Guest Comments by Michael Moore

The writer, an American author and Academy Award-winning film-maker, frequently comments on politics and business.

MICHIGAN, United States -- The time has arrived for what TIME magazine calls my “magnum opus”. I had only a year of Latin back in high school, so I’m not quite sure what that means, but I think it’s good.

Today, on October 2, my new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, opens on more than 1,000 screens across the United States, a record for an independent documentary. This follows last weekend’s limited opening in New York and Los Angeles.

To kick off the movie’s national release, I asked the studio to offer some free screenings in the nation’s hardest-hit cities, those with the most unemployment and foreclosures. People didn’t need to bring any “proof” of difficulties. It was the honor system, no questions asked.

Ten cities held such events yesterday. They were Las Vegas (Nevada), Phoenix (Arizona), Saginaw (Michigan), Raleigh/Durham (North Carolina), Tampa (Florida), Elkhart (Indiana), Baltimore (Maryland), Cleveland (Ohio) and Peoria (Illinois).

True, a free movie isn’t much when you really need a job or place to live. As I show in the movie, we must challenge some fundamental assumptions about an economic system that allows concentration of money and power in just a few hands.

I believe deeply in this movie and spent nearly two years on it. Some early critics and viewers call it my “best film yet”. That’s hard for me to judge because I’m proud of all my films, but I’ll tell you this: What you’ll see in Capitalism should stun you. It may make you angry and could give a new sense of hope that we’ll fix the sick-and-twisted mess made by the previous American president. Oh, and you’ll have a good laugh at the expense of the banking and corporate criminals who made out like bandits.

The movie shows stuff the nightly news rarely does. Ever meet a pilot for American Airlines on food stamps because his pay has 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 says he doesn’t care much for democracy and that capitalism should be our only ruling concern?

You’ll meet a whistleblower who tells about the million-dollar sweetheart loans he approved for the head of the Senate Banking Committee, the very committee supposed to regulate his lending institution. And you’ll learn, from a woman who heads the congressional commission charged with keeping an eye on bailout money, how Alan Greenspan and crew schemed and connived the public into putting up inflated-valued homes as collateral, causing the biggest-ever foreclosure epidemic. Now there’s a foreclosure filed in the U.S. once every 7.5 seconds.

None of this was an accident. The movie names the people who ransacked the pensions of working people and plundered the future. Somehow they expected to get away with it, that we’d believe their Big Lie that the crash was caused by low-income people taking out loans they couldn’t afford. Much of the mainstream media bought this storyline. Jeez, I guess the wealthy thieves forgot about my crew. You’d think we’d have made a bigger impression on them by now. Guess not.

So it’s all up there on the silver screen, two hours of a tragedy-comedy-crime story starring vampires who had to see if they could take down the whole damn country. In this cops-and-robbers movie, the robbers wear suits and ties.

See you at the movies!

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