Michael Moore: 'It's the end of capitalism as we know it' David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Thursday November 20, 2008





Print This Email This Following Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's admission that there is currently little chance of a federal bailout for the country's beleaguered automakers, things are looking bleak for the industry and the possibility of a complete collapse does not seem out of the question.



CNN's Larry King spoke about the causes of the failure with Michael Moore, who first made his reputation 20 years ago with a film about the decline of General Motors in his home town of Flint, MI.



Moore was emphatic in blaming the automakers' problems on their own bad decisions over many years and not on the current economic crisis. "General Motors has had this philosophy from the beginning that what's good for General Motors is good for the country," he told King. "So their attitude was we'll build it and you buy it."



"Eventually, the consumer got smart," Moore continued, "so they started to buy other cars. General Motors still wouldn't change. They still kept building the wrong cars, and more and more people stopped buying them."



Moore was equally certain that union demands for higher wages are not at the root of the problem. "I'm stunned, actually, at how much they've given back," he said of the unions. "This is not the workers' fault. The workers don't design these cars. The workers don't have this arrogant attitude that the public will buy whatever we make for them."



But Moore did see a "hypocritical" reluctance to do anything to help workers as being behind the inability of Congress to act. "[Reid] can't get the votes to bail out the auto companies because that's going to help a lot of blue collar people, people that don't have a voice," he told King.



"As soon as the banks or the financial institutions or the people that just gambled the money away -- as soon as they were wanting some dough, boy, the trough just was laid out for them," complained Moore. "But when it came time, now, to help the people, the working class of this country, it's like, 'Ah, I don't know about that.'"



However, Moore himself is not in favor of a Congressional bailout. He acknowledged that "if General Motors collapses, then there goes hundreds of thousands of jobs, if not millions of jobs." But he also insisted, "I don't think these companies, with these management people, should be given a dime, because that's just going to be money going up in smoke or off to other countries."



"I'll tell you what it really has proven to me," Moore observed. "These guys, after all of that stuff they've been telling us all these years about capitalism, free market, free enterprise -- they don't believe in any of that. They don't believe in free enterprise or a free market. They want -- they want socialism for themselves. ... To hell with everybody else, but give it to them. And I think, really, what we're seeing here right now with them, with the banks, we're seeing the end of capitalism -- the end of capitalism as we know it. And I say good riddance."



Moore's preferred solution is that "President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we're going to use this money to save these jobs, but we're not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer. We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reins on these companies"



"There's a catastrophe about to happen," Moore emphasized, "and the government has to step in and say, just like Roosevelt did, this is what you're building. This is how it's going to be built. We're going to have a mass transit system in this country. We're going to bring back light rail. We're going to build more subways. We're going to build more buses. And we're going to employ not only the people that are currently employed, but a lot of the people who have lost their jobs. ... That's what the country needs. That's what the world needs."



One centrist defender of the free market took objection to Moore's central argument that the automakers had failed because they weren't building the fuel-efficient, well-engineered cars Moore believes Americans want. "Those gas-guzzling vehicles (SUVs and large trucks) have been the only thing propping up the U.S. automakers," argued Alan Carl Stewart. "Until gas hit $4.00 this summer, Americans loved their gas guzzlers and GM and Ford were the companies meeting the markets demand."



"What Moore is suggesting is a step away from nationalization of industry," Stewart continued. "Whats really amazing is that hes advocating that the government should do exactly what he says caused GM to fail in the first place. Read this quote from the interview ... 'Their attitude was well build it and you buy it. Well tell you what to buy.' ... But I guess its different if the U.S. government is telling people whats good for them."





A full transcript of Moore's interview is available here.



This video is from CNN's Larry King Live, broadcast Nov. 19, 2008.









Download video via RawReplay.com







