If Michael Moore ran for President

At Truthout, Robert Naiman asks and answers what would happen if Michael Moore ran for President in 2012:

If Michael Moore were to run for president in 2012, it could be a game changer in American political life. For starters, it would likely shorten the war in Afghanistan by at least six months, and the American and Afghan lives that would be saved would alone justify the effort. If Moore announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination now, and followed up that announcement with a vigorous campaign focused on the struggles of rank-and-file Democrats, it would remobilize rank-and-file Democratic activists. It's possible that he might even win; but win or lose, the campaign could arrest and reverse the current rightward, pro-corporate trajectory of our national politics, which is the predictable consequence of the failure of Team Obama to deliver on its promises from 2008, which in turn was the predictable consequence of the doomed effort to try to serve two masters: Wall Street and Main Street.

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Michael Moore: The current proposals can’t fix health care

Michael Moore gives 13 reasons why the current proposals don't get to the heart of the problem. His conclusion:

We may be slow learners, but the rest of the industrial world has figured it out: Universal, single-payer or national health care systems. That's the reason why all those other countries cover everyone, have better patient outcomes, cause no one to declare bankruptcy or lose their homes because of medical bills, and spend less than half per capita on health care than we do. We could do it too, by reducing the starting age for Medicare from 65 to 0. There's still time to act.

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Michael Moore on the challenges we face

Over at The Nation, Naomi Klein interviewed Michael Moore, who has just released his newest movie: "Capitalism: A Love Story." You can hear the entire podcast here. What follows are three excerpts from the interview (Michael Moore speaking):

You can't avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have one in eight mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there's a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point. . . . Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. . . . [W]hen anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now--if we make it that far--they're going to say, "Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent ten hours of every day in a totalitarian situation and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined." Truly they're going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people's bodies to cure them.

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