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Every story on the front page of Monday’s New York Times told the story of the Age of Greed during which a system known as capitalism is slowly, but surely, killing us:

Michael doesn’t link to any of these stories for fear that his shallow readers might learn something.  So we’ll just take a look at the stories he’s complaining about.  As you’ll see, Mike didn’t actually read them.  He just glanced at the headlines and drew his own conclusions (gee, we haven’t seen that before in his movies (search for Tobin)).

Insurance company greed: “Millions Spent to Sway Democrats on Health Care”

Here is the story.  It’s actually not about insurance companies but about a group if interests, headed by the Chamber of Commerce, who are trying to persuade key Democrats to vote against the legislation.  it also goes into something Mike would rather you not know about—the enormous amount of money organized labor and pharmaceutical companies—yes, Evil Big Pharma—are putting into supporting the legislation.  I don’t know what people like Moore expect when the government tries to transform one sixth of the economy.  Or what they expect to continue to happen as the sector become more and more controlled by politics.

It once again illustrates a pattern from Moore: special interest groups Mike agrees with are principled; ones he disagrees with are evil.

War profiteers: “Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants”

Here is the story and it is actually alarming.  But, of course, this is happening under a Democratic President overseen by a Democratic Congress.  So much for change.

There’s no profit in repairing our infrastructure: “Repair Costs Daunting as Water Lines Crumble”

Here is the story.  The problem is that it has nothing to do with capitalistic greed and everything do with incompetent city governments that have been run for decades by Democrats. While they’ve found plenty of money to build stadium for sports teams (or to fund social programs), they can’t seem to find the money to keep up their infrastructure.  And efforts to raise water rates have been met with fierce opposition, particularly from the Left.  This isn’t capitalism gone wrong.  This is bad governing.

Ironically, there are good reasons to believe that the problem here is that water is a public monopoly with no privatization.  This makes simply maintaining the system heavily political and expensive.  I’m not completely sold on the idea of water privatization.  I fear it will end up as the politicized statist mess that California’s energy “privatization” effort did.  But can it be worse than the mess we have now?

China, the bank: “China Uses Rules on Global Trade to Its Advantage”

Here is the story.  I disagree with their conclusion, which is about China manipulating currency and trade rules to their advantage.  But the irony here is so thick you could slice it.  China is exactly the all-controlling, all-powerful government that Michael favors.  And, moreover, China’s leverage on these issues would be far smaller if it weren’t for the massive debts we are accumulating, especially under the current President and in liberal Democrat-controlled states like California.

You mean NAFTA didn’t improve life in Mexico: “Two Drug Slayings in Mexico Rock US Consulate”

Now we’re just getting stupid.  This story has nothing to do with NAFTA.  Nothing whatsoever.  The article doesn’t mention NAFTA once.  Mexico’s massive wave of drug violence is the result of an ill-advised ramp up in the War on Drugs, not NAFTA.

What happens when Big Food profits from hurting kids: “Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has New Boss”

Michael clearly didn’t read this story at all. It’s about schools hiring recess coaches to get kids playing again, rather than just lazing around.  It has NOTHING, nothing to do with Big Food.  Mike pulls the connection completety and totally out of his ass. (A good take on this story can be found at Lenore Skenazy’s outstanding Free Range Kids blog.  Skenazy, unlike Moore, actually bothers to read stories before she comments on them.)

There’s now a daily parade of news like this—well, not really “news,” more like the media division of large corporations shoving your face into the dirt that is your life. You already know the schools are a disaster and the war is a boon for the Halliburtons and a bust for you. You don’t need a newspaper to tell you the roads and electrical lines and the local sewage plant is in miserable disrepair.

No, Mike. This is reporting on incompetent and ineffective government.  And this is you shoving dirt in people’s face, taking a positive story about recess and turning into a whine about Big Food; taking a story about the War on Drugs and turning into an indictment of NAFTA.  This is you taking the front page of the New York Times and trying to shoehorn every headline into your ignorant, far Left, eternally whining point of view.

Mike then finally gets to his point—I think—which is bashing the Democrats’ health care bill.  On this, we agree:

Within days, the House of Representatives will vote to pass the Senate health care “reform” bill. This bill is a joke. It has NOTHING to do with “health care reform.” It has EVERYTHING to do with lining the pockets of the health insurance industry. It forces, by law, every American who isn’t old or destitute to buy health insurance if their boss doesn’t provide it. What company wouldn’t love the government forcing the public to buy that company’s product?! Imagine a bill that ordered every citizen to buy the extended warranty on all their appliances? Imagine a law that made it illegal not to own an iPhone? Or how ‘bout I get a law passed that makes it compulsory for every American to go see my next movie? Woo-hoo! Who wouldn’t love a sweet set-up like this windfall?

Exactly.  It’s a good thing we’re united in our ... oh.

Please, Democrats—just say that—then pass this poor excuse of a bill. Pass it because, if President Obama takes a fall on this one, I don’t know if he’ll be able to get back up. And then NOTHING will get done. We can’t have that.

Yes let’s pass this turd of a bill to support a presidency that is cow-towing to every special interest out there.  OK.

(Mike goes on a long rant, which I’ve left out, about how insurance companies want to kill children by denying them care.  Completely ignored in his rant is the existence of S-CHIP, a program created by the evil Republican Congress that now guarantees coverage for the children of people making up to 400% of the poverty level.  For a family of four, that’s $88,000 per year.)

But then it gets really fun:

On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, the dateline was, sadly, once again, “Flint, Michigan.” The story was about how doctors are no longer accepting Medicaid patients. Which means tens of thousands of poor can no longer go to the doctor. Last year, the State of Michigan also prohibited doctors from accepting Medicaid patients who had anything wrong with their vision, their hearing, their feet or their teeth. In a 16-county area northwest of Flint, there will soon be not one single hospital that will allow you to give birth there if you’re on Medicaid. The official unemployment rate in Flint is 27% (unofficially, closer to 40%).

This is an American tragedy. And, as I’ve warned you for years, this tsunami is heading your way—if it’s not there already.

Jumping Jesus Christ.  Medicaid is a government program.  And like all government healthcare programs, it’s keeping costs down by denying care and underpaying doctors.  Medicare also has problems with doctors refusing to take it.  And with $60 trillion in unfunded liability, it’s only a matter of time before it begins denying care.

Moreover, Mike is an advocate of “Medicare for all” which really means “Medicaid for all”.  He’s (apparently) taken a good look at the bankrupt system that is denying care, driving doctors out and said, “That’s what America needs”.  I guess it’s OK for him, since he’ll have enough money to get real care.  But the intellectual dishonesty is jaw-dropping, Mike advocates for a system, then blames the massive failure of that system on some nebulous entity called “capitalism”.

Whatever it takes.

But friends, it gets even better.  After showing he can’t read a web page and openly advocating for a government healthcare system he admits is a disaster, he just starts rambling.

I’ve just turned on my new iPhone and it informs me that it has “apps” it would like to suggest I buy. One is called “Scanner.” It will allow me to listen in on police scanners anywhere across the country. I buy the app. I see that the Flint police scanner is part of this. I turn it on out of curiosity. And this is what I hear, at one in the morning: A woman is being beaten by her husband… A home invasion is taking place ("16-year-old black male, wearing a white skull cap")… A child has been missing since noon today… Another woman is being beaten by her boyfriend… A diabetic, obese man is having trouble breathing and needs to be rushed to the hospital (there will be three more of these obese diabetics in the hours to come; the entire town is ill)… One more woman calling, screaming for help, “officers urged to use caution...”

...And on and on and on. This is what I have listened to before going to bed. I am filled with despair and helplessness as I hear my former neighbors crying out for help. I hate it. I have to turn it off. I start to cry. Thank you, iPhone. Thank you, Democrats. I’ll sleep better knowing that you’re looking out for all of us.

What.  The. Hell.  An incident of criminality, health problems of the obese (their obesity, of course, being the fault of Republicans), a beating.  What the hell is the point here?  Are Democrats supposed to prevent this?  Is Barack Obama supposed to magically leap between an abusive husband and his wife?

I think his point is that Flint (which, I should remind you, is about 200 miles from where Mike actually lives) is in a bad state.  And that misery is a creation of vile capitalism.  But do the liberal Democrats who have long controlled Michigan and driven it to financial ruin bear no responsibility for what’s going on?  What about their willingness to cut essential services, like police and hospitals, rather than tamper with unionized payrolls, benefits and pensions?  Flint didn’t just happen by accident.  It was made.  And the men who made are not evil capitalists, but liberal politicians who have no idea of how the world works.

(By coincidence, Reason.com is running a wonderful series of videos this week on how to save Cleveland, a city that has suffered a similar fate to Flint.  It is absolutely worth your time.  You will learn far more about big city failures than you will from Mike’s last movie.  And, unlike Mike, they don’t just whine and cover their eyes and hope for a merciful Democratic Messiah to do something, please.  They actually propose solutions to Cleveland’s woes.  Real solutions that empower the citizens of Cleveland, not the unions and their Democratic puppets.)

Guys, I’m scratching my head here.  How does something like this get written?  Michael usually is at least semi-coherent.  This reads more like something one of his fans wrote on Democratic Underground. While high.

In other Mike News, he was on Olbermann, saying that the healthcare bill that he wants passed is “death sentence” to tens of thousands of people.  Never mind that the evidence that lack of insurance kills is ambiguous at worst and massively exaggerated at best.  Here is Mike’s take on it.

“Their only crime – for dying – their only crime that they would have committed was they were a citizen in the United States of America,” Moore said of the uninsured. “If they were a few hundred miles north of us here, they wouldn’t die. Pure and simple, that’s the only difference – they hold an American passport instead of a Canadian passport.”

Yeah.  In Canada, they would never be denied care because clinics are running out of money.  They would never be unable to get the most advance procedures because the socialized system won’t pay for it.  They would never have to go onto a waiting list for care.

Tell me, Mike.  Are millions of Americans moving to Canada to enjoy their free healthcare?  Or are Canadians coming here to get care they are denied by their wonderful socialist system.  Don’t think too hard.

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Before we get started, I’ll state my position: I’m of two minds on the Afghan War.  On the one hand, I don’t want to abandon the Aghan people and potentially recreate a safe haven for Al-Quaeda.  On the other hand, I’m not sure throwing more troops at the problem is going to help.  I’m also aware that we are—once again—doing the rest of the world’s work for them.  Nations that won’t lift a finger to help us will condemn us if Afghanistan falls into chaos.  I’m not sure there is a good option but I’m cautiously optimistic that an Iraq-esque surge—not just more troops but a change in strategy—could stabilize the situation enough for us to leave.  I’m also realistic enough to accept that making a deal with the less-repugnant factions of the Taliban may be necessary.

Moore’s position is more stark: he wants out, plain and simple.  While it provides him with a certain clarity, it also causes him to steamroll over inconvenient realities while huffing deep from a 55-gallon sized bag of stupid.

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple.

True enough.  That’s why it’s taken a long time to decide this.  By the end of his first year, Obama will own the wars, the economy, Gitmo, everything.  The “blame Bush” days will be—well, not over, since they’ll never be over—but lack an audience.  Obama knows the public will hold him responsible for what happens, which means he has to weigh his options, not instantly comply with liberal demands.

And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do—destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true—that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so.

First of all, there are far “worse possible things” that Obama could do.  Running up massive debts comes to mind.  Smacking young idealists with the harsh reality how politics actually works—with compromise and debate—would not even make my list of the top 100 worst things Obama could do.  I’d actually placed it on a list of good things, slightly behind “64. Try not to bow to foreign royalty.”

Second, what was your first hint that Obama was just another politician, Michael?  When Obama rigged the auto bailout, the stimulus and healthcare to favor your special interests, those were matters of principle.  But the second he does something you don’t like, suddenly he’s “another politician”.  What special interests would he be catering to in continuing the war?  The “industrial military complex” that opposed him in 2008?  The Republicans who regard him as slightly to the left of Lenin? Rush Limbaugh?

Third, did you fucking pay attention during the election?  Obama ran on this policy.  He promised to put more troops into Afghanistan.  This is not breaking a campaign promise—it’s fulfilling one.

It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do. We are a civilian-run government. WE tell the Joint Chiefs what to do, not the other way around. That’s the way General Washington insisted it must be. That’s what President Truman told General MacArthur when MacArthur wanted to invade China. “You’re fired!,” said Truman, and that was that.

We are a civilian-run government.  But it’s the job of the generals to figure out how to carry out the mission.  I don’t like McChrystal taking the squabble public, but his job is to tell Obama what is needed to do the mission.  It is Obama’s job to decide whether to accept or ignore that advice.

Let me be blunt: We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in’ hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption).

Yes, we hate those damned generals.  We hated George Washington, U.S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower so much that we elected them President.  We hated Robert E. Lee, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall and Norman Schwarzkopf so much they were revered around the nation.  And Colin Powell remains one of the most respected men in America who supported Obama in the election (that being the “seeking redemption” Mike references).

As an aside, any reading of the history of the Iraq War—I just read the outstanding The Dark Side—will tell you that Powell was fed bad information by the Bush Administration and his State Department thought we were going into Iraq woefully underprepared.  Of all the possible nefarious figures in the Iraq War, Powell would place very low—and well below the “no blood for oil” shriekers like Moore who derailed the pre-war conversation with conspiracy theories about why we were going.

But I digress.

So now you feel backed into a corner. 30 years ago this past Thursday (Thanksgiving) the Soviet generals had a cool idea—“Let’s invade Afghanistan!” Well, that turned out to be the final nail in the USSR coffin.

What a minute.  Is Mike suddenly saying the Reagan was right to support the Mujahideen?  Is he acknowledging the aggression of the Evil Empire?  Am I dreaming?  If so, why am I dreaming about fisking Michael Moore instead of my dreaming about naked ... uh ... art?

Mike goes into a long ramble about the history of Aghan invasions that demonstrates, clearly and definitively, that he knows how to work Wikipedia.  While these comparison are important, they are all example of nations attempting to conquer Afghanistan and turn it into part of their Empire.  What we are doing is a little different.  It’s hard to call it Empire expansion when our intention is to set up a permanent independent government and then get the hell out.

With our economic collapse still in full swing and our precious young men and women being sacrificed on the altar of arrogance and greed, the breakdown of this great civilization we call America will head, full throttle, into oblivion if you become the “war president.”

Wait.  Isn’t the economic crisis solved?

Empires never think the end is near, until the end is here. Empires think that more evil will force the heathens to toe the line—and yet it never works. The heathens usually tear them to shreds.

Patently ridiculous and ignorant.  I doubt that the Native Americans would think they tore us to shreds.  Nor would the vast swathes of people conquered by the British Empire, the French Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire ...

I have long thought that the most apt historical comparison to our own civilization is the Roman Empire (if nothing else, to steal a line from Eddie Izzard, I’m looking forward to the orgies and vomitariums). Any reading of Gibbon will reveal that expanding their Empire was never their problem.  Failing to defend it was.  Allowing the barbarians to storm the gates was.  Draw your own conclusions.

You know that nothing good can come from sending more troops halfway around the world to a place neither you nor they understand, to achieve an objective that neither you nor they understand, in a country that does not want us there. You can feel it in your bones.

Really?  They don’t want us there?  It’s hard to tell.  The opinion of the Aghan people is notoriously difficult to gauge.  As recently as February, they wanted us there.  The turning tide of opinion is not over whether Americans should be there, but whether we can accomplish the mission or not.

Maybe we can’t finish off the Taliban and create a stable government.  But the debate is a lot more subtle and complex than “they don’t want us there”.  And Obama has a whole State Department designed to figure this out so that he doesn’t have to “feel it in his bones”.  He can make judgements based on fact.

I know you know that there are LESS than a hundred al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan! A hundred thousand troops trying to crush a hundred guys living in caves? Are you serious? Have you drunk Bush’s Kool-Aid? I refuse to believe it.

Well, we aren’t fighting AQ anymore, Mike. We’re fighting the Taliban.  Try to keep up.

Also, part of the reason there are so few fighters is because of our invasion.  When this started, there were thousands.  Most of them are dead or captured and the rest are in Pakistan.  Our concern now is preventing the Taliban from retaking the country, imposing radical Islam and allowing Al-Queda a safe haven in which to rebuild.  Now maybe that’s not doable.  But this has become a far more complex situation than “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?”

Choose carefully, Mr. President. Your corporate backers are going to abandon you as soon as it is clear you are a one-term president and that the nation will be safely back in the hands of the usual idiots who do their bidding. That could be Wednesday morning.

Corporate backers?  I thought Obama was elected by a groundswell from “the peepul”.  I do share Moore’s fear of what might happen if someone else gets into power.  Why they might even engage in a $6.5 trillion boondoggle involving huge bribes to drug companies, doctors and insurance companies.

We can’t take your caving in, over and over, when we elected you by a big, wide margin of millions to get in there and get the job done. What part of “landslide victory” don’t you understand?

Caving in?  On what?  Michael defines any difference between his wishes and Obama’s decisions as “caving in”.  This happens because Moore thinks his own opinions are Absolute Truth and any deviation from them is due to selfishness, cowardice or evil.  It never occurs to him that Obama might have an opinion of his own or that governing a fairly conservative country involves some compromise.  If Obama were truly going to “cave in” to the “haters”, he would have just accepted McChrystal’s recommendations months ago.

You would still be the victim of their incessant venom on hate radio and television because no matter what you do, you can’t change the one thing about yourself that sends them over the edge.

I’m guessing the “one thing” is his skin color.

What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do?  Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines.

Oh, Jesus Christ.  Has there been an actual explosion of homelessness and bread lines?  Are there zillions of invisible Hoovervilles all over the nation?  If so, then the situation has only gotten worse in the last ten months.  Who bears the blame for that, Michael?  The “haters”, the “crazies”, the “idiots”?  Or maybe the fools in charge?  At least a little bit?

Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn’t even function as a nation and never, ever has. Stop, stop, stop! For the sake of the lives of young Americans and Afghan civilians, stop. For the sake of your presidency, hope, and the future of our nation, stop. For God’s sake, stop.

If he does, Michael, will you be willing to take credit for any chaos that follows?  Or will you own up if the Taliban returns to power?  If terror attacks start being launched from a failed state, will you accept this as the price of withdrawal?

There are always tradeoffs.  You want to make this simple—that all we have to do is “stop the killing” and everything will be butterflies and rainbows as it was in your hilariously rosy vision of pre-war Iraq.  But it’s not like that.  We don’t have any good options.  Even if we admit it was a mistake to invade Afghanistan—and I don’t—that decision can not be undone.  Leaving now is not the same as un-invading the country.  We have to deal with the situation we have now, not the one we had in 2001 and certainly not the one that exists only in your imagination.

Are you willing to accept the price—short- and long-term—of bringing they boys home?  Are you willing to oppose efforts to intervene in other horror spots like Darfur?  I’m something an isolationist myself but I accept that this means looking away from suffering that we could prevent.  Do you?

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First, he goes through five things we should demand the President and Congress do immediately:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people’s homes are now truly worth—and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

Hillary Clinton did, in fact, propose something like this.  Now let’s ignore that this would destroy the idea of the rule of law—our Constitutional right of contract would be permanently shredded, giving the Feds the unlimited power to rewrite contracts as they see fit.  Michael has never cared for the constitution or the law anyway.  No, let’s remember that no one would ever seriously propose this because of the devastating effect it would have on the country.

Eviction is one of the few tools in the bank’s arsenal—one they hate to use because they lose tens of thousands of dollars every time they enact a foreclosure.  Without that tool, there is less incentive for people to make their mortgage payments, especially when money is tight.  If Mikey wants to trigger another bank bailout, that’s a perfect way to do it.

But it gets worse.  To compensate for their inability to foreclose, banks will demand more money up front and higher interest rates for any new borrowers.  Fewer people will be able to buy homes.  People who prudently saved their money during the housing bubble will be screwed.  The result will be a collapse of the real estate market and real estate prices.  Demand for new houses—and those yummy constructions jobs associated with them—will vanish.

So apart from its ability to simultaneously crash the real estate market, the banking system and the economy, this is a fine idea.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery

And replace it with a different sort of misery.  60 minutes just ran a story about how easy it is to defraud the Medicare system.  The reason for this is that Medicare’s administration is criminally small, focused on just doling out money without review so that they appear “efficient”.  The program has swelled and continues to swell beyond anyone’s expectation, despite shifting much of its costs to the private sector.  Simply dumping everyone into this system without any cost controls is a recipe for fiscal catastrophe (and will necessitate massive tax hikes).  And cost controls—assuming you can get any past AARP—mean rationing, mean an end of innovation, mean a political scrabble for the government pile of money, means government money going to quackery like Therapeutic Touch.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists.

This is forcing people to pay for the promulgation of views with which they disagree.  Suppose, for example, I favor drug legalization.  Now I’m having to fork over my tax money so that both parties can run on the War on Drugs.

And what happens to third parties under this system, Michael?  Do you really think our two parties are going to let guys like your buddy Ralph Nader have serious campaigns?  That’s a recipe for political stagnation as, historically, ideas for change have come from outside parties that can focus on ideas rather than elections.

As for the ban on politicians becoming lobbyists, I don’t have much of a problem apart from my general disposition toward freedom.  I would much rather cut the influence of special interests by cutting government so that it is no longer worth their time to lobby government.  But what does Mikey think of Obama granting all these waivers so that lobbyists can work in his Administration?  Does he really want to ban Bill Clinton from lobbying on behalf of certain interests?  Or prevent politicians from helping out Big Labor?  Always remember that, to Mike, “special interests” excludes any interests he likes.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies—and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies—you name it. If a company’s primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by—and the first rule is “Do no harm.” The second rule: The question must always be asked—“Is this for the common good?”

This would be the state-run banks like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who are still losing money and getting bailed out by the taxpapers?  And I’m sure it would be great for the county to return to the Carter-era economy.  There’s really no question among economists that airline and telecom deregulation have been good things, producing cheap flights to Flint and cheaper cellphones.  Focus especially on the later.  The development of modern telecommunications, something deregulation was a critical part of, has proven to be one of the great forces for freedom—as being demonstrated even now in Iran.

Thinking all our problems will be solved by more regulation is to indulge in magical thinking.  Sacrificing more money and power to Washington in the hopes that it will heal what ails us is no more rational than sacrificing virgins to the Sun God.

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin’s socialist Alaska.

The stupidity of this statement is too much even for Mikey.  He want to model our energy policy on the graft and corruption of Alaska?! He has a point—the US is one of the few countries that has not nationalized its energy industry.  As a result, our energy industry—as bad as it is—is not the cesspool of corruption, inefficiency and pollution that it is in many countries—countries like the communist paradise being run by Mikey’s buddy Hugo Chavez.

Now he has five ways to “make Congress and the President listen to us”.  Not much to argue with here:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121)

Actually, letters tend to be more effective, especially if they’re not boilerplate.  I have never failed to received a response—usually a very polite and intelligent one—when I’ve written a physical letter to a Member of Congress.

2. Take over your local Democratic Party.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year—or, better yet, consider running for office yourself!

I’m all in favor of this.  Nothing will vault the GOP back into power faster than have the Moore-ons take over the Democratic Party.

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there’s more of us than there are of them!).

Wouldn’t want to be like those raucous tea-partiers now.  I would point out that there are not more of “us” than there are of “them”.  Poll after poll shows that there are far more conservatives in this country than liberals, almost 2-to-1 in the nation as a whole.  At the lowest ebb, conservatives are just below independents (who tend to lean right).  I know that it doesn’t seem like that.  But that’s because conservatives are more likely to have jobs and, until recently, less likely to be marching in the streets.

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth—so you have to do it! Start a blog!

Unless it’s a conservative blog, of course.  And be prepared—if you blog, people will challenge your preconceptions.  You will learn that things are a lot more complicated than they are in Mike’s movies.  You will learn that the other side is not unadulterated evil—they have reasons for what they believe.

Joking aside, I don’t disagree much with the middle five of Mike’s suggestions.  People should be more involved in their government.  At the very least, it would be good for the Moore-ons to learn first-hand that all governing is done by compromise and tradeoffs.  Someone making movies or sitting in a college dorm room can spin little fantasies about single payer healthcare systems.  But once those grandiose plans make contact with reality, you discover it’s not so easy.  Opponents have legitimate arguments against it; unintended consequences are rife; and small steps become much more doable than massive changes.  Exposure to reality is always a good thing.  Get cracking, Moore-ons!

Mike then has some personal advice.  Once again, there are some pears of wisdom buried in a big pile of manure.

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

I don’t disagree with this at all.  Small banks were far more prudent over the last decade.  Be aware, however, that you will lose the advantages of a national bank, such as pervasive ATMs.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one—the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

In principle, I don’t disagree with this.  However, there are time when credit cards can be a lifesaver.  Earlier this year, my family had more mortgages than jobs and had to live off our credit cards for a while.  We paid them off once we sold our old home.  Soon, we will have to have our roof replaced.  Delaying it until we’ve saved up enough will just cause more expensive damage to the house.

Better advice would be to only run up long-term credit card debts when absolutely necessary.  Always remember that, when you have credit card debt, the interest makes every purchase cost twice the ticket price.  There is no such thing as a sale when you’re in hock to the credit card companies.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

Flowers?  I thought we weren’t supposed to be using credit cards?  And why would you want to pay off your mortgage when you can’t be evicted and Mikey’s mortgage freeze is going to destroy the value of your home anyway?

I will agree that playing the stock market is a fool’s game.  But over the long haul, through boom and bust, a broad dollar-cost-averaged stock market portfolio—e. g., a typical 401k or IRA—would have returned 5-7% interest over any decades-long period in the market’s history.  This is better than 0% currently being returned by bonds (which are not that safe when government is trillions in debt).  The key to saving money is diversity—stocks, bonds, savings accounts, etc.

I have better advice—ignore the stock market.  Put part of every paycheck in a broad array of investments and don’t worry about the bumps and dips of the markets.

4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run.

These would be the union-run business that are going bankrupt.  And the unions that have become badly corrupt.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she’s right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, “Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants"). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month.

Actually, I don’t have a problem with this.  It’s difficult to find time for this in a bad economy.  But no one ever lay on their death bed wishing they’d watched more TV.  When I had two mortgages, I cancelled cable to save money.  I don’t miss it (except during football season) and don’t plan to turn it back on anytime soon.  Our new home also has a great veggie garden and an 80% reduction in our commute time.  I can’t express how much better this had made our lives.  So—on this one idea—Moore and I are in compete ag- ...  we are in complete agre-… Come on.  I can do this.  We are in complete agreement.

(Note to self: take shower now).

This seems to be a running theme on Moorewatch these days.  Mike is turning up the occasional truffle as he roots around in the dirt.  It almost breaks your heart to think of what he could do if he weren’t so beholden to ignorant liberal ideology.

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First, this, his initial reaction.  At first, it seems like something I wouldn’t have a problem with.  He points out that the Afghan War is quickly becoming Obama’s War and thinks that we should have gotten bin Laden without a war (how you do this without taking down the government sheltering him is left unexplored).  Whatever you may think of those views, they’re legitimate.  But he just can’t write a simple open letter without driving headfirst into a septic tank.

The Taliban is another matter. That is a problem for the people of Afghanistan to resolve—just as we did in 1776, the French did in 1789, the Cubans did in 1959, the Nicaraguans did in 1979 and the people of East Berlin did in 1989. One thing is certain through all revolutions by people who wish to be free—they ultimately have to bring about that freedom themselves. Others can be supportive, but freedom can not be delivered from the front seat of someone else’s Humvee.

Our independence came after a very long and bloody war and with a big assist from the French.  The French Revolution went ten years, was a bloody disaster and ended, not in Democracy but in Napoleon’s tyranny and even more wars of aggression.  You can say that we have to leave Afghanistan to let the Afghans sort out their future—but you have to acknowledge that this will mean years, possibly decades of bloodshed and may end in something just as oppressive as the Tallban.  Iran had a revolution too, you know.  And right now, they’re raping people in prison to stay in power.

For an example of revolutions gone wrong, you need look no further than the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions that Mike bizarrely juxtaposes with the American and French.  It’s that connection that moves this letter from “normal Michael Moore background stupidity” to “post worthy”.

Neither of those revolutions was based on ideas of enlightenment, freedom or democracy.  Both installed horrendous tyrants who imprisoned dissenters, oppressed minorities and use violence and murder to stay in power.

Both also reduced their populations to abject poverty.  Cuba went from the richest nation in the Caribbean to a nation so poor that teenage girls prostitute themselves to foreign visitors so their families can eat.  Yes, the US has a stupid embargo in place.  But Cuba got billions in aide from the Soviets and has open relations with many other countries.  Our Iranian embargo is more oppressive but you don’t see Persian girls working the streets to avoid starvation.  Cuba is such a badly run country that their famous cigars are almost unsmokeable now.  How do you screw up cigars?  By being a God-damned communist, that’s how.

As for Nicaragua, they have foolishly re-elected the Sandanistas, fooled by the veneer painted on their dissent-crushing, freedom-gobbling, Indian-murdering thug of a leader, Danny Ortega.  Apparently, they failed to learn the last time when the Sandanistas looted the country on the way out of power.  They will learn again, sooner or later.

There’s also Mikey’s jab at Nobel critics—“Why do they hate America so much?”.  I’d attack this but I’ll be generous and assume he’s being sarcastic.  It is worth noting that the DNC said this in all seriousness.  When Michael is less stupid that the DNC, we’re in trouble.

He’s followed up his letter with an even dumber one today.  Here’s my absolute favorite Michael Moore quote ever:

I went back and re-read what I had written. And I listened for far too long yesterday to the right wing hate machine who did what they could to crap all over Barack’s big day. Did I—and others on the left—do the same?

The question, I think --- it’s sometimes hard to slice Michael’s prose into coherent ‘thoughts”—is whether the Left always dumped on everything Bush did and what little he accomplished.  Um, Mike?  You made a whole damned movie in that vein.  You might remember it?  You do remember when the evil capitalist system kept bring dumptrucks full of money up to your poor starving artist’s mansion as you bravely put out your underground film?  No?  OK.

Then after his call to action—and the pre-requisite lumping of the Religious Right, libertarians, flat taxers, social security privatizers and Bush into one big glump called “stuff Michael Hates”—there’s this gem.

So, at least for this weekend, let us celebrate what people elsewhere are celebrating—that America now has a sane and smart man in the White House, a man who truly wants a world at peace for his two daughters.

As opposed to Bush, who wanted his daughters to live in a barren nuke-ravaged hellscape.  Everyone wants peace, Mike.  It’s what we’re willing to endure for it that distinguishes us.

And there’s this, which is currently second on my list of favorite Mike quotations:

The simple fact that he was elected was reason enough for him to be the recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Norman Borlaug planted crops while wars were going on and saved a billion lives.  F. W. de Klerk defied his own nation to end apartheid.  Nelson Mandela and Andrei Sakharov endured years of oppression for their ideals.  Lech Walesa fought communism for decades.  MLK used non-violence to liberate millions.  Sadat and Begin made peace between Israel and Egypt.  For all their flaws, the UN Peace Keepers put their lives on the line to try to stop conflict.  Hell, even Jimmy Carter helped make the Egyptian Peace and has worked to make the world more peaceful.

And Barack Obama ... successfully ran a campaign to become the most powerful man on Earth.  I realize that, to his critics, anyone who is not George W. Bush was going to be worthy of some award.  But you might want to check out the Constitutional limits on presidential terms, Mike.  Someone was going to replace George Bush.  Would you think it appropriate if John McCain got a Nobel Prize for winning the election?  Don’t think too hard.

I too was distressed by a lot of what Bush did.  But John McCain would have broken from a lot of his policies as well.  And—and I’m sorry to keep pushing this—What.  Has.  Obama.  Actually.  Done?  Is Gitmo closed?  Are the wars ended?  Is the recession over?  You don’t give people awards because they might do something—you give them because they have done something.  Barack Obama was awarded for things he said against the Bush Presidency (he was nominated by February), not things he did.  Would Mike be fine—as one wag quipped—if Obama were given this year’s Best Documentary Oscar because he “might” make a great movie one day?

Actually, I think I’ve pinpointed why Mike is so enthusiastic about this.  An award given by intellectual elites to undeserving recipients for political purposes?  Oh, my God.  Mike thinks Obama just won the Palme d’Or!

And, as always, Michael Moore can’t get through a letter without the usual bashing.

I think the Nobel committee, in awarding Obama the prize, was also rewarding the fact that something profound had happened in a nation that was founded on racial genocide, built on racist slavery, and held back for a hundred-plus years by vestiges of hateful bigotry (which can still be found on display at teabagger rallies and daily talk radio) ... After seeing searing images of our black fellow citizens left to drown in New Orleans—and poor whites seeing their own treated no better than the black man they had been raised to hate—we had all seen enough. It was time for change.

Change passed you by decades ago, Mikey.

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The time has arrived for, as Time magazine called it, my “magnum opus.” I only had a year of Latin when I was in high school, so I’m not quite sure what that means, but I think it’s good.

Well, I took two years of Latin in high school, so I can tell you that magnum opus means “the largest piece of shit Michael Moore has ever squeezed out”.  It would appear that we are indeed seeing the ultimate encapsulation of Michael Moore’s trashing of the American way of life; a piece that fuses his ignorance of politics, violence, healthcare and manufacturing into one sizzling cowpat of economic idiocy.

Many early critics and viewers have called it my “best film yet.”

The film’s current rating at Rotten Tomatoes is 73% with an average rating of 6.6.  That’s passable, but hardly remarkable. Both Sicko and Fahrenheit rated higher.  I don’t see any reviews claiming it’s his best ever.  As we will see later, the only critics claiming this is Moore’s best film ever are talk show hosts.

It’s going to make some of you angry and I believe it’s going to give most of you a new sense of hope that we are going to turn the sick and twisted mess made by the last president around.

Turning his mess around will be our current President, who has continued corporate bailouts and voted for TARP.

I’m gonna show you the stuff the nightly news will rarely show you. Ever meet a pilot for American Airlines on food stamps because his pay’s been cut so low? Ever meet a judge who gets kickbacks for sending innocent kids to a private prison? Ever meet someone from the Wall Street Journal who bluntly states on camera that he doesn’t much care for democracy and that capitalism should be our only ruling concern?

The first tale on this list of woe is a unionized employee.  The alternative to the furloughs hitting American would be bankruptcy.  I guess Michael would have him completely on the street.

The second story is indeed a tragedy—one that as incited particular anger here in Pennsylvania.  But it has nothing to do with capitalism.  It has to do with corrupt and evil people who abused the judicial system.  Does Michael think that judges in communist/socialist systems or more or less corrupt?  Is he perhaps familiar with China?  Just because there is money-grubbing involved does not make it “capitalism”.

The last is not particularly interesting.  I can find you a dozen liberals who don’t care much for democracy or the Constitution.  Michael Moore, for example, sees no need for Constitutional restraint on the federal government and has little regard for democracy when it goes against him.  And then there were the celebrities who threatened to leave America if Bush was re-elected.

You’ll also meet a whistleblower who, with documents in hand, tells us about the million-dollar-plus sweetheart loans he approved for the head of Senate Banking Committee—the very committee that was supposed to be regulating his lending institution!

He’s talking about Chris Dodd.  I’m no fan of Dodd, but it’s looking like these allegations are garbage.  When the HuffPo calls you a lair, you might want to take their concerns under advisement.

And you’ll learn, from the woman who heads up the congressional commission charged with keeping an eye on the bailout money, how Alan Greenspan & Co. schemed and connived the public into putting up their inflated valued homes as collateral—thus causing the biggest foreclosure epidemic in our history.

Really?  How did they connive this?  Thought control medications in our food?  Hypnotism?  Jedi Mind Trick?  It is true that the Federal Reserve made the crisis worse by keeping interest rates artificially low.  That’s a genuine beef that Moore and I share.  But no one forced people to treat their homes like cash machines.

Moreover, the high-end bankers lost astonishing amounts of money and almost destroyed their own companies with their own stupidity.  They were hit hard by the collapse of mortgage-backed securities and it was that financial crisis that nearly brought the system to its knees.  Now I have no sympathy for a rich banker who’s a lot less rich; not when there are people losing jobs and homes and health insurance.  But to blame “Alan Greenspan and Co” for this crisis is to assume that they cut off their nose to spite their face; that they deliberately lost billions of dollars so that could cackled with glee when the little guy was thrown out onto the street.

No one on the banking industry wanted the foreclosure crisis, not when they had so much money riding on the mortgage-backed securities.  What they did was stupid, short-sighted and often vile.  But it was not deliberately destructive.  Banks lose enormous amounts of money when a home if foreclosed on.  They only make money when people keeping paying their mortgages, which is why many of them have been willing to re-negotiate the loans rather than foreclose.

There is now a foreclosure filed in the U.S. once every seven-and-half SECONDS.

Damn, we have to get those evil Republicans out of power!  Oh, wait.

None of this is an accident, and I name the names others seem to be afraid to name, the men who have ransacked the pensions of working people and plundered the future of our kids and grandkids. Somehow they thought they were going to get away with this, that we’d believe their Big Lie that this crash was caused by a bunch of low-income people who took out loans they couldn’t afford.

But it was, Michael. The subprime mortages—those made to people with bad credit—are still driving the problem.  Many can not even afford the low teaser rates before their ARMs adjust.  Banks that have renegotiated loans are finding half of them going right back into default.  The President that you hailed as a Messiah has done little to alleviate this.  In fact, his Congress continues to try to prop up the market with such ideas as the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

I will grant that the larger problem was (a) a government that felt it could pressure banks into making dumb loans; (b) a banking industry that stupidly came to believe it could make bad loans and calculate the risk away and; (c) the “moral hazard” of banks being able to take dumb risks because they were “too big to fail”.  But no matter how you slice it, the loans were the heart of the problem.  We can debate why exactly such dumb loans were made.

And you want to talk about people robbing pensions?  Try Barack Obama, who skewed the automotive bankruptcies to turn the entire shebang over to politically powerful unions—at tremendous cost to the pension plans and retirement funds that were invested in the car companies and legally had priority.

So here we come! It’s all there, up on the silver screen, two hours of a tragicomedy crime story starring a bunch of vampires who just weren’t satisfied with simply destroying Flint, Michigan—they had to try and see if they could take down the whole damn country.

Yeah, the same bankers who forced Detroit to engage in stupid labor agreements and to continue to pour money into unprofitable car lines also crashed the real estate market.  They sure are powerful, those guys!  This is classic Moore—take everything that pisses him off and attribute it to some nebulous “capitalistic” Other.

Mike then runs down his press junket, lauding the people who host him as “brave”.  Uh-huh.  We all know how much Steven Colbert, Larry King and Keith Olberman hide their liberalism and hate to host shrieking left-wing nuts.  It get extra nauseous when he talks about Leno:

This man called me after seeing the movie and asked me to be his only in-studio guest on the second night of his new prime-time show. I said, “Jay, shouldn’t you be thinking of your ratings in the first week of the show? Are you sure you didn’t misdial Tom Hanks’ number (the area code where I live is 231; 213 is LA)?” He told me he was profoundly moved by this film. So I was the guest on his second show, and he told all of America it was my “best film” and to please go see “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

Jay Leno?  That’s your endorsement?  A comedian?  A comedian who inevitably says that every movie his guests are flogging is fantastic?  OK.

Incidentally, area code 231 is not the area code of Flint.  It is, however, the area code for the very white and wealthy place where MIchael Moore actually lives.

That was Jay Leno saying that, not Noam Chomsky or Jane Fonda (both of whom I love dearly).

No comment.

Nope. No comment.

Seriously.  I have nothing to say about this.

OK, comment.  Chomsky and Fonda, like Leno and Moore, are very wealthy.  And, like Moore, they spend most of their time denouncing capitalism, promoting socialism and living high on the hog.  I’m not surprised he loves them.  Red pees in a pod, those three.

The audience responded enthusiastically and, after 20 years of filmmaking, it was a moment where I crossed over deep into the mainstream of middle America.

Number of time Moore appeared on the Tonight Show: 6, including several times when he did not have a movie to flog.  Leno is not stupid.  He knows that because Moore is controversial, he’s a good guest for ratings.

He’s one helluva guy (and following the example he set with his free concerts for the unemployed in Michigan and Ohio last spring, I’ve gotten permission from the studio to do the same with my film in ten of the hardest-hit cities in the U.S. next week).

Finally.  I was wondering when the champion of the little guy was going to quit charging them $10 to see how badly they have it.

Oh, and he made me sing! Prepare yourself!

No thanks.  If your singing is anything like your writing or film-making, I’d risk melting the speakers on my TV.

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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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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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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.

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