Despite complaints about his ego, filmmaking style and his overexposure in the 2004 elections, Michael Moore remains the most effective, progressive and influential filmmaker out there.
Expect the MSM to attack Moore for the hypocrisy and corruption spotlighted in this film, as they did with Sicko and Fahrenheit 911. There is something terribly wrong with this country that the MSM acts as a willing or passive co-conspirator in the outrages perpetrated on this country by corporations and the politicians they own, yet is aggressively confrontational in their mission to discredit an independent filmmaker who accurately exposes and analyzes what is happening in this country.
Don’t know about you but there haven’t been many films this year that have motivated me to go to the theater but I am looking forward to seeing this one.
A poster on HP from the Netherlands made a very good point about capitalism the other night. I’m familiar with the Dutch healthcare system because of my research but he reiterated that the Dutch healthcare insurance industry was 100% private and it delivers low cost policies something like $200/individual and quality healthcare. The big difference in the US and in the Netherlands is they have dozens of private insurance competitors and fierce healthcare regulations where every insurer has to have a minimal plan that is really quite generous.
One of the problems in this country is we just don’t have real capitalism in the sense of real competition in too many industrial sectors. So when that happens the only choice we have is to add competition to the market using something like a public plan for healthcare.
Bottom line in this country we don’t have free market capitalism. We have a series of oligarchies in almost every important industry.
The real question is, “Should Health Insurance be as profitable and unregulated a business as selling TVs?”
If there is a profit incentive to someone not receiving health care, is that not a fascist society in the true sense of the word? A corporately run nation.
Profit before lives?
How is that moral? If it is not, then unbridled capitalism is immoral and dangerous and should be restrained as any other sociopath would be in this society.
No absolutely not. The fact is the basic program in the Netherlands is a mostly a loss leader (subsidized by the government) for private healthcare insurance companies but they make modest profits on their supplemental plans.
But really the for profit companies in the US are oligarchies where CEOs and corporate officers make 5-10X what they do in Europe and have much higher overhead costs than in Europe so they are not even close in comparison.
The US just has a culture of excess in corporate America.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a 1998 Michael Moore film I had not seen or even heard of before. “The Big One” documents the great “downsizing” that got underway in the wake of NAFTA, and though much of it was filmed prior to the 1996 election (Remember? -the lowest turnout in American electoral history), its release was delayed until way AFTER the election. Check it out and you’ll understand WHY! The segment featuring newly unemployed workers at the Centralia, Illinois “Payday” candy bar plant is incredibly prescient.
EB rates this film a “humdinger”, and it’s available through Netflix.
(Yeah…I know…they should be paying me a sales commission.heh)
Hi Ernestine!
Yes, I was one of the probable few who saw it back then. After “Roger and Me”, I was a fan. Did you see his tv series, TV Nation?
Some of the same issues in The Big One were attacked on his series.
It is frustrating and a bit depressing to look back at all the things we opposed or would have opposed had the MSM filled us in and see how they have all come together to undermine our democracy and the welfare of the nation’s citizens.
We’re wiser now and we do have the tubes of The Internets now to expose and oppose further descent into the madness that corporate greed has wrought.
Still, I play what-ifs in my mind sometimes. If JFK and RFK weren’t assassinated, there probably wouldn’t have been a Nixon or a Reagan or a Bush and America would necessarily have been a very different place in 2009.
Fortunately, Moore adds “A Love Story” to the title “Capitalism”. The concrete minded will accept “love” and “capitalism” in the same sentence without squawking “socialism!”
The MSM has been in on it ever since Watergate. That’s when they were invited to the White House and took their first bites into the cocktail party canap
Indeed, the co-opting of the press became worse and worse since then. The embedding of journalists in Iraq ended critical reporting of the war for years.
The press is not supposed to be so cozy with the government. They think it’s a way to get better scoops or not be shut out, by becoming a friend of politicians but as Judith Miller might remind us, they simply become dangerous pawns.
Talking about movies, you’ve seen the Paddy Chayefsky penned classic, “Network”?
A wise and insightful writer who knew TV very well, he foresaw the total corporate takeover of news and the seduction of turning it into a profit center instead of something that may not make money but was a social responsibility.
The real news people in the past saw their work as part of a social compact enshrined by the Founders of the nation…that the press would represent the virtual fourth branch of government, being the safety net if the other three branches were not respecting the will of the people.
Now, the virtual fourth branch of government has been vacated as corporations put ratings and their corporate owners’ interests first.
That has created a vacuum that independent parties on the internet have fortunately filled to a degree.
Still, as we’ve seen with the propagation of the meme that Granny Skeet Shooting is becoming legal, the influence of the MSM is not exactly neutralized by blogs and online reporting.
Anyone or anything that owns the language, owns the reality. Ain’t that so?
WE need to become the “virtual” fourth branch of government. And I think it’s my duty to get in there and report on exactly what is transpiring in the White House.
AdLib, I’ll need my id, traveling expenses, new wardrobe allowances, and a trailer (just in case I don’t like my room at the Ritz-Carlton).
Whew! I was waiting for the request for a G4.
As to your requests:
1. I will send your ID card to you as soon as I finish whiting out Chucky Cheese from it.
2. I will need to know what the Greyhound bus fare is from NY to DC.
3. To blend in, best for you to look like an ordinary American, out of work and foreclosed on so wearing the same set of clothes each day would be great. We will of course provide the quarters for weekly visits to the laundromat.
4. I have worked out a sweet deal on obtaining a trailer for you, it’s on its way but it may take a while to get to DC as it is just outside of New Orleans right now. We’ve installed several Glade Plug In Air Fresheners so you’ll hardly notice any scent of formaldehyde.
I do think it has come down to the citizens needing to step up and guard their own democracy. So I plan on attending any town hall meetings held by Republicans with a Death Star satellite just to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights.
1) Works for me.
2) Works for me.
3) Works for me.
4) Works for me.
So….am I in?
😆 My own trailer, have always loved outdoor plumbing with old newspapers cut to size hanging on a rusty nail. Whoopie!!!
All the news that’s fit to detach in little squares.
OK. It’ll only work for me if you make good on that perfume your “intern” lost.
I drive a hard bargain, AdLib. I’m a player in the Altman sense. So WATCH IT!
A player, really? Well, then I’ve got this project to pitch you, “Ms. Questinia Goes To Washington”.
It writes itself!
No. I plan on doing “Citizen Q”, where I play a concerned citizen against urban over development. Scene one is my entering DC one snowy night on a sled called “RoseHUD”.
(GROAN!!!)
Or how about Qasablanca?
Q: I’m shocked, shocked to find that corporate bribery is going on in here!
Aide: Here, your corporate campaign contributions, ma’am.
Q: Oh, thank you very much.
Good one! Or maybe The Qandidate, where a wide-eyed yet savvy blogger is given a press pass to the White House; while donning her Dior evening gown at the Ritz-Carlton, she is spotted by Michelle Obama who convinces her to run for the Senate.
Where am I going with this? Oh yeah, she ends up having an affair with Rahm Emmanuel, and he takes her to the finest perfumerie in all of DC.
Very nice!
Then the follow up could be, “DraQla”, a gothic story about people who suck, naturally set in DC.
You’re in! Being a new start up, The Planet has a limited budget so if you can rid DC of corruption and block the influence of corporations and special interests on politicians by Tuesday, that would be great.