America's Teacher

On September 17, in the midst of the publicity blitz for his
cinematic takedown of the capitalist order, Moore talked with Nation columnist Naomi Klein by phone about the film, the roots of
our economic crisis and the promise and peril of the present political
moment. To listen to a podcast of the full conversation, click here. Following
is an edited transcript of their conversation.- -The Nation
Editors

Naomi Klein: So, the film is wonderful. Congratulations. It is,
as many people have already heard, an unapologetic call for a revolt
against capitalist madness. But the week it premiered, a very different
kind of revolt was in the news: the so-called tea parties, seemingly a
passionate defense of capitalism and against social programs.

Meanwhile, we are not seeing too many signs of the hordes storming Wall
Street. Personally, I'm hoping that your film is going to be the wake-up
call and the catalyst for all of that changing. But I'm just wondering
how you're coping with this odd turn of events, these revolts for
capitalism led by Glenn Beck.

Michael Moore: I don't know if they're so much revolts in favor
of capitalism as they are being fueled by a couple of different agendas,
one being the fact that a number of Americans still haven't come to
grips with the fact that there's an African-American who is their
leader. And I don't think they like that.

NK: Do you see that as the main driving force for the tea
parties?

MM: I think it's one of the forces--but I think there's a number
of agendas at work here. The other agenda is the corporate agenda. The
healthcare companies and other corporate concerns are helping to pull
together what seems like a spontaneous outpouring of citizen anger.

But the third part of this is--and this is what I really have always
admired about the right wing: they are organized, they are dedicated,
they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side,
I don't really see that kind of commitment.

When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August--those
meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side?
And then I thought, Wow, it's August. You ever try to organize anything
on the left in August?

NK: Wasn't part of it also, though, that the left, or
progressives, or whatever you want to call them, have been in something
of a state of disarray with regard to the Obama administration--that
most people favor universal healthcare, but they couldn't rally behind
it because it wasn't on the table?

MM: Yes. And that's why Obama keeps turning around and looking
for the millions behind him, supporting him, and there's nobody even
standing there, because he chose to take a half measure instead of the
full measure that needed to happen. Had he taken the full measure--true
single-payer, universal healthcare--I think he'd have millions out there
backing him up.

NK: Now that the Baucus plan is going down in flames, do you
think there's another window to put universal healthcare on the table?

MM: Yes. And we need people to articulate the message and get out
in front of this and lead it. You know, there's close to a hundred
Democrats in Congress who had already signed on as co-signers to John
Conyers's bill.

Obama, I think, realizes now that whatever he thought he was trying to
do with bipartisanship or holding up the olive branch, that the other
side has no interest in anything other than the total destruction of
anything he has stood for or was going to try and do. So if [New York
Congressman Anthony] Weiner or any of the other members of Congress want
to step forward, now would be the time. And I certainly would be out
there. I am out there. I mean, I would use this time right now to
really rally people, because I think the majority of the country wants
this.

NK: Coming back to Wall Street, I want to talk a little bit more
about this strange moment that we're in, where the rage that was
directed at Wall Street, what was being directed at AIG executives when
people were showing up in their driveways--I don't know what happened to
that.

My fear was always that this huge anger that you show in the film, the
kind of uprising in the face of the bailout, which forced Congress to
vote against it that first time, that if that anger wasn't continuously
directed at the most powerful people in society, at the elites, at the
people who had created the disaster, and channeled into a real project
for changing the system, then it could easily be redirected at the most
vulnerable people in society; I mean immigrants, or channeled into
racist rage.

And what I'm trying to sort out now is, Is it the same rage or do you
think these are totally different streams of American culture--have the
people who were angry at AIG turned their rage on Obama and on the idea
of health reform?

MM: I don't think that is what has happened. I'm not so sure
they're the same people.

In fact, I can tell you from my travels across the country while making
the film and even in the last few weeks, there is something else that's
simmering beneath the surface. You can't avoid the anger boiling over at
some point when you have one in eight mortgages in delinquency or
foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds
and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping
point.

And the scary thing about that is that historically, at times when that
has happened, the right has been able to successfully manipulate those
who have been beaten down and use their rage to support what they used
to call fascism.

Where has it gone since the crash? It's a year later. I think that
people felt like they got it out of their system when they voted for
Obama six weeks later and that he was going to ride into town and do the
right thing. And he's kind of sauntered into town promising to do the
right thing but not accomplishing a whole heck of a lot.

Now, that's not to say that I'm not really happy with a number of things
I've seen him do.

To hear a president of the United States admit that we overthrew a
democratically elected government in Iran, that's one of the things on
my list I thought I'd never hear in my lifetime. So there have been
those moments.

And maybe I'm just a bit too optimistic here, but he was raised by a
single mother and grandparents and he did not grow up with money. And
when he was fortunate enough to be able to go to Harvard and graduate
from there, he didn't then go and do something where he could become
rich; he decides to go work in the inner city of Chicago.

Oh, and he decides to change his name back to what it was on the birth
certificate--Barack. Not exactly the move of somebody who's trying to
become a politician. So he's shown us, I think, in his lifetime many
things about where his heart is, and he slipped up during the campaign
and told Joe the Plumber that he believed in spreading the wealth.

And I think that those things that he believes in are still there. Now,
it's kind of up to him. If he's going to listen to the Rubins and the
Geithners and the Summerses, you and I lose. And a lot of people who
have gotten involved, many of them for the first time, won't get
involved again. He will have done more to destroy what needs to happen
in this country in terms of people participating in their democracy. So
I hope he understands the burden that he's carrying and does the right
thing.

NK: Well, I want to push you a little bit on this, because I
understand what you're saying about the way he's lived his life and
certainly the character he appears to have. But he is the person who
appointed Summers and Geithner, who you're very appropriately hard on in
the film.

And one year later, he hasn't reined in Wall Street. He reappointed
Bernanke. He's not just appointed Summers but has given him an
unprecedented degree of power for a mere economic adviser.

MM: And meets with him every morning.

NK: Exactly. So what I worry about is this idea that we're always
psychoanalyzing Obama, and the feeling I often hear from people is that
he's being duped by these guys. But these are his choices, and so why
not judge him on his actions and really say, "This is on him, not on
them"?

MM: I agree. I don't think he is being duped by them; I think
he's smarter than all of them.

When he first appointed them I had just finished interviewing a bank
robber who didn't make it into the film, but he is a bank robber who is
hired by the big banks to advise them on how to avoid bank robberies.

So in order to not sink into a deep, dark pit of despair, I said to
myself that night, That's what Obama's doing. Who better to fix the mess
than the people who created it? He's bringing them in to clean up their
own mess. Yeah, yeah. That's it. That's it. Just keep repeating it:
"There's no place like home, there's no place like home..."

NK: And now it turns out they were just being brought in to keep
stealing.

MM: Right. So now it's on him.

NK: All right. Let's talk about the film some more. I saw you on
Leno, and I was struck that one of his first questions to you was this
objection--that it's greed that's evil, not capitalism. And this
is something that I hear a lot--this idea that greed or corruption is
somehow an aberration from the logic of capitalism rather than the
engine and the centerpiece of capitalism. And I think that that's
probably something you're already hearing about the terrific sequence in
the film about those corrupt Pennsylvania judges who were sending kids
to private prison and getting kickbacks. I think people would say,
That's not capitalism, that's corruption.

Why is it so hard to see the connection, and how are you responding to
this?

MM: Well, people want to believe that it's not the economic
system that's at the core of all this. You know, it's just a few bad
eggs. But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay [Leno],
capitalism is the legalization of this greed.

Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in
our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them.
If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those
parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of
control. Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn't
really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it
rewards it.

I'm asked this question every day, because people are pretty stunned at
the end of the movie to hear me say that it should just be eliminated
altogether. And they're like, "Well, what's wrong with making money? Why
can't I open a shoe store?"

And I realized that [because] we no longer teach economics in high
school, they don't really understand what any of it means.

The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to
think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never
could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the
juvenile hall. But because there's been this big push in the past twenty
or thirty years to privatize government services, take it out of our
hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their
fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets,
it has messed everything up.

NK: The thing that I found most exciting in the film is that you
make a very convincing pitch for democratically run workplaces as the
alternative to this kind of loot-and-leave capitalism.

So I'm just wondering, as you're traveling around, are you seeing any
momentum out there for this idea?

MM: People love this part of the film. I've been kind of
surprised because I thought people aren't maybe going to understand this
or it seems too hippie-dippy--but it really has resonated in the
audiences that I've seen it with.

But, of course, I've pitched it as a patriotic thing to do. So if you
believe in democracy, democracy can't be being able to vote every two or
four years. It has to be every part of every day of your life.

We've changed relationships and institutions around quite considerably
because we've decided democracy is a better way to do it. Two hundred
years ago you had to ask a woman's father for permission to marry her,
and then once the marriage happened, the man was calling all the shots.
And legally, women couldn't own property and things like that.

Thanks to the women's movement of the '60s and '70s, this idea was
introduced to that relationship--that both people are equal and both
people should have a say. And I think we're better off as a result of
introducing democracy into an institution like marriage.

But we spend eight to ten to twelve hours of our daily lives at work,
where we have no say. I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years
from now--if we make it that far--they're going to say, "Look at these
people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a
democracy, but they spent ten hours of every day in a totalitarian
situation and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial
wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."

Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years
ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.

NK: It is one of those ideas that keeps coming up. At various
points in history it's been an enormously popular idea. It is actually
what people wanted in the former Soviet Union instead of the Wild West
sort of mafia capitalism that they ended up with. And what people wanted
in Poland in 1989 when they voted for Solidarity was for their
state-owned companies to be turned into democratically run workplaces,
not to be privatized and looted.

But one of the biggest barriers I've found in my research around worker
cooperatives is not just government and companies being resistant to it
but actually unions as well. Obviously there are exceptions, like the
union in your film, United Electrical Workers, which was really open to
the idea of the Republic Windows & Doors factory being turned into a
cooperative, if that's what the workers wanted. But in most cases,
particularly with larger unions, they have their script, and when a
factory is being closed down their job is to get a big payout--as big a
payout as they can, as big a severance package as they can for the
workers. And they have a dynamic that is in place, which is that the
powerful ones, the decision-makers, are the owners.

You had your US premiere at the AFL-CIO convention. How are you finding
labor leadership in relation to this idea? Are they open to it, or are
you hearing, "Well, this isn't really workable"? Because I know you've
also written about the idea that some of the auto plant factories or
auto parts factories that are being closed down could be turned into
factories producing subway cars, for instance. The unions would need to
champion that idea for it to work.

MM: I sat there in the theater the other night with about 1,500
delegates of the AFL-CIO convention, and I was a little nervous as we
got near that part of the film, and I was worried that it was going to
get a little quiet in there.

Just the opposite. They cheered it. A couple people shouted out, "Right
on!" "Absolutely!" I think that unions at this point have been so beaten
down, they're open to some new thinking and some new ideas. And I was
very encouraged to see that.

The next day at the convention the AFL-CIO passed a resolution
supporting single-payer healthcare. I thought, Wow, you know? Things are
changing.

NK: Coming back to what we were talking about a little earlier,
about people's inability to understand basic economic theory: in your
film you have this great scene where you can't get anybody, no matter
how educated they are, to explain what a derivative is.

So it isn't just about basic education. It's that complexity is being
used as a weapon against democratic control over the economy. This was
Greenspan's argument--that derivatives were so complicated that
lawmakers couldn't regulate them.

It's almost as if there needs to be a movement toward simplicity in
economics or in financial affairs, which is something that Elizabeth
Warren, the chief bailout watchdog for Congress, has been talking about
in terms of the need to simplify people's relationships with lenders.

So I'm wondering what you think about that. Also, this isn't really much
of a question, but isn't Elizabeth Warren sort of incredible? She's kind
of like the anti-Summers. It's enough to give you hope, that she exists.

MM: Absolutely. And can I suggest a presidential ticket for 2016
or 2012 if Obama fails us? [Ohio Congresswoman] Marcy Kaptur and
Elizabeth Warren.

NK: I love it. They really are the heroes of your film. I would
vote for that.

I was thinking about what to call this piece, and what I'm going to
suggest to my editor is "America's Teacher," because the film is this
incredible piece of old-style popular education. One of the things that
my colleague at The Nation Bill Greider talks about is that we
don't do this kind of popular education anymore, that unions used to
have budgets to do this kind of thing for their members, to just unpack
economic theory and what's going on in the world and make it accessible.
I know you see yourself as an entertainer, but I'm wondering, do you
also see yourself as a teacher?

MM: I'm honored that you would use such a term. I like teachers.