Jesus. The words “Michael Moore” are either printed or spoken FIVE times in that trailer. Six if you count “America’s most feared filmmaker” as another reference. That’s worse than Tyler Perry.
Competitive production costs = elimination of environmental, worker safety, & child labor laws.
Free trade = massive oil-burning transportation system that centralizes economic power in the corporations.
Privatization = corporate appropriation of public lands and resources.
The poor = people who live sustainably in true communities and diverse cultures, crafting their own homes, clothing, and utensils, and growing their own food, thus requiring little or no cash income. These millions are termed “poor” because industrial capitalism places no value on the goods and services people provide for themselves.
Globalization = destruction of all cultures.
Shift to export economy = corporate agribusiness theft of peasants’ land forcing migration into big city slums and sweatshops.
Business-friendly environment = corporate puppet regime installed by CIA and controlled by detailed and conditional World Bank loans.
European Union = elimination of local democracy and homogenization of Europe’s diverse cultures.
Costs outsourcing = government subsidies and tax breaks given to corporations in exchange for campaign contributions.
Media = propaganda machine owned by corporations and funded by corporate advertising.
Industry consultant = corporate lobbyist.
Market creation = advertising and selling increasingly complex, costly, and unnecessary consumer products.
Automobile = a highly expensive, dangerous, stressful, and environmentally destructive personal isolation chamber which disperses and destroys compact pedestrian communities.
Infrastructure = subsidized freeway sprawl.
Television = an addictive corporate advertising and “news” propaganda device, which wastes time formerly used for family, friends, community, and the reading of books.
Chain store and chain café = corporate outlets replacing individuality with conformity, diversity with monotony.
American Dream = Corporate Dream.
GO MICHAEL MOORE!!
Robert Hamer
You’re…joking, right, James?
James Hannum
What do you find above that is funny?
Or untrue?
Come on now, a serious answer please!
Robert Hamer
Um, everything?
James Hannum
Come on, you can do better than that! If you’ve got a valid criticism of the above, let’s all hear it!
Which of the above definitions do you disagree with, and why?
Robert Hamer
James, I have no desire to treat any of your ideas (if they even are your ideas, something about them screams “copy-and-paste”) as if they are legitimate.
Just looking at your definition of “the poor,” as if their lives are somehow preferable to those with wealth and income, tells me that you have no clue what you are talking about and you are under the delusional belief that capitalism brings more people down than lifts people up, which anyone who doesn’t live a sheltered life knows is absolutely not true. To quote from a distinguished Massachusetts Representative, “Debating you would be like having a discussion with a dining room table, I have no interest in doing so.”
Robert, your unwillingness to engage in a serious discussion of the above 20 definitions indicates that you need to read more about this subject. Don’t get me wrong, I myself knew little about it before I began reading some books and articles. I discovered that you have to read more than the New York Times, and find better news sources than Fox or CNN, to get the real picture of what is going on in the world.
Your comment about “the poor” is interesting. What is it that makes a person “poor?” Were the Hawaiian natives before Hawaii was “economically developed” more “poor” than the sweatshop workers or Enron office workers of today?
You are referring to this definition, above:
“The poor = people who live sustainably in true communities and diverse cultures, crafting their own homes, clothing, and utensils, and growing their own food, thus requiring little or no cash income. These millions are termed “poor” because industrial capitalism places no value on the goods and services people provide for themselves.”
(And I would add that they are termed “poor” because they do not have enough money to buy big corporate products like wide TVs, water ski boats, and CuisineArts.)
You say, Robert, that the above definition says that the lives of the poor “are somehow preferable to those with wealth and income,” and you therefore disagree with the definition. But aren’t the lives of the poor indeed “somehow preferable” to those of the “rich?”
Who has the better life, in you opinion:
Donald Trump or Mother Theresa
George Bush or Michael Moore
American Indians before Colombus or American Indians after Colombus
A woodcarver and furniture maker with his own small shop 0r the CEO of Enron Corp
These are interesting questions.
The truth is purposely kept from us. Everyone believes that he or she is personally immune to advertising, propiganda, and public relations campaigns, and that they know the truth because they are intelligent and “free.” But it is not true. One has to dig to find the real truth. If you take what the mainstream gives you, they are telling you what to think.
If you don’t believe that, how do you explain that millions of educated Germans, Austrians, and others believed Hitler that they should attack the Soviet Union? They believed it, and they did it. 20,000,000 Germans died on the Eastern Front trying to steal land that Germany did not need and could not use.
For example, you may now realize that Pres. Bush lied to get us into the Iraq War. (Iraq has WMD, Iraq did 911, America needs the oil). (America was buying the oil from Sadaam Hussein, and now is buying the same oil from Bush’s bosses). There are other truths, deeper and more pervasive than those about Iraq.
Which brings us to the topic we are discussing here, Michael Moore’s new movie about Corporations. The economic establishment has been imposing a development model which seems designed to benefit transnational corporations over workers; foreign investors over local businesses; and wealthy countries over developing nations. By reading websites like the IFG’s, I learned that the institutions of globalization are undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Corporate scandals such as Enron and Worldcom, the recent “bailouts” in amounts of hundreds of billions of dollars each to unaccountable corporations and banks, the failures of World Bank policies and programs, the recent break down of WTO (World Trade Organization) negotiations, and other events reveal that the benefits of corporate globalization that were promised by its advocates have not come to fruition.
The IFG’s dozens of professors, experts, and book author members all agree, and document for those who will read it, that the policy that governed development thinking during most of the past two decades, the so-called Washington Consensus, has broken up with notable “defectors” such as former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz and the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs. From conservative circles, the Meltzer Commission, along with Walter Wriston, Henry Kissinger, and William Simon also have issued strong critiques against Bretton Woods institutions.
But perhaps the greatest indictment against corporate/banking globalization is the unprecedented global citizen movement that has emerged during the last decade, demonstrating that the benefits of globalization have gone to the few at the exclusion of many. This extraordinary alliance brings together numerous diverse groups and perspectives — union members, farmers, landless peasants, people of faith, women’s organizations, youth organizations, environmentalists, AIDS and other health activists, politicians, civil servants, immigrants, peace and human rights organizations, intellectuals, consumer advocates, and many others. While promoters of globalization proclaim that this model is the rising tide that will lift all boats, citizen movements find that it is instead lifting only yachts. In fact, the actual beneficiaries are obvious. In the United States, for example, during the period of the most rapid economic globalization — the 1990s — the top corporate executives of the largest global companies made salaries and gained options in the tens of millions of dollars (often in the hundreds of millions), while real wages of ordinary workers either remained stagnant or rose insignificantly.
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) reports that American CEOs were paid an average of 458 times more than production workers in 2000, up from 104 times in 1991. The degree of wealth concentration of the world’s 475 billionaires is now worth the combined income of the bottom half of humanity. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Program’s 1999 Human Development Report revealed that the gap between the wealthy and the poor both within and between countries is growing steadily larger. It notes inequities of the current global trading system as one of the key contributors to this trend. Even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concurred. In its Global Trends 2015 report, issued in 2000, the CIA maintained that globalization will create “an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today. [Corporate globalization’s] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic volatility and a widening economic divide…deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. [It] will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.”
Robert, all over the world evidence points to the failure of globalization and the so-called “free trade” policies of the last decade – loss of jobs and livelihoods, displacement of indigenous peoples, massive immigration, rapid environmental devastation and loss of biodiversity, increases in poverty and hunger, and many additional negative effects.
If you don’t know about the above, (like I didn’t a while back), that’s certainly understandable. But just Google some of the above names and phrases, and you can find out a lot more about this.
Yes, I wrote the above 20 definitions. It took me a long time and a lot of research. If anyone can show me that any of them can be improved or corrected, I invite it. I believe them all to be accurate.
I also wrote the below. Most of these are not my ideas, but are information and ideas I gained from others by reading on this subject:
For millenniums, Earth’s millions of diverse communities co-existed in harmony with nature. They were held together by their self-sufficient local economies and their unique and vibrant cultures. Small was beautiful, and money was secondary in importance. Cultural diversity and true communities made the world a vibrant, fascinating place.
Our Heritage
Most of our ancestors who lived in the centuries between 12,000 B.C. and 1700 A.D. were independent craftsmen and farmers. There weren’t any corporations or factories. Leather workers made shoes and saddles, spinners and weavers made cloth and rugs, tailors and dress-makers made clothing, joiners made furniture and cabinets, smiths made wares of iron, copper, and brass, and farmers grew organic food. All was for local use and consumption.
Robert- If you disagree with any of this, let us know! But be specific please– say what you don’t agree with, and why.
Globalization (outside corporate control) has increasingly destroyed this natural way of life. The clothing, furniture, and other products we buy are made in distant lands, without laws protecting workers, children, or the environment. Cultural diversity is being replaced by corporate-controlled world monoculture. Global competition destroys productive jobs at home and drives wages below the poverty level abroad. In the so-called undeveloped countries, puppet governments allow global corporations to convert land which has been communally farmed for centuries into huge single-crop export plantations. The hundreds of millions of dispossessed farmers must then move to big city slums and sweatshops.
Heavy industry, synthetic products and GMO food, millions of tons of crop-dusting poison, massive global transport and warming, over-consumption and starvation, and the specter of more wars over raw materials and markets, have brought us to the brink of extinction.
Robert Hamer – Anything here that you think is false? What exactly do you find false?
Relocalization
The return to local economies is imperative.
The Master Craftsmen Local Economy is based on the European economies which developed naturally for centuries before industrialization. A master weaver or coppersmith, employing journeymen and apprentices and selling directly from his shop, is accountable to the small pedestrian community.
Production by hand tools, using windmill and waterwheel power for heavier jobs, promotes health and camaraderie and reduces pollution. The master craftsman’s high level of artisan skills give individuality, beauty, and durability to his products. Self-sufficiency creates community spirit.
In the US today there are not enough opportunities for young people to learn to become high craftsmen. The non-profit Craft Works will help meet this need for serious craft training.
The Craft Works and its on-site Inn will test, teach, and publicly demonstrate the Master Craftsmen Local Economy. Several masters will live and have workshops
{photos} Weaver at loom↑ Shoemaker↓
at the Craft Works, where they will instruct and supervise apprentices and journeymen in the fabrication of useful products. Occupational apprenticeship courses last from three to five years.
Authorities & Further Reading
E. F. Schumacher Small is Beautiful, Chapter 5 (1973)
Mahatma Gandhi, Swadesi (1921)
Harry Braverman Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974)
Pope Pius XI “Dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded.” (1931)
Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Toward the Local (1996)
James and Lesya Hannum, promoters of the nonprofit Craft Works opening soon, give lecture-with-slides resentations to high school and college classes, contrasting the global economy with the local economy, and industrialism with craftsmanship. The no-charge presentation also introduces the Craft Works Apprenticeship Program.
Ligaya
@Robert: You ripped off a great line, but your no Barney Frank, and you don’t get off the hook that easily.
Comments
17 responses to “New ‘Capitalism’ trailer”
Jesus. The words “Michael Moore” are either printed or spoken FIVE times in that trailer. Six if you count “America’s most feared filmmaker” as another reference. That’s worse than Tyler Perry.
I can’t wait, personally, even if the trailer did use that nasty song that ripped off of the Clash.
Looks great. I can’t wait to see Michael Moore distribute this film for free, since, you know, he hates rich people and capitalism so much.
Hating greed and hating rich people don’t go hand-in-hand.
Michael Moore again has it all wrong. He really doesn’t understand what capitalism is. He is mixing mixed economics with free market economics.
He gave away his last film for free online. In an unrelated note, I think we could use a moratorium on Paper Planes in trailers.
Where’s our money? That’s the tagline of the movie.
Well, I for one am SO excited for another Michael Moore film. They’re always such glorious fun.
It can be a real challenge to keep up with all the new words and phrases in our burgeoning global economy! The key terms are defined below:
The economy = the global corporate economy.
Industrialization = corporate usurpation of production and destruction of the independent craftsman.
Economic development = replacement of small businesses and self-sufficient local economies with the corporate system.
Economic freedom = working for the corporations and buying from the corporations.
Growth = increase in corporate profits.
Mobility of capital and ideas = rootlessness, unaccountability.
Job creation =
1. (Global North) paper-shufflers.
2. (Global South) sweatshops, child labor.
Competitive production costs = elimination of environmental, worker safety, & child labor laws.
Free trade = massive oil-burning transportation system that centralizes economic power in the corporations.
Privatization = corporate appropriation of public lands and resources.
The poor = people who live sustainably in true communities and diverse cultures, crafting their own homes, clothing, and utensils, and growing their own food, thus requiring little or no cash income. These millions are termed “poor” because industrial capitalism places no value on the goods and services people provide for themselves.
Globalization = destruction of all cultures.
Shift to export economy = corporate agribusiness theft of peasants’ land forcing migration into big city slums and sweatshops.
Business-friendly environment = corporate puppet regime installed by CIA and controlled by detailed and conditional World Bank loans.
European Union = elimination of local democracy and homogenization of Europe’s diverse cultures.
Costs outsourcing = government subsidies and tax breaks given to corporations in exchange for campaign contributions.
Media = propaganda machine owned by corporations and funded by corporate advertising.
Industry consultant = corporate lobbyist.
Market creation = advertising and selling increasingly complex, costly, and unnecessary consumer products.
Automobile = a highly expensive, dangerous, stressful, and environmentally destructive personal isolation chamber which disperses and destroys compact pedestrian communities.
Infrastructure = subsidized freeway sprawl.
Television = an addictive corporate advertising and “news” propaganda device, which wastes time formerly used for family, friends, community, and the reading of books.
Chain store and chain café = corporate outlets replacing individuality with conformity, diversity with monotony.
American Dream = Corporate Dream.
GO MICHAEL MOORE!!
You’re…joking, right, James?
What do you find above that is funny?
Or untrue?
Come on now, a serious answer please!
Um, everything?
Come on, you can do better than that! If you’ve got a valid criticism of the above, let’s all hear it!
Which of the above definitions do you disagree with, and why?
James, I have no desire to treat any of your ideas (if they even are your ideas, something about them screams “copy-and-paste”) as if they are legitimate.
Just looking at your definition of “the poor,” as if their lives are somehow preferable to those with wealth and income, tells me that you have no clue what you are talking about and you are under the delusional belief that capitalism brings more people down than lifts people up, which anyone who doesn’t live a sheltered life knows is absolutely not true. To quote from a distinguished Massachusetts Representative, “Debating you would be like having a discussion with a dining room table, I have no interest in doing so.”
Robert, your unwillingness to engage in a serious discussion of the above 20 definitions indicates that you need to read more about this subject. Don’t get me wrong, I myself knew little about it before I began reading some books and articles. I discovered that you have to read more than the New York Times, and find better news sources than Fox or CNN, to get the real picture of what is going on in the world.
Your comment about “the poor” is interesting. What is it that makes a person “poor?” Were the Hawaiian natives before Hawaii was “economically developed” more “poor” than the sweatshop workers or Enron office workers of today?
You are referring to this definition, above:
“The poor = people who live sustainably in true communities and diverse cultures, crafting their own homes, clothing, and utensils, and growing their own food, thus requiring little or no cash income. These millions are termed “poor” because industrial capitalism places no value on the goods and services people provide for themselves.”
(And I would add that they are termed “poor” because they do not have enough money to buy big corporate products like wide TVs, water ski boats, and CuisineArts.)
You say, Robert, that the above definition says that the lives of the poor “are somehow preferable to those with wealth and income,” and you therefore disagree with the definition. But aren’t the lives of the poor indeed “somehow preferable” to those of the “rich?”
Who has the better life, in you opinion:
Donald Trump or Mother Theresa
George Bush or Michael Moore
American Indians before Colombus or American Indians after Colombus
A woodcarver and furniture maker with his own small shop 0r the CEO of Enron Corp
These are interesting questions.
The truth is purposely kept from us. Everyone believes that he or she is personally immune to advertising, propiganda, and public relations campaigns, and that they know the truth because they are intelligent and “free.” But it is not true. One has to dig to find the real truth. If you take what the mainstream gives you, they are telling you what to think.
If you don’t believe that, how do you explain that millions of educated Germans, Austrians, and others believed Hitler that they should attack the Soviet Union? They believed it, and they did it. 20,000,000 Germans died on the Eastern Front trying to steal land that Germany did not need and could not use.
For example, you may now realize that Pres. Bush lied to get us into the Iraq War. (Iraq has WMD, Iraq did 911, America needs the oil). (America was buying the oil from Sadaam Hussein, and now is buying the same oil from Bush’s bosses). There are other truths, deeper and more pervasive than those about Iraq.
Which brings us to the topic we are discussing here, Michael Moore’s new movie about Corporations. The economic establishment has been imposing a development model which seems designed to benefit transnational corporations over workers; foreign investors over local businesses; and wealthy countries over developing nations. By reading websites like the IFG’s, I learned that the institutions of globalization are undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Corporate scandals such as Enron and Worldcom, the recent “bailouts” in amounts of hundreds of billions of dollars each to unaccountable corporations and banks, the failures of World Bank policies and programs, the recent break down of WTO (World Trade Organization) negotiations, and other events reveal that the benefits of corporate globalization that were promised by its advocates have not come to fruition.
The IFG’s dozens of professors, experts, and book author members all agree, and document for those who will read it, that the policy that governed development thinking during most of the past two decades, the so-called Washington Consensus, has broken up with notable “defectors” such as former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz and the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs. From conservative circles, the Meltzer Commission, along with Walter Wriston, Henry Kissinger, and William Simon also have issued strong critiques against Bretton Woods institutions.
But perhaps the greatest indictment against corporate/banking globalization is the unprecedented global citizen movement that has emerged during the last decade, demonstrating that the benefits of globalization have gone to the few at the exclusion of many. This extraordinary alliance brings together numerous diverse groups and perspectives — union members, farmers, landless peasants, people of faith, women’s organizations, youth organizations, environmentalists, AIDS and other health activists, politicians, civil servants, immigrants, peace and human rights organizations, intellectuals, consumer advocates, and many others. While promoters of globalization proclaim that this model is the rising tide that will lift all boats, citizen movements find that it is instead lifting only yachts. In fact, the actual beneficiaries are obvious. In the United States, for example, during the period of the most rapid economic globalization — the 1990s — the top corporate executives of the largest global companies made salaries and gained options in the tens of millions of dollars (often in the hundreds of millions), while real wages of ordinary workers either remained stagnant or rose insignificantly.
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) reports that American CEOs were paid an average of 458 times more than production workers in 2000, up from 104 times in 1991. The degree of wealth concentration of the world’s 475 billionaires is now worth the combined income of the bottom half of humanity. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Program’s 1999 Human Development Report revealed that the gap between the wealthy and the poor both within and between countries is growing steadily larger. It notes inequities of the current global trading system as one of the key contributors to this trend. Even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) concurred. In its Global Trends 2015 report, issued in 2000, the CIA maintained that globalization will create “an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today. [Corporate globalization’s] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic volatility and a widening economic divide…deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. [It] will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.”
Robert, all over the world evidence points to the failure of globalization and the so-called “free trade” policies of the last decade – loss of jobs and livelihoods, displacement of indigenous peoples, massive immigration, rapid environmental devastation and loss of biodiversity, increases in poverty and hunger, and many additional negative effects.
If you don’t know about the above, (like I didn’t a while back), that’s certainly understandable. But just Google some of the above names and phrases, and you can find out a lot more about this.
Yes, I wrote the above 20 definitions. It took me a long time and a lot of research. If anyone can show me that any of them can be improved or corrected, I invite it. I believe them all to be accurate.
I also wrote the below. Most of these are not my ideas, but are information and ideas I gained from others by reading on this subject:
For millenniums, Earth’s millions of diverse communities co-existed in harmony with nature. They were held together by their self-sufficient local economies and their unique and vibrant cultures. Small was beautiful, and money was secondary in importance. Cultural diversity and true communities made the world a vibrant, fascinating place.
Our Heritage
Most of our ancestors who lived in the centuries between 12,000 B.C. and 1700 A.D. were independent craftsmen and farmers. There weren’t any corporations or factories. Leather workers made shoes and saddles, spinners and weavers made cloth and rugs, tailors and dress-makers made clothing, joiners made furniture and cabinets, smiths made wares of iron, copper, and brass, and farmers grew organic food. All was for local use and consumption.
Robert- If you disagree with any of this, let us know! But be specific please– say what you don’t agree with, and why.
Globalization (outside corporate control) has increasingly destroyed this natural way of life. The clothing, furniture, and other products we buy are made in distant lands, without laws protecting workers, children, or the environment. Cultural diversity is being replaced by corporate-controlled world monoculture. Global competition destroys productive jobs at home and drives wages below the poverty level abroad. In the so-called undeveloped countries, puppet governments allow global corporations to convert land which has been communally farmed for centuries into huge single-crop export plantations. The hundreds of millions of dispossessed farmers must then move to big city slums and sweatshops.
Heavy industry, synthetic products and GMO food, millions of tons of crop-dusting poison, massive global transport and warming, over-consumption and starvation, and the specter of more wars over raw materials and markets, have brought us to the brink of extinction.
Robert Hamer – Anything here that you think is false? What exactly do you find false?
Relocalization
The return to local economies is imperative.
The Master Craftsmen Local Economy is based on the European economies which developed naturally for centuries before industrialization. A master weaver or coppersmith, employing journeymen and apprentices and selling directly from his shop, is accountable to the small pedestrian community.
Production by hand tools, using windmill and waterwheel power for heavier jobs, promotes health and camaraderie and reduces pollution. The master craftsman’s high level of artisan skills give individuality, beauty, and durability to his products. Self-sufficiency creates community spirit.
In the US today there are not enough opportunities for young people to learn to become high craftsmen. The non-profit Craft Works will help meet this need for serious craft training.
The Craft Works and its on-site Inn will test, teach, and publicly demonstrate the Master Craftsmen Local Economy. Several masters will live and have workshops
{photos} Weaver at loom↑ Shoemaker↓
at the Craft Works, where they will instruct and supervise apprentices and journeymen in the fabrication of useful products. Occupational apprenticeship courses last from three to five years.
Authorities & Further Reading
E. F. Schumacher Small is Beautiful, Chapter 5 (1973)
Mahatma Gandhi, Swadesi (1921)
Harry Braverman Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974)
Pope Pius XI “Dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded.” (1931)
Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Toward the Local (1996)
Contact Us
James & Lesya Hannum
E-mail: hannum7@yahoo.com
James and Lesya Hannum, promoters of the nonprofit Craft Works opening soon, give lecture-with-slides resentations to high school and college classes, contrasting the global economy with the local economy, and industrialism with craftsmanship. The no-charge presentation also introduces the Craft Works Apprenticeship Program.
@Robert: You ripped off a great line, but your no Barney Frank, and you don’t get off the hook that easily.
“your” > “you’re”