This Is Not Michael Moore's Love Song

The collapse of financial institutions shocked the general public and people are justifiably pissed off . People are hurting and they want to know WHY . Due to this , serial opportunist Michael Moore has taken a stab at big business using the collapse as an example . This is not a creative nor novel idea and not entirely out of character for Mr. Moore . In days gone by , he has informed the average person of what he deems to be horrors of the world using one-sided facts that anyone can look up in an encyclopaedia and he's become fabulously wealthy as a result.

In his latest tome on film , he takes yet another uncreative stab at financially-blessed scumbags under the blanket of evil capitalism . In Mikey's jaded myopia , any capitalist , save for himself and his malcontent cohorts , is a bastard out to take everyone for a ride. While my personal leanings might be slightly socialist to the average person , there is nothing inherently wrong with any system . there are douchebags in all systems - you had Stalin's bastardization of theoretically wholesome communism that has now become a totalitarian capitalist dynasty run by oligarchs who ensure that opponents have no hope of changing the status quo . But just because Russia has no concept of moderation doesn't mean that the globe is hopeless .

Capitalism as a system is not evil , nor are the vast majority of those who have attained wealth from it . A great deal of the wealthy did not start off in luxe surroundings , but to the contrary . Any Canadian will remember Yehuda "Honest Ed" Mirvish and his retail and theatre empire . His father owned a tiny grocery , and at 15 Ed dropped out of school to run it after his father's untimely death and saw his first business failure . Later on , he came up with a novel concept - the "loss-leader" and his wife allowed him to cash in an insurance policy she held to start his flagship cash-only no-frills shop stocked with fire-sale oddities and cut-rate groceries with his below cost gatecrashers to draw crowds that never went away . He and his wife amassed vast real estate holdings and saved every artistic genre from destruction by offering studios to artists and saving the now-luxurious royal Alexandra Theatre that was slated for demolition . Every year until his death he gave away a minimum of 10,000 pounds of turkeys to working-class families and was known for randomly handing out parkas and sleeping bags to the homeless , a teenage me being one of them . He was a capitalist .

While people focus on a few assholes , think of the philanthropy of the benefactors of the system - Warren Buffet , Joan Kroc , Bill Gates , Sam Sniderman , Michael Bloomberg , and George Soros are just a few of the super-rich who have made it their raison d'etre to help those less fortunate with their blessings .

Michael Moore uses the plight of conglomerates who used existing financial loopholes to assert his position that capitalism is evil while he reaps the luxuries of said system . At best , his films are investigative journalism , at worst alarmist and categorically unfair judgments of people he has never met to piss off people who don't understand the way that the world works. Yes , health care should be a right and people should be free to question their government . Dissent and questioning are always fair , but what isn't is the wholesale branding of self-made people as oppressors . After all , didn't Moore's prepackaged finger-pointing make him wealthier than most of us could dream of becoming?

Instead of pointing the finger at others , us educated people need to look inside ourselves . Why are we so quick to trust our finances with people foreign to our lives ? Simply , it's because we all buy into the get-rich-quick investment strategy as opposed to working our asses off to realize our dreams . We need to use our collective voices to question the things we find objectionable . We need to be like Honest Ed . It is imperative that we pass on positive ethics to our kids instead of propagating laziness and the whiny why-can't-I-have-a-Maserati-without-working-for-it attitude becoming prevalent . The alternative is the Communist Revolution for the new century , where the poor murder the rich and then have no idea how to run the show , with a few Bill Mahers thrown in for good measure.
I'm not promoting vilification of people like Michael Moore , but we must guard ourselves from making heroes out of hypocrites .