An Open Letter to Capitalism, A Love Story Audiences

Dear Friends,

For millions of us, the release of a new Michael Moore film brings with it a familiar ritual: you clear an evening, shell out for a baby sitter and a pair of eight dollar tickets for you and your wife and you show up at your local multiplex for the first time in a long time.

 

You come away inspired, moved, angered, impressed with Michael's eloquence, courage and decency.

 

But if you're like a lot of us you come out more than a little frustrated. And that's because we know that buying a ticket to a movie doesn't get anyone back into a foreclosed home, it doesn't recoup one cent of the trillions stolen from us by Wall Street, and it doesn't make it any less likely that our health insurance company won't figure out a way to let us die rather than pay our hospital bill.

 

So whatever it is we need to do, sitting in a dark room in a movie theatre is not it.  

 

In fact, we know what what we need to do and that is get out on the streets.  

 

And we should be doing so in the belly of the beast, on Wall Street, on May 1, 2010.

 

 

Mayday was originally celebrated to commemorate the lives of strikers shot by corporate hired thugs and demonstrators sentenced to death by payed off judges and juries on charges brought by crooked DAs.

 

As Michael shows, corporations are as much a menace as they were then, though now they're more likely to do their dirty work with a fountain pen rather than a six gun-as Woody Guthrie put it.

 

And now, just as then, they need to be put in a choke hold by the government acting as the people's servant and the bosses' master, not the other way around. 

 

But we also need to remember that back then thousands of workers were willing to put their lives and bodies on the line.  The front lines facing down the Pinkerton squads were supported by thousands more on the streets and others closing down the factories.  

 

After numerous sit-down strikes, street protests, bombings, not to mention the threat of a complete expropriation of their assets coming from socialist and communist parties here and abroad, the bosses and the politicians cried uncle.  

 

Their doing so took the form of progressive era anti-trust legislation, New Deal banking regulations and employment programs of the thirties, and the Second Bill of Rights so movingly evoked by President Roosevelt in Michael's film. 

 

 

 

For Wall Street is where, as Michael shows, the deals are made which lay off workers, loot our pension funds, pull the plug on Granny, and where the checks are cut to buy off the politicians.

 

This May 1 needs to be the first Mayday when the computer screens at AIG go dark, the super computers at Goldman Sachs get shut down, and the lights in the New York Stock exchange get turned off.

 

And we need to make clear that business as usual on Wall Street won't return until they return to us what they owe us-in the form of free health care for everyone, an end to foreclosures, a tax system where those at the top pay their fair share, a green jobs program to bring the factories and assembly lines laid waste by Wall Street back to life producing a renewable energy infrastructure.

 

The day for this to happen is Mayday: May 1, 2010.