Capitalism, a Love Story

Last night we watched Michael Moore's latest rabble-rousing movie, Capitalism, a Love Story. Like his previous movies on the broken US health care system, the gun culture and the destruction of US manufacturing industries and exporting of jobs to countries where labour costs are lower and there are fewer irritating occupational safety laws and regulations, this is a left-wing perspective - but an accurate perspective, I think - of the corruption of American democracy by the super-rich and the money-worshippers in the financial sector of American capitalism. I hope many Americans are looking at this and at Michael Moore's other movies. I wonder, too, whether the new American under-class that has been created by this unbridled predatory form of capitalism will continue to tolerate this state of affairs indefinitely, or whether there will be another American revolution. If there is, I don't think I want still to be alive to watch it, because it is certain to be very vicious and very bloody. Thanks to the gun laws, or rather the absence of gun laws in the USA, just about all the angry Americans who have lost their homes and been impoverished by the way things are, are heavily armed and have nothing to lose. It's a moot point whether the law enforcement agencies and the military would unanimously support the rich in any conflict between the haves and the have-nots in the USA of the early 21st century. I hope it's never put to the test. I wonder whether any of our American friends have been victims of the foreclosures and bank failures of the last few years. Yet again I'm thankful that we set our faces against all the seductive invitations I used to get years ago to move to the USA. It would have meant a big increase in income and lower taxes; but then I reflect on the good things our taxes pay for in Canada, like Wendy's care now that she is increasingly infirm, and I am convinced over again that Canada is a more civilized nation. What's more, if the winter that is now almost over (we hope) is a harbinger of things to come, Canada may soon be a climatically more comfortable country too.