At least 180 people were laid off today at Conde Nast, the magazine company with $3.5 billion in revenue last year. More will be laid off as the Christmas season grinds its way towards us. At the height of Tina Brown era, the New Yorker's editorial budget was $30 million a year. If that astounding number were still true, which it certainly is not still that monster, and every magazine there were as insanely expensive, which they are not, then it would cost $510 million a year for editorial on 17 magazines. Triple that (an excessive estimate!) to pay for the business side: congratulations, you are still making $1.5 billion in profit. Oh, wait, let's set aside $500 million in rent? Still all clear, at a billion! Say your advertising income shrinks by 30% across the board. Are you in the red? Only if you keep spending at just above that rate-and you wouldn't, would you now? So what do you do? Yes. You fire people. As many as possible! Stupid fucking people, with their places to live and their constant desire for food.

Michael Moore's newest film is about the disposable American worker. It is called "Capitalism" because his not unreasonable theory is that the latest iteration of capitalism, in which corporations have created ways to become ever-larger and ever more disparate in rate of pay, succeeds primarily through a process of taking on, using up and casting off workers. He thinks that capitalism, which is a fine working financial theory, in greedy practice does substantial disservices to a majority of its participants.

That this is so clearly true doesn't make it any less frustrating. The fun and amusing thing about capitalism is that value is artificial, and therefore hilarious and odd things happen like some people get accidentally rich, and some people skate by in the world with little effort. It is a rather big casino. The less amusing thing about capitalism is that it destroys a number of other people's lives.

This movie is being snarked upon from many quarters-people seem to think it's ironic that this movie is being commercially released, and is therefore a capitalist product. Oh my God that is so hilarious! As opposed to, what, he barters some theater screens in exchange for donuts and then invites us all on Facebook? Please, you catty bitches. So the film faces a huge, jaded, undermining audience of people who haven't and won't see it. I don't understand quite why people are so gleeful about dismissing a movie that is about how the American system hurts poor people. That feels weird!

While the film has a blue-collar middle-class focus, the worker is disposable across every industry now. This was as true at GM as it is true at Conde Nast, and at Goldman Sachs, where, a year ago, more than 10% of the workforce was laid off for PR reasons, and it is true at Viacom, where, the year prior, a huge swath of people were laid off, many of whom have since been invited to return as consultants. (Not paying for healthcare makes employing people semi-worthwhile to corporations!) We won't even get into-and neither does the film-the way our produce industry-the way the food you eat-is often produced by people who work for slave wages and then are cyclically put in prison.

The campaign against the American worker is also a PR campaign. People believe now, thanks to decades of lobbying, that unions are corrupt and dishonest. And in traditionally unorganized labor markets, such as those that feed Viacom and Conde Nast, the idea of union organizing is so out-of-place as to be laughable. White collar workers think unions are for the poor; the poor think unions conspire to rip them off.

These are the sorts of opinions one has about unions before one is unceremoniously fired after a bad quarter for the millionaires who own the company. Certainly someone benefits from this attitude, it seems obvious.

Taken at face value-by which I mean, setting aside how WILDLY annoying Michael Moore can be, and also some of the sweeping, overly-purple techniques of the documentary form-this is a fairly motivating movie that pecks away at the greatest problem our country faces. We believe that we can always "do better" (on our own, not together!), despite all signs to the contrary. We don't like to share&mdash:"sharing" means having things taken away. Related: none of us like to pay taxes! Particularly as the system we're paying them into is bloated, inefficient and-we'd all agree, for very different reasons-has terrible spending priorities.

So basically we would really all rather step over actual starving homeless people on the way to a job that we don't particularly like than design a system that takes into account that perhaps shelter and medical care should be a priority to have for everyone.

About 60% of the movie is engaging and upsetting and feels rock-solid in its premise, which makes it way better and more convincing than GI Joe and Where the Wild Things Are (oops, sorry, SPOILER). It is also fairly error-free, though Moore has some confusion when he tackles the bailout and the banks-at one point he lumps in AIG with Goldman Sachs' "competitors"-when nothing could be further from the truth. (And the truth is so much more interesting.)

The question at the end of the movie seems to me to be: Is the country a community? Or is the country a grouping of communities? Or are we just a bunch of people trapped on the same continent? That last is largely what we act like now. And actually, I don't want to be responsible for, or in agreement with, most of the people I'm trapped on this continent with. (And vice versa, I'm sure.) We do not have the same interests or beliefs. In some ways, we are at war. And capitalism contains the methods we use to show that we don't actually care about each other. In that regard, it's working fine.