Probably the most depressing movie anyone is likely to see this year is Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. While many either disagree with Moore’s conclusions, or think he is too radical, the film provides helpful, sobering, and upsetting facts and stories of crimes committed by CEOs and wealthy business owners.
House Evictions
Discussions, interviews, comments, and scenes of evictions happen at various points in the documentary. Some families in the Midwest are kicked out of their homes even though they have paid every bill. One family is told they have a certain number of days to pack their things and find a new home, but people come to evict them halfway through that period.
One family, however, in Miami, FL, refuses to leave. Moore shows clips of the community banding together to support the family, raising signs and yelling at the evictors, and eventually they get the evictors to leave.
Ohio Representative Marcy Kaptur encourages other Americans to do the same as the family in Florida, saying, “You be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave.” If evictors are forced to show the paperwork, Kaptur continues, they will rarely have the necessary documents.
The Rich’s Political Influence
Moore also shows how the rich have gotten the power to do what they do. He shows clips of deals with politicians, Reagan’s tax cut for the rich, GM’s massive layoffs (which inevitably led to their bankruptcy), the bank bailout, and “Dead Peasant’s Insurance.”
Dead Peasant’s Insurance is a company that deals with life insurance. One of its spokesmen discloses that companies will buy life insurance for their workers, naming themselves as the beneficiaries, without telling the workers.
Another portion shows a deal between a judge and an owner of a juvenile hall in Wilkes Barre, PA. Juveniles spent 9 to 11.5 months in prison for light crimes such as smoking pot, having a fight, and creating an offensive myspace page.
Protests and Democratic Businesses
But as a powerful activist does, Moore makes it about 80% depressing and 20% hopeful. He shows democratic businesses who have overcome the desire for greed—a cooperated engineering company in Wisconsin that is owned by the workers, and a bread factory in California where the boss does not get paid more than the workers and every employee makes enough to live.
And besides the eviction protesters, the film shows another protest at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, happening because the workers were not getting their due pay and benefits. It shows the support they got from the rest of the town, the support they got from the president, and finally, it shows related protests happening outside banks at Amherst, MS, and Charlotte, NC. Eventually, Bank of America paid the workers what they demanded.
Moore ends his film by showing himself spanning yellow tape across several bank buildings that says “CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.” He narrates a message to the audience, telling them he is getting “too old for this,” and calling them to join him, and to “please…speed it up.”
The film cannot be ignored by anyone who watches it. It's a patriotic call to harms to address the dehumanizing effects of unbridled capitalism and the power people possess to stop it.
Elisabeth Sharber - Elisabeth Sharber is a Messiah College graduate with a BA in English, and minors in politics and psychology. She is currently job ...
