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horses4courses
02-23-2010, 05:43 PM
Seems that the new Michael Moore film is debuting in Euro film festivals.

Does he have any fans in this forum?

Here's a short preview from today's "Irish Times" newspaper:

Capitalism: A Love Story
February 23, 2010 @ 2:10 am | by Laura Slattery
Twenty years after he made Roger & Me about the decline of his home town of Flint, Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story is an early contender for horror movie of the decade. Any film featuring full-time pilots forced to rely on food stamps to survive, privately run prisons profiting off the incarceration of innocent teenagers, blue chip companies that take out something known (amongst themselves) as “dead peasants” insurance and an army of aptly named “condo vultures” is always going to be pretty spine-chilling.

Capitalism… has got all that and a brief history of Reaganomics. Moore’s film documents how the financial crisis turned cities across the US into Flint-like pockets of desolation, with boarded-up windows and a grim proliferation of ripped-up furniture amassing on the roadsides. Shown at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival at the weekend, Capitalism… picks up where Roger & Me ended. Moore’s deeply sarcastic conclusion in 1989 that General Motors’ gutting of the Michigan town (laying off tens of thousands of workers at a time when it was massively profitable) was “truly the dawn of a new era” has turned out to be even more accurate and damning a prophecy that he could have imagined. Its days as the proud production centre for Cadillacs long behind it, this time Moore found that Flint had the honour of providing the PO Box for a company that processes hundreds of thousands of foreclosure notices to defrauded customers of predatory lenders.

During Moore’s childhood in Flint’s 1950s heyday, the marginal rate of tax was more than 90 per cent, he notes, and yet the rich still led a good life. In the decades that followed, the rate more than halved. Washington became synonymous with Wall Street, the rulebooks for financial institutions were burned and real incomes for workers flatlined. In March 2006, Citigroup - then the world’s largest bank - wrote triumphantly in a (now notorious) memo entitled “Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer” that 1 per cent of the wealth was safely in the hands of 95 per cent of the population. An even greater concentration of wealth was possible, Citigroup speculated: the only threat to this glorious state of being was the risk that voters might suddenly demand a more “equitable” share of the loot.

Thankfully, the plutonomists were in place to maintain control of the peasants via an increasingly well-trodden path from the Goldman Sachs boardroom to the White House. Nobody wanted rid of capitalism, because everyone thought it possible that they too could someday be the ones with the corporate jet. For all this villainy and despair, Capitalism… is casually hilarious. All the trademark Moore-isms are deployed: the purposefully gormless attempts to doorstep CEOs; the archive footage of Stalinist marches to mock capitalist propaganda; the faux-incredulity as he asks a succession of bankers to explain the equations that purported to prove how financial derivatives work.

On that subject, however, nothing in the film made me quite as incredulous as the passage in John Lanchester’s book Whoops! (reviewed here) on how the financial institutions’ resident mathematicians (the “quants”) peddled to the world models of risk calculation so impossibly wrong that they confidently asserted that the risk of a meltdown in the US property market was such that it would only happen in a time-frame many, many trillions of years longer than the history of the universe. I’d have liked to have seen Moore’s bad-actor face as someone told him that piece of delusional pseudo-science.

For an entertaining summary of Wall Street’s dubious grasp of maths, read this 2008 paper by a group of UCD economists. For a definitive account of the event lovingly known as the GFC (global financial crisis) by those who caused it, buy Whoops! And in the meantime, Capitalism: A Love Story is on general release from Friday.

horses4courses
02-23-2010, 05:53 PM
Seems it's been around a while.....I don't get out much

:lol:

Greyfox
02-23-2010, 06:44 PM
Seems it's been around a while.....I don't get out much

:lol:

Were you just released out of somewhere? :lol:

boxcar
02-23-2010, 11:04 PM
Were you just released out of somewhere? :lol:

Maye he was one of those innocent teenagers locked away in a dark dungeon and cared for my corporate jailers. :eek:

Boxcar

Leonard
02-23-2010, 11:18 PM
Seems it's been around a while.....I don't get out much

:lol:

Of course it is new -- it was released quite a while ago but no one has seen it yet! :lol:

NJ Stinks
02-23-2010, 11:34 PM
Of course it is new -- it was released quite a while ago but no one has seen it yet! :lol:

Just to show what a good guy I really am, Leonard, when it comes to Jersey I'm going to buy theater tickets for you and all my conservative buddies here. :ThmbUp:

And don't worry. You don't have to go. :lol:

Leonard
02-24-2010, 12:45 AM
Just to show what a good guy I really am, Leonard, when it comes to Jersey I'm going to buy theater tickets for you and all my conservative buddies here. :ThmbUp:

And don't worry. You don't have to go. :lol:

:lol:

46zilzal
02-24-2010, 12:45 AM
Saw that in October