Michael Moore expresses Joy at GM Demise!

[boloboffin]

READ PEOPLE READ. Also, what sane person puts black text on a gray background?

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices.

"Our auto factories" are not all of the ones in the country, but the ones we just bought. The ones we own. That's clearly Moore's meaning in this article.

Read, indeed.

 

[quadraginta]

I am sincere when I say that I wasn't intentionally twisting your words... rather I was merely focussing on the first bit... erm... first...

I acknowledge that there is a steaming heap of hyperbole flying around... and I'm happy to let it drop

Pax.

 

[Skeptic]

How so? Wiki says he was born in Flint and raised in a nearby suburb.

'Nearby' and 'Suburb' being the operative word. He made himself into a working-class man growing in a working-class town, when in fact he was a middle-class kid growing up in the 'burbs.

It's as if someone growing up in Beverly Hills would claim to understand the plight of the workers because Beverly Hills and East LA's projects are both in the same area.

 

[six7s]

"Our auto factories" are not all of the ones in the country, but the ones we just bought. The ones we own. That's clearly Moore's meaning in this article.

Read, indeed.

When I typed Obama GM, Google 'prompted' me to select:

obama gm bailout
obama gm bankruptcy
obama gm plan
obama gm speech​

Without following all of the suggestions, I have a hunch that no credible sites contend that the fiasco has been orchestrated by an uber-socialist cabal - simply because this is a case of unchecked capitalist greed gone wrong

Its absurd to pretend that Moore is advocating anything more sinister than getting people to think... If that scares the reactionary right, then so be it

 

[six7s]

'Nearby' and 'Suburb' being the operative word. He made himself into a working-class man growing in a working-class town, when in fact he was a middle-class kid growing up in the 'burbs.

It's as if someone growing up in Beverly Hills would claim to understand the plight of the workers because Beverly Hills and East LA's projects are both in the same area.

Bollocks

Michael Moore knows whats going on in Flint cos he got off his arse and did some research

You should try it one day

 

[quadraginta]

'Nearby' and 'Suburb' being the operative word. He made himself into a working-class man growing in a working-class town, when in fact he was a middle-class kid growing up in the 'burbs.

It's as if someone growing up in Beverly Hills would claim to understand the plight of the workers because Beverly Hills and East LA's projects are both in the same area.

Is it?

You seem to be saying that auto workers cannot be "middle class", or perhaps that the "middle class" is not a "working class".

You also seem to be equating Beverly Hills with a Flint, Michigan suburb.

I don't think I can agree with either idea.

My first thought upon reading your post was that it is likely that Flint's suburbs would be occupied largely by GM and related businesses' employees.

Imagine my lack of surprise when I skimmed the same Wiki article which prompted this sequence of posts and found this tidbit.

"Moore was born in Flint, Michigan[1] but raised in nearby Davison, a suburb of Flint, to parents Veronica, a secretary, and Frank Moore, an automotive assembly-line worker."
(my bold above)

​

Mr. Moore's credentials as a native of Flint have been attacked. Falsely, it has been shown.

His credentials as a child of the auto manufacturing industry have been attacked. Also falsely, it would seem.

I have seen comments of substance in disagreement with the ideas and sentiments of Mr. Moores' expressed in this thread, and the various perspectives being discussed intelligently.

I'm not certain why it is needful to fabricate slurs against him in pursuit of such disagreement.

 

[shecky]

I wonder how many replied to the bolded portion without clicking the link...

Indeed.

What is it with randi forum members when it comes to Michael Moore. All the usual suspects go ◊◊◊◊◊◊t insane at the mention of his name for what turns out to be a yawn 90% of the time. This is some serious derangement syndrome here.

 

[six7s]

My first thought upon reading your post was that it is likely that Flint's suburbs would be occupied largely by GM and related businesses' employees.

Imagine my lack of surprise when I skimmed the same Wiki article which prompted this sequence of posts and found this tidbit.

"Moore was born in Flint, Michigan[1] but raised in nearby Davison, a suburb of Flint, to parents Veronica, a secretary, and Frank Moore, an automotive assembly-line worker."
(my bold above)

​

Mr. Moore's credentials as a native of Flint have been attacked. Falsely, it has been shown.

Ain't teh interwebs brilliant?!?!

Literally at our fingertips, we have the greatest research resource ever known...

Odd how so many forget that their lies are so easily debunked

 

[boooeee]

'Nearby' and 'Suburb' being the operative word. He made himself into a working-class man growing in a working-class town, when in fact he was a middle-class kid growing up in the 'burbs.

It's as if someone growing up in Beverly Hills would claim to understand the plight of the workers because Beverly Hills and East LA's projects are both in the same area.

No, it's not. Davison is not Beverly Hills.

The median income for a household in the city was $37,482, and the median income for a family was $51,925. Males had a median income of $42,719 versus $28,222 for females. The per capita income for the city was $24,449. About 5.6% of families and 6.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 6.9% of those under age 18 and 7.6% of those age 65 or over.

Better off than Flint, for sure. But no swimming pools and movie stars.

His mom was a secretary, his dad was an auto assembly line worker. Sounds like working class and middle class (I don't think they're mutually exclusive).

And claiming you're from a city when you really grew up in the surrounding suburb doesn't really strike me as a lie. I'm sure lots of people from El Segundo or Culver City just say they're from LA.

ETA: Whoops. quadraginta beat me to it.

 

[332nd]

'Nearby' and 'Suburb' being the operative word. He made himself into a working-class man growing in a working-class town, when in fact he was a middle-class kid growing up in the 'burbs.

That line of thinking is so wrong I don't even know where to begin....

Others have touched on it but... Wow... Maybe you should give your definitions of "working class" and "middle class."

It's as if someone growing up in Beverly Hills would claim to understand the plight of the workers because Beverly Hills and East LA's projects are both in the same area.

So people from Beverly Hills don't work?


ETA: As for Moore's article, I have to take issue with point 9.

9. To help pay for this, impose a two-dollar tax on every gallon of gasoline. This will get people to switch to more energy saving cars or to use the new rail lines and rail cars the former autoworkers have built for them.

Ok, I'm pretty sure I couldn't get my trailer on the train, and I'm equally sure Hybrids and electrics can't tow it... So... What? I, and the hundreds of thousands if not millions who need heavy, powerful, vehicles, just scrap our careers and start over in new jobs? Do we go on welfare until these companies start making affordable hybrids, electrics that can tow 7,000+ lbs? Do I get to trade my Silverado in straight up? Not to mention that many people who need to tow don't live near major cities.

 

[Megalodon]

Ok, I'm pretty sure I couldn't get my trailer on the train, and I'm equally sure Hybrids and electrics can't tow it... So... What? I, and the hundreds of thousands if not millions who need heavy, powerful, vehicles, just scrap our careers and start over in new jobs? Do we go on welfare until these companies start making affordable hybrids, electrics that can tow 7,000+ lbs? Do I get to trade my Silverado in straight up? Not to mention that many people who need to tow don't live near major cities.

I'm not sure how it works in other places where gas is heavily taxed, but in Portugal people who depend on vehicles as tools have access to either significantly lower priced fuel or the possibility of deducting the gas expense (and the other car expenses) from taxes.

So no, you wouldn't necessarily have to dump your Silverado. You actually might make some extra money from it.

As for people who own a huge truck because they need to tow something once a year, I recommend trading in for a small car and renting a truck for your one week vacation. It pays off (specially with a 2$/gallon tax).

 

[Kotatsu]

Ok, I'm pretty sure I couldn't get my trailer on the train, and I'm equally sure Hybrids and electrics can't tow it... So... What? I, and the hundreds of thousands if not millions who need heavy, powerful, vehicles, just scrap our careers and start over in new jobs? Do we go on welfare until these companies start making affordable hybrids, electrics that can tow 7,000+ lbs? Do I get to trade my Silverado in straight up? Not to mention that many people who need to tow don't live near major cities.

If you use your trailer for commercial purposes, can you not just add some kind of charge equivalent to the two dollar increase to the person or company whose loads you carry? My father is an electrician in a semi-rural area, and when the petrol prizes increase here (and they are already much higher than in the US, I am told), they don't go demanding that the petrol stations either lower their prizes again or they will be forced out of work. Instead, they just add this to the over all costs of whatever work he is doing, and have the customer pay for this increase.

 

[technoextreme]

"Our auto factories" are not all of the ones in the country, but the ones we just bought. The ones we own. That's clearly Moore's meaning in this article.

Read, indeed.

I didn't quote the entire paragraph. He is talking about the entire auto industry. But you know you would know that if you READ.

'Nearby' and 'Suburb' being the operative word. He made himself into a working-class man growing in a working-class town, when in fact he was a middle-class kid growing up in the 'burbs.

Since when was middle class not working class......

 

[tyr_13]

Does your browser run on straw?

Tip: if you want to find out what Moore wants, read moor Moore

Travis made no such strawman and asked a valid question, the start of which you highlighted. Moore misused history if the answer to that question is 'no' and is right on if the answer is 'yes'.

Moore wants massive public transport systems and the end of private cars. This isn't straw, and it is the argument he put forth. Honestly I'd personally like to see more debate on this and less about if Moore was 'working class' or is really from Flint, as ultimately it matters little.

 

[GreNME]

"Our auto factories" are not all of the ones in the country, but the ones we just bought. The ones we own. That's clearly Moore's meaning in this article.

Read, indeed.

I understand that you're arguing for clarity on this. I really do. However, it has to be noted that Moore is not very clear as to whether he's talking about the entire industry or just GM-- neither of which matters, because holding 60% does not give the government the mandate to enact such huge changes even within just GM.

Like tyr_13 mentioned in an earlier post, Moore provides himself with plenty of wiggle-room in his hyperbole, but that doesn't make his arguments any more realistically attainable.

 

[tyr_13]

That's a good point too. Moore is talking as if we 'own' GM. The US government has 60% of GM's stock, that's true, but 'the US government' isn't some person. It's many people. So even only within GM, it's unreasonable to do such massive and sweeping changes.

Again, it isn't that I don't think some of these goals aren't good, and that steps shouldn't be take towards them, but that it's silly to 'just do it'.

 

[headscratcher4]

'Nearby' and 'Suburb' being the operative word. He made himself into a working-class man growing in a working-class town, when in fact he was a middle-class kid growing up in the 'burbs.

It's as if someone growing up in Beverly Hills would claim to understand the plight of the workers because Beverly Hills and East LA's projects are both in the same area.

You shouldn’t opine when you've no idea what you are talking about – it just shows that you are willfully ignorant.

I too was born in Flint...four years after Moore, in fact...at the time my family also lived in Davison (where Moore's family moved). Davison was/is a working class suburb of Flint. It was small, two and three bedroom ranch house (Levittown-like). It was "middle class" because the factories in Flint made automobile workers middle class.

In the early 1960s, Flint was rich. Indeed, it's per capita earnings were in the top five in the United States...I seem to remember that they were about $29,000 p/y (in 1960). That was how good those jobs in a company town were.

(Interestingly, “suburbs” like Davison emerged as places where White working families moved to get away from the blacks in the inner-city. Racism isn’t pretty, but there was a fair amount of it in Flint as so many workers had come from the South during WWII…but that’s another discussion).

But comparing Davison, however, to Beverly Hills, is meaningless (besides, everyone knows that the "rich" people in Genesee County Michigan live in Grand Blanc and Fenton). Ten years prior to the Moore’s moving there, it would have been a small farming community. It exists today because working/middle class factory workers moved there. These were working people trying to get the American dream…they made good wages in the shop and during this period they could earn a lot of overtime. Beverly Hills? Seriously. Mayberry, maybe.

Moore is very problematic. For instance, his portrait of the decline of Flint in Roger and Me takes some chronological and even factual liberties. However, I was living there at the time, and the mood and spirit of Flint's decline that he captured was dead on.

In fact, I worked on an auto line in Pontiac during the summer of 76 and again in 77. We were building crap cars. Everyone liked to blame the American worker...too well paid, too secure in their jobs, incompetence protected by the Union, etc. ... However, I saw from working on the line that it was GM that was really at fault. No, the workers are not with out blame, but GM designed the car. GM built or contracted for the parts. GM created the conditions that existed on the shop floor. But, apparently, it was the workers fault.

I am not sure what to think about the demise of GM. I still grieve for Flint...I remember it as a great place to grow up, at least until about 1975.

As a further aside, I've never understood the anger that some have about America auto workers and the high wages they won. First, they negotiated those deals. Second, it made millions of families middle class. They sent their kids to college, they bought homes, and cars and lived the American dream -- were they not supposed to have the American dream because they were industrial workers?

Having had family involved in the Strike of 1936 at Fisher Body in Flint, the conditions GM workers had prior to Unionization (and the same for Ford) were awful.

There was a lot wrong with our auto industry, but I guarantee you that union workers were not first on the list.

Anyway, all of which to say is that Davison in the fifties and sixties was a working, middle class suburb of Flint, modest houses, mostly autoworkers and their families. You may not like Moore, but his beginnings are pretty much as he describes it.

I knew him (a passing acquaintance) many years ago in Flint when he was still running the Michigan Times (before he went to Mother Jones and than got into film-making). He was arrogant and self centered...but he really did care about the demise of our community, what it was doing to workers and their families and the town. In some respects, while a radical, he is very conservative...if you really think about it, Roger and Me laments the passing of a great middleclass life for many industrial workers...a life we both knew in the Sixties, to have it be replaced by the confusion, bad decisions and poor auto design of the 70s. For all his posturing, he was looking backward to a time when autoworkers could live in a nice ranch house in Davison Michigan, before GM took the jobs to Mexico (and we can have another argument about that at a later point)

 

[boloboffin]

I didn't quote the entire paragraph. He is talking about the entire auto industry. But you know you would know that if you READ.

Oh, you fail.

1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.

We are now in a different kind of war -- a war that we have conducted against the ecosystem and has been conducted by our very own corporate leaders. This current war has two fronts. One is headquartered in Detroit. The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature. To continue to build them would only lead to the ruin of our species and much of the planet.

The other front in this war is being waged by the oil companies against you and me. They are committed to fleecing us whenever they can, and they have been reckless stewards of the finite amount of oil that is located under the surface of the earth. They know they are sucking it bone dry. And like the lumber tycoons of the early 20th century who didn't give a damn about future generations as they tore down every forest they could get their hands on, these oil barons are not telling the public what they know to be true -- that there are only a few more decades of useable oil on this planet. And as the end days of oil approach us, get ready for some very desperate people willing to kill and be killed just to get their hands on a gallon can of gasoline.

President Obama, now that he has taken control of GM, needs to convert the factories to new and needed uses immediately.

See that last paragraph? You almost had a point because Moore mentions Ford in the second paragraph. That would have been the much better sentence for you to quotemine.

But the one you DID quotemine only talks about GM. That's the entire point I quoted, and Moore finishes up by rewording the sentiment in the first - where he makes it clear he's talking only about converting GM factories - "our auto factories" - to "factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices."

So I appreciate that you really want to rub my nose in Moore's excess, but you should try again. You're only embarrassing yourself by enjoining others to read.

 

[headscratcher4]

I hope this works....this link is to a picture of a house for sale in Davision Michigan...this is what houses looked like in Davison when Mike Moore and I were kids...

http://cdn.homes.com/cgi-bin/readimage_v2/385520977

For the comparison to Beverly Hills, see the the Beverly Hillbillies....

 

[technoextreme]

So I appreciate that you really want to rub my nose in Moore's excess[/quote[

but you should try again. You're only embarrassing yourself by enjoining others to read.

Maybe read isn't the word Im thinking off. Thinking would probably be best. I don't know how you can advocate getting rid of the car without getting involved with Ford and Chrysler so it isn't really that much of a straw man. Also, why do I get the distinct impression that Moore wants us to move back into cities like what was suggested in another discussion.