The Phony Radicalism of Michael Moore
by
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Sheldon Richman, <!-- put date below, before
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22, 2009
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0910h.asp
With phony
radicals like Michael Moore around, the ruling elite has nothing to
worry about.
The filmmaker
likes to pose as a radical critic of the status quo, but he isn’t.
All the evidence you need is in his latest documentary,
Capitalism: A Love Story. Sure, he rails against home
foreclosures, bank bailouts, low wages, other real and imagined
problems, but his solution would not disturb the sleep of any big
banker, corporate bigwig, or political big shot.
The tipoff
comes right at the beginning of the movie. He paints an idyllic
picture of life in America in the 1950s. His father worked for a
big auto company, through which the family got free medical and
dental care. All was well. He realizes that a major reason things
were so good was that the U.S. military had destroyed Japan’s and
Germany’s competitive industrial bases in World War II. But
the dominance was great while it lasted. It was a time when an
alliance of big government, big business, and big labor ruled the
roost. The military-industrial complex was thriving. That seems
fine with Moore, which puts him in the camp of the corporatists of
Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, who thought free markets and
competition among independent firms were passé. The new world
required big monolithic entities that sat down together and worked
things out nicely. The spirit of Mussolini hovered over all of
it.
Of course,
Moore blasts Wall Street because it got all that taxpayer bailout
money and is not being held accountable for it. That is worth
getting mad about. But how would he feel if the money had been
given with lots of conditions and regulations? He might
have liked that.
He certainly
doesn’t mind that the government had the taxpayers’ money to give
away in the first place. He never once suggests that the people
should keep their own money because the political elite has no
right to it. He also never indicts the Federal Reserve for its
legal counterfeiting. That would be the true radical position.
Moore sides with the politicians. He even complains that the top
income-tax rate was lowered from 90 percent some years ago!
Conveniently, he gets the history wrong. He says Republican Ronald
Reagan cut the 90 percent rate, but it was really Democrat Lyndon
Johnson who did it, following through on John Kennedy’s proposal.
(Reagan presided over a cut from 70 to 50 and then to 28 percent.)
At any rate, he is perfectly comfortable with government’s taking
90 percent of people’s earnings. He seems indifferent about whether
the money is made through honest trade or political
privilege.
Favoring a
high top rate may not win him favors from some in the
establishment, but for generations there has been a wing of that
establishment that understood that high marginal rates were the
price of the lucrative corporate state. So Moore may not be the
pariah among the ruling elite that he makes himself out to
be.
Moore’s movie
contains much else to make us doubt his radical bona fides. He
blusters about Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers,
and their relationship to the current financial problems. Rubin, a
Wall Street hotshot, and Summers were Treasury secretaries under
President Bill Clinton. Geithner ran the New York Federal Reserve
Bank from late 2003 to 2009, overseeing the Wall Street bailouts.
In Moore’s eyes, they are the rogues who, along with former Fed
chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson, gave us the meltdown of 2008.
So far so
good. But when he gets to the election of Barack Obama in November
2008 he declares, “This is not what Wall Street wanted.” Yeah? Then
why are Moore’s bêtes noires Rubin and Summers close Obama economic
advisors, and why is Geithner secretary of the Treasury?
A true radical
would not have given Obama a pass. Moore says he’s for socialism,
but all he means by that is that workers have some say in their
companies. Nothing very radical about that.
If Moore were
truly a radical critic of capitalism as he conceives it, he’d be
for its true opposite: the radical separation of business and State
— that is, the free market.
