Michael Moore is one of those filmmakers that most seem to either love or hate. I'm kind of in the middle. Some of his stuff I agree with, some I don't. But to hate someone for wanting to at least try and bring forth some things you may not be aware of is kind of foolish I think. I mean, can you name any other documentary filmmaker that has caused so much controversy?
I'm sure that controversy will just keep building with Michael's latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. A movie that will have you laughing at parts and have you wanting to burn down our government in others. I mean, are companies really doing this? Apparently they are.
This subject is just one of many that will have you shaking your head about how things are going in this country. And while I'm in not agreement with sharing the wealth (I think if you earned your money, you have a right to keep it) I do think it's fucked up that the rich aren't paying certain taxes the rest of are.
After the screening last week, Michael Moore spoke to the audience how his views on, well, pretty much everything. The Q&A was moderated by Ariana Huffington and also includes some questions from the crowd in attendance.
Huffington: Ever since I was a little girl growing up in Athens, Greece I always kind of worshipped Cassandra. She spoke the truth. It was a hard truth to hear and many people didn't like it. They prefer right now, for example, to hear a cheerful Ben Bernanke, that sanction is over, but Michael Moore is our Cassandra with a baseball cap. I'm really grateful for you Michael and for what you did. Even though Cassandra wasn't popular during her time, she turned out to be right and the cheerleading Trojans turned out to be wrong and very, very dead. So I just wanted to start, really, by asking you what shocked you the most of all the things you discovered? You already knew a lot when you started. Of all the things that you portray here from the disclosures to the dead peasant policies to Larry Summers still being there making policy after he had been responsible for dismantling all the regulations in the late '90's, what shocked you the most?
Moore: I don't think I'm shocked by much anymore. It's so bothersome that Summers, [Tim] Geithner and [Robert] Rubin are there and in charge of this stuff right now. I've tried to convince myself that it's because…I actually shot a scene that I didn't put in the movie where I interviewed a bank robber who's hired by all the big banks to advise them on how to prevent bank robberies. I thought, 'Well, maybe that's why Obama has brought the version of bank robbers in, the people who actually helped to create this mess, to advise him on how to un-fuck it up.' So I'm hoping that maybe that's the reason they're there. But I realize the truth is probably closer to the fact that Obama probably didn't understand what a derivative was either and was told, 'Well, these are the smart guys. Lets bring them in. They'll know what to do.' So it's disheartening to see these three men in charge of our economy still. But all of the things that you mentioned were equally shocking to me. The airline pilots, what they make. The Dead Peasants insurance. But I guess the strength of the slow change that's occurred over the last thirty years because while I was making this one day I had to stop and remember what it was like when I was a kid and nobody had a credit card. There was a guy down the street, some kid's parents had a Shell card for gas and maybe mom had a JC Penny department store card but that was it. No one was in credit card debt and it was like the beast started to sort of figure out, 'How can I get money out of people. I need more money. So lets get them all charging things. Then lets get their kids when they go to college getting into these twenty year loans.' When we were college age you didn't go to a private bank to get a student loan. There was a thing on the college campus called the financial aid office. You went there and you go financial aid. Sometimes it was work study and you worked in the cafeteria or the library or sometimes it was a low interest loan, like a one or two percent thing that you paid back to the college when you got around to it or there were some scholarships but you weren't going to be beholden for the next twenty years to a private bank. You had a defined pension plan. There was no 401K where all of a sudden, again right around when Reagan became president, this whole concept of putting your pension into the stock market which wasn't going to be guaranteed pension from the moment that you were doing that. So it just sort of amazes me, the slow creep of all of this and probably how I over the years haven't even really thought about how the takeover has occurred.
Huffington: When we talked right after you showed the movie in Venice you said to me that movie really has for you in some euphoric sense and audience of one. Can you tell us about that audience of one?
Moore: When I put that scene in about Obama receiving all that money, when it looked like he was going to win they started throwing all this money at him, all these Wall Street firms and these banks, and I put the thing in there about Goldman Sachs being his number one private contributor and I thought while I was doing that I wasn't really doing this for the general audience. I'm doing it for Obama to see it. I'm doing this scene for an audience of one because I want him to know that we know and I want him to know that I'm telling everybody else. As much as I admire and love the guy I want to put him on notice that if he doesn't do what's in our best interest, if he sides with Wall Street, this organized crime family of banks and investment firms – really, seriously, they're just a legalized form…we talk about Bernie Madoff and his ponzi scheme, that's exactly what they do everyday. They concoct a system holding out this carrot to everybody that you can be at the top here if you just sell enough Amway, but actually at the top are only a very, very few people that have most of the wealth. If he doesn't side with us and he sides with them then the next film will make the stuff that I did about Bush look like a Disney movie.
Huffington: That's really what's so troubling, at least for me, right now, that here we are again and I have that sense that it's as though Obama is a captain of a ship and he's giving that speech this week to Wall Street saying that you need to be responsible, you need to change direction, the ship is now going in that way and really in the boiler room there's another pilot and the ship is going to keep going in the same direction we're going unless something very dramatic happens down in the boiler room. But it's not up here in the speeches and in the rhetoric. In a sense, when you show what happened during that weekend when everyone was terrified into voting for the bailout ultimately because otherwise the whole thing would collapse, it's the way that system is sort of using fear to manipulate and elected officials and the public. Can you talk about this use of fear?
Moore: Well, this is a theme that I've been exploring for the last few films, really, since 'Bowling for Columbine' when I was trying to figure out why we have two hundred and twenty million guns in our homes. I don't think it's all because of pheasants. Most of those guns, I can't remember the exact statistic but it was something like eighty percent of those guns are in the suburbs or in all white sections of town. So why were white people buying all these guns. In the film I explored this manipulative fear that is created about the Black man and African Americans in general where white people felt like they better be armed because somebody could come in and hurt them. That somebody of course was not freckled face Jimmy down the street, whenever they had the image in their head of someone who might harm them. So I started thinking about that then and with 9/11 how fear was used right from the beginning. They knew that they had almost a gift given to them where they could manipulate any number of things, the worst of course being lying to us about why we should go to war. Then the same thing with 'Sicko'. I just think it's one of the genius things that the right and the wealthy have done, they've recognized just what a bunch of scaredy cats we are as Americans. You say boo and we really jump. I don't quite know why that is. I mean, I had a whole thing about when the settlers came here and was reading this history about how we had all these forests here. We hadn't torn anything down yet and so it was really scary for the early settlers. They were really frightened by what was in these forests and of course it was the Native people and that was scary enough, but there were all these things and then of course there were witches, all this stuff that had everyone all bugaloo. I think there's something about our American nature that you don't find in other countries. I don't know how many Greeks are sitting around being scared. So I think that they knew that and I think that's what happened with this bailout, there were probably very few amongst us during that weekend who weren't thinking, 'Oh my God, what if this is actually true? There goes the pension.' I mean, I think if people were honest, if we ask for a show of hands in here how many people thought about a race to the bank and or even the ATM machine and getting out as much as you could get out of whatever you have in there because there might not be any money left.
Huffington: This is a very brave crowd in here, only about five people.
Moore: I've never bought a share of stock for myself. I've never owned a share of stock. I don't own any stocks. I've never really participated in that. Mainly it's because I don't understand it. When you come from a working class home you understanding other kinds of gambling but you don't quite understand this kind.
Huffington: I want to talk about the heroes in the movie. One of them is the sheriff who won't let people be thrown out of their homes. I just love this guy. But my absolutely favorite, heroine actually, is Elizabeth Warren. For me she sums up someone who's in a position of power and yet has not in the slightest sense been co-opted or corrupted, this Harvard professor, unimpeachable and is the chair of the Congressional Oversight Committee, of the bailout. I mean, that's a real position of power in Washington. She also the gift of being a storyteller in your interview with her and her narrative and how she puts it all together. I'm so glad that you have her in the movie because I hope that more people will come to know her and that her voice will be amplified.
Moore: I agree. I actually filmed her for 'Sicko' and just couldn't figure out where to put her and she ended up on the cutting room floor. She was gracious enough to talk to me again for this film. During 'Sicko' she had just completed a study at Harvard about the number one reason for bankruptcy's in the United States which are medical bills and the number one cause of foreclosures are medical bills. So while you hear on CNBC and all this talk from other people who on the other side of the political fence, 'Oh, this whole mess was caused by people living beyond their means and taking all these loans out that they shouldn't have –' how often have you heard in the last year that the number one reason being foreclosed upon is because they don't have any health insurance? They've been paying medical bills and now they can't pay their mortgage. That's the number one reason. Have you heard that discussed at all on these gab-fests and on the op-ed pages? It's always trying to blame the victim. 'What did this person do to lose their home? What skirt were they wearing to cause this?' It's really that. It has that tone to it, that tone of, 'What did this victim do to bring this upon themselves?' I don't think that even when I put Elizabeth Warren here in the film that it does her justice because I have a whole hour that she gave me. Lets face it, a lot of people on Capitol Hill don't want to talk to me and turn the other way. But she was very open. They won't give her the information. The Treasury Department will still not tell her what the banks are doing with our money, what they've done with it and there's no accountability whatsoever. If you ever try to go get a loan and all the fucking paperwork that you have to fill out and every personal question that they ask you, all this backup and proof of what you're going to do with that loan from the bank, the ringer that they put the average person through to get a measly ten thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars, whatever – I'll have the actual form on my website that you download if you were bank trying to get bailout money. It's a two page form with mostly white space on it. It's three questions and send it in to the Department of Treasury. You're right, she's absolutely great.
Huffington: I'd love to have the outtakes to put them up on the Huffington Post.
Moore: Oh, okay. I'll do that.
Huffington: She's been trying to find out what they did with this money and what they're doing with this money and we still don't know what has happened to the $180 billion we gave to AIG.
Moore: That's just the bailout money. That's what she's in charge of. The Fed has been printing money. We're really talking about trillions of dollars that have been flowing out of the printing presses at the Department of the Treasury and into the hands of these banks and investment firms and of course General Motors and Chrysler and all of that. Man, I don't know, we're going to be paying this sucker off for the rest of our lives. We're never going to, in our lifetime, Arianna – maybe in the younger people here, in their lifetime – we're not going to get the really basic things that Franklin Roosevelt thought we should have sixty five years ago, let alone any of the newer things that we should have in terms of the kinds of transportation we should be building for the 21st century or trying to fix our problems with global warming or energy sources and things like that. All that stuff that we really need money for, all the inventions that need to take place now, where we need to be supporting people with the great ideas, that's gone. That just got vaporized. It really is just simply gone. Now it's got to be paid back with interest to banks in China. I don't want to bring everyone down but if we don't rise up and get busy, all of us – it wasn't enough to just get excited and vote for Obama. I'm going to have a larger opening than I have with any other film for a number of cities over the country, over a thousand. I didn't even have that for 'Fahrenheit' at the beginning. I really hope that this movie just inspires and stimulates people to do any number of things that they can do, starting with don't leave your home because they can't produce the mortgage. I'm going to have a thing on my website with Marcy Kaptur, and by the way, that Congresswoman from Toledo, Ohio, when Obama's eight years are up can we just make her the first female president in the United States.
Huffington: Or when his four years are up if he doesn't behave himself. She's from Toledo, Ohio, too, which is not exactly a solid blue state. I love that urgency that you bring to it, that you have a window. Lets talk about that, that we have a window in which to act and change things. This is not an unlimited amount of time. My final question is about something I would've expressed differently. I have a different framing about capitalism. I actually believe that what we have is not capitalism. If we really had capitalism Citi Group would not exist right now because in capitalism you win big or you lose big and if you're failing you're allowed to fail. Here we have the worst form of an economic system. We have a corporatism. For me that's important because I know a lot of capitalists who are actually disgusted with what's' happening because we now basically are socializing the losses and privatizing the gains and you have the government picking winners and losers. The other day I was at this 'Fortune' magazine conference, yesterday actually, and Andy Serwer the editor of 'Fortune' when he was asked how come Goldman Sachs got all this money, made all these profits? He said, 'The government pulled them aside and said to them put your money on sixty two black.' That's not capitalism. That's the government picking winners and losers. The reason that's important is because I want people from across the political spectrum to join forces and bring down the current system.
Moore: I think that the current system, when you say across the spectrum do you mean people with money, capitalists, 'Fortune' magazine –
Huffington: …people with no money, people who vote republican. I don't care where they come from. The system is so obviously corrupt that anybody with eyes to see should be against it.
Moore: Right. I think it's going to collapse and be done away with regardless of what people with money want because the people who are getting screwed, one out of every eight homes in America right now is in delinquency or foreclosure. There's a foreclosure filing in this country once every seven and a half seconds. If you do this to that many millions of people the man Peoria with the guns who wants to blow up the bank, there's a tipping point down the road. We can choose to deal with this now non-violently and hopefully stem what is possibly going to happen because eventually people won't take it anymore and when they're feeling so screwed, as we know historically, it's very easy to manipulate them from the right with Fascism and getting them to blame the other. This is my definition of capitalism and why I think it needs to be eliminated. It's legalizing greed. Our laws demand that a corporation has a fiduciary responsibility to it's shareholders to maximize profits. That's what it says. They are legally required to make as much money as possible any way possible within the 'law'. If they can come up with a scheme like Dead Peasants great. If they can come up with what 'The New York Times' reported last Sunday, the new scheme of derivatives on life insurance policies which is essentially a new form of dead peasant insurance then great. A health insurance company has a fiduciary responsibility. It's not their fault that they deny claims or kick people off the rolls or reject you because you have a preexisting condition. The law that supports that economic system that we call capitalism demands that they do that because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to send those shareholders as much money as possible and you're not going to send them as much money as possible if you start doling out checks to people when they get sick. So they work night and day trying not to handout any of the money to the doctors and the hospitals or the people who need help. That is a sick system and I'm tired of twenty of years of this, starting with 'Roger & Me'. I feel like I've just danced around it, talking about General Motors and warning people what was going to happen with this and other companies like it and city's life Flint. The healthcare system, Haliburton, big oil companies taking us to war; all of this stuff has at it's center, at it's core an economic system that is unfair, is unjust, is not democratic. You and I have no say in how this economy is run and so when I say at the end of the film that I want democracy I want you and I to control this economy. I want a say in what the decisions are that are made and if you're not going to give me and you a say then quit calling this country a democracy. It's not a democracy because I get to vote every two or four years. We've got to stop that because I'm telling you that anthropologists are going to dig up videotape that we've left behind four hundred years from now and they're going to laugh at us the way that we laugh at people who use to put leeches on their bodies to get better and that was just a hundred and fifty years ago. That's the kind of laughter they're going to have at us. 'Look at these fools. They call their country a democracy and yet they let one percent control everything and call all the shots. They ran around saying, "I'm free, I'm free, I live in a democracy."' We're going to look like idiots. I think that capitalism means that there's a pie on the table, to use Glen Beck's reference, it's okay for one guy at the table to grab nine slices of the pie and say to the other nine people at the table, 'That last slice is for you.' Capitalism says that legal. Capitalism says that's correct and we have to reject it. It's not a capitalism versus communism discussion that I want to have. I just want to go back to our root values, what Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and all those guys said about democracy and warning us about people with money and they were people with money. They were wealthy landowners who did quite well under the king's system. Yet they knew that it was a fraud upon the people because the people had no say. The other core values that I refer to in the film, and I'm not proselytizing, I was nervous even putting the Catholicism in the film because I'm so upset at the institution called The Catholic Church and it's crimes against humanity, but I was taught some really basic things that I thought were good lessons, that we will be judge by how we treat the least among us and that the rich man will have a harder time getting into heaven than a camel will passing through the eye of a needle. I believe in all those things and I believe that we're supposed to share that pie. I think that people like you and me should be paying up to seventy percent of our income in taxes. That's another crime that's been committed against the people. I don't know what you make, actually. You probably don't make anything with the little internet thing you got going on there. But I'd like to ask this audience, how many of you know that those of us who earn more than a $110k a year, we pay no FICA, no social security tax after a $110K. Zero. How many of you are hearing this for the first time? Did you realize that? That you pay, whatever you make, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year, you about seven percent. Seven percent is just sucked out of your check every week to go for social security medicare tax. It's a flat tax. It doesn't matter how much you make. You pay a full seven percent. It fluctuates between 6.7 and 7.2 but lets just call it a seven percent tax. After a $110k you pay zero percent. If the rich have to pay the same flat tax that you have to pay on all your income which is a hardship on you, a seven percent tax on all our income is not a hardship. If we had to pay seven percent on all our income right now starting tomorrow there would be enough money in social security to last until 2087, almost to the next century. That's the big lie that's not told about social security when they say that we're going to run out in 2017. We're going to run out because rich people don't pay. This is going to continue as long as we say that this economic system that we have is right and just. I don't think it is and we can get caught up in the semantics of it and defining capitalism but my feeling is that a hundred years ago there was a debate about child labor in this country. There were liberal, well meaning people who said that all we needed to do was regulate it. 'We just need to make the factories safe and make sure the kids can go to school. Then twelve year olds can work in the factory.' But society said, 'No. It's just wrong. It's just plain wrong.' You can't regulate child labor. You can't regulate slavery. Some things are just wrong and I think this economic system that we call capitalism is wrong and I'm not looking at regulations. I'm looking to see what we can do. We're in the 21st century. Aren't we smart enough to come up with a new economic system that goes back to the old values of democracy and moral ethics that we were all raised with? I'm not an economist and so I'm sorry that I don't have a blueprint to present to you in terms of what that means but I hope that someone will get stimulated into thinking about this because that's the direction that we need to go. This upper one percent, the fact that they have more than the bottom ninety five, and I hate calling it the bottom ninety five because it's almost the rest of everybody, I don't know how we wrestle that power back unless we do it legally and that's the only chance that we have now. Because we have more votes than them we can do whatever we want and they know that.
What do you think the disconnect is with the excitement and the desire for change that we all feel when we watch the movie, the disconnect between that and actual change happening and what can we do to bridge that gap?
Moore: That's a very good question and I have talked about that in the past, wondering really what is the point of all of this. I think the disconnect isn't really a disconnect because 'Fahrenheit 9/11' couldn't change enough people's minds in a four month period but it was one of the first salvos fired at this lying administration. It sort of gave permission for other people to go ahead and try it but somebody has to get it going. I think that people forget in the first year of the war, when the war started, to do something like 'Fahrenheit 9/11', well I was boo'd off the Oscar stage five days into the war because I said something that I thought was kind of simple and people started booing but I was pretty much alone. I remember Al Franken supported the war. I remember that Keith Oberman. He mentioned this last week on his show, that at the beginning of the war he wanted to give the president the benefit of the doubt. So there's two people. I remember Harvey and Bob Weinstein who were funding 'Fahrenheit 9/11', having arguments with them and they supported the war. I mean, this is kind of forgotten, how lonely it was and I think that many of you know how lonely it was at work, in your neighborhood, in your own families. If you were opposed to the war at the beginning there was something unpatriotic about you. But the good news is that the American people, when presented with the truth will just about always do the right thing. The American people, we're good at our core. We're just sometimes slow learners. It doesn't happen four months after a movie but that was his highest approval rating and he never ever went above that rating again. After 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and after that election, and remember he only won one state and a hundred thousand votes in Ohio which is the smallest margin any sitting president running for reelection had been elected by since forever. So I think eventually things do happen. 'Sicko' I made two years ago. I wish the healthcare would've happened then. It's happening now. I don’t get discouraged by that, but I will say that in terms of the excitement that you feel when you're watching a movie like this when in a crowded theater, what happens after we leave the theater? At those Town Hall meetings in August, we could've gone to them. They're open. We could've packed them. Why didn't we? Well, it was August. What I mean by that is, this is what I absolutely admire about the right wing and republicans, they are committed. They're up at the crack of dawn living, eating breathing, shitting the things that they are for and it is admirable.
Moore: …and they are locked and loaded and ready to go. We're kind of like, at the first sign of Obama doing something that we don’t like, 'Oh, it's all over. I knew he wasn't going to do it.' [laughs] As a kid there used to be this cartoon series called 'Libby The Lion and Hardy Har Har'. Does anybody remember that? Remember how Hardy Har Har the Hyena was always like, 'Oh, woe is me. Obama. He says that he's still going to have the military secret trial thing. I knew he wasn't going to do anything.' I don't mean to make light of that but I just think, 'Come on, party people. Where are we and what's holding us back? We're the majority. Seventy five percent of the people in this country want universal healthcare. Where the hell are we?' If they win this they deserve, they deserve it because they got out of bed in August and did something. I'm sorry to throw that back onto the audience and onto myself because I didn't go to any Town Hall meetings. There you go. Lets not let this happen. Lets not leave him out there alone. Lets have the guys back. I wish that he would've gone all the way with the single payer. He didn't. I'm not going to throw him to the wolves because of that. He's all we've got, really. He's what we've got and I don't want to go back to that other way four years from now, and like I said, I'm not leaving and so I don't have a choice. I've got to do something.
I'm not sure if you remember me or not. My name is Mike Prisner. I wrote you a letter back in 2003.
Moore: Oh, yeah, of course I remember you. I'm not one of these big celebrity types who wouldn't remember someone who wrote me a letter in 2003 [laughs].
Right, but I wrote it to you while I was in a fox hole in Iraq, while I was trying to figure out why I was in that war.
Moore: Oh, you know what, I do remember you. Seriously, I'll tell you in a second when I remember.
Can you comment now that in these times how we can't be sitting back and have to be doing something? Can you talk becoming involved in grass roots politics, getting involved in change and not waiting for you, not voting for it but fighting for it.
Moore: If you go to my website, and that's why I put it at the end of this film, when people see this movie there will be those groups to join, those magazines to read, those websites to go to. There will be tools available for people and there will be some specific action things that people can do. I'm hoping that'll be what happens and that kind of organizing around this film is being done by various groups around the country that I'm making sure can setup their table on the opening weekend at this film. We're doing screenings in dozens of cities across the country with activists groups. It's important. It isn't just going to happen on it's own if I don't make that happen.
Huffington: Michael and I talked about telling more stories, like the incredibly powerful stories in the movie of people being thrown out of their home. So if you know stories like that, if you know people who are being thrown out of their homes –
Moore: Can I say something about the telling of stories because we're here in Los Angeles, in Hollywood? I've been doing press this week and one of the big questions that I keep getting asked, 'What are you going to do now that Bush is gone? Who's going to be your nemesis –' and all of this, and it's like I should film some of these interviews. What I've told them is actually I think that my kind of films or all kinds of art and culture, writing, other filmmakers, plays, books, we're going to thrive during the Obama during era. We're going to thrive the way that artists did under Roosevelt. Once Roosevelt became president that's when we got our Will Rogers and our Frank Capra and our Preston Sturgis and John Steinbeck and John Ford, making a movie out of John Steinbeck's book. I mean, this town especially understood the importance of telling stories to essentially take Roosevelt's message about the little guy, about the common people and create this ground swell of public and popular support. Artists in this town played a very important role in that. I can see that happening again, and my hope and expectation, if I can say even demand of our new president is that I want him to be the Roosevelt of the 21st century and that means the rest of us need to do our work to help create that kind of popular support for the things that he believes in. There's that famous story where Roosevelt had already been in office for a couple of years and social security still hadn't passed and a woman came up to him and said, 'When are you going to get us our social security? You promised social security. It's been two years.' He said, 'I'm not going to get you your social security. You're going to have to make me do it.' He said, 'You're going to have to make me do it because I have the banks against me, I have the corporations against me and I can't do this alone. You, the American people, are going to have to make Washington do this and if you do that then you'll have it.' That's what the people did and they got it. That sit down strike that took place in Flint, Michigan that started the UAW and the whole movement, they went into the factory literally six weeks after Roosevelt's election in 1936, his reelection. They were so inspired by that victory and the huge outpouring of support that people had that the sit down strike didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened because they were inspired by the new president and we need to be inspired and he needs to inspire us, he needs to be a leader and I think he's finally understood it this past week or two. I'm glad that bigot shouted 'you lie'. I'm glad that Jimmy Carter called him out on it and discussed the elephant in the room. Race. And what's behind this hatred. I mean, he hasn't done enough to require that much hatred and for school districts to say, 'Don't listen to the president of the United States, I'm not sending my kids to the schools today because they might have to listen to the United States –' I'm telling you that I'm sorry to say it, too, but I think that race has a hell of a lot to do with this movement against him. Maybe he can't say it but we can say it and we should say it and bigots are committed. They're a committed bunch. They don't care if it's August and we're going to have to get committed. We're going to have to have that same enthusiasm we had a year ago at this time if we're going to get anything. I think he's figured that out. I hope that he's done with his compromising and his bipartisan bullshit and all that other stuff. I mean, I'll give him this. He's nicer than you or I. He's a nice guy. I think he genuinely went in there with the olive branch and said, 'Come on, we've had enough of this. Lets all do this together as Americans.' I know he meant that in his heart, but if they won't take the olive branch you just can't become their doormat. You have to then go to plan b.
Huffington: So, plan b, in terms of us doing our part, being on the road last week, sometimes it's not enough to Tweet and text and do everything from our couch. Sometimes we have to get off the couch, but lets all start by Tweeting tonight. I hope you're tweeting about how great the movie was and if you haven't, do it as soon as you get home and do send us your stories. Put them on Michael's site. Send them to us. I have an email address. Arianna@huffingtonpost.com. We'd like to post them there, put up pictures because these are ongoing stories so that we can keep all of our imaginations captured.
When you investigated Goldman Sachs and started looking into that, drawing attention to that, did you consider more of a call to action? I know your website very well, but a call to action for the public to go out and start getting involved?
Moore: When I was at the AFL-CIO convention this week, and by the way, yesterday, the day after I was there and made an impassioned plea for them to not compromise on healthcare and please support a single payer plan they never passed a resolution endorsing single payer all these years, the AFL-CIO. They were inclined to just go along and compromise like Obama was doing. I was saying that compromise is for politicians. We're not politicians. We're the people and you're the AFL-CIO. You should be on the front lines, leading the charge for exactly what we want. The next day, yesterday, for the time ever they passed a resolution in support of single payer health insurance and the other thing that I asked them to do because they have the man and woman power to do this is to make a national call, whether it's for one demonstration or a series of demonstrations, whatever, but lets be visible with this. The internet stuff isn't visible and our bodies need to be put on the line and we need to be seen and heard. So I think that sometimes shortly someone will do that. There are so many stories, like you mentioned, about 'Rolling Stone', so many things that you find in Huffington Post, on the other websites. There's just so much good stuff out there for us to share. I just read this one thing about how (SP?) Barkley's bank and I think there are a couple of other banks have rented these large oil super tankers and are buying up barrels of oil while the price has been down and storing it on these super tankers and storing it elsewhere to wait until it goes back up to a $150 a barrel again and then put it on the market. These are the kinds of crazy ideas that they come up with all the time. Where are they getting the money to do this? They're using the teacher's pension fun of California. They're using our money. This is why this really has to be stopped because it's a beast that's out of control. So, thank you for encouraging everyone to do that and to get involved.
When you were doing your investigations for this movie, did the topic of all the money that the Fed is printing up and sending out the back door come up even more so than is talked about in the movie?
Moore: Yeah. There is a four hour cut of this movie and the Fed is a part of that. The credit card industry, I have another whole section on that. I had the same problem with 'Sicko' where I literally decided the only way to do this properly was to focus on one thing well and so I picked the health insurance industry, but there's a whole other movie on pharmaceutical industries that needs to be made. In this case, the other robbery that's going on, the credit card collapse that'll be our next collapse, the house of cards that is, the credit card debt that's out there. So there are a lot of things that are coming down the pike and I think that we're in no way out of the woods on any of this yet. Just because the Dow Jones is up in the nine thousands again doesn't have a whole hell of a lot to do with to do with the big stuff that effects people in their everyday lives. So, unemployment now is still officially near ten percent. Unofficially probably closer to twenty percent. All the foreclosures I talked about, this is going to continue. I think that I'm pretty aware of congress and all of that, I had never heard of Marcy Kaptur and her district borders Michigan where I live. I'm thinking, 'I didn't know about her. I'll be you there are ten other great minds in this congress.' I'll bet you there are people out there who need to be thinking of running next year, right now. I mean, why leave it up to the professionals who just keep running. What's the return rate for incumbents? It's something like ninety five percent or something like that. I just remember reading this statistic where the return rate of our incumbents to congress was somewhere around ninety five percent and the old Soviet Polit Bureau was ninety one percent. People have to start thinking about running for office. The number one piece of legislation that we should be pushing for always is a removal of money from politics. Once the money is out of there those people are going to have to respond to us. But once they get in there they're immediately told, 'You have to start fund raising for the next election right now or you're not going to make it.' We need some people who say, 'I'm going to run and I'm not going to run with that in mind.' We need to get behind those people and get them elected. People in here tonight, there are one or two people in here tonight who should be running for office next year, whether that's locally for your school board or your city commission or if it's for congress. I think that sounds like a crazy idea, but I ran for school board when I was eighteen and I won. I know from my own personal experience that it can happen. I don't know if that answers your question or not.
The only thing stopping super inflation right now is confidence. If people start panicking we'll have another situation which is super inflation. The problems that we have now could be compounded. It's incredible considering the amount of money we've pumped into our system that it hasn't effected our inflation rates.
Moore: Right, but I don't want to feel like we've been lucky because I know from enough of the emails and letters that I get that people are really suffering out there and people are really hurting. While it's hard for me to make these movies because I can't get interviews with people who are in the opposition I do hear from a lot of people and get a lot of things sent to me. I get a lot of great ideas for the next film and the next film, or documents that people steal from the office and scan and send to me. Some of the people in this film are just people who wrote to me. The guy who gave Chris Dodd all those loans, the sweetheart deals that he got –
Huffington: The VIP guy.
Moore: Yeah, and if we didn't have the internet he would literally have no way to reach me. He could send a fan letter to the studio and I'd never see it. But the fact that he could communicate directly to me and say, 'And I have the documents to prove what I'm going to tell you –' I'm fortunate to be in a position to be able to get that sort of thing and I'm lucky to have an internet to be able to do that. So I want to encourage you to keep doing what you do and keep getting that information out there and have a take no prisoners attitude. I mean that because very few of us on the left – is it okay to say that about you, Arianna?
Huffington: Yeah, but let me tell you something. I really think that we are more powerful when we recognize, as you said earlier, that seventy five percent of Americans wants universal healthcare. Large majorities want the troops to come from Afghanistan. Large majorities want something to be done about Wall Street. So when we say the left, either the left has massively expanded to three quarters of all America or these are not just left wing positions, these are majority positions.
Moore: But they started as left wing positions.
Huffington: That's fine. We can take credit for that.
Moore: But I'm just saying thank you to those of you who had those positions five, six, seven, eight years ago and you're right, we're now the mainstream. We are the majority opinion of this country. Instead of just sitting back and smoking a dubie on that one I think that we need – I'm not accusing you of smoking anything [laughs] –
Huffington: But lets act like the majority.
Moore: Lets act like the majority. We have the power, right? Come on!
Huffington: As Michael said, we do have the internet. We can actually reach millions of people. We can actually run for office without having to depend on Goldman Sachs and the pharmaceutical companies. We can raise small donations. All those things are now possible. Michael, I'm so glad that you're not going anywhere. I'm so glad that you promised to stay and made this magnificent movie. Thank you for everything.
Capitalism: A Love Story opens in theaters October 2nd
