Capitalism Is Evil

In what will surely become an infamous scene in his oeuvre, Michael Moore backs an armored truck onto the sidewalk outside several bailed-out New York City financial institutions and asks the banks (or at least their security guards) to give back the people's money. It's a guerrilla tactic that Moore has perfected and that's good for a laugh, but it hardly delves into the causes of the global economic collapse. Moore's thesis in his latest movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, is that our current economic system is bad, even evil. But what economic system would Moore prefer? The filmmaker recently spoke with NEWSWEEK's Nancy Cook about the way he invests his own money, the future of industrial towns and cities, and the people to blame for the Great Recession. Excerpts:

Not since your first movie, Roger and Me,has one of your films had such a personal tone. Why did you choose to get so personal?
For years, I've been making films and writing books about what I believe the wealthiest citizens have been up to and how they've tried to achieve short-term gain by reducing the workforce, by trying to get out of paying their taxes, and by moving operations overseas. This film is something that just sort of grew out of two decades of thinking about this, observing this, and writing about it.

Do you think making money is bad? You portray it as something that's wrong, but your movies have grossed an estimated $173 million.
I come from the working class, and through some good fortune I've been able to make these movies and write these books and earn a decent living. I was brought up that if you were able to do well, you have an additional responsibility of making sure that others do well. To me, capitalism isn't about making money or doing well or being rewarded for your ideas and your ingenuity. Capitalism has become something that has benefited the few at the expense of the many. It just seems to be a system that legalizes what is a very basic human foible, which is greed.

What have you done with all the money you've made? Do you invest it?
I don't invest in anything. I don't own any stock. I don't participate in the system. Why would I want to put my hard-earned money into a casino? Now, when you invest, people are taking secondary bets on other secondary bets and concocting weird schemes. No normal person can benefit.

Is Wall Street alone to blame for the financial crisis? What about consumers who spent beyond their means?
That was the storyline during the first couple weeks of the crash—all of those people who took out loans they couldn't afford. But there have always have been people who have lived beyond their means. There are always those people who don't understand how to watch their money. They've never caused a crash before.

The banks and the lending institutions perpetrated a fraud so that people would never really understand what they would owe the banks. Elizabeth Warren [a law professor at Harvard University and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel] took her credit-card contract into her class at Harvard and asked them to look at what the interest rate was. They couldn't find a straight answer in that long document. That's not an accident. That's on purpose. Hopefully, the Justice Department will attack this and clean this up, but I don't blame the people who are victimized by this.

The movie idealizes the 1950s and 1960s, before foreign countries became so competitive and the global economy emerged. It's not realistic to go back to those times now, so how can the U.S. fit into a global marketplace?
Where is the moral question that gets asked? The question can't just be about making money. If the company was just about making money, then why doesn't General Motors just sell crack? They don't sell crack because, as a society, we don't let them sell crack. We can actually tell a company, "No, you can't move that work to a factory in Mexico. You have to stay."