WASHINGTON: Michael Moore, clad in customary baseball cap, a black T-shirt, baggy trousers and white sneakers, strolled into the neo-Gothic splendour of Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall and began to preach.
“We as Americans have allowed a very small group of people to be highly skilled practitioners of one of the seven deadly sins,” he told his youthful and multinational audience on Friday, “and that sin, of course, is greed.”
The Oscar-winning filmmaker, author and scourge of the American Right was schooled by Roman Catholic priests and after noting that Georgetown, whose main campus is in the eponymous, wealthy district of the US capital, was founded by Jesuits he scolded the inequalities pervading the modern day United States.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was growing up in the motor city of Flint, Michigan, the rich paid high taxes, but still lived well, he said. So too did the not-so-rich who had good homes, free education and job security.
Not so today, said the director of “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Sicko” and “Capitalism: A Love Story” who is touring the United States and Canada to promote his just-published memoirs, “Here Comes Trouble.”
“What on earth got into us in these last 30 years where we thought we were doing ourselves good by creating a society that’s filled with so much poverty?” he asked, recalling the record 46.2 million Americans now living in poverty.
“What part of what Jesus said had to do with kicking people out of their homes?” he said, citing a record number of foreclosures triggered by sub-prime lending and the ensuing global financial crisis.
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