Capitalism - A Love Story

Now we sat down to watch this one after it had been lying around the house for a while. Who put this on the list? We said. Caitie!!! But last night she forced it upon us. Three of us watched: myself (44 year old single working class Mum - small business owner), Caitlain 18 year old student who hopes to do an extra year at college to study Politics and David, a 14 year old boy at Secondary school. Fair to say, David didn't understand everything and got bored towards the end - but only right towards the end - about 10 minutes before the end he fell off the sofa with acting that even Michael Moore would have been proud of. But actually, he'd found Moore's exploits quite amusing throughout and waited eagerly for the next. Caitlain was glued to the screen, surprised that it was documentary (I do wish she'd look at what she's clicking on that list!) but enjoying it nonetheless. I sat aghast! This is the story of what happened to the US of A during the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations - huge parallels could be drawn with what's happening today in our country under Camoron and Smeg - only the closest thing we've got to an Obama in the wings is Milliband *guffaw* and Blair is trying to upset that applecart at the moment too. But back to the film - Moore's take on the whole situation is breathtakingly frank and something we all need to take heed of (and although a small business owner I'm no capitalist - in fact we work to address this awful situation some of us are in and provide cheap cheap cheap clothing for people as broke as us - and right now, just as in America not so long ago - it's difficult for the working classes to buy luxuries like clothes as we're hammered by a government intent on screwing over the little guy while handing tax cuts to the rich man - oh hang on?! Since when did clothes become luxury?!?!?) Moore also talks about the banks and their hold on the US government - and the Libor scandal - ringing any bells?! There are interesting moments when Moore tries to make citizen's arrests at Goldmann Sachs but the most striking thing for me was the success of people power - and what happened in America could happen here if we just got our balls back and struck back. Interesting statistic - 1% of the rich out there had the vote and were a little worried about the 'peasants' (yes the rich called the lower classes that as shown in an astonishing life insurance segment of the movie) who had 99% of the vote. Before anything did happen (the voting in of Obama) the working/middle classes were making all sorts of noise and taking back their rights to decent wages/housing etc. and eventually a once beleaguered electorate took down the government that really represented, and most of them came from, Wall Street. This was a very powerful, moving piece - most of the way through I had a lump in my throat, either because it was happy or sad, and afterwards I was made to feel like I should be doing something about our situation here in the UK but more importantly I was made to believe I COULD do something about what's happening to our society. This is a must watch and I think I'm going to be broadcasting this on every social network possible - and hopefully get people just thinking about what's happening to us, if not get them off their sofas to do something about it!