Hypocrisy abounds in the NY debut of “Capitalism”

The premise of Moore’s newest opus is that the economic system of capitalism is inherently evil and must be destroyed. The LA Times is not alone in noting how ironic it is to hold a premiere for a movie with this as its thesis in such a manor:

As the Deal Journal’s Michael Corkery notes in a surprisingly evenhanded report, having the film open at New York’s Lincoln Center was a huge blunder, since it made Moore a fat target (no pun intended) for charges of hypocrisy.

After all, as Corkery puts it, the center’s sleek new theater was largely funded “by the very institutions that Moore lambasts as greedy, sleazy and beyond repent. Before the film, the crowd sipped champagne and cocktails in the ‘Morgan Stanley Lobby’ and then headed to their seats in the ‘Citi Balcony.’ Movie tickets were available at the ‘Bank of New York Box Office’ and there’s outdoor seating at the Credit Suisse Information Grandstand.’ “ (Geez, when you have to pee, do you think you can do your business at the Alan Greenspan Memorial Urinal?)

Corkery says there is “plenty of good entertainment” in Moore’s film while acknowledging the emotional impact of some of the film’s scenes, including one where Moore exposes how Wal-Mart profited from a life insurance policy it took out on a young woman who died unexpectedly, leaving behind a young family scrambling to make ends meet. But he also points out that Moore is often guilty of “throwing stones in a glass house he often frequents.” Noting that Moore has gone from assembly line worker to well-compensated indie filmmaker, Corkery contends that “his journey alone exemplifies the social mobility made possible by the very economic system he savages in his latest film.”

But wait! There’s more from The Business Insider, who noticed something rather interesting at the NY premiere:

Held at the fabulous, sprawling, lushly-appointed Esquire Apartment in Soho, it was packed with good-looking, well-dressed people, had multiple bars across two suites and two balconies, featured a Steak Bar, and even had a hot tub, complete with young lovelies lounging steamily therein. Meanwhile, the Hackers were there — the Hackers from Peoria, Illinois, whom an hour ago I had watched get evicted from their home, bewildered and tearful, burning their worldly possessions. I wondered what they must think. (Actually, I asked Mr. Hacker, who said that everyone in New York seemed to be beautiful, that it was their first trip and that they were having fun. I said I was glad to see that they were doing okay; he said, “Well, we’re not in that movie for nothing.”)

Hmmm… I wonder what exactly the Hackers did receive for appearing in Moore’s new film? Given Moore’s past of attempting to buy opinions and silence (*cough*), one has to wonder.

More heat for “Capitalism”

When even The Huffington Post starts to turn on Michael Moore’s new film, you know there’s trouble a-brewin’ for our favorite polemicist. I couldn’t believe my eye when I read their review the review of “Capitalism”. Now, for the sake of fairness, it starts out with a slew of compliments:

Like I said after a screening on Wednesday here in L.A., Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story is awesome and I want to recommend it (again) to everyone-- except for one part.

But after a short time, reviewer Howie Klein skewers Moore to the wall over Moore’s treatment of Chris Dodd in his film. Listen to this:

Well, okay, the traditional media, sure, the AP, of course, but not a liberal media source like Michael Moore, right?  Right?

Wrong.

Moore:  As I point out in the film, I have an exclusive interview with the VIP loan manager at Countrywide Loans, the largest mortgage company in the country, was giving sweetheart loans to Senator Dodd where he didn’t have to pay fees, they did away with the paper work for him, he got all-- things the average person couldn’t get. ... I think people are going to be surprised.

Hell yeah, they are going to be surprised!  Surprised that Michael-freaking-Moore ate this guy’s story up without even the most basic fact check!  Sure, it fit his narrative well, but c’mon, could you at least check to see if he, in fact got a special deal? Time to hand over that $10,000, Michael.

Also, if you are Michael Moore, and you have basically made a career out of getting powerful people, people who you have no business interviewing, on film, how is it possible that Chris Dodd is not interviewed in the film?  Roger-- check. Charlton Heston-- check.  Chris Dodd-- [crickets].  If you get the accuser on video, making wild accusations that everyone now agrees are completely false, how is the accused not here, allowed even a moment to mention that HE GOT THE SAME FUCKING RATES AS EVERYONE ELSE?

Why does this feel like, in the interest of being able to sit on Leno and say, “I went after Democrats too!,” Moore passed up the real story here?  It would have been really powerful if he made the connection between the bullshit allegations about Dodd and the banking industry desperately wanting to put the breaks on important housing and foreclosure legislation that Dodd was championing in the Senate at that very moment.  Well, mission accomplished assholes, excuse me, the Sheriff is here to foreclose on my house (is it possible its the same one from Roger and Me? Oh, the irony).

Finally, exclusive?  You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.  Maybe what he meant was that, even though the Feinberg Interview Express has more miles on it than the Madden Cruiser, he was only getting interviewed by Moore at that particular moment, so it was exclusive as to that particular place and time.  Or something.  (Seriously, not counting Darrell Issa’s I-am-doing-the-bidding-of-the-NRSC’s sham investigations, Feinberg has done roughly seven quintillion interviews.  You can look it up.

Ummm… yeah. I won’t comment on Klein’s opinions about Dodd, but I do think it says a lot when The Huffington Post puts out a piece that slams Moore this hard.

But wait! There’s more! The National came out with an exceptional review of the film’s premise and execution thereof. You should read the whole thing, but I especially liked this section:

On Tuesday, pitching his latest film on the Jay Leno Show, Mr Moore declared capitalism as “evil” and called for Americans to “go back to the roots of our country, democracy”, to fix the system.

The implication seemed to be that democracy and capitalism are somehow incompatible, like oil and water. In fact, they are as combustible as fire and a stiff wind.

Unless Mr Moore is aware of some as-yet-to-be-written revisionist history, America was a democracy in 1837 when a massive banking collapse led to a six-year long recession.

It was democratic during the crippling depression that began in 1873 and lingered on for a quarter of a century.

It was similarly pluralist during the mild recession that began in 1920 and it remained so in the run-up to the Great Depression a decade later.

The October 1929 stock market crash occurred on the presidential watch of Herbert Hoover who, far from an amiable dunce as he is popularly portrayed, was one of the most able men of his generation, a self-made multimillionaire, philanthropist, humanitarian and pioneer of the liberal “progressive” movement with which Mr Moore seems to so closely identify.

In his interview with Mr Leno, Mr Moore said capitalism was “legalised” greed, as if there was such a thing as “outlawed” greed. It would be more accurate to say that a common feature of democracy, particularly in one as unfettered as America’s, is legalised excess.

Nicely put. So once again, it seems that even liberals who normally defend Moore tooth and nail are angry with him for at least parts of “Capitalism”. If these are the early reviews, I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen when the general public gets a look at it. 

Early responses to “Capitalism: A Love Story”

I know I’ve been an absent landlord for a while, and I do apologize for that. I plan on becoming much more present in the near future, and there is certainly much to discuss as Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, has just debuted at The Venice Film Festival. Set to debut in US theaters on October 2nd, the film garnered Moore a nearly eight minute standing ovation from the Venice film audience. However, reviews outside the festival have been lukewarm at best. Even traditionally liberal and Moore-friendly publications are slamming “Capitalism” right and left to a rather surprising degree. So what are reviewers saying about Moore’s newest opus?

From The Telegraph Online:

I wonder, is there a more serious reason than his weight behind Michael Moore’s demise? Seven or eight years ago, his films - such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine - were incredibly fashionable, and he was one of the most talked about directors around. But although his new film - Capitalism: a love story - has received an eight-minute standing ovation from the luvvies in Venice (”the longest in memory”, according to Moore’s twitter account) for most people, his hypocrisy is too much to bear.

Don’t be fooled by the scruffy cap and trampish demeanour. Moore is as well-to-do as the “stupid white men” which he has made millions of dollars from criticising. The Guardian interviewed him shortly after he became a best-selling author and discovered not only that he was the best paid presenter at Channel 4 (during his short-lived career as a chat show host), but that he was no stranger to the high-life....

Sadly for Michael Moore, many of the people that should be watching his films don’t get the joke either. He is supposed to be the champion of the oppressed, who spends his career holding the rich and famous to account. Now he’s one of them, and lapping up the lifestyle like a banker in boom time, it makes no sense. Still, at least he gets to rub shoulders with Hugo Chavez.

From The Examiner:

“Capitalism is evil” is the conclusion of Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism:  A Love Story”.

What an embarrassment....

So what socialist country does Michael Moore like better than the United States?  And don’t write in by trying to prove the Netherlands, or France, or whatever:  Michael Moore says CAPITALISM is evil.  Not a mixed system.  I’ll debate the U.S. being better than those places, but not right now.  Which socialist, fascist, communist, anarchist, or other system is better than capitalism?

Every possible experiment in socialism has been a colossal failure with millions dead from starvation.  It is a system that is pure evil; stealing from some to give to others and leaving everyone poor.

And if Michael Moore is advocating that, then he is the evil one.

From CNNMoney:

VENICE (Fortune)—If anyone has profited from the free-enterprise system in the past 20 years, it’s Michael Moore. Since 1989, when his “Roger & Me” pioneered the docu-comedy form of nonfiction film, Moore’s movies, TV shows and best-selling books have given him an eight-figure net worth.

And in all of these, he is the improbable star: a heavyset fellow with a doofus grin, alternately laughing and badgering but always at the center of his own attention. Why, there he is, at the end of his new movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” wrapping the New York Stock Exchange building in yellow tape that reads: CRIME SCENE…

By now, a Michael Moore film is its own genre: a vigorous vaudeville of working-class sob stories, snippets of right-wing power players saying ugly things, longer interviews with experts on the Left, funny old film clips and, at the climax, Moore engaging in some form of populist grandstanding.

This time, he goes to the headquarters of the former AIG, a multibillion-dollar recipient of government largesse, and attempts to make a citizen’s arrest of its chief executives. He also asks Wall Streeters for advice on healing the nation. One man’s quick reply: “Don’t make any more movies.”

“Capitalism” has lots of statistics, like the Rasmussen poll that showed only a slight majority of young adults prefer capitalism to socialism. But this is a lecture from a charismatic comedian of a professor; he makes his points with gag movie references and quick visual puns.

From The Atlantic:

Instead, I’ll just say that I highly doubt that either movie will do particularly well at the box office, though Moore’s film may spark some interest due to the economic events that it considers. I think much of the public’s wary response to Washington’s efforts at healthcare reform shows that Americans are still generally pretty nervous about the government being too involved in their lives. So the thought of trading in free-market capitalism for government-run socialism probably won’t appeal to most Americans at this time.

I will also note that no one going to see these films should expect a thorough examination of the economic merits of capitalism versus socialism. Neither of these directors, to my knowledge, have much experience in economics or finance. As a result, I doubt either is a particularly rigorous film, but probably more based on opinion and anecdotal observation.

From Variety:

Unfortunately, elsewhere, Moore strives so hard to manipulate viewers’ emotions with shots of crying children and tearjerking musical choices that he’s not so much over-egging the pudding as making an omelet out of it. While it could be argued that Moore needs to milk the human-interest stories for all their worth to get auds to engage with his denunciation of capitalism, more often than not, such tactics just patronize the audience and descend into cheap sentimentality. Moore all but stops short of holding up dead puppies Hank Paulson personally murdered.....

No Michael Moore film would be complete without scenes of the writer-helmer arguing with security guards in glassy office-building foyers as he attempts to have an impromptu word with the company’s CEO. Predictably ill-fated attempts are made to storm the citadels of various banks and financial institutions that survived the crash. In perhaps the funniest moment, Moore tries to find a banker who can explain what derivatives are; he corners one and says he wants some advice, to which the reply comes, quick as a flash: “Stop making films!”

Moore shows no signs of heeding this injunction, and ends the pic on a combatative note, vowing, “I refuse to live in a country like this, and I’m not leaving.” It’s a pugnacious riposte to his right-wing critics, but in the end, Moore also fails to answer his left-wing doubters, who will have plenty of evidence here that Moore’s argument is less with capitalism as Marx and Engels understood it, or even as the North Koreans and Cubans do, than with capitalism’s most egregious excesses in the U.S. His ideal is not the end of private ownership, just more cooperatively owned businesses where everyone shares the wealth and makes collective decisions. Moore merely flirts with counterpointing socialism with capitalism, and ultimately sets up an inoffensive-to-the-point-of-meaningless notion of democracy as capitalism’s opposite.

Ummm… wow. I honestly didn’t expect such an immediate derogatory response to Moore’s work, but here it is already pouring in, and these are just the early reviews. So how off-the-mark is this film? Have people finally had their fill of Moore’s particular brand of polemic? Time will only tell, but I’ll do my best to look back through the last week or so of news to see if I can put some more meat and perspective on this negative response to Moore’s new film.

This should be an interesting car-crash of a film premiere, that’s for sure. 

Michael Moore’s next film to be released in October

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.

Explosively Good Medicine

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.

Once Again, Capitalism Saves the World

When Michael Moore wants to drop a few pounds he usually just pays someone to use Photoshop to stick his head on the body of a smaller fat guy.  Other than that he pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to the world’s most exclusive fat farm resorts.  However, if you’re a nurse in the socialist medical utopia of the UK, you just let the taxpayers pick up the bill.

Overweight nurses are to get personal trainers and high street vouchers to encourage them to lose weight.

More than 200 NHS staff are being equipped with pedometers and offered motivational fitness coaches to help them slim down.

They have been promised £20 of high street store vouchers if they manage to keep the weight off during the year-long pilot.

But here comes the best part.  Are you ready?  Make sure you’re sitting down, because this is awesome.

The £250,000 scheme at Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust is being run by American healthcare company Humana, which wants to roll the programme out across Britain.

That’s right, folks!  The compassionate, free governmental fantasyland of the UK is turning to an evil, greedy, for-profit, heartless capitalist American company to get their lard-ass nurses to drop weight. 

My God, it’s almost as if socialism doesn’t work, and the free market provides solutions that government either cannot or will not!  Who could have ever imagined such a thing?

Dead Baby Jokes

You know that wonderful medical utopia in the UK, where everyone gets all the super duper magical free healthcare they could ever need, and it’s paid for by fairies and unicorns?  Well, it’s killing babies.

A devastating report on the state of Britain’s maternity services has concluded that they put the lives of women and their babies at risk.

The first national inquiry into maternity care by the Healthcare Commission, the NHS watchdog, has revealed a critical shortage of midwives, obstetricians absent from wards, a lack of beds and poor continuity of care. These have contributed to high death rates in some units and threaten the long-term health of mothers and their babies in others.

The inquiry, which is the largest ever carried out, involved all 150 NHS maternity units in England. It was triggered by separate full-scale investigations conducted at three trusts where mothers and babies died, which revealed failings indicative of a national pattern.

The three trusts were Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, where 10 mothers died between 2002 and 2005, New Cross in Wolverhampton, where three babies died in two months in 2003, and Ashford & St Peters in Surrey, where there was a series of serious incidents in 2000 and 2001.

The Healthcare Commission said the root cause of poor performance was weak leadership by managers and medical staff. Many trusts were critically short of midwives, with numbers ranging from 40 per 1,000 births in the best-staffed trusts to 25 per 1,000 in the worst.

Only two-thirds of trusts had a consultant present on their wards for 40 hours a week – the basic safety standard laid down by the Royal College of Obstetricians. The study also revealed a five-fold variation in the number of consultants among trusts, from 3.3 to 0.6 per 1,000 births. In some trusts this meant consultants were present on the wards for just 10 hours a week.

More than £660m was paid out by NHS trusts in the three years to 2007 in negligence cases for obstetric claims – enough to hire 1,000 extra consultant obstetricians. Maternity services account for one in 10 requests to the Healthcare Commission to investigate particular trusts. Today’s report, which included surveys of 5,000 staff and 26,000 mothers, says nine out of 10 mothers rated their care as good. But it said there were “significant weaknesses”, with wide variations in standards between trusts. Many of the problems identified in earlier investigations were widespread, suggesting that NHS trusts are not giving maternity services priority. Sir Ian Kennedy, chairman of the commission, said: “I don’t ever again want to be reading another report into high death rates at a maternity unit.”

It’s worth noting that this report comes from The Independent, one of Britain’s leftie papers.  Ah, socialism.  Guaranteeing the same equal level of misery and shitty treatment for everyone.  (Except of course the rich, who can avoid the whole socialist disaster altogether by paying for private care themselves.)

Guess What?  Socialism Kills People

It’s often been our contention, as vehement critics of socialized medicine and its supporters like Moore, that all government healthcare provides is the same equally shitty service to everyone.  (Except, of course, the wealthy, who can pay for their own treatments.) As usual the Times of London lays it out.

The National Health Service is providing dying cancer patients with drugs that are five times less effective than those available privately and is refusing to treat them if they try to buy medicines themselves.

That’s right, folks.  If you decide to use your own money to pay for the life-saving drugs that your free healthcare system doesn’t provide, you’re shit out of luck on any future treatment.  Their policy is, “Use our substandard care or you’re on your own.” Ah, compassion.

One drug for kidney cancer, routinely available through public health systems in most European countries but not to British patients, can reduce the size of tumours in 31% of patients, compared with just 6% of those prescribed the standard NHS drug.

The growing row over “co-payments” has prompted the government to reconsider the ban. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, has promised a “fundamental rethink” of the policy.

Just not a fundamental rethink of the socialist disaster which created the problem in the first place.

A woman with bowel cancer is fighting for the right to pay for a drug that could extend her life long enough for her to spend Christmas with her grandchildren.

Sheila Norrington, 59, a former NHS medical secretary from Maidstone, Kent, has been told by doctors that if she buys the drug Erbitux, which the health service will not pay for, she will lose her state-funded cancer care. Erbitux is the only drug capable of treating her advanced bowel cancer.

Norrington’s husband, Goff, 61, a former sales manager, said: “We have been told that if we pay for it ourselves we will be thrown off the NHS completely and we will need to pay for everything privately. We are devastated. This is not going to cure my wife, but if it keeps her alive a little bit longer, then we would pay for it.”

The couple say that although they could pay for a few cycles of the drug, which costs about £3,000 a month, they could not pay for all Norrington’s care, including scans, blood tests and consultations.

Goff Norrington added: “We have two young granddaughters and this could make the difference between sitting round the table with them at Christmas or not. We think it is deplorable that patients can get this drug almost anywhere in Europe but we cannot get it in the UK.”

A spokesman for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust said: “We are governed by Department of Health policy on this issue.”

And why shouldn’t they be?  The government is the one paying for it.  They aren’t concerned with individuals, they’re concerned with doling out their limited resources in the most compassionate and fair manner, which in this case is simply letting people die.

A poll for The Sunday Times shows strong support for allowing co-payment in the National Health Service, with 89% saying that people who buy additional cancer drugs should continue to get free NHS treatment.

Only 5% think allowing co-payment would create a two-tier NHS. Until now this has been the position taken by Alan Johnson, the health secretary.

Ministers had feared that allowing co-payment would upset less well-off patients, but the YouGov poll of nearly 1,800 people shows strong backing across the social spectrum and supporters of all three main parties.

This, of course, begs the question.  If compassionate free government healthcare can’t provide, y’know, actual healthcare to patients, and they are forced to paying massive amounts of money to buy their own treatments, maybe the solution to the problem is less free government healthcare and more private sector solutions.

Wow, paying for healthare.  What a concept!

Go Home and Die

Here’s some more of that wonderful socialist compassion that is supposed to infuse our cousins across the Atlantic, this proving their inherent moral superiority over us.

An HIV-positive Ugandan woman’s claim to stay in the UK has been rejected by the European Court of Human Rights.

Her lawyers argued that a lack of medical care in Uganda would lead to her early death, and this would amount to cruel and degrading treatment.

The government denies this, saying all NHS HIV drugs are available in Uganda.

The court agreed that if the unnamed woman were sent back to Uganda, there would be no violation of the bar on inhuman or degrading treatment.

When the woman entered the UK in March 1998 under an assumed name, she was seriously ill and was admitted to hospital.

Soon afterwards, solicitors lodged an asylum application on her behalf, claiming she had been raped by government soldiers in Uganda because of her association with the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group in the north of the country.

The lawyers argued that her life would be in danger if she were returned to Uganda.

By November 1998, she was diagnosed with two illnesses which are known to be indicators of having AIDS, and as being in an extremely advanced state of HIV infection.

Her asylum claim was rejected in March 2001, a decision she appealed against.

In rejecting her claim, the secretary of state found no evidence that Ugandan authorities were interested in her and that treatment of Aids in Uganda was comparable to any other African country.

The secretary of state also found that all the major anti-viral drugs were available in Uganda at highly subsidised prices.

In January the government sent a terminally ill Ghanaian woman who had been receiving treatment in the UK back to her country because her visa had expired.

Now, which do you think is more likely, that she was deported because of a expired viusa, or because and HIV diagnisis would reqire thirthy fo forty more years of retroviral and “drug cocktail” therapy to keep her alive, when we all know that NHS is failing miserably to provide even basic care to the citizenry.  So rather than deal with the expense of treating this woman they’re sending her back home, to her happy land full of sunshine and rainbows and rivers of chocolate, where the children dance and play with gumdrop smiles.

Full discosure:  The US has some pretty draconian laws regarding HIV people obtaining citizenship in this country.  I’m just as opposed to this as I am to what these European dickwads are doing? 

See?  That’s called “intellectual honesty.” You Moore fans should try it once in a while.

Getting Care to the Sick

Michael Moore has stated that evil capitalism is the cause of all America’s healthcare woes, and that only the loving, warm, benevolent arms of the nanny state can provide what we need.  (He has explicitly called for the abolition of private health insurance.) But it seems that (gasp!) maybe one solution to the problem is to get rid of the bloodsucking trial lawyers.

Tort reform, of course, resulting in substantially lower medical malpractice premiums and expenses, and an influx of 7000 doctors, including into many underserved regions. One indirect benefit: with less money spent on medical malpractice lawyers, self-insuring hospitals can spend more on doctors and on medical practice:

Take Christus Health, a nonprofit Catholic health system across the state. Thanks to tort reform, over the past four years Christus saved $100 million that it otherwise would have spent fending off bogus lawsuits or paying higher insurance premiums. Every dollar saved was reinvested in helping poor patients.

Also of relevance: the amusing results when Texas added evidentiary standards of medical harm to their asbestos and silicosis docket. Suddenly, over 99% of the cases went away because so few suing plaintiffs had a doctor willing to certify harm.

My God, what a concept!  It should be noted, gentle reader, that trial lawyers overwhelmingly donate to Democrats.  In return, the Democrats will inevitably put a stop to this terrible example of the deregulated free market actually, y’know, improving the lives of patients.  For liberals, especially those like Moore, the means are more important than the ends.  Moore doesn’t want to see more people get healthcare, he wants to prove that socialism is super peachy awesome, and he pimps out sick people to make that point.  Any solution which is not directly attributable to government intervention will not sit well with him, because it won’t support his overall thesis that eeeeeevil capitalism is to blame for everything.

Update Well well well.  It looks like the Democrats are dutifully bending over for their ambulance-chasing overlords with a nice $1.6 billion payoff which somehow managed to find its way into the Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008.

The language is from Sec. 311, Uniform Treatment of Attorney-Advanced Expenses and Court Costs in Contingency Fee Cases. The provisions allow trial attorneys to deduct advanced litigation fees regardless of whether their contingency fee was structured as a “net” or a “gross” fee arrangement. The law does not now allow lawyers to take a current tax deduction under a net fee arrangement.

Anything that makes it easier for bloodsucking mass tort lawyers to drive up the costs of healthcare (and everything else). 

A Film With Heart

You know how when you’re watching a movie, and there are three guys sitting around drinking beer, and all the beer bottles are positioned so you can clearly read the label?  That’s called product placement, which Wikipedia defines thus:

Product placement is a type of advertising, in which promotional advertisements placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in media, where the presence of a particular brand is the result of an economic exchange. When featuring a product is not part of an economic exchange, it is called a product plug. Product placement appears in plays, film, television series, music videos, video games and books. It became more common starting in the 1980s, but can be traced back to at least 1949. Product placement occurs with the inclusion of a brand’s logo in shot, or a favorable mention or appearance of a product in shot. This is done without disclosure, and under the premise that it is a natural part of the work. Most major movie releases today contain product placements.

This is one means by which movies get funded.  For example, in the last two or three James Bond movies starring Pierce Brosnan came out Bond was driving a BMW.  The producers signed a deal with BMW to provide the vehicle in exchange for monetary or other consideration.  When the last movie, Casino Royale, came out the producers signed a deal with Ford.  When Bond first goes to Bermuda he rents a small Ford which he drives to the hotel.  Once there he ends up winning the bad guy’s Aston Martin in a poker game.  Later on we see Bond driving his pimped-out Aston Martin, the one with the defibrillator in it.  At the time Ford owned Aston Martin, thus the majority of vehicles in the movie are by Ford.  (Apparently the new owners of Aston Martin have agreed to abide by the terms of the contract entered into by Ford, so Bond will be driving an Aston Martin for the next few films.)

The Only Chemist in the Village

It’s the latest socialized medicine success!

Tens of thousands of English patients could be registering with Welsh GPs and making day-trips to the country to obtain free prescriptions, it was claimed yesterday.

Statistics show that three million people are registered with Welsh GPs, about 100,000 more than the official population. Wales is the only part of Britain not to have prescription charges.

England has the highest at £7.10, followed by Northern Ireland at £6.85 and Scotland at £5.

The Conservative Party in Wales claimed that the figures pointed to patients from England travelling to Wales and called on the Welsh Assembly executive to stop “prescription tourism”.

The copay in Englad is roughly the same as the prescription copay that I have with my eeeeeevil kapitalist for-profit US health insurance.  The only difference is that I have access to a wider range of newer, higher-quality drugs than the English.  And I don’t have to travel to Wales to avoid paying for it.

Oh, lest anyone get the wrong idea, I live in Beijing.  I pay, every month, out of my own pocket, for US healthcare, so that I can get prescriptions which are not available here in China’s socialist paradise.  Funny how that works, isn’t it?  When I want something I (gasp!) pay for it.

Dr. Teeth

Remember folks, socialized medicine is a utopian paradise where everyone gets everything they need all the time.

Health service dentists have been forced to go on holiday or spend time on the golf course this month despite millions of patients being denied dental care.

Many have fulfilled their annual work quotas allotted by the National Health Service and have been turning patients away because they are not paid to do extra work. This is despite the fact that more than 7m people in Britain are unable to find an NHS dentist.

Patients have been told they must either pay privately or return in April when the new work year begins. People suffering from toothache have been advised to go to hospital.

This is vastly different from the US, where uninsured people are forced to either pay privately or go to an emergency room.

Scenes We’d Love To See

In this post below, Donna writes:

I just thought of something that really makes the idea of Moore bringing Castro to the Academy Awards this year even *more* repugnant, if that’s even possible.

As some of you will know, I published a long series of articles about the extraordinarily talented dissident Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas. In the year 2000, director Julian Schnabel brought the story of Reinaldo Arenas to the silver screen with his film “Before Night Falls”, an adaptation of Arenas’ memoirs by the same name. In the movie Arenas was played so well by the talented Javier Bardem that he won an Oscar nomination for his performance.

How does this movie made nearly a decade ago connect to Moore’s desire to bring Castro to the Oscars this year? Simple, really. This year, Julian Schnabel is up for Best Director for his work in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”, and of course Javier Bardem is the favorite to take home the Best Actor in a Supporting Role statue for his astounding performance in “No Country for Old Men”. So… Moore would like sit Castro just rows away from the man who brought Reinaldo Arenas’ story to the world and the man who immersed himself so deeply in the tortured soul of Reinaldo that he won an Oscar nomination for his work. Can you imagine the effect having Castro so close to them would have on both of these men, on what should be one of the happiest nights of their lives? How selfish and thoughtless could Moore possibly be?

We’ve all known for years that Michael Moore is a sociopath who cares about nobody but himself.  But if he does end up bringing El Presidente to the awards, this presents a golden opportunity. Assume that either Julian Schnabel or Javier Bardem win their respective awards.  They’ll be standing there, in front of the world, and can say anything they want.  Allow me to fantasize using Javier Bardem as an example.

“Wow, this is just incredible.  Thank you so much.  However, before I get stuck in with the thank you’s I’d like to say something.  A few years ago I played a Cuban Dissident named Reynaldo Arenas, a man tortured and humiliated by Castro’s Cuba, which was directed by another of tonight’s nominees, Julian Schnabel.  This man Castro, this monster, this piece of human filth, now sits among us as the guest of another nominee.  To Michael Moore, Castro’s most famous propagandist, I would like to say, shame on you.  Shame on you for sullying these awards with the presence of this vile, disgusting person.”

I think he’d get a standing ovation.  Of course Moore, Castro, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn will all remain seated.  Someone forward this to Javier Bardem’s publicist.

And the Walls Came Crumbling Down

As happens oh so often with Michael Moore’s bullshit, reality comes along and slaps him in the face with its dick.

Foreigners coming to Britain are to face a new “immigrant tax” under Government plans to try to make them help pay for the schools and hospitals they use, ministers are to announce.

They will have to pay a special levy on entering the country which will be used to provide extra funding for public services.

The announcement follows growing evidence that health, education and social services are coming under increasing strain from immigration, with councils complaining that they need hundreds of millions of pounds more every year to cope.

But… but… this is Britain.  They have glorious “free” healthcare for everyone!  It’s all free free free!!!  So how can it be that their healthcare system is swamped under the demand of immigrants?  Could it be that—gasp!—there is no such thing as “free” healthcare, and a single-payer system run by the government is a recipe for complete disaster?  (You know, exactly what we’ve been saying through the entire history of this blog.)

Sources indicate that the additional levy could be set at 10 per cent of the visa fee - an additional £20 for the usual £200 visa granted to those wishing to stay in Britain longer than six months.

Ministers hope to generate an extra £15 million a year, although council chiefs say they need £250 million more annually to avoid increased council tax.

Ah, I see.  So what’s going to happen is the immigrants are going to pay a little bit extra in taxes, and the rest of the bill is going to be footed by the general public through increased local taxes.  So much for “free” healthcare.

Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman, said the cost of the visas could put off key workers such as nurses coming from outside the EU.

What?  You mean there are negative consequences to big government socialist idiocy?  Who the hell could have seen THAT coming!

Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said recently: “It is fair that those who benefit most from using our immigration system should help fund it.

Come now, Liam.  Where’s your compassion?  What will Michael Moore make of this development?  Does anyone here think he has the balls or integrity to send out one of his super awesome messages?  Of course not, he’s a fucking coward.

Sorry, Tubby.  Go Home and Die.

Take note, Michael Moore, you fat bastard.

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

That’s right, tubby.  You’re a multi-millionaire, so you can afford to climb into your private jet and scoot off to the world’s most luxurious fat farms when you want to drop a couple of pounds.  But the average working class Joe, who eats the same food you do and puts on a few pounds, well, he doesn’t qualify for healthcare under your socialist medical care utopia.  But wait, it gets better.

Fertility treatment and “social” abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

That’s right, Mikey.  Not only is your socialist paradise going to stand by and allow fat fucks like you to drop dead of a heart attack, but they’re also going to prevent pregnant women from terminating their pregnancies, as well as only allowing the infertile rich to have children, since poor people won’t be able to afford to pay for the treatment themselves.

Oh yeah, that free healthcare is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?  Smokers, fatties, sluts, and the barren, all of them are completely fucked under your socialist healthcare fantasyland.

The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as “out rageous” and “disgraceful”.

About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

Managers defend the policies because of the higher risk of complications on the operating table for unfit patients. But critics believe that patients are being denied care simply to save money.

Of course they’re being denied treatment because of money.  Money is a finite resource.  In economic terms it is “a scarce resource which has alternate uses.” And when the government provides all the fabulous free healthcare that people could ever hope for, they will quickly run out of money, because the public has no financial incentive NOT to go to the doctor.

But keep pushing for this evil scheme, you fat fuck.  Someone can always buy one of your books or DVDs instead of paying for their own medical care, while you hobnob with the rest of the unhealthy socialist millionaires at your $20,000 a day for-profit Swiss health chalet.

Update: Oh man, it just gets better and better.

School lunchboxes could soon be monitored by dinner ladies to ensure children are eating healthy meals, ministers said.

Under the Government’s obesity strategy, all schools will be expected to design a “healthy lunchbox policy” on what makes a nutritional packed lunch over the next year.

Some parents may even be asked to sign a form agreeing to ban unhealthy foods from their children’s lunches.

If a packed lunch is deemed to contain too much fat and sugar, parents could be sent warning letters or their children’s meals confiscated.

That’s right.  The food Nazis are now going to be keeping an Orwellian eye on what British children eat.  If they make food choices that Big Brother has determined are not in the public interest, then the Gestapo will ensure you comply.  Then, if the kid happens to choose to smoke or turns into a fat kid anyway, well, don’t come crying to the government for fabulous free healthcare.

Hey Michael Moore, we all know that you (or at least one of your low-paid, non-union flunkies) read this site.  Do you have the balls at all to comment on this?  You claim to oppose government and worship individual freedom, but the very policies you support are going to result in this type of surveillance-state over fucking food.  So rather than suck your own cock over your latest Oscar nomination, why don’t you show some integrity and actually send out one of your Mike’s Messages either supporting this type of police state activism or decrying it?

Naah, you’ll just keep sucking your own cock, won’t you?  Have fun at the fat farm, Tubby.

More Money for Schools!

When you hear Michael Moore or some other leftist issue their plaintive wails about how we need “more money for education,” despite the highest per-student spending in the world, think back to this story about the abandoned Detroit public school book depository.

Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the “ghetto palm” grows in a soil made by thousands of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that’s left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential. It is almost impossible not to see all this and make some connection between the needless waste of all these educational supplies and the needless loss of so many lives in this city to poverty and violence, though the reality of why these supplies were never used is unclear. In some breathtakingly-beautiful expression of hope, an anonymous graffiti artist has painted a phoenix-like book rising from the ashes of the third floor.

Click the link for pictures.  This is, yet again, why government is a failure at everything it does.

Dealing With the Facts

Let’s assume that there are still some readers out there who harbor the delusion that government-run healthcare is a good idea.  Could we even afford to pay for it?  The answer, of course, is no fucking way.

If you forgot to get a Christmas present for Charlie Rangel, don’t worry. The congressman picked one out for himself, and he’s sending you the bill: $2 million for a shiny new Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College.

The New York Democrat’s Monument to Me was one of about 9,000 earmarks in the omnibus spending bill Congress approved before going on vacation. Most represented a more subtle form of self-aggrandizement, aimed at maintaining power and prestige by currying favor with voters.

According to Citizens Against Government Waste, the total cost of the 11,000 or so earmarks in the omnibus bill and an earlier defense bill is about $14 billion, which is not much in the context of a $2.8 trillion federal budget. But the same tendency that explains the persistence of earmarks—the habit of staying popular by pretending your constituents can get something for nothing—also explains the failure to address the federal government’s increasingly dire fiscal situation.

The root of that situation is not earmarks, which represent less than 1 percent of federal spending. Nor is it the war in Iraq, which at $100 billion or so a year accounts for less than 4 percent.

So-called entitlement programs are the reason “America faces escalating deficit levels and debt burdens that could swamp our ship of state,” as Comptroller General David Walker put it in a recent speech. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for 40 percent of federal spending and are expected to consume 51 percent in a decade.

Right now Social Security makes the federal fiscal picture look better than it really is, since the program generates a surplus that masks the true size of the deficit. In fiscal year 2007, for example, the official budget deficit was $163 billion; excluding the Social Security surplus, it was more than twice as high.

Since the government spends the surplus on other programs, the Social Security “trust fund” consists entirely of federal bonds, and those IOUs will come due soon. The oldest baby boomers become eligible for early retirement in 2008. They will start drawing Medicare benefits in three years.

The result, said Walker, will be a “tsunami of spending” that “will never recede.” Under current law the estimated gap between the benefits retirees have been promised and revenue to fund them is $53 trillion, of which $34 trillion is due to Medicare.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Medicare is America’s free government healthcare program for the poor.  So when Michael Moore tells you that there is no healthcare here for poor people, I’ve got $34,000,000,000,000 in IOUs that say otherwise.  Make sure you take note of the fact that the Iraq War costs less than 4% of federal spending.  This is one of the most common arguments we hear from Moore-ons who write us, that if it wasn’t for the evil Bush and his war for oil then we’d have all the money in the world for fabulous free government healthcare.

So, let’s hear some real-world solutions from the Michael Moore crowd.  Other than claiming that “free” government healthcare is more “compassionate,” make a practical argument about (a) how and (b) why the US government can provide fabulous free healthcare for everyone.

Two Emails

I just received two emails, one right after the other.  They are the polar opposites of each other.  One is from someone with a perfectly legitimate question, and in return she receives a perfectly legitimate answer.  The other is a typical Canadian Michael Moore-worshipping moron.  The first:

I have read your site for the last few hours. I admit, you do have some excellent view points, but between you three it seems to be a tug a war on one sidedness opinions. You guys express it through your site, and Moore expresses it through his films. Now about Moore generosity, well we all know that was more the sake of the movie, and to get attention to him and his ideas. But if you are here to argue his beliefs amd bash him to the ground, you need to consider what he has done for you besides his little donation, he not only allowed you to get more hits to your site, and allow people to see your view points but allowed people to make a “choice” by deciding what we want to believe in, stand for. He is allowing us to choose, to make a choice between the point of views. right or wrong? then again, is there a right or wrong between you three??? I beg to differ.

My response:

Vivian, thanks for a pretty reasonable question.

Let me put it like this.  Name ONE THING in Sicko which expressed, in any manner, that there is a downside to socialized medicine.  Name one.  You can’t, because there isn’t any.  This is why I say on the site that Moore has no interest whatsoever in actually seeing people get quality healthcare.  He wants to see people get healthcare *through socialism.* That’s his primary goal, to see his grand socialist plan implemented.  In order to do so he has to ignore all the negatives, and present socialized medicine as some kind of medical Disneyland, where people will come to your house and wipe your ass for you if you choose, and it’s all FREE FREE FREE!

Now, by way of comparison, Jim and I freely admit that the current US system sucks.  We also make the case that socialized medicine, far from being the utopian paradise portrayed by Moore, is just as bad, if not worse.  So the solution is not to abandon one shitty system (the US) for a system which is, at best, equally shitty (European and Canadian).

Moore’s trickery has made this appear like a two-sided coin:  one one side are the bloodthirsty evil capitalists and their for-profit healthcare system, and on the other are the kindly, benevolent government-run systems, which never deny anything to anyone.  The impression left in the viewers mind is “Wow, if I care about people then how can I support anything but socialized medicine?” Search our site, you’ll find countless horror stories about socialized medicine—people pulling their own teeth out with pliers because they couldn’t get in to see a dentist, nurses merely turning sheets over between patients to save on laundry costs, rationing schemes which send old people home to die because it would cost too much in limited resources, and so on.

Again, was ANY of this mentioned in Moore’s film?  No, of course not.  Because it was a two hour lie.

So, in this respect, does Moore actually give you a choice of what to believe in?  Or does he lie, distort, obfuscate, bullshit, and *trick* you into believing what he wants you to believe?  And if socialized medicine is so wonderful, why does he need to present such a distorted and inaccurate version of its reality? These are the real questions you should be asking yourself.

Take care.

And now, the clueless Canadian moore-on.

From:
Subj: Once again, the stupidity of United States is shinning through

Thank you MR. MOORE, you have again opened the eyes of many and shut the ones that are already blind. Blinded by stupidity. Michael Moore is one of the best things that is happening in the states.  Its pretty sad when people from the states have to sneak across the border, lie and say that they are Canadians just to get treatment they think they deserve.  Well if you are so deserving of this treatment, look to your own government for help.  You think that your land is the best, everything in the states are better than everyone else, WOW do you people need an awakening!  How much more stupid can you people get, you support a government that cares more about war then its own people.  They even treat the terrorist with better health care than they give their own people.  Hello?  should that not tell you something.  Its really a shame that you people can only see whats in front of you.  Take off the blinders, the rose colored glasses.  Hey, there is a world out there, other countries that do look after their own.  Theres alot about this SiCKO film that alot of you americans can learn alot from.  Take notes, that is if you can read or write!

First off, I would be willing to bet that I have lived in more countries than this dunce will ever visit in her entire life. Secondly, the Canadian inferiority complex is clearly evident here.  And third, the fact that there is an entire healthcare industry in Canada whose sole purpose is to find medical care in the United States for Canadians who are stuck for years on waiting lists shows that this woman clearly has absolutely no idea what she is talking about.  In other words, she’s a typical Moore fan.

Greedy, Heartless, For-Profit Government

Of the many points Michael Moore raises in Sicko, two stick with me.

1.  Insurance companies routinely deny service to patients as a matter of policy, and they do so out of a heartless sense of corporate greed.
2.  To solve this problem a government agency, with no heartless and greedy profit motive, is essential for equitable distribution of benefits.

Keep these two points in mind as you read this story.

Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.

Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.

But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.

The agency’s new plan to hire at least 150 new appeals judges to whittle down the backlog, which has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000, will require $100 million more than the president requested this year and still more in the future. The plan has been delayed by the standoff between Congress and the White House over domestic appropriations.

There are 1,025 judges currently at work, and the wait for an appeals hearing averages more than 500 days, compared with 258 in 2000. Without new hirings, federal officials predict even longer waits and more of the personal tragedies that can result from years of painful uncertainty.

Backlogs?  Denials?  Years of uncertainty?  Where have we heard of all these things?  Oh yeah, I remember now:  Canada, the UK, Australia, and every other country with compassionate, “free” healthcare fun by the government.  But wait, it gets better.

Of the roughly 2.5 million disability applicants each year now, about two-thirds are turned down initially by state agencies, which make decisions with federal oversight based on paper records but no face-to-face interview. Most of those who are refused give up at that point or after a failed request for local reconsideration.

But of the more than 575,000 who go on to file appeals — putting them in the vast line for a hearing before a special federal judge — two-thirds eventually win a reversal.

Why, it’s almost like the government routinely denies claims.  You know, just like private insurance does.  But how can this be?  Government isn’t motivated by evil profit, is it?  They don’t operate with the brutal capitalist motivation, do they?  Government is the solution, isn’t it?  Government never fails us, does it?

The growing delays in the appeal process over the last decade resulted in part from litigation and financing shortages that prevented the hiring of new administrative law judges. In addition, the number of applications is rising as baby boomers reach their 50s and 60s.

Litigation?  The costs of litigation on rising insurance premiums are continually dismissed by compassionate Moore fans as nothing but capitalist propaganda.  But here it is, contributing to delays and waiting lists and misery in providing Social Security benefits.  But I’m sure that nothing similar will happen when government runs healthcare, will it Mikey?

And people wonder why we oppose government-run healthcare.  The government ponzi scheme is finally starting to fall apart, and the investors are finding out that they’ve being scammed.  What a complete fucking disaster.

But at least it’s a compassionate disaster.