Wall Street

'Capitalism': Can you take it to the bank?

movie review, Movies, Writing

capitalismYou know what I wish? I wish that Michael Moore weren’t such an obvious manipulator of the facts. He’s such an unreliable narrator that it gets in the way of my enjoyment of his films.

Latest case in point: “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which I saw at the L.A. premiere Tuesday night. The provocateur rails against the government’s handling of the finance crisis in typical fashion: He satirizes the powers that be and tugs the hearts strings with stories of average working folk afflicted by corporate malfeasance.

Moore blames the government for its cozy relationship with Wall Street in particular and big business in general. According to “Capitalism,” things began falling apart when Ronald Reagan was elected president; deregulation and mindless focus on profits laid the seeds for the economy’s collapse last year. Further, he presents archival footage of FDR suggesting none of this had to happen: The ailing president apparently wanted to enact a second Bill of Rights stipulating the right to a decent wage and healthcare before he died. Moore told the premiere audience that this footage had been purposefully suppressed; even FDR’s library didn’t know it existed.

Are we getting the full story?

They didn’t get it then, don’t get it now

book reviews, Books, Writing

indecentFaced with proof that then Columbia prexy David Begelman forged checks, what did the company do? Throw him out on his ear? No, the board pressured top exec Alan Hirschfeld to keep the repentant former agent on staff, arguing that he was a good leader, and besides, the amount of money he stole wasn’t really that much.

Never mind the fact that Columbia, then as now, was a publicly traded company and the news was sure to leak out eventually.

“Indecent Exposure,” David McClintick’s absorbing chronicle of the late 1970s check kiting scandal, unfolds like a slow train wreck.  Reading it today, the parallels between the board’s arrogance and the banking industry’s recent behavior is hard to miss. 

The same type of moral relativism that financiers like Herb Allen employed informs today’s arguments that those AIG execs really deserve those retention bonuses despite having helped bring down the global economy. At the time of the Begelman scandal there was much tut-tutting over Hollywood’s laissez faire attitude toward such ethical breaches — supposedly Judy Garland waved off talk that Begelman had embezzled her while her agent — but the East Coast moneymen on Columbia’s board at the time seem to be just as tone deaf as producer Ray Stark, a tireless advocate for his pal Begelman.

Quite simply, they acted as if the normal rules did not apply to them. And this, McClintick reminds more than once, was but a few years after the Watergate scandal brought down the similarly arrogant Nixon administration. “All the President’s Men” had hit theaters the year before.   

Remarkable.