Moore's musings

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog
We might not agree with Michael Moore upon everything in his new movie "Capitalism: A Love story" but in this interview there are points in which we do share . One of those is that the capitalist class rule by virtue of the consent of the many.

" Capitalism is not only an economic system that legalizes greed, it also has at its foundation a political system of capitalism that is, 'We have to buy the political system because we don't have enough votes. We're only 1% of the votes. We have to buy the people, and we have to buy the people by convincing them if they work hard, they too can be rich one day.' "

"I think they

[The wealthiest Americans] exposed themselves to a lot of middle class people who did believe in their system and they showed everybody the Ponzi scheme that it is. It's set up like a pyramid, so that the richest 1% at the top have more financial wealth than the 95% beneath them.
But the trick here is to get the 95% believing that if they work hard and slave away, they would get to the top of the pyramid. Of course, as we know, only a few people can stand on top of a pyramid. The fact that this crash exposed our economic system as a corrupt scam was something I didn't intend on happening while I was making the movie."
"Where's the cure for cancer? Where's the bullet train to take us from New York to L.A. in 10 hours? Where are the alternative energy systems to save us when we run out of oil? I wish these were the priorities. But when Wall Street sucks up our best mathematicians, physicists, engineers, when they should be working on these other things and instead they're working to create derivatives ... c'mon. We're in deep, deep trouble. We need the best minds working on these things."
In the movie , Moore ends with this conclusion: "Capitalism is an evil and you can't regulate evil. You have to replace it with something that is good for everyone."
He is not quite there yet on understanding what that "something" is but hopefully , he is getting there and also hopefully so are many others .

Alan Johnstone