore detects the beginnings of a popular movement against unbridled capitalism, and believes President Barack Obama's rise to power may

bolster it.

"Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event," he told a news conference. "If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him."

Moore also warned other countries around the world against following the recent U.S. economic and political model.

The film follows factory workers who stage a sit-in at a Chicago glass factory when they are sacked with little warning and no pay and who eventually prevail over the bank.

And a group of citizens occupies a home that has been repossessed and boarded up by the lending company, forcing the police who come to evict them to back down.

The film re-visits some of Moore's earlier movies, including a trip to his native Flint where his father was a car assembly line worker and was able to buy a home, a car, educate his children and look forward to a decent pension.

But he brings it up to date with an examination of the financial crisis, demanding to speak to the bosses of companies at the center of the collapse and demanding that banks give back the hundreds of billions of bailout dollars to the country.

And he interviews an employee of a firm which buys up re-possessed, or "distressed" properties at a fraction of their original value and which is called Condo Vultures.

On TV, Honduran Generals Explain Their Role in Coup

Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press

As rain fell, Honduran police officers blocked a road last week in Jacagalpa, near Nicaragua.

By GINGER THOMPSON

Published: August 4, 2009

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — For the past month, a steady drumbeat of government images on the airwaves and on front pages has tried to convey to Hondurans that this country has not experienced a military coup.
On Tuesday, however, television viewers could have been forgiven for thinking that is exactly what had happened.
The five generals at the head of the Honduran armed forces made a rare appearance on national television to explain their role in the ouster in late June of President Manuel Zelaya, and to respond to charges that they acted in defense of the country’s elite.
In language that often veered into confessional, they repeated that they did not act to take sides in the political fight that had polarized the country, but out of obedience to the law. And they said they were confident that history would judge them as patriots for their actions.
The more they spoke, however, the more they showed how concerned they were that their image had been damaged by their actions, and the clearer it became that they continued to play a leading role in Honduran politics, nearly three decades since the end of military rule.
“They call us golpistas,” said Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, the head of the armed forces, using the Spanish word to describe leaders of a coup. “If that’s what we were, we would have called a national emergency and detained all of those who are out there causing trouble.”
Yet troubles have mounted for the military since troops detained Mr. Zelaya and loaded him onto a plane leaving the country five weeks ago. He was detained on charges that he was trying to change the Constitution in order to extend his time in power.
Military officials have been feeling increasingly isolated, as those who support Mr. Zelaya accuse them of being traitors and those who support the de facto regime, led by Roberto Micheletti, distance themselves from the decision to expel the president.
“In the end, there is a chance that the civilians will all kiss and make up, and the military is going to be held as the bad guys,” said a high-ranking official in the defense ministry, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the military’s position. “These guys are worried. They are worried about going to jail.”
On Tuesday morning, the military defended itself. For an hour and a half, the five camouflage-clad generals said their actions were aimed at defending the Constitution from a president who threatened to do away with it. Seated on a darkened set, the generals described themselves as men of humble beginnings, and said that as such, they would never act against the most vulnerable.
The program on which they appeared, “Face to Face,” was broadcast as international pressure continued to mount on the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti to allow Mr. Zelaya to return to power. The latest criticism came from Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico, which Mr. Zelaya visited Tuesday.
During the visit, Mr. Zelaya said he was prepared to sign a proposed agreement forged after two rounds of negotiations mediated by President Óscar Arias of Costa Rica. The agreement would let Mr. Zelaya return to the presidency, but with significantly limited powers.
Mr. Micheletti, however, with staunch backing from this country’s business leaders, its religious community and its two major political parties, has refused to accept Mr. Arias’s plan, saying that the only way he would allow Mr. Zelaya back into the country was to face charges.
Gabo Jalil, the vice minister of defense in the de facto government, said in an interview that international human rights groups have made baseless accusations that the military is using “death squad” strategies against Mr. Micheletti’s opponents.
At the same time, another defense ministry official said, the officers responsible for the decision to load Mr. Zelaya onto a plane to Costa Rica on June 28 could face charges of abusing their authority because their orders were to present the ousted president for trial.
Edmundo Orellana, who was defense minister under Mr. Zelaya, cautioned against viewing the military as victims. He said he worried that the generals’ appearance on Tuesday signaled that the military, emboldened by its move against Mr. Zelaya, had decided to take more of a leading role in a government that had no legal international standing and only tenuous control of its institutions at home.
As the crisis continues, the government’s most important offices and public hospitals are under military guard. The military is posted at checkpoints along highways across the country. And it has been deployed to help the police manage the pro-Zelaya protests that have disrupted daily life in this country.
“They are the cornerstone of the government,” Mr. Orellana said of the military. “Without their support the whole thing collapses, and Micheletti knows it.”
The generals expressed regret Tuesday about two protesters who had been killed, but dismissed accusations that they were “assassins” as part of a strategy to tarnish their image. Though the military had once been considered a repressive tool of Washington’s campaign against communism, the officers said it had evolved into the country’s second-most-trusted institution, after the Catholic Church.
The generals said that in ousting Mr. Zelaya, they did not act in the interests of any “oligarchy.” Mr. Zelaya, they said, had become a threat to Honduran democracy, not only because he had disobeyed court orders, but also because he had allied Honduras with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
As if taking a page from a cold war playbook, Gen. Miguel Ángel Garcia Padget said the military had disrupted Mr. Chávez’s plans to spread socialism across the region. “Central America was not the objective of this communism disguised as democracy,” he said. “This socialism, communism, Chávismo, we could call it, was headed to the heart of the United States.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/americas/05honduras.html