Michael Moore and Plutonomy

From OneUtah here.

Last night, I went to Moore’s latest cinematic op-ed, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” I haven’t seen a Michael Moore film since “Roger & Me.” I did watch his brilliant, short-lived network series “TV Nation” (IMHO the immediacy of television makes it a better medium for Moore).

The film introduces us to the term “plutonomy,” coined five years ago by Ajay Kapur of Citigroup Global Markets. Actually, I think “Plutonomy” would have made a better movie title (Moore originally wanted to call it “Manifesto” because this is a sort of a summation of how he thinks America has gone wrong).

In a plutonomy, Kapur wrote:

[T]he top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) – the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together.

The result of a plutonomy is that the economy — particularly the financial sector — gets run largely by and for that top 1 percent. One of the big reasons for last year’s economic collapse was that increasingly exotic investments were created to attract investors. The top 1 percent has so much money compared to the rest of us that they ran out of opportunities for high returns in the “real” economy, and turned to derivatives.

One of the funniest moments in “Capitalism” was when Moore tried to get the experts to explain derivatives and credit-default swaps in plain English. It turns out there’s no way to do that, except to just concede it’s the same as making a bet on something, like you would place with a bookie. On screen, the New York Stock Exchange trading floor morphs into a Las Vegas casino.

The top 1 percent are not believers in majority rule. When the inevitable collapse came a year ago, the House of Representatives was swamped with calls from constituents opposed to the Bush administration’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The House voted “no.” Then, pressure was applied and “no” turned into “yes” –against the expressed will of the vast majority of Americans.

When Moore points out the really inconvenient (to the right-wing) fact that raw capitalism is antithetical to both democracy and Christianity, he’s really saying that plutonomy is the problem. We have more than 90 percent of the votes, but the rich have found out how to make that irrelevant. Most for-profit companies are anything but democratic, yet we go to work for them every day. Hypocrites go around claiming God is on their side, but would Jesus ring the trading bell on Wall Street?

There’s a laugh-out-loud sequence where Moore has re-dubbed Max von Sydow in “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” Instead of evicting the money-changers, the capitalist Jesus extols the virtues of financial deregulation. Brought a chronically ill man in need of a miracle, Jesus pronounces it a “pre-existing condition” and says there is nothing he can do to help.

Michael Moore will be the first to admit he’s a failure, as he did in a recent interview. This movie even revisits “Roger & Me” and has a new scene of Moore, 20 years later, still trying to persuade unamused security guards to let him in to see the head of General Motors. None of his films have changed American politics. This one probably won’t either, even though it opens with an anarchic montage of bank robbery videos, features an overabundance of scary music and ends with a call to revolution based on FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights.”

But at least somebody knows what’s wrong. It’s the plutonomy, stupid. (Rated “R” because Moore asks the same question we all did when the economy went down like the Titanic and the billionaires got all the lifeboats: “What the FUCK happened?”)

See more about the "Plutonomy" here and here. Also see here.