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Michael Moore Gets ‘People’s Oscar’
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The Metropolitan Washington (D.C.) Council, AFL-CIO and the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Md., co-sponsored last night’s showing of “Capitalism: A Love Story,” Michael Moore’s fantastic new documentary that some of us were fortunate to see at its U.S. premier in Pittsburgh during the AFL-CIO Convention. Below is a cross-post from the central labor council.
Calling it “The People’s Oscar,” Michael Moore (left) enthusiastically accepted the Tony Mazzocchi Labor Arts Award at last night’s D.C. preview of his new film Capitalism: A Love Story. “I knew Tony and he was a remarkable man,” an obviously touched Moore said after being presented with the award by DC Labor FilmFest Co-Chairs Jos Williams and Mark Dudzic, “this really means a lot to me.” (Mazzocchi, president of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, was a driving force in establishing the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970.)
The standing-room-only crowd in AFI’s main theater gave Moore and the film a standing ovation and Moore—who reminded the audience that he’d lived in D.C. while editing his first film, Roger & Me—fielded questions after the screening at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring.
Echoing his final words in the film, Moore exhorted the audience to:
Get up and get involved to make this the world we want.
He also encouraged activists to make their own films that entertain and mobilize and pledged to work with the D.C. Labor FilmFest to continue working to help organize local labor film festivals around the world.
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4 Comments
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Michael Moore is a great guy, a guy who stood up to power-still does- to try and help the people of the U.S. create a better place for us in which to live. I’m going to go see his new movie as soon as possible as I’ve previously ordered at least 2 of his movies on line, and have never been disappointed. Capitalism needs a big overhaul as its engine’s just about run its course. We’ll either have to create a new mode of production, or we’ll simply perish. Between the massive multinational corporations on state welfare, and the bribed politicians in Washington D.C. most of which seem to go out of their way to avoid doing most anything of benefit for their constituents, our country’s a mess, and there’s got to be a better way.
Roy,
I whole heartedly agree with you! When three to five percent of the total population controls the government, the economy, the news media, the educational systems, the entertainment industry and some of the churches… well that is not a true democracy!
Tony Mazzocchi was a great trade unionist who firmly believed that workers should have their own political party. It was true 15 years ago and and even more true today!
Both major parties are owned lock stock and barrel by the corporate bosses. They deny us much deserved healthcare, on the job justice, housing, decent education… What more evidence do we need to do something for ourselves??
Mike showed up to the premier of Capitalism in Toronto with striking Steelworkers from Sudbury, Ontario at Vale Inco nickel mining. He brought the miners onto the red carpet with him in a showing of true Solidarity. Later he sent a copy of his move to Sudbury, making our exclusive audience the 3rd time his movie had been shown in NA.
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I am against Capitalism; I have lived under it my entire life and I am just totally against it and here is why: Capitalism, as I see it, is a system that very simply declares that a person in a strong position, when presented with competition, takes advantage of his strong position and gets rid of the competition by buying him out or destroying him, in any way that will most benefit him. Today, this is done almost exclusively by lawyers representing huge corporate employers, where the controlling forces always arrange things to benefit their companies and they always make provisions for certain things to be deemed as criminal acts and making sure that the largest number of these acts are always property crimes; that is crimes against poverty. The ruling class has always, throughout history, come together and made laws as to what would and would not constitute a crime and, of course, the ruling class, are also those that own the most property and commodities.
In England, where America’s law derived from, down to 200 years ago there were about that many, 200, crimes punishable by death and hungry human beings who were caught stealing food could be (and many were) simply and stoically hanged. Today, in England, there is no death penalty but we, in America, have had the death penalty for hundreds of years because it derives from Mosaic Law—“An eye for an eye.” Today, we only have capital punishment for certain crimes, in 38 of the 50 States, and we make sure we treat any prisoner who has been condemned to death very well indeed, we make sure he is warm and comfortably encased in an 8-foot by10 cell, where we provide him with a doctor and feed him better and better food as his date with the executioner approaches; we want to make sure he is in good health when we strap him into the electric chair and fry his brains or stick a needle with enough Potassium Chloride in it to kill him within 5-30 minutes. The greatest majority of these “murderers” have been convicted of a property crime; that is holding up a convenience store and shooting a clerk or a policeman or intruder into the crime or by being an accomplice to that murder, as a getaway driver or helping in some other way. I am not condoning these shootings; I am simply stating facts.
We, in America, as the World over, have built up our Armies and Navies and Marines because the reign of force and violence has spread the World over forever and we are as afraid of others’ threats as they are of ours. In the business and industrial world where the reign of force and violence means competition it is responsible for the greed and selfishness that contribute to the fortunes of the rich and the poverty of the poor.
The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, and later the 1956 Bank Holding Company Act, mandated the separation of banks, insurance companies and securities firms but when Ronald Reagan came to power, in 1981, he pushed for total deregulation of every industry imaginable and even after taxpayers had to rescue deregulated S&Ls, with a $200 billion bailout in the late 1980s, the push to loosen regulation paused only briefly and in fact strengthened when an “avowed” Democrat, Bill Clinton, in 1999, signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which tore down Glass-Steagall’s reforms by removing the walls separating banks, securities firms and insurers; creating a system whereby huge banks and corporations, like AIG, B.O.A., Citi-Bank, etc., all came to expect privatized profits and socialized losses and they have gotten them and will continue to get them as long as they in effect “run” this country and unless Barak Obama makes good on his campaign promises, and brings the working classes, the poor and middle classes of America, the decent wages and health care that he ran on, we are headed for trouble, as the current policies devalue the dollar, by the hyperinflationary politics of the Federal Reserve, to such an extent that nothing short of an implosion of Capitalism or a Revolution will soon take place.
Peace,
Keith G.