Michael, Just What DO You Want Us to Do?

Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story provided entertainment yesterday afternoon but left us shaking our heads. The message? I think he wants us to rise up and stop banks from foreclosing on people who haven’t paid their mortgages, stop the cabal from Goldman Sachs from running the government, and oh, throw the crooks who run AIG into a prison cell.  Realistic? No.

Watching Moore at the movie’s end wrap crime scene tape around buildings on Wall Street weakened his argument, and just made it all look like, well, a Michael Moore movie.  He managed to make some salient points; such as the ‘dead peasant’ provisions that many corporations use to take out secret life insurance policies on employees, but again, what are we do to?

Movies like this do provide some education and for that I’m glad I watched it.  I think that Senator Chris Dodd’s decision not to run again for the 100th term might have been spurred on by this movie, that reveals his ties to Countrywide as a ‘Friend of [chairman] Angelo’s.’

An interesting twist was that now in 2010, a year after the movie was made, I think most of the $400 billion lent out to banks, insurance companies and the auto industry has been paid back. Proving that the giant risk, that outrageous act that nobody in the movie could believe we’d ever do, was actually a smart investment that earned the US billions in interest.