Michael Moore. Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) More4.

I kept thinking in clichés watching this: Who pays the piper. It’s a dog eat dog world. Pressure cooker of fear. Pillaging by the wealthy. Worshiping greed.

A cliché is a well-worn piece of rhetoric, like an old music hall joke that everyone knows the punch line and laughs in advance. So Moore went through his repertoire. We all know its going to be ‘Roger and Me’(1989) about his attempt to interview the CEO of General Motors about job losses in Flint Michigan, his home town, writ large. In fact, like an old blues-man, using up his back catalogue he replayed some of the original tracks here. He went ever further and interviews his dad about what it was like to work in the plant in the old days. That’s nepotism, something the super rich bathe in like asses milk.

One of the problems is that super rich is a descriptive term. Rich is not rich enough. Billions. Trillions. Who cares? The problem is of course he can’t interview Mr Capitalism. So he’s got to tell a story.

Stories usually follow the shape of a normal distribution curve, with a beginning, rising up to meet the middle and plunging down to meet the end.

The super rich are at the end of the curve. Like a tail wagging the dog they own the planet. When I was at school there was a theatre company called 7:84, which meant that 7% of those in the UK own 84% of the wealth. Moore’s conservative figure was that 1% of the super rich in the US own 45% of the wealth. The plutocracy set the agenda in corporate America and the world, which is hardly a love story.

Moore does not want to seem partisan. He flickers through his back catalogue of idyllic childhood to show that, hey, it was great, but that was only because we’d took out Japan and reduced Germany to rubble. The production lines that could turn out a B52 bomber a week (or was it a day?) could just as easily make things the rest of the world needed, like automobiles. Then the pesky foreigners started making things better and cheaper. So the golden age wasn’t really a golden age, more a false dawn.

A quick flicker back and Moore finds that the Golden Age was actually when Roosevelt was President. The New Deal was king. He wanted workman to have a fare wage, universal health care, and adequate pensions. All the things the European democracies and Japan had. I must have missed that Roger, but never mind. Moore equates this as a blueprint for what he terms democracy. So now we know. It’s a straight forward slugging match between Roosevelt’s democracy and US Plutocracy. It’s the old where did we go wrong story.

Jimmy Carter, US President, c1974 was one of the good guys. He may have been a peanut farmer, but he could count his chickens. He warned us that the moneymen were taking over the world.

Fast forward right wing to 1980. Ronald Reagan is in the Oval Office. And although he doesn’t say it, the wicked witch of the north, Margaret Thatcher is also in office. Monetarism was the new God and it was measured in petrodollars.

Deregulation of the money markets meant that the rich got richer and with the trickle down effect the poor got poorer. So corporate America told Reagan that we needed to burst free from regulation. We needed more trickle effect.

Moore indulged himself and had a little comic number in which he tried to get financial experts to tell the camera what a derivative was. He should have interviewed me. I derivative is what you say it is. Putting a price on it is the difficult part. And, of course, like a second hand car, you need to insure it, in case of breakdowns. Bill Black, The Savings and Loan Scandal, was interviewed. He was the only one in the documentary worth listening to. There was no big trick, no hiding in plain sight, no Dorothy pulling away the curtain. It was quite simple. Sean Connery won an Oscar for it in ‘The Untouchables’. Follow the money.

The Treasure Dicks have been taken over by Goldman Sachs and Reagan helped them load up and shoot out of town. Only they didn’t. They stayed put. Took over the town. The financial crisis of 2007 –2008 meant that the Goldman Sachs of the world got even more money to prop them up. They were too big to fail.

Moore did his little bit of acting, marking off corporate offices as crime scenes and asking to speak to the CEO. He never got off the forecourt. Yawn.

But what’s that? We can hear the hoofs. There’s a new sheriff on the block. He’s big and he’s black and he talks tough. Democracy has knocked out capitalism with a swift Obama left hook. Oh dear. No happy endings.