Take a look at the trailer for Michael Moore's new movie "Capitalism: A Love Story." Moore appears poised to knock it out of the park again.

"It's a crime story. But it's also a war story about class warfare. And a vampire movie, with the upper 1 percent feeding off the rest of us. And, of course, it's also a love story. Only it's about an abusive relationship.

"It's not about an individual, like Roger Smith, or a corporation, or even an issue, like health care. This is the big enchilada. This is about the thing that dominates all our lives — the economy. I made this movie as if it was going to be the last movie I was allowed to make.

"It's a comedy." — Michael Moore

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This was another gem from Hardball yesterday besides Matthews' "deather" rant where bad Tweety was rearing his ugly head again. Was it a full moon yesterday or what? Joan Walsh attempted to give Chris Matthews a bit of a history lesson on the divisions in the United States which have been played upon by politicians and corporate interests to keep people voting against their own interests, and Matthews attacks it as being "Marxist".

Joan had something to say about this over at Salon, Is GOP using race to block Obama agenda? Ya think?:

There is one main reason the U.S. doesn't have the social democratic traditions and programs enjoyed by most Western democracies -- we are the only such nation without some kind of universal healthcare -- and that reason is our history of ethnic, racial and class strife. (The bounty of the eternal frontier and American exceptionalism fit in there too, but I'd pick our fractious and well-manipulated heterogeneity as the top reason.)

The history of the 19th century and early 20th century is the history of labor and political coalitions splintered by divisions between Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans, between middle-class Germans and less well off German Jews, between the Irish and everyone else, and, increasingly after blacks won something akin to freedom, between all white ethnic groups and African-Americans. Latinos and Asians came with their own demands and baggage and relations got more complicated still. Barriers of language, culture, class and skin color thwarted many efforts to grow labor unions and build a social-democratic majority.

Meanwhile, the one constant for at least 150 years has been a savvy cadre of political operatives who used those racial and ethnic divisions to advance their pro-business agenda. Go back to Karl Rove's idol Mark Hanna, who made turn-of-the-19th-century Republican politics safe for whites-only organizing in the South, to Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton strategy to Rove's own neo-Southern, pander-to-the-base strategy that has driven the GOP into its current ditch. Where in other Western nations, those years saw the fairly steady advance of basic conceptions of human rights, labor rights and an expanded social safety net, in the U.S. such social progress -- and especially such programs -- was more sporadic and limited.

Matthews didn't buy my analysis; in fact, he called it "Marxist" -- I challenged him, as it's not that simple, and he changed it to an "economic analysis" -- and he put former Rep. Kweisi Mfume on the hot seat asking if he agreed with me. Mfume started off by saying he's not a conspiracy theorist -- for the record, neither am I -- but then he added with a smile, "I don't believe Humpty Dumpty just fell; I believe he was pushed. And there are people who are pushing buttons to try to hold back the progress we are making in this country as one nation. And when you push those buttons, it causes the progress to slow down ... This is anti-American."

Digby weighed in on the interview as well.

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David Sirota with a really insightful piece on the forces opposing progressive reform. Please note: as he points out, Blue Dogs are not actually constrained by their constituents. It's all about the money!

The health care debate has reminded us that there really are three separate but coordinated armies that defend the status quo in Washington - and will defend that status quo, whether on health care or any other economic issue. In my newspaper column today, I look at who these factions are, and what their motives are. You can read the column here.

In a nutshell, you have the Land Rover Liberals, many coming from the 14 out of 25 wealthiest congressional districts that Democrats now represent. Right now, their opposition to health care and tax reform is being led by Boulder, Colorado Rep. Jared Polis (D).

You also have the Corrupt Cowboys - those lawmakers from very poor, mostly Southern and Western parts of the country. These people give themselves Americana sounding nicknames like "Blue Dog Democrats" or "Main Street Republicans" so as to pretend their opposition to health care comes from their being down home guys "representin' the folks back home." Of course, these same lawmakers are among the most rapacious corporate fundraisers and lobbyist-connected insiders in Congress. And as I pointed out yesterday, there's no evidence that the districts and states the Corrupt Cowboys represent despise health reform by virtue of the fact that they are culturally conservative bastions. In fact, Nate Silver says there's exactly the opposite evidence:

There's not really any evidence that health care reform is unpopular in the Blue Dog districts. Although there are exceptions, most of the Blue Dog districts are fairly poor. A Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month suggested that while 53 percent of voters overall think "think it's the government's responsibility to make sure that everyone in the United States has adequate health care", 61 percent of voters making under $50,000 do. Also, while Quinnipaic did not break out the results for moderate and conservative Democrats, which are plentiful in these Districts, one can reasonably infer them. In this poll, 79 percent of liberals agreed with the statement as did 77 percent of Democrats -- not a very big difference. Since almost all liberals are Democrats and about half of all Democrats are liberals, that suggests that support for health care reform among non-liberal Democrats is something like 75 percent.

Thus, the story about the honest, god-fearing, good ol' boy cowboys opposing health care reform out of representational obligation has only been able to become conventional wisdom through the Millionaire Media - the elite national press corps, chock full of very wealthy people, that disseminates the most pernicious kind of anti-reform propaganda. These are the same people who insisted we should immediately rush $12 trillion in bailout cash out to Wall Street speculators, and who now insist that 64 years of debates over a $1 trillion health care proposal is inappropriately "rushing" health care reform. They are also the voices who are actually deriding health care reform as an inhumane proposal to legislatively waterboard the poor, persecuted richest one percent.

In the column, I look at the motives of all these groups, and give President Obama huge props for taking them on. As a sometime critic of Obama, I really think he's doing a fantastic job right now, and the news this morning from the New York Times that "the president planning trips across the country" to campaign for health care reform is just fantastic. He's going to have to take on the three groups I discuss in my column - and if he can beat them, we're going to get universal health care.

The Republicans have been pushing the "class warfare" theme since Obama released his budget. The cable talking heads and the Beltway bobbleheads have mostly swallowed it whole and regurgitate the GOP talking points, but this L.A. Times article actually takes a look at the facts:

"Throughout our history, the United States has grown and prospered when all Americans have shared in the opportunities created by our economy," Obama said in the budget overview. (A more detailed formal budget will be sent to Congress in April.)

Some Republicans denounced the priority shift in Obama's budget as class warfare, and the budget is sure to face several tests as it works its way through Congress. Also, some economists warned that higher taxes on the affluent could reduce their entrepreneurial energy and were unfair because upper-income Americans already pay a large share of the government's total revenue.

It would be nice if they made a distinction here: Namely, that many of the economists in this group are in the employ of right-wing think tanks. But not many media types ever bother to point that out.

Many other economists think history supports Obama's argument that the country's overall prosperity has generally increased when those in the middle did better.

During the economic boom that followed World War II, income inequalities eased as the middle class prospered. One reason was the availability of increasingly well-paying jobs in manufacturing and other booming sectors of the economy. Strong unions were able to negotiate contracts that gave even relatively unskilled workers more than such workers had earned in earlier times.

Also, those in the upper income brackets were heavily taxed. Until the 1980s, the top tax bracket was 70%, though most wealthy Americans found ways to shelter much of their income from the highest rates.

In the 1990s, as manufacturing gave way to an economy based on services and technology, incomes would have become more unequal even without government action, said William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution. But the tax cuts enacted under George W. Bush accelerated the trend.

"If inequality was growing because everyone's income was growing a lot -- but the rich were just growing faster -- then it might not be that much of an issue," Gale said. "But what has happened in the last 10 years is that incomes at lower and medium levels have stagnated while the rich have gotten really rich."

In 1980, the richest 1% of Americans claimed 10% of all national income. In 2004, they claimed more than twice as much -- 22%.

"There's nothing wrong with making money," Obama's budget document said, "but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few."