Michael Moore on Capitalism: 'Anti-Christian,' 'Anti-American' System
Filmmaker Michael Moore says capitalism conflicts with religion, democracy.
Sept. 22, 2009— -- "Anti-Jesus." "Anti-American." "Anti-democracy."
That's not a conservative pundit blasting communism or socialism. It's filmmaker Michael Moore talking about the target of his latest film: capitalism.
In "Capitalism: A Love Story," Moore takes aim at corporate America and Wall Street, for what he says amounts to robbing the American taxpayers and promoting a culture of greed.
He profiles several stories of economic hardship, from the now familiar tale of a family forced out of their home by the mortgage crisis, to more shocking anecdotes about families who discover the corporations their deceased loved ones worked for made money off their employees' deaths -- a practice referred to within several companies as "Dead Peasants."
Moore says the film gets to the core of what he's been trying to say throughout his career.
"I've done this for 20 years, and I'm tired of dancing around it," he said. "You know, make a movie about General Motors here, make a movie about the health care industry there. These are all spokes to the hub. And that hub is capitalism."
"[It's] an economic system that's ... protecting, and guaranteeing the richest 1 percent, so that they have as much financial wealth as the bottom 95 percent combined ...In a democracy, how can you have that?" Moore said. "How can you have the richest 1 percent really calling the shots like that?"
In his first television interview about the film, Moore suggests that corruption-filled capitalism conflicts with the values of a democratic system of government.
"Corporate America ... they are all about trying to make as much money as they can ... This capitalism doesn't seem to have a moral or ethical center to it. And it has very little to do with democracy," Moore told "Nightline's" Terry Moran. "We need to interject democratic values into our economic order."
One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the New York City investment bank, whose failure sent shockwaves throughout the global economy and marked the beginning of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, Moore says the economic system has spiraled out of control.
"This thing is so on steroids at this point, so out of control, I don't think that just a few rules and regulations are going to correct it," he said. "I think we are too far down the road, the genie is too far out of the bottle, and I think that this is probably an excellent time to say, 'OK, if we could create our own American order, our own economic order, how would we do that? And let's start with democracy in mind and having a moral value system attached to it.'"
Moore took Moran on a tour of New York City's financial district -- the lion's den of the financial crisis -- to the institutions Moore considers the worst offenders, Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange. In the film, he carries out what could be described as a classic Michael Moore stunt by wrapping the perimeters of the buildings in yellow crime scene tape.
"I believe this is a crime scene. I believe that millions of Americans have had their pensions robbed from them, their jobs stolen from them," Moore said. "People in the top floors of these buildings, they know what they've done to the average American. And they know that the possibility exists as that … there could be a severe backlash to all of this -- that the peasants may revolt."
