And as for Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (also not kindly treated), Moore told his audience that he hoped Obama had brought them on in the same way that some banks hire robbers to help them guard against future theft: "Maybe that's what Obama's doing -- he hired the people who robbed all the money to help him get it back. That's the optimistic version."

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I just remembered... When I was living in a house with a frangipani at the front, the poor tree was once mauled by kids on a rampage. So I got the leader of the gang, did not chatise him... I told him from now on it he was responsible for the tree. Should the tree get damaged some more, he would be responsible... The tree never got touched again.

For conservatives who feel the media is almost instinctively biased and corrupt, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9— a sequel of sorts (or at least follow-up) to the highest grossing documentary movie of all time, Moore’s 2004 Bush-whacker Fahrenheit 9/11—offers one of the most damning portraits of media industry cravenness since Network.  

Moore dives deep into how the feedback-looping and self-validating punditocracy consistently pushed back against blue-collar economic populism, marginalized and erased legitimate economic anxiety among downscale whites, and refused to adequately cover police shootings and brutality in minority communities until they reached a state of emergency. (The water quality scandal in Moore’s hometown of largely black Flint gets major play.)

Recently disgraced CBS chief Les Moonves is quoted bragging that Trump may be bad for America but he’s great for business. CNN topper and former NBC program chief Jeff Zucker hems and haws when asked whether his network covered Trump because he was newsworthy or because he was ratings gold. The movie suggests Trump initially ran for president as a marketing ploy to build leverage for his own media branding. And Moore quite rightly makes fun of how ballistically wrong the major papers got the election—with The New York Times giving Hillary better than four-to-one odds of winning on the very Election Day that she lost.

In one snarkadelic sequence, we see smug media mavens like Matt Lauer, Mark Halperin, Roger Ailes, and Charlie Rose smugly grilling and cross-examining Hillary Clinton before being “stamped” with laundry lists of their own Weinstein-esque sexual assault shenanigans.

Yet while initially sympathizing with Hillary in her defeat, Moore shows no mercy at all to her husband for his late ‘80s and ‘90s Third Way triangulations and neoliberalism, blaming Bubba every bit as much as Ronald Reagan and the Bushes for the orgy of Wall Street and Silicon Valley deregulation and casino capitalism of the last three decades. Moore underlines this with a montage of A-list Democrats saying the word “compromise” over and over again during the worst of the Great Recession. 

Even Obama himself is not immune from criticism. Moore accuses him of being too centrist and accommodating, showing him staging a media-op in Flint and, instead of calling a full-on emergency, literally “drinking the water” and telling people that everything was on its way to being fine.  

But for all the leftist preaching to the choir, there’s trouble brewing in Moore’s liberal paradise. There are plenty of progressive voices—especially women, LGBTs, and people of color under 50—who believe Moore is giving Trump voters an “excuse” for voting as they did.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/in-fahrenheit-119-micha...

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Planet of the Humans is an environmental documentary that has enraged renewable energy experts and environmentalists, with some calling for its high-profile executive producer, Michael Moore, to apologise.

It was released for free less than two weeks ago, and at the time of writing had had close to 5m views on YouTube.

Across its 102 minutes, the film’s producer and narrator, Jeff Gibbs, weaves a disjointed narrative that renewable energy is just as bad as fossil fuels, high-profile environmentalists are corrupted by capitalism and population growth is the great unspoken enemy.

“It is truly demoralising how much damage this film has done at a moment when many are ready for deep change,” said the Canadian activist and journalist Naomi Klein.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/03/once-again-michael-moore-st...

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See also:

Now, the essential and overriding two problems with this film can be generalized as absence of class analysis, and an absent analysis of western Imperialism. 

More succinctly, the military is never mentioned, not ever. And the open Malthusian meme ‘we are the problem’, or what is often called ‘the overpopulation argument’ (or Pogo argument) is a profoundly reactionary and racist idea based on classic eugenics, and the one glaring omission and the other rather disturbing ideology, eclipse the genuine (though limited) truths of the film.

And I say limited because while, yes, Al Gore is a ruling class vulture and Bill McKibben an opportunistic self-promoting liar, and pointing this out is correct and even satisfying, these points are subsumed by Gibbs greater political mystifications.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/03/review-planet-of-the-humans/

Climate science deniers and long-time opponents of renewable energy, many with ties to oil and gas companies, have seized on Michael Moore’s latest documentary to argue the case for continued fossil fuel dependence.

Planet of the Humans investigates the environmental footprint of renewable technologies such as wind, solar and biomass, and argues that the green movement has sold out to corporate interests. The documentary has been viewed over five million times on YouTube since its release last week to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day.

But the film, produced by Moore and written and directed by his long-time collaborator Jeff Gibbs, has been widely criticised by energy and climate experts, who say it fails to provide context on the benefits of renewable energy and the negative impacts of fossil fuels, and is based on out-of-date information.

A group of environmentalists and climate scientists, including Professor of Atmospheric Science Michael Mann, who was this week elected to the National Academy of Sciences, has described the documentary as “shockingly misleading” and called for it to be withdrawn.

In contrast, the film has been heavily promoted in recent days by commentators known for their rejection of mainstream climate science and support for fossil fuels, including some with direct ties to the industry.

While the film’s anti-economic growth and population control message has not appealed to the free-market philosophies of many of these commentators, its criticism of renewables struck a chord, with the narratives used generally taking one of three forms.

Read more:

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/01/fossil-fuel-backed-climate-deniers...

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Michael Moore is an award-winning American documentary filmmaker, particularly known for "Bowling for Columbine", dedicated to the fifth-deadliest US shooting that, as in the recent Boulder gun carnage, took place in the state of Colorado.

As passions around the Monday shooting in Colorado continue to boil, filmmaker Michael Moore on Tuesday tweeted commentary over the recent disclosure of the Boulder gunman's identity, immediately prompting a wave of harsh criticism.

Moore rolled out two tweets, unsparingly slamming the vision of normality in the United States and saying that "a young man with anger issues & easy access to semi-automatic weapons who shoots up a nice town in Colorado is as American as apple pie."

In a follow-up tweet Moore added fuel to the fire surrounding the need for gun control in the US, asserting sarcastically that the life of Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the Boulder shooter, is an illustration of how people "from all over the world" can "assimilate into our beloved American culture". He spiced his tweet with an image of the Statue of Liberty. 

Not everyone online enjoyed Moore's bitter anger and sarcasm.

do you even own a brain?