Art and Culture Articles - A review of the movie Capitalism: A Love Story


by JOSEPH JAGDE - Date: 2009-10-19 - Word Count: 717 Share This!

This movie brings about a general knock on the capitalistic approach and this is not out of tune with Mr. Moore's previous movies.

Partly, there is a general sense that the major financial giants have raided the general public for another round of super bonuses and more money to slush around with. Giant financials seemed to pull the strings endlessly, filling their coffers again with taxpayer money.

In the context of the broad base of taxpayers, mostly lugging away at relatively lower paying jobs, this is not of out context with reality.

As usual Mr. Moore sometimes slants the angle to far to get the points but it does resonate aptly and he gets some good mini interviews with some of the players especially in Congress.

His notions and conclusions are somewhat contradictory. There should be more guarantees of a job, home and so on according to him, but that doesn't seem to be taking into account current realities where something like 25 percent of workers in major cities are freelancers and the earlier job models don't hold in and lots of free information is available in the web which means that in a service based economy, it is harder to charge for the services to the extent that it could be done previously.

It is interesting that according to the movie there is a possible tie in to Roosevelt understudies and the model of reconstruction in post World War 2 European reconstruction which was U.S. led but evolved with greater social enhancements for individuals than those that ever came about here.

Obviously with the foreclosures there is also the fault of some people that took on mortgages they couldn't hang with and others who aptly took advantage of the boom in flipping houses.

But the whole state of affairs points to what is wrong with the economy and working class in the first place.

The developed skill set of workers, so called talented or not, is very much geared toward market maneuverings and there is only so much of skill that actually comes from that that has wider and useful benefits that actually forms into a contribution to society.

Even the high flyer derivative players, are just playing high stakes with other peoples money. But could this also be the fault of the other people who handed their money over and might they also be so called greedy. Bottom line is lots of people wanted something for nothing.

It was annoying the way the movie treated the issue of derivatives in particular where it even shows a Harvard professor stumbling to explain them. You wonder if this was just a staged scene for the movie rather than a clip.

Derivatives are nothing extraordinary or that complicated, it is just financial products put to creative mathematics and that is about it, so there is no reason to insult anybody's intelligence by calling this things nearly without understanding or difficult to grasp.

It isn't necessarily true that in the long run the large financial players will not get caught and be legally responsible, although they had a long and easy free legal ride before they got caught.

Obviously enough leeway was out there, to let these so called financial big shots go unfettered or look to go unfettered as in the perfect example of Henry Paulson, who insultingly sends in a three page request giving him the keys to nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to remedy as he pleases, not withstanding his own possible ties to the money within his near billion dollar personal fortune. Should a billionaire be given on top of that nearly a trillion of taxpayer dollars to play with? Is that the right window to a view of the common man and his toils?

The movie garners some nice footage from old union disputes, the historical Obama campaign and victory announcement and the unfortunate state of some of the cities in terms of faltering housing.

Probably the most haunting scene was a banker who went to get the house back from a sit in and as the scene unfolded he is standing on the front porch, not really reacting to any side but just in the state of unspoken bewilderment as to how these things and problems got so big.


Related Tags: money, banking, economhy

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