AT THE END of his last movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore wraps yellow tape emblazoned with the words "CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER" around the buildings of the New York Stock Exchange and the banks that received hundreds of billions of dollars in no-strings taxpayer bailouts.
In the same film, Moore, a left-wing Irish-American Catholic, interviews two priests and a bishop who confirm his belief that capitalism is sinful. “Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil,” Moore concludes. “You have to replace it with something that is good for all people, and that something is called democracy.”
As the credits start to roll, Moore appeals to cinema-goers with his mix of sardonic humour and world-weariness: “I can’t really do this any more unless you people seeing this in the theatre want to join me . . . Please speed it up.”
In the two years since Capitalism: A Love Storywas released, Moore's diagnosis of a corrupt, unjust and irredeemable financial system has gained currency in the US. The momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement seems a direct and positive answer to Moore's appeal.
When Moore visited the protestors’ encampment at Zuccotti Park on September 26th, he told them the wealthiest Americans “have tried to take our democracy and turn it into a kleptocracy . . . These people on Wall Street ripped off the future of many of these young people here and their not-yet-born children. It was the greatest heist certainly of my lifetime.”
For 22 years, since he made Roger & Me, a film about about how General Motors shipped all the jobs in Moore's home town of Flint, Michigan to Mexico, Moore has been a thorn in the side of corporate America. His films dissect the absurdities of American life: the gun craze, the inability to create a decent healthcare system, the exploitation of the 9/11 attacks by the Bush administration. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen's story, Moore shouts out that the emperor has no clothes.
Four days after the Iraq war started, Moore used his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards (for best documentary for Bowling for Columbine) to criticise "a fictitious president" elected by "fictitious election results" for "sending us to war for fictitious reasons". Moore paid a high price for the outburst. As he recounts in his new book, Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life, the threats, insults and physical attacks on him started immediately. Police arrested a man in Ohio who had amassed a cache of assault weapons and bombmaking materials for the purpose of killing Moore. He hired former Navy Seals as bodyguards.
Two stories in Capitalismare precursors of today's Occupy Wall Street movement: one is about a community in Florida that unites to drive police away from a home in which its former owners are squatting; the other is about workers in Chicago who refuse to leave their factory until they receive the severance pay to which they are entitled.
“I refuse to live in a country like this. And I’m not leaving,” Moore says.
THE FIRST STOPon Moore's "living-room tour" to promote Here Comes Troubleturns out to be a beer party for young professionals in their 20s, in a back garden strung with fairy lights, in Washington DC. Few have bought the book but all have seen the movie. One young woman tells Moore how her cousin was jailed in the juvenile prison scam that Moore denounced. A young man says he wept at the sequence about the factory workers in Chicago.
“I put that in there because I wanted to show you have more power than them,” Moore says. “They have the money, but you have the people. In the voting booth, it’s your hand on the lever.”
For the two hours that Moore sits on the garden deck, surrounded by dozens of young people, the oft-repeated word “revolution” provokes a frisson of excitement. “You can’t kick millions of people out of their homes,” Moore says. “You can’t f**k with people’s lives.”
Mike Elk is a 25-year-old labour reporter for the Chicago-based progressive magazine In These Timesand the organiser of the revolutionary soiree with Moore. "When we were in middle school, when we were in high school, before the rise of bloggers, there was only Michael Moore," Elk says. "We grew up with TV Nationand Awful Truth[Moore's television programmes]. We watched all his movies. For so many years, Michael Moore was the only voice in the wilderness saying what so many young people felt in their hearts."
Moore is a consummate storyteller, funny and poignant. His book is a series of vignettes: Moore in a Senate lift with Bobby Kennedy at the age of 11; encounters with John Lennon, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; his childhood wonder at seeing Michelangelo’s Pietà; the sadness of his mother’s death; a close call with the Abu Nidal terrorist group.
Moore talks more about his setbacks than his triumphs: how he was sacked as editor of Mother Jonesmagazine; his row with his erstwhile employer, Ralph Nader, the consumer activist. "Young people, whenever something shitty happens to you – you get fired, you get dumped – it's a sign that something great is about to happen to you!" he tells his young audience.
Washington is a merciless city in a country without mercy. “So many of these young people are going through the same frustration,” Elk says. “To hear Michael Moore say, ‘Look, you can do this dynamic thing. I was in the same boat as you,’ is really helpful.”
Moore’s desire to learn from the experiences of other countries is also a rarity in the US. He tells the young Washingtonians that workers hold half the seats on the boards of German companies with more than 2,000 employees; that in Canada, old-fashioned, pencil and paper elections prevent the kind of fraud that elected George W Bush in 2000; that teachers are highly regarded and well paid in Finland.
MOORE CAMPAIGNEDfor Democrats in the last two presidential campaigns, but when I ask about the 2012 race, he replies glumly, "I don't know what I'm going to do."
He is disappointed with Obama. Of the 2008 election, Moore says, “I walked into a voting booth and I looked down at the ballot and I started to cry. I could not believe I was in my lifetime being able to vote not only for an African-American but for someone who had the balls to put his middle name on that ballot in post-9/11 America. I looked down and I saw the word Hussein. I just thought, Oh my God. How many hundreds of political consultants told him: ‘Do not put your middle name on this ballot’? And he said, ‘Dammit, that’s my name and it’s going on the ballot.’
“Where is that guy? Where’s the guy who had the courage to do that? So I voted for a person who had courage and conviction and I haven’t seen hardly any of that in his first three years.”
In an opinion poll this week, 55 per cent of Americans surveyed said they thought Obama would lose to a Republican. Obama’s base will vote for him, Moore predicts. “But we, each of us, are not going to bring 20 people with us like last time. Because we’re not good actors. We can’t say to our neighbours, ‘Let’s go down to the phone banks and make some calls, because look how great everything has been for the last three years.’ ”
Moore hasn’t given up on Obama, but he wants action, not words. He wants Obama to reverse his weakening of environmental regulations, and to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now. “[Obama’s] justice department needs to investigate the people who crashed this economy back in 2008,” Moore says. “We need to see a perp walk. We need to see some bankers and some Wall Street people arrested who played with and lost the money of millions of Americans. He needs to be a doer.”
‘Obama is worse than George Bush, because he knows better’
THE SCRIPT OF the US protest movement is written on T-shirts and placards at Freedom Plaza: Human Need Not Corporate Greed. Healthcare Not Warfare. Corporations Hands Off Our Government. Let’s Have An American Spring. You Have the Right to Remain Silent But I Don’t Recommend It. Windmills Not Oil Spills. Stop Killing the Planet. Join the Resistance.
An old black woman stands on the periphery of the demonstration with a handmade sign: “Tired of babysitting for the riches,” it says. “Tax their ass.”
One month ago today, an amorphous group calling itself Occupy Wall Street took over a park in lower Manhattan. They had grown from a few dozen to thousands by this Wednesday, when the leading US trade unions joined their march. On Thursday, protests started in Washington DC. Organisers say close to 300 such movements have sprung up across the US and overseas.
It is impossible to say how long the fledgling movement will continue or whether it will bring real change. But Wall Street is worried. Andrew Ross Sorkin reported in the New York Times that the chief executive of a major bank called him to ask: “Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal? We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried. Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
Margaret Flowers gave up her medical practice four years ago to campaign for healthcare reform. Then she realised the problem is bigger than healthcare and began organising the Washington protest six months ago. I found the 48-year-old working on a portable computer, under a parasol, on Freedom Plaza. “The healthcare movement cannot take on the corporate power that has a stranglehold over conditions,” Flowers says. “The normal tools of advocacy are not sufficient. There is such wealth inequality.”
Tarak Kauff was opening cardboard boxes filled with freshly printed placards, paid for by contributions on the october2011.org website. “A lot of my time is spent organising the resistance,” the 70-year-old says. “We are here because people feel that corporations have taken over every aspect of our lives. We’re not organised by organisations; this is people coming together. It’s a little messy and it takes time, but it’s real.”
Kauff predicts the Democratic Party will try to co-opt the movement. “But this is not about getting Democrats elected instead of Republicans because they will be nicer. We know better,” he says. “This is a wave, a historical wave, and we are riding it.”
The last time Art and Nancy Brennan, a retired judge and school teacher, aged 64 and 63, drove from their home in New Hampshire to Washington was to witness Obama’s inauguration. “He sold out so soon to the corporate machine,” Nancy says. “We have less rights than before. Obama’s worse than George Bush, because he knows better.”
A tall, thin man in a black top hat and tailcoat, with a plastic pig’s snout attached to his nose, makes his way through the crowd. “Brother, can you spare a billion?” says the pseudo-banker’s sign.
Two young men with a placard saying “Support our troops. Kill the terrorists” stand out in the mostly left-wing assembly. A Tea Party representative is embroiled in an argument with an anti-war protestor. “You called me an asshole! That’s pretty mean!” says the Tea Partier.
Do the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have anything in common? Alex Cortes of Let Freedom Ring, a Tea Party affiliate, says, "Yes. We're against corporate bailouts. We agree on the right to freely protest. But I suspect my kind of revolution is not theirkind of revolution."
Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life, by Michael Moore, is published by Allen Lane.Moore is at the Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin, on October 17th; michaelmoorelive.com
