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There a few filmmakers less fit to get to the bottom of our financial crisis than Michael Moore, but he's still gonna try.
How does he put it?
The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn't have enough wealth. They wanted more -- a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money. Now, why would they do this? That is what I seek to discover in this movie.
So he already knows what caused the crisis. The only thing that interests him at this point is the psychology of the people responsible.
His film was never high on my must-see list, but I have to thank him for admitting up front he's proceeding from a false premise--it's saved me whatever time and money I may have spent watching it.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:05 AM
2 Comments:
Of course but its a false premise that many of all persuasions have been making -including the President as well as candidate McCain and both parties in Congress- that some evil persons' evil activities are responsible for the current economic crisis.
A far more interesting movie would work off Richard Posner's recent book (I have only read reviews and summaries so far so this is only based on them) which states that the crisis is the predictable result of reasonable people acting reasonably within the accepted rules of the system- i.e. the market is wonderful thing mainly but that it is occasionally capable of fantastic flame-outs and can't always self-correct. His argument doesn't fit into a tidy ideological kit bag (I imagine he would further argue that no matter how wrong the market goes on its own, regulation is more likely to make it go wrong-er)so the talking heads probably won't take it up.
I've read his book and, while I think he lets a few people off a bit easy, his main problem is he doesn't go far enough. He suggests after this is over (after? what good is that) we should sit down and figure out how to prevent it from happening again. As if somehow we can predict exactly what will go wrong in the future, rather than pressing down strong on the economy won't slow it down without necessarily preventing further meltdowns.
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