MOOREWATCH - Watching Michael Moore's every move

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Saturday, May 30, 2009

It’s donatin’ time…

Posted by JimK on 05/30/09 at 07:39 PM

I’m afraid it’s that time again...time for a server drive. With Lee’s passing, the entire cost of the server is now on my shoulders, and times - as they are for everyone I’m sure - are tight. Blogads are a thin trickle these days, not nearly enough to pay for the server. And so I’m coming to all of you hat in hand. If you find any value in any of the sites I host, please consider a small donation. Every penny will go directly to the cost of paying for the $250 a month this machine and the associated bandwidth costs me.

DonationsTracker.com - Live Donations Tracking for Server Drive

We host the following blogs:

Right Thinking
Right Thoughts
Made of Awesome
Wasting Time WIth Alex
Moorewatch
The Victorious Opposition

So if you are a fan of any of these sites, consider sending maybe the cost of a beer or two. The cost of a couple of beers, when multipled by a group of you, could keep us going for months. Unfortunately we only have Paypal as a donation solution, since Amazon closed their donation/payment program. Hopefully that’s okay for most people.

I wish there was a way to express to all of you how little I like doing this. Some day I will either be rich or Supreme Ruler of the Universe and then I’ll host everyone’s websites for free. :)

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Sunday, June 07, 2009

Running On Empty

Posted by MikeS on 06/07/09 at 12:23 PM

Donna e-mailed me last week telling me Michael Moore had put up a post on his website that made her skin crawl. It took me until the weekend to read it. And I must confess myself ... disappointed.

The post is Michael Moore celebrating the collapse of General Motors and asking where we should go next. For a man who claims to be from Flint and to know the car industry, it shows a stunning lack of knowledge. This ignorance is combined with pure economic stupidity and a stunning faith in the power of government to make things happen just by wishing so.

Michael Moore is 55 years old. He is a highly successful film-maker, and one of the few who understands the financial benefit of tacitly allowing his films to be pirated. He has been a political force for the last decade or more. And yet, given months to think about it, he’s produced a “plan” for GM’s bankruptcy that looks like something a 19-year-old college kid would write the night before a deadline. It has no original ideas; it’s just a liberal wish list. It does not acknowledge tradeoffs or problems; it lives in fantasy world. It practically refutes itself.

If you don’t want to read the fisking, here’s the short version: Mike wants Barack Obama to declare himself Czar of the United States and reorganize industry, infrastructure and the economy along the lines Michael Moore thinks best. He doesn’t, of course, say he wants a dictatorship but that’s the only possible interpretation. Because there is no way that what Michael proposes could be done in our current Constitutional Republic. Such sweeping changes would only be possible if government broke all the boundaries of the Constitution, the law and federalism.

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Here we go. Mike asks why GM failed:

It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh—and that wouldn’t start falling apart after two years.

Ignore for the moment, that “great gas mileage” and “as safe as they could be” may be competing, not complementary goals (the safety of SUVs is highly questionable, but the lack of safety of small light cars is not). The problem with this statement is that GM was was building the cars Americans wanted—big inefficient gas-guzzling SUVs. Fuel-efficient cars, until last year’s oil spike, sat unwanted on lots. And even now, sales have dropped and the so-called “smart cars” are not selling.

This is a pity because Americans should want fuel efficient cars. I just sold my 1995 Saturn and it was lovely car—safe, fuel efficient and cheap. The price of oil is not going to stay low and so my next car will inevitably be something along the same lines.

But the fact is that most Americans do not want those kinds of cars. And they certainly don’t want the little tin econoboxes that our government is about to force onto us.

And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to “improve” the short-term bottom line of the corporation.

Pure lies. As Michael is well aware, the Big Three had an extremely cozy relationship with the unions for decades. The biggest reason they are crumbling now is because, during those years, they foolishly made tens of billions of dollars in future commitments to the unions. Workers got high salaries, generous benefits and could retire relatively young with a pension equal to their working pay. They even get paid when the factories are idle.

This was sustainable for a long time because Detroit was effectively a monopoly. The Big Three did not compete on labor costs (or reliability) because they had a captive market in the American public. They could charge high prices for cars because there was no competition. When foreign companies breached the American market with cheaper more reliable cars, that system collapsed. By the 1990’s, the Big Three were using cars a loss leader to sell financing.

Moore notes that GM laughed at “inferior” Japanese and German cars. The reason those cars are successful, Michael, is because the unions have had far less influence. Their pension and healthcare commitments are far smaller, which is why their effective cost per hour of making a car is so much smaller.

Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars?

More economic ignorance. Cheaper manufacturing means cheaper cars (and therefore, an ability to compete with Japan and Germany). It also means that while the auto-workers are hurt, other industries boom because of cheaper transportation—industries that can then hire the displaced auto workers.

In addition, Michael completely ignores insourcing. Many of the plants GM opened overseas were to manufacture cars for sale in those countries —a sound practice, but one actively enouraged by nitwit protectionism and foolish tax laws. Moreover, just as we have opened factories in other countries, the system of capitalism has allowed companies like Nissan and Toyota to open factories in this country. But without the legacy of old union contracts, those factories turn a profit.

So here we are at the deathbed of General Motors. The company’s body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with—dare I say it—joy. It is not the joy of revenge against a corporation that ruined my hometown and brought misery, divorce, alcoholism, homelessness, physical and mental debilitation, and drug addiction to the people I grew up with. Nor do I, obviously, claim any joy in knowing that 21,000 more GM workers will be told that they, too, are without a job.

Actually, considering how much Michael loves to wallow in other people’s suffering, I think he does feel some joy about these things. He’s made a career exploiting tragedy, from laid-off workers to gunshot victims to the uninsured. And he sure as hell enjoys blaming those tragedies on his political opponents.

Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light rail and bullet trains and cleaner buses, how will we do this if we’ve allowed our industrial capacity and its skilled workforce to disappear?

It’s not that simple to bend sword into plowshares (or cars into trains). You’re talking about an enormous investment of infrastructure in an area of the country that is hemorrhaging workers, capital and education. Detroit may not be the ideal place to build those things, anyway, especially given the horrendous tax situation in Michigan. Finally, many of the jobs for bullet trains and light rail need to be where these things would be built—on the coasts.

We can’t just pick communities and order industry to build there. That’s a good way to hamstring an economy.

Twenty years ago when I made “Roger & Me,” I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided.

I have not seen Roger and Me. But if Michael was warning us that overly generous union benefits would make cars a loss-leader for the Big Three, I will eat my copy of Do As I Say, Not As I Do. It wasn’t outsourcing that killed GM; it was a change in the marketplace. Their business model—a model based partially on hefty union benefits—became outdated and unsustainable.

Based on Michael’s “expertise”, he suggests what we need to do now. His plan is as bold, as ignorant and as doomed to fail as any “Five Year Plan” that ever emerged from the Soviet Union. Michael envisions the government completely reworking the economy, trampling thousands of laws and the liberties of millions of people—all to create his vision. There are no caveats—no acknowledgement of uncertainty—no indication that this may not work. Michael believes in this with a fervor that would make the most End of Days Christian blush. He really thinks we can do all these things just be wishing for it be so.

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We also had a shocking amount of debt and an economy that, while producing nominal growth, produced little improvement in American lives. Moreover, we were at war for our very existence. Wasting billions of dollars was not an issue because FDR understood that there is nothing more expensive than a second-rate military. Everything was sacrificed for the war effort. And even then, the effort was heavily dependent on Americans freely donating scrap, rubber, metal, even cooking grease and buying the hell out of bonds. Our entire economy was turned over to war. Our current situation is not even close.

And Michael take the wrong lesson from history. It’s relatively easy to have a car factory churn out jeeps and tanks—the skills needed are very similar. Alternative energy is a completely different industry—and requires very different skills from the workers. The people that build cars may not have the skills to build solar panels. In a free market economy, those jobs would be taken by people who do have those skills and the auto workers would find jobs that exploit the skills they have. In economic circles, it’s called the Law of Comparative Advantage and it is the principle reason why capitalism works as well as it does.

This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call “cars” may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

Apparently, we should go back to transporting food to the hungry people of the world by pack mule.

I will not stand for this slander. The automobile is one of the greatest inventions in human history. It has generated astonishing human wealth and progress by liberating people from the confines of geography. It has made mobile the greatest resource we have—human beings—and therefore made us all rich by any historical standard. It abolished the horse and the manure-spread epidemics that used to ravage cities. Even if we accept global warming—and I do—cars are a small part of the overall picture. What is it with Left and demonizing cars?

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn’t give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true—that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

It’s worth pointing out here that the vast majority of the world’s oil companies are state-owned and state-run. To the extent that have despoiled the Earth, it has been largely a political hand at the till.

Moreover, the evil oil companies have never held a gun to our head and forced us to drive. All they did was make cheap energy readily available, to the benefit of billions who have used that energy to get clean food and clean water; to educate themselves; and to lift themselves out of poverty. The engine of human progress has been driven by fossil fuels and I have no problem with people making money off of that. That’s not even to mention that petroleum products, like plastic, that have made our lives infinitely better and safer.

Fossil fuels may have outlived their ecological welcome. But their exploitation made the 20th century the best in human history, despite the predations of the powerful governments Mikey loves so much. It made people rich enough that war became too much of a hassle; healthy enough that most of us will die of old age; educated enough to understand the world we live in; and fed enough that obesity is our biggest health concern.

I don’t like all the practices of the oil companies myself. I have no illusions about the dark side of capitalism. But the oil companies’ greed and their chicanery has, as Adam Smith predicted, inadvertantly benefited us all.

And to hear “didn’t give a damn about future generations” from a man who is advocating a massive expansion of debt and the crippling of healthcare innovation through socialized medicine is offensive.

2. Don’t put another $30 billion into the coffers of GM to build cars. Instead, use that money to keep the current workforce—and most of those who have been laid off—employed so that they can build the new modes of 21st century transportation. Let them start the conversion work now.

I agree that we shouldn’t give any more money to GM. But this is a repeat of point 1. Moreover, what Michael is talking about will cost many many times what we’re proposing to give GM.

3. Announce that we will have bullet trains criss-crossing this country in the next five years.

This is hilarious. Five years would not even be enough time to get the land-use permits, least of all build a massive train system. The last major work we had in this vein was the interstate system. As you may have noticed, it’s still being built. Creating a rail system that fast—over multiple states, through many districts, over private and public land—some of which has been set aside as nature preserves—would only be possible in a dictatorship. That’s the only way to bulldoze the thousands of competing and legitimate interests along with the forests and wetlands the rail would need to go through.

And it’s not cheap. The cost, if you extrapolate California’s projections for the Vegas line, would be north of $500 billion just for the modest proposals we have right now. For that price, we could practically buy ever American an electric car.

High speed rail always sounds good but it is the perpetual pipe dream. Every proposal (and Obama’s is just a recycled version of Bush’s) comes to nothing. Even the current proposals aren’t high speed, as such. They meander through various congressional districts and can therefore not maintain a high speed.

They’re not even clean:

According to the Department of Energy, the average Amtrak train uses about 2,700 British thermal units (BTUs) of energy per passenger mile. This is a little better than cars (about 3,400 BTUs per passenger mile) or airplanes (about 3,300 BTUs per passenger mile). But auto and airline fuel efficiencies are improving by 2 percent to 3 percent per year (for example, a Toyota Prius uses less than 1,700 BTUs per passenger mile).

By contrast, Amtrak’s fuel efficiency has increased by just one-tenth of 1 percent per year in the past 10 years.

This means, over the lifetime of an investment in moderate-speed trains, the trains won’t save any energy at all. In fact, to achieve higher speeds, moderate-speed trains will require even more energy than conventional trains and probably much more than the average car or airplane 10 or 20 years from now.

Michael compares us to Japan (liberals always love anything from Japan). This is incredibly stupid. Japan has ten times our population density. Japan does not have massive stretches of unoccupied land. High speed rail works—in a limited context—in Japan. Even then, 80% of their rail service is traditional rail. And Tokyo is not exactly known for its light traffic.

High-speed rail, if it actually came to pass, might work in some of the more high-density areas of the US, like the coasts. But as a national solution to move three hundred million people and unthinkable tons of freight, it’s bollocks.

4. Initiate a program to put light rail mass transit lines in all our large and medium-sized cities. Build those trains in the GM factories. And hire local people everywhere to install and run this system.

Jobs jobs jobs. Who cares if it works? It’s all just a jobs program.

Light rail has proven to be an economic disaster with little to no benefit to the environment. Cities that can benefit from rail—like New York—have already built it. In most American cities, people prefer to drive. So you’re spending energy building and running a light rail system that carries very few passengers. In order to make it work, you are going to have to force people to ride it.

5. For people in rural areas not served by the train lines, have the GM plants produce energy efficient clean buses.

A gigantic waste of money. And with little ecological benefit. I live in a small town that has a very good bus system. I still have to drive a lot. The only reason it works at all is because this a college town and many students do not have or need cars. This would not be the case in most cities. And it does not benefit the environment to have empty buses rattling down the roads.

6. For the time being, have some factories build hybrid or all-electric cars (and batteries). It will take a few years for people to get used to the new ways to transport ourselves, so if we’re going to have automobiles, let’s have kinder, gentler ones. We can be building these next month (do not believe anyone who tells you it will take years to retool the factories—that simply isn’t true).

As I noted above, we can’t even sell the electric and hybrid cars we already have. Are you going to force people to buy these cars? Are you going to impose trade restriction to keep Japan, Korea, China, Germany, Italy, France and the UK from selling us the cars we actually want? Where is this massive increase in the power output of our electrical grid going to come from? Even if we start a crash course of building alternative energy, it will be decades before it comes on line.

7. Transform some of the empty GM factories to facilities that build windmills, solar panels and other means of alternate forms of energy. We need tens of millions of solar panels right now. And there is an eager and skilled workforce who can build them.

Where are you going to put the solar panels and windmills, Michael? In deserts? On mountains? The environmentalists are opposed to that. Moreover, neither solar nor wind is mature enough to take over our energy structure. We have no way to efficiently get that power to the cities or to store it for use on cloudy windless days.

There are huge advances yet to be made in energy transfer and storage before solar and wind power are even remotely viable. Simply waving your hands does not make the huge technological hurdles disappear.

And again, it takes years to get things built. Even if we shoot all the environmentalists so that we can build in isolated areas, we will need years just to build the transmission lines. What are we going to do with those solar panels in the meantime? Stack them up in warehouses?

8. Provide tax incentives for those who travel by hybrid car or bus or train. Also, credits for those who convert their home to alternative energy.

Uh, Mike? I realize you probably don’t fill out your own taxes. But we’re already doing that.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Finally, we get to the way Michael intends to coerce people into buying shitty cars, riding on energy-guzzling trains and moving to cities serviced by trains. He’s going to tax the hell out of them. Never mind the crippling effect this will have on poor people who can not afford the new cars or do not live where these fancy rail lines are going to run.

Remember this, as well: high-speed rail will mostly service the coasts, not in the midwest. So people in New York will get cheap rail payed for by the gas bills of people in the heartland. That’s a great way to save Flint.

Here’s his conclusion:

It’s a new day and a new century. The President—and the UAW—must seize this moment and create a big batch of lemonade from this very sour and sad lemon.

They can. By not trying to run an economy based on politics and wishcasting.

60% of GM is ours. I think we can do a better job.

Just Like we did with Amtrack. Or the Synthetic Fuels Corporation. Or ethanol. Or the post office. Or the VA hospitals. Or Medicaid. Or…

(Final note: if you like the content here, please help with our server drive).

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Posted in The Unbearable Wrongness of Moore • Fiskings •
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Michael Moore’s next film to be released in October

Posted by DonnaK on 05/26/09 at 05:59 PM

Well… it looks like it’s that time again. Michael Moore has announced his upcoming film will be released in the States on October 2nd. Since virtually every news source is just quoting Moore’s own site and press release, I’ll link to the same:

Firebrand filmmaker Michael Moore, who targeted the Bush administration in “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the healthcare industry in “Sicko,” is now focusing on the global economic meltdown.

The Oscar-winning director will release his as-yet-untitled documentary across North America on October 2, co-financiers Overture Films and Paramount Vantage said on Thursday.

“The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn’t have enough wealth,” the statement quoted Moore as saying.

“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.”

Overture said Moore was still working on the film, and was keeping plot details close to his vest in typical fashion.

So… anyone remember that this film was originally going to be a “sequel” of sorts to Fahrenheit 9/11 and that Moore shot hundreds of hours of footage about the War on Terror and our foreign relation blunders? Anyone else wondering how Moore’s going to work all that footage into his new piece on the economy? He said he would use all that footage… but how? And isn’t the promise to do so already letting us know that Moore went into this project with a point already in mind, with a fully-formed premise in place that all this footage would support? How is this journalism or a documentary? How is this anything but another scare-piece polemic that Moore has pre-constructed to fit a conclusion at which Moore has already arrived?

I like how Terra King of the Indie Film Examiner put it:

I’m sure Mr. Moore believes in the causes he has chosen to make documentaries about. I’m not saying he is anything but passionate. What I would like to see is a documentary on the fear Moore has caused as a result of some of his work.

Nicely put.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Madoff Madness

Posted by MikeS on 05/13/09 at 08:29 PM

Boy, Time Magazine has really fallen on hard times, haven’t they? They did a series on the 100 Most Influential People in the world and, for some reason, picked Bernie Madoff. So who did they get to write an article about him? Why, it’s our man from ~~Flint~~ Davison. He basically says, in a beautiful “blame the victim” piece, that we deserved Bernie Madoff (assuming I have correctly read his rambling piece).

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Yes, he stole $65 billion from some already quite wealthy people. I know that’s upsetting to them because rich guys like Bernie are not supposed to be stealing from their own kind. Crime, thievery, looting — that’s what happens on the other side of town. The rules of the money game on Park Avenue and Wall Street are comprised of things like charging the public 29% credit card interest, tricking people into taking out a second mortgage they can’t afford, and concocting a student loan system that has graduates in hock for the next 20 years. Now that’s smart business! And it’s legal. That’s where Bernie went wrong — his scheming, his trickery was an outrage both because it was illegal and because he preyed on his side of the tracks.

This would be the credit card industry whose chief representative is now Vice President to the Chosen One? A housing bubble inflated to a large extent by government pressure on lenders and loose money policies at the fed? A federal loan company—two companies in fact—that went completely belly up while paying out tens of millions of dollars to political hacks? The student loan system that, despite being a government-controlled mess, still leaves the average student with a debt of about $20,000 in exchange for a first-rate college education.

I mean, I just wanted to be sure.

Apparently, Moore would prefer that the middle class have no access to credit at all. It would be much better for them to return to the days before credit cards, when they borrowed money from loan sharks or pawnshops and only rich people like Michael Moore could afford to buy a house and an education.

Had Mr. Madoff just followed the example of his fellow top one-percenters, there were many ways he could have legally multiplied his wealth many times over. Here’s how it’s done. First, threaten your workers that you’ll move their jobs offshore if they don’t agree to reduce their pay and benefits. Then move those jobs offshore. Then place that income on the shores of the Cayman Islands and pay no taxes. Don’t put the money back into your company. Put it into your pocket and the pockets of your shareholders. There! Done! Legal!

Well, except that the overseas tax dodge is a complete myth. And companies outsourcing frees resources and capital for greater insourcing while providing cheaper goods to the lower and middle class. And shareholder earnings are taxed. And companies that don’t plow profits into improving their company tend to go bankrupt—like, you know, GM and Chrysler.

Other than everything about it being wrong, however, I stand in we of Mike’s keen analysis of our economic system.

It would be too easy — and the wrong lesson learned — to put Bernie on TIME’s list all by himself. If Ponzi schemes are such a bad thing, then why have we allowed all of our top banks to deal in credit default swaps and other make-believe rackets? Why did we allow those same banks to create the scam of a sub-prime mortgage?

Moore conveniently ignores the largest Ponzi scheme in human history—the Social Security and Medicare systems that are now projected to go bankrupt within the next decade or so.

And instead of putting the people responsible in the cell block in Lower Manhattan, where Bernie now resides, why did we give them huge sums of our hard-earned tax dollars to bail them out of their self-inflicted troubles? Bernard Madoff is nothing more than the scab on the wound. He’s also a most-needed and convenient distraction. Where’s the photo on this list of the ex-chairmen of AIG, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup?

Well, the difference is that most of what those banks did was legal, whereas what Madoff did was illegal. We don’t jail people in this country for being irresponsible assholes (although I think plenty of bank and AIG executives do belong in prison for fraud).

Where’s the mug shot of Phil Gramm, the senator who wrote the bill to strip the system of its regulations, or of the President who signed that bill?

Just to clear, Mikey. That was President Clinton. I mean, just in case you forgot who was President back in 1999. And the big probem wasn’t the repeal of Glass-Steagel but the complete lack of regulation of CDS markets and derivatives.

And how ‘bout those who ran the fake numbers at the ratings agencies, the lobbyists who succeeded in making sleazy accounting a lawful practice, or the stock market itself — an institution that’s treated like the Holy Sepulchre instead of the casino that it is (and, like all other casinos, the house eventually wins).

The Feds still require banks to use those ratings agencies, that’s what’s happening to them. In a capitalist system, those rating agencies would have been ruined by their mistakes.

As for the stock market, it has had a solid return for most of the last century, including the Great Depressions and the Great Whatever We’re In Now. The reason it’s treated like a “Holy Sepulchre”, Mikey, is that hundreds of millions of Americans and thousands of pension funds are invested in it—for the long term. I do agree that there’s a little too much attention paid to the stock market. But it’s not a casino—it’s a tremendous force for elevating the middle class and helping people retire in comfort.

Here’s where it gets fun. I’ll quote it in full.

And what of Madoff’s clients themselves? What did they think was going on to guarantee them incredible returns on their investments every single year — when no one else on planet Earth was getting anything like that? Some have admitted they did have an inkling “something was up,” but no one really wanted to ask what it was that was making their money grow on trees. They were afraid they might find out it had nothing to do with gardening. Many of Madoff’s victims have told investigators that, over the years, they have made much more than the original investment they gave Bernie. If I buy a stolen car from the guy down the street, the police will take that car from me regardless of whether I knew it was stolen. If I knew it was stolen, then I go to jail for receiving stolen property. Will these “victims” give back their gains that were fraudulently obtained? Will the head of Goldman Sachs reveal what he was doing at the meetings with the Fed chairman and the Treasury secretary before the bailout? Will Bank of America please tell us what they’ve spent $45 billion of our TARP money on?

Actually, they spent a lot of that money buying Merrill Lynch at federal gunpoint.

The thing about this article is that sometimes Moore actually makes sense. There are some ... well, not pearls ... but maybe nice pieces of quartz in that river of shit. A lot of the problems we’re having are a result of influence-peddling in Washington. A lot of the problems can be blamed on a Congress and a White House that were more interested in lobbyist junkets than sound banking practices. This isn’t a matter of party either—both were culpable.

But Moore has embraced, repeatedly, a model that would make these things even worse—that would put more of our economy in the hands of politicians, that would make influence-peddling even more critical to business success. Here he is praising the President for firing the CEO of GM. Here he is saying the bailout of GM should have come with all kinds of requirement for mass transit and green cars. His movie on healthcare was practically a love letter to socialism.

What does he think is going to happen when the federal government controls the banks, the car makers, the loan companies, the hospitals, the drug companies, credit cards and healthcare? Does he really think that all those powerful lobbyists and monied interests are going to go home? Or will they simply redouble their efforts to claim their piece of the federal pie? Will we not be right back here with another mysterious baillout and billions more dollars being heaved around at special interests?

Moore has an idea of what the problem is. And I share his outrage over the bailouts. But he wants to put out the fire by pouring more gasoline onto it.

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Smiles For Socialism

Posted by MikeS on 04/22/09 at 09:32 AM

For people who oppose socialized medicine, Britain’s NHS is the gift that keeps on giving. And for genuine Brits, it’s a nightmare:

Like so many young women, Amy King always took great pride in her appearance.

Standing in front of the mirror to check her make-up before a night out, the 21-year-old would always try a smile - friends told her they loved the way it lit up her face.

Eight weeks ago, all that changed. The student from Plymouth was admitted to hospital where, in a single operation, she had every tooth in her mouth removed.

Amy, whose dental problems were caused by untreated gum disease, does not go out any more. And when she looks in the mirror she hardly recognises the face staring back at her.

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While Amy’s experience is an extreme one, it highlights growing concerns about the state of the nation’s dental health.

Last week, statistics obtained by the Liberal Democrats revealed that the number of people having teeth extracted in hospital has risen by one third in the past four years.

More than 175,000 Britons had their teeth removed under general anaesthetic in 2007/08, up 40,000 on the 2003/04 figure.

The number of children having teeth out has shot up, too. But more pertinent is the fact that the rate of these extractions gathered pace after a deeply controversial contract for NHS dentists was introduced in April 2006.

Read the whole thing. The system in Britain is basically denying people routine care but paying for massive expensive procedures. So Amy couldn’t get any help until they needed to yank out every last tooth.

Yes, the Law of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head again.

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Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Ten Years Gone

Posted by DonnaK on 04/21/09 at 07:16 AM

This post was Originally posted at Right-Thinking by West Virginia Rebel. I don’t think I could have said it any better myself, so I’m republishing it in its entirety. Enjoy.

This week has marked the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. As it turns out, much of what we thought happened didn’t.

They weren’t goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School...weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied—in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”

Their rampage put schools on alert for “enemies lists” made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information—including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors—indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

People on both the left and the right projected a lot of their own fears about teenage subcultures and gun violence onto these two. Columbine became one of the touchstones in the “Culture War”, mostly for all the wrong reasons. The plain fact of the matter was that these two were psychopaths who needed little outside influence to do what they did. The lesson of Columbine? It can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone.

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Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Bad news about Lee

Posted by JimK on 04/07/09 at 09:39 PM

Please read this. We’ve lost Lee. Please be respectful in the comments.

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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The NHS’s Latest Hits

Posted by MikeS on 03/18/09 at 09:25 AM

Mike, what news is there from the wonderful UK healthcare system? Glad you asked:

The full extent of the horrific conditions at an NHS hospital where hundreds may have died because of ‘appalling’ care was laid bare yesterday.

Dehydrated patients were forced to drink out of flower vases, while others were left in soiled linen on filthy wards.

Relatives of patients who died at Staffordshire General Hospital told how they were so worried by the standard of care they slept in chairs on the wards.

The ‘shocking’ catalogue of failures was released yesterday after an independent investigation by the Healthcare Commission.

It found Government waiting time targets and a bid to win foundation status were pursued at the expense of patient safety over a three-year period at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust.

The commission’s report - revealed in yesterday’s Daily Mail - said at least 400 deaths could not be explained, although it is feared up to 1,200 patients may have died needlessly.

This is just stunning.

Among the findings of the report were:

Receptionists carrying out initial checks on patients;

Two clinical decision units - one unstaffed - used as ‘dumping grounds’ for A&E patients to avoid missing waiting targets;

Nurses who turned off heart monitors because they didn’t understand how to use them;

Delayed operations, with some patients having surgery cancelled four days in a row and left without food, drink or medication;

Vital equipment such as heart defibrilators was not working;

A savings target of £10million met at the expense of 150 posts, including nurses.

I will grant that this is not typical of the NHS system. But it is something that you will get when you essentially take the consumer completely out of the loop.

But let’s look at the good side—at least the kept costs down.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Feuerwaffe Kontrolle

Posted by Lee on 03/11/09 at 06:48 AM

Ten innocents were gunned down today by a crazed madman in Alabama.

A gunman on a terrifying rampage across two southern Alabama counties killed at least nine people Tuesday, including members of his own family and apparent strangers, and burned down his mother’s home before shooting himself at a metals plant, authorities said.

Police were investigating shootings in at least four different locations in several communities, all of which were believed to be the work of a single gunman who had not yet been identified by investigators.

The afternoon of bloodshed began in Kinston, near the Alabama-Florida border, where the shooter burned down his mother’s house, according to the Coffee County coroner, Robert Preachers. Officials located the woman’s body inside the house, but they had not been able to get inside the still-burning house to determine if he shot her first.

The gunman then headed east, into Geneva County, where he shot and killed five people—four adults and a child—at a home in the nearby town of Samson. Then he killed one person each in two other homes. The identities of all the victims were unknown, but Preachers said they included other members of the shooter’s family.

“He started in his mother’s house,” Preachers said. “Then he went to Samson and he killed his granny and granddaddy and aunt and uncle.”

“We don’t know what triggered it,” Preachers added.

The gunman also shot at a state trooper’s car, striking the vehicle seven times and wounding the trooper with broken glass.

He then killed someone at a Samson supply store, and another person at a service station.

When, oh when, are we going to learn the abject stupidity of allowing so many guns in America? When are we going to adopt a more logical, civilized, rational approach to guns? Why don’t we just ban them like they do in Europe, so that this sort of thing can never happen?

At least 10 people have been killed in a shooting at a school in south-west Germany, police say.

A number of people are also thought to have been wounded in the attack at the Albertville school in Winnenden, north of Stuttgart.

Police say the gunman, who was reported to have been wearing black combat gear, has fled into the town.

A major search is underway, and police and rescue workers are at the secondary school.

“We have at least nine dead and numerous injured,” a police spokeswoman said.

The editor of the local paper, Frank Nipkau, told television channel N-TV that eight pupils and two adults were among the dead.

It’s the latest gun control success!

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Friday, February 13, 2009

Nutroots Of the World Unite!

Posted by MikeS on 02/13/09 at 11:02 AM

Oooh, joy. Michael Moore is planning to make a movie about the economic crisis. And who is he turning to for info? Financial reporters? Economists? Business analysts? How about the business geniuses of Daily Kos:

I am in the middle of shooting my next movie and I am looking for a few brave people who work on Wall Street or in the financial industry to come forward and share with me what they know. Based on those who have already contacted me, I believe there are a number of you who know “the real deal” about the abuses that have been happening. You have information that the American people need to hear. I am humbly asking you for a moment of courage, to be a hero and help me expose the biggest swindle in American history.

That would be TARP, right? Or the CRA? Or Freddie and Fannie? Or the Federal Reserve. Right? Right?! Hmm. Somehow, I don’t think that’s where this will go.

All correspondence with me will be kept confidential. Your identity will be protected and you will decide to what extent you wish to participate in telling the greatest crime story ever told.

The important thing here is for you to step up as an American and do your duty of shedding some light on this financial collapse. A few good people have already come forward, which leads me to believe there are many more of you out there who know what’s going on. Here’s your chance to let your fellow citizens in on the truth.

If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com.

For the rest of you on my email list who don’t work in the financial industry, you’re probably wondering, “What the heck is this all about? I thought he said he was making a romantic comedy!”

Well, I just can’t say much right now. I’m sure you can understand why. One thing I can tell you is that you’re gonna like this movie when I’m done with it. Oh, yeah…

So, again, if you work for a bank, a brokerage firm or an insurance company—or if you have seen things or heard things that you believe the American people have a right to know—please contact me at bailout@michaelmoore.com.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Yours,
Michael Moore

Now, I’m probably talking out of my ass here, since I don’t work in the movie industry. But if I were interested, as a writer, in learning the story of how the financial collapse happened and I were advertising for interview subjects, I would probably put anonymous ads in financial magazines or craiglist or something. I would not want to selectively pick out people who post, write and comment at one of the most liberal websites in the world. Or one of the most conservative, for that matter. But then again, I would be interested in the truth, not in constructing a slick polemic targeted at George Bush, Republicans, rich bankers, freemasons and capitalism in general.

Your Uncle MikeS is about to save you $10 on a movie ticket. I’ll summarize the probable movie for you. This was all the fault of Republicans and evil bankers. They forced people to buy homes they couldn’t afford so that they could lose hundreds of billions of dollars in foreclosures. They deliberately crashed the stock market so we would also lose our 401k’s and not be able to retire. Even now, they are planning the next wave of financial catastrophe.

There is a good story to be told in the financial collapse. There are certainly villains and idiots aplently. A good film-maker—such as Alex Gibney, who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room could make a compelling film that would educate and enrage at the same time. But Michael Moore is no Alex Gibney. And now that he’s about to venture into economics, expect plenty of analysis to skewer his nonsense.

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

War Porn

Posted by Lee on 01/14/09 at 01:24 AM

Indie war correspondent Michael Yon is suing Michael Moore for copyright violation. Basically he used one of Yon’s pictures in the banner on his website, and despite numerous requests to take it down has refused to do so. Be sure and read the whole thing for the specifics, but this section really struck me as being right on.

Justice Potter Stewart once defined pornography by saying, “I know it when I see it.” Pornography and propaganda are closely related, as they are both cynical attempts at manipulation, rooted in a lack of respect for humanity. War Porn is one of the more disturbing developments in the new media, as people on both sides of the Iraq War get their kicks watching video images of death and destruction – as long as it’s their opponents who get killed. Whether it’s an Al Qaeda cell-phone video of an IED attack or the grisly footage of a Coalition air strike, War Porn is degrading and incendiary. Of course, some footage is newsworthy and informative and the public deserves to see it. There is also great value to soldiers in watching footage for training purposes and to better understand battlefields and weapons. But at some point, especially when the material is used to make political points, images of combat can cross the line into pornography. People die in war, but we must never forget that each casualty is a human being, even people as deserving of death as Al Qaeda. Denying our opponents’ humanity, we lose a little of our own.

When someone’s grandmother disseminates the photo of Major Beiger cradling a dying girl in his arms, I allow the usage because I feel she is trying to share the human tragedy. When Michael Moore puts that same photo on his web site, alongside images of George Bush, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, the clear implication is that Farah’s death is their fault. That is a misrepresentation of the facts on the ground, as well as the story of the photo. Farah was killed by a suicide car bomb in Mosul on May 2, 2005. Major Bieger and other soldiers literally risked their own lives to save many children and adults that day, but Farah didn’t make it. Michael Moore apparently does not understand – or refuses to acknowledge – the moral distinction between a man who would murder innocent people, and a man who would sacrifice himself to save them. The photo, as I took it, is the truth, but Moore uses it – illegally – to convey falsehoods. His mind is that of a political propagandist who sees Farah’s death not as a human tragedy, but a tool.

Hey, as long as Mikey can sell his shitty movies and books and keep on making himself even more millions, what the hell does he care?

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Friday, January 09, 2009

Somewhere in a penthouse in New York Michael Moore is feeling ill!

Posted by yngcelt on 01/09/09 at 01:57 PM

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for Surgeon General may leave Michael Moore feeling a bit “Sicko”.

President-elect Obama has chosen Dr. Sanjay Gupta as the new Surgeon General when his term begins this month. You might remember Dr. Gupta from his criticisms of Moore’s propaganda film, er, “documentary” Sicko:

CNN’s Gupta Fact Checks Moore’s Sicko

and his on air debate with the corpulent one over the “facts” of the film:

You tube video of the Gupta/Moore debate over Sicko

Is it any surprise that Moore would not only question, but criticize and attack such a choice? Check out his website for the numerous references to the decision by Obama:

MichaelMoore.com

Considering the vast knowledge and wisdom of Moore and that fact that according to him we should never question anything HE says, what could someone like Dr. Gupta possibly offer as the Surgeon General? Well, a lot it seems according to some sources such as U.S. News and World Report:

Gupta, a surgeon and assistant professor of neurosurgery at Emory University (where he still cares for patients), would bring to the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services unique talents unrivaled by any of the prior 17 surgeons general going back to 1871. Among them are his truly outstanding health communication skills and the fact that he is already a trusted figure in many people’s living rooms on all matters of health and disease—particularly on the major national heath problems that are within the domain of the surgeon general.

But what about the problems facing veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan? Surely this “quack” wouldn’t know how to address THOSE issues! Or would he?:

Speaking of wars, Gupta gained some unique battlefield exposure as an embedded correspondent in Iraq with a U.S. Navy medical unit dubbed the “Devil Docs.” He will no doubt bring to the job a perspective on military health eminently helpful to his office as the Iraq War winds down and thousands of men and women return to civilian life carrying with them their wartime experiences and sometimes residual illnesses.

US News & World Report

So why would anyone criticize such a choice? Apparently, it’s because of the fact that Dr. Gupta had the audacity to actually question the “infallible” Moore on the so-called facts in his film “Sicko”. Consider the criticism from the New York Times’ Paul Krugman:

I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

New York Times Paul Krugman blog

So what’s wrong if Dr. Gupta accused Moore of “fudging the facts”? Which of course, Moore would NEVER do?

Gupta didn’t say “Michael Moore is an annoying blowhard”; he didn’t say “We question his interpretation of the evidence”; he said he “fudged the facts”. In other words, he accused Moore of lying. That’s a very strong accusation, which had better be backed by solid evidence. Instead, we had CNN misreading a number from Moore; CNN objecting to Moore using a projected health care spending number for 2007 instead of an actual number for 2005 (and the projection was right, by the way); CNN accusing Moore of not showing a number that was in fact right there in the movie. And Gupta did not apologize, except for the misread number.

Huh, so making strong accusations without solid evidence is wrong and therefore brings a person’s integrity into question? Really? So can Mr. Krugman or anyone else who defends Moore’s propaganda and cherry picking of information repackaged to push Moore’s agenda tell me what kind of “solid evidence” Moore EVER provides to support his accusations against anyone and everyone he’s ever attacked or accused of wrongdoing?

To be honest, I really don’t care about Dr. Gupta’s qualifications as Surgeon General. After all, what does the Surgeon General do anyway except provide warnings about stuff we already know is unhealthy? Does the Surgeon General have the power to directly influence or personally change medical policies or the health care system in our country? I’m just tickled that Obama, the man that Moore has praised and glorified and taken personal credit for helping to get elected has made a decision that pisses Moore off so badly. Although I didn’t vote for Obama and still have reservations about how he is going to handle crisis in our country when all he really won the election on was charm and cult of personality, I am really looking forward to see how many of the liberal/democrat flock of sheep start questioning him and are forced to eat crow in front of the rest of us. It looks like Dr. Gupta is the first appetizer!

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Thursday, December 18, 2008

Explosively Good Medicine

Posted by Lee on 12/18/08 at 08:21 AM

Meet the doctor.

NHS doctor Bilal Abdulla, who tried to blow up a London nightclub and Glasgow airport, will serve a minimum of 32 years after a judge condemned his “murderous intent” to maim and kill.

Mr Justice Mackay told Bilal Abdulla, 29, he was a “ very dangerous man” who posed a high risk to the British public

He said he had no doubt that Abdulla and his accomplice Kafeel Ahmed, 28, who died a month after the attacks, were planning to “kill innocent civilians on an indiscriminate basis.”

Both men shared equal responsibility, he added, but they may have had “external encouragement.”

Abdulla, a junior doctor from Iraq, and Ahmed, a PhD student from India, tried to set off two car bombs outside the Tiger Tiger night club in London’s West End and when they failed to go off drove a burning Jeep into Glasgow airport in June last year.

The judge said the nails added to the London bombs demonstrated Abdulla’s deadly intent and the car had been parked next to a the glass wall of the nightclub for maximum effect.

He said: “Your murderous intent was best shown by the obstructing of the safety mechanisms on two of the cylinders and by the 800-plus nails in one car and 1,000 in the second, designed to do nothing else but constitute a deadly form of shrapnel to maim, injure and kill.

“The club represented everything that you and Ahmed held in contempt and despised about Western culture - drink, association between the sexes, and music.”

Michael Moore fans will be thrilled to know that Dr. Abdulla’s medical care was provided free by the British government.

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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Moore is Right. And Wrong

Posted by MikeS on 11/20/08 at 11:11 AM

You just knew the media was going to have to probe the wisdom of the creator of Roger and Me on the auto industry bailout. But, surprisingly, Moore actually says something right! Yeah, I know you don’t believe it. Here it is:

I’ll tell you, it was hilarious just watching these CEOs there (Tuesday) and (Wednesday) testifying in Congress, saying that, you know, that the problem wasn’t theirs, you know, the cars they were building. It was the financial situation that we’re in now.

The problem is the cars they’ve been building. They’ve never listened to the consumers. They’ve just gone about it their own wrong way. I’ll tell you, you know, I’m of mixed mind about this bailout, Larry, because I don’t think these companies, with these management people, should be given a dime, because that’s just going to be money going up in smoke or off to other countries.

GM is currently building a $300 million factory in Russia right now to build SUVs, right outside of St. Petersburg. That’s where your money’s going to go, no matter what they say.

Now, granted, he thinks their big problem is building cars overseas rather than here. He makes no mention of American companies paying 50% more per hour than other companies thanks to union benefits and featherbedding. And his cure is, if anything, worse than the disease:

President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we’re going to use this money to save these jobs, but we’re not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer.

We’re going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reigns on these companies. They’re to build mass transit. They’re to build hybrid cars. They’re to build cars that use little or no gasoline.

We’re facing a national crisis, not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of the polar ice caps are melting. There’s only so much oil left under the Earth. We’re going to run out of that, if not in our children’s time, our grandchildren’s time.

There’s got to be a plan set out to find other ways to transport ourselves in other ways than using fossil fuels.

Yes, Barack Obama, who drives an SUV, certainly has the expertise to turn around a flailing industry. With his degrees in Business Management, Engineering and Chemistry, he’s the perfect man to run this industry. One day, we can look forward to the auto industry being run with the same skill and efficiency with which the government runs Amtrak.

But let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. Mikey said something right. He was due to say something right at some point this year as one correct statement per year is his established performance level. And we, at Moorewatch, are nothing if not fair.

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Moore Cries A River

Posted by MikeS on 11/20/08 at 02:44 AM

If Michael Moore is indeed changing his movie to a paen to Barack Obama, I can save you the effort of seeing it. Just read his hysterical open letter.

Who among us is not at a loss for words? Tears pour out. Tears of joy. Tears of relief. A stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair.

In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity: Barack Obama, a good man, a black man, said he would bring change to Washington, and the majority of the country liked that idea. The racists were present throughout the campaign and in the voting booth. But they are no longer the majority, and we will see their flame of hate fizzle out in our lifetime.

Oh, it gets better.

More...

There was another important “first” last night. Never before in our history has an avowed anti-war candidate been elected president during a time of war. I hope President-elect Obama remembers that as he considers expanding the war in Afghanistan. The faith we now have will be lost if he forgets the main issue on which he beat his fellow Dems in the primaries and then a great war hero in the general election: The people of America are tired of war. Sick and tired. And their voice was loud and clear yesterday.

The problem here is that Obama won, at least in part, because he toughened his message on terrorism. If the Taliban re-establishes itself in Afghanistan, Obama will have a very short four years.

It’s been an inexcusable 44 years since a Democrat running for president has received even just 51% of the vote. That’s because most Americans haven’t really liked the Democrats

Is it because of their big-government high-tax agenda? Their occasional spinelessness in confronting Communism and terrorism? Jimmy Carter’s comically bad presidency?

They see them as rarely having the guts to get the job done or stand up for the working people they say they support.

Precisely. They tax their employers to death and regulate their companies into the ground. Wait a minute. I’m not sure that’s what Mike meant.

Well, here’s their chance. It has been handed to them, via the voting public, in the form of a man who is not a party hack, not a set-for-life Beltway bureaucrat.

Voted with his party over 90% of the time. Was a product of the Daley Machine. Yes, definitely not a partisan.

We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, “gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?” Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We’ve entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

FDR created Capra and Steinbeck? Does that mean that President Polk created Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne? Did Carter create Steven Spielberg and George Lucas? What the hell is this messianic twaddle? What kind of artist can’t function unless there is a divine being at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

An African American has been elected President of the United States! Anything is possible! We can wrestle our economy out of the hands of the reckless rich and return it to the people. Anything is possible! Every citizen can be guaranteed health care. Anything is possible! We can stop melting the polar ice caps. Anything is possible! Those who have committed war crimes will be brought to justice. Anything is possible.

News flash: anything was always possible in America. It was even possible, under the eeevil Ronald Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, for a documentary director of moderate talent and piss-poor accuracy to become undeservedly rich and famous.

Less...

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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Moore’s new movie… version 2.0

Posted by DonnaK on 11/19/08 at 06:01 AM

I know I said in the comments to the previous post I would have this up a couple of days ago - I apologize for the delay. WotLK has me a bit under it’s spell… ;)

Remember the announcements a few months ago about Moore’s new film, the sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11? You know, the one he’s been shooting for a good couple of months? Well… he’s still shooting it… it just isn’t a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 anymore. Anyone else confused? Cinematical seems to be as well:

By now we all know that Michael Moore doesn’t make documentaries like our grandfathers did. He’s a master of polemics, using his films to rail against corporations, guns, governments, insurance companies, and whatever else riles up his David vs. Goliath sensibility. When his most recent project was announced in May, it was described as a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 that would “tackle what’s going on in the world and America’s place in it,” as pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter. Now, however, THR says the film will focus on “the global financial crisis and the U.S. economy.”

Moore is still “feverishly shooting” and it’s hoped the film will be ready for release next spring. At first blush, though, it sounds like he decided to make the mid-project adjustment in reaction to (or in anticipation of) the Democrats’ victory. Without Bush to bash, and without the Republican Party in control of Congress, how much mileage could he get out of criticizing U.S. foreign policy with a new President steering a (presumably) different course?

So.... let me see if I have this right. Moore has COMPLETELY changed the topic of his film. It was going to be a polemic that railed against US foreign policy, and now it’s going to be an study of our economic crisis. These are two completely and totally different topics… and yet Moore isn’t stopping his filming or scraping his footage. Somehow he’s going to make all the footage he’s shot about foreign policy now work for and focus on the economy.

.... ummmm...... anyone else confused about how he could possibly pull that one off without coming to both projects with very similar theses, preconceptions and foregone conclusions? Me either. I think Cinematical states the problem quite well:

Unlike many documentary filmmakers, Moore appears to start with a conclusion on his projects and then search for footage to back it up. Documentarians often say they don’t really ‘find’ their film, or discover the story, until they’re knee-deep in editing, but it doesn’t sound like Moore works that way. Which doesn’t mean his films lack meaning or substance or entertainment value, just that they’re more like personal essays than traditional docs.

According to THR, Moore is now saying that the project is less a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 and more of a bookend to Roger & Me. What more could he say, though, about corporations and big business than he already has? When he endorsed Barack Obama in April, he wrote: “Corporate America is not going to give up their hold on our government just because we say so.” Maybe he wants to hold their feet to the fire until they burst into flame.

If all Moore does is bitch about the economy and complain about corporations, I don’t think it’ll be a very welcome message.

Well said.

I open to the floor to you fine ladies and gentlemen. Thoughts? Comments? Opinions? What do you think about this sudden and drastic turn in Moore’s agenda?

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Why I have gone silent

Posted by JimK on 11/14/08 at 04:33 PM

A commenter recently bemoaned the lack of this site’s activity. Well...I take much of the blame for that. I have had the politics beaten out of me on *every* front long before the election. This is NOT about Obama’s victory. I gave up on my personal politics/oriented blog for the most part about 6 months ago. This place sucked the joy out of me a year ago. I cannot seem to find it again. The fire that drives me to want to rail against the shit I see is still burning...but it’s a small coal, buried under a pile of ash. I cannot imagine it will stay dormant forever, especially in an administration that will likely try to implement some of the things Mikey loves (to happen to other people), like stealing via outrageous taxes from anyone who works for more than a living wage and populist crap like bread and circuses. Free money for all! Tax the rich until there are no rich anymore, it’s only fair! Mike will hide his wealth in all sorts of tax shelters, I’m sure, paying the bare minimum the government requires while advocating that all of you who make more than you need to pay your bills and buy his DVDs give up all disposable income to help those who make less. He’s nothing if not consistently inconsistent.

See? I still have a little fire in there. Enough to make me mad on occasion. :) Anyway, I apologize for the lack of activity. If you feel like you have something you’d like to see on the front page, email me and we can talk about making you an author on the site. if you are already an author...please feel free to post about anything Mikey brings up on his site. I understand he’s been one unbearable prick lately. :)

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Monday, October 27, 2008

A Corny Argument

Posted by Lee on 10/27/08 at 10:36 AM

A few weeks ago the lovely DonnaK posted a list of Mikey’s latest idiocies, as well as her critique of them. One particularly stuck out in my mind.

Proposal Three: Ban high fructose corn syrup. “And I will be the poster boy of that campaign.” Earlier in his lecture, Moore suggested that corn syrup’s historical dominance as a sweetener was a result of government collusion with large agribusinesses.

This is, simply put, one of the most retarded things he has ever said. The EXACT OPPOSITE is true. The prevalence of HFCS is a direct result of government interfering in the free market, and it was implement by the Grand Socialist himself FDR. Here’s what I wrote FOUR YEARS AGO on my personal blog regarding this issue.

There’s one aspect to this that this article neglected to mention. The next time you buy a Coke look at the ingredients. You won’t see sugar, you’ll see “high fructose corn syrup.” This is sugar syrup made from corn, and it’s used in almost everything. Why? Because the high tariffs on imported sugar inflate the price to such a high level that using corn syrup is far less expensive. The main group lobbying for these high sugar tariffs is a corporation called Archer Daniels Midland. Why should ADM care about sugar tariffs? Because, you guessed it, ADM are the makers of, among other things, high fructose corn syrup. There’s absolutely no reason that Coca Cola couldn’t be made, as it used to be, with sugar, except for the artificially high price caused by government interference in free trade.

To put it in simple terms, the government puts tariffs on imported sugar in order to keep the price artificially high. (I have heard estimates that sugar is five to ten times more expensive than it would be if subject to market forces.) The makers of HFCS only have to make their product a penny or two cheaper than sugar to make it an economically attractive alternative. Coca Cola alone must save millions, of not billions, of dollars by saving those few pennies with each batch of Coke they produce.

Why is business able to collude with government? If government were to get out of the sugar price support business, and let the market decide, you would have fewer products using HFCS because sugar would immediately drop in price. What Mikey is proposing with his ban on HFCS is treating the symptom, not the disease itself. If the government were not involved in sugar prices, then there would be no avenue for business to collude with them to keep the price of sugar high. Mike is therefore correct in stating that it is collusion between agribusiness and government, but he implies some kind of corporate conspiracy, when the simple solution is to just end all farm subsidies once and for all.

So, let’s look at this in the context of the current election. Cato has a great post up about the policy proposals of the specific candidates regarding this very issue.

In an article in today’s Congress Daily, key sugar lobby groups praised Senator Obama’s newfound enthusiasm for the U.S. sugar program. As a sen