This weekend, I’ve been watching films at Sheffield’s Doc/Fest. One of the highlights so far has been Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a Love Story, which Jonathan has already blogged about here. After the screening, Moore answered questions from the audience (via Skype, no less). Below are a few choice excerpts.
Your film outlines the human impact of last year’s financial crash. Do you have much hope that Obama can fix these problems?
You can’t expect things to change overnight and there’s not time in nine months to fix catastrophes left by the Bush administration. But I don’t believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, and he might not be able to fix the problems left by Bush and Cheney.
In the UK there seemed to be more protection against the banking collapse. Why do you think the US doesn’t have that protection?
For some reason as Americans we want you to be punished if you lose your job or get an illness. If you hit hard times it’s at that moment that we want to be exceptionally cruel. People in America are good on an individual basis, but collectively we get angry at the world. Why do we want to punish people when they get ill? I’ve never really understood it.
Perhaps it’s also because Americans don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the world. Why don’t Americans travel more?
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per monthWhy should we care about the rest of the world? People here aren’t given a reason to care. And it’s this attitude that kills creativity, kills curiosity. We don’t want to know what’s going on in France, Ireland, Finland; that’s not surprising, really, seeing as we don’t even care about ourselves.
I believe there is a basic goodness in people, but they’ve been made stupid. There are 44 million illiterate adults in the US. The media reinforces the stupidity and ignorance, which makes it very easy to manipulate people with fear. That’s my country, anyway, I don’t know how it is in the UK when you have a prime minister who tells you that Iraq could fire a missile on you within 45 minutes [laughs].
What is capitalism?
Well, I can only define it as it exists today — the same as these days you wouldn’t answer the question “What is marriage?” by saying: “Well, it’s something that happens when the groom visits the bride’s father to ask permission . . .” In 2009 capitalism is a system of legalised greed, organised to protect the 1 per cent who own most of the wealth.
Is the “American Dream” — the idea that anyone can become rich if they work hard enough — a good thing?
I think that’s what it is: a dream, not a reality for most people. These days it’s more of a nightmare. In the old days you could work hard and if your boss prospered, then you would prosper. Now you work hard, your boss prospers, then you get sick and you lose your job.
But there are a lot of reasons people all around the world like America. There is something about our get-up-and-go. Sometimes we’re full of ideas — sometimes they’re not very good ideas, sometimes they’re great. My frustration is our capacity to do so much good for the world, the fact we don’t do it is criminal.
You were midway through making the film when Obama was elected president. How did that impact on the project?
Well, I can tell you how it impacted on us as a team: 4 November 2008 was one of the happiest days we’ve had in decades. We could not believe our fellow citizens came through and did this. There is a lot of racism around, so just the fact that people pushed through that and chose the better person, the smarter person.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in the 1930s, suddenly you had John Steinbeck, all this art, cinema, all these books — we felt we were one of the first films of a new era, out of the darkness of the last 30 years. Kind of an enlightenment, that’s how it feels.
I would like Roosevelt’s dream of a second Bill of Rights [which would guarantee the right to a job, to education and to health care] to live on. When I say [in the film] that Europe has all these things, I don’t mean you shouldn’t have them. No system is perfect — not even the NHS is perfect — but you have at your core a belief that if someone gets sick they should be able to go to a doctor. So Obama gave us the feeling that maybe he will be the Roosevelt of the 21st century. We still have that hope, even after a year.
What practical advice would you give to everyday people who want to act on what they’ve seen in your film?
What you in the UK can do is stop being like us. All the consumption, the way we eat, the way we treat each other. What you’ve done in the UK, first during the Thatcher years, then during the Thatcher-lite years — and especially your last prime minister — you have copied the US and made it easier for the rich to get away with murder. You once had a system based on social democracy and you need to make sure that people still have a say.
Now you’re going to have a Conservative prime minister, because people who supported Labour didn’t rise up and say “enough”. The UK provided a cover for Bush. Now you’re going to get punished for it with a Conservative prime minister and I’m so sorry about that.
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