Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [142]
The closing-night dinner was held outdoors, where a whole pig was roasted on a spit for us. The keynote speaker was Republican congressman Jim Kolbe from Arizona. Kolbe was a big backer of the move of American business to Mexico because, as he pointed out, “70 percent of the wages these Mexicans get, they come across the border and spend them in El Paso and Yuma—so it’s a win-win for us!”
Everybody was now wearing the WORK MAKES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE stickers on their outerwear. And Kolbe’s main point?
“These American factories in Mexico do not take away jobs from the U.S.,” he said with a straight face. “They save jobs!”
Kolbe said that “a free country has to allow U.S. business to operate freely.” And besides, he added, if we didn’t make it easy for corporate America to operate in Mexico, “then these cars and other items are going to be made in Asia.” The crowd snickered. Ha! Americans buying Asian cars! Please! And pass me some more of that pig.
When Kolbe finished, the Mexican official who was the evening’s emcee made a “motion” to “nominate Congressman Kolbe for president of the United States!”10 In 2010, Barack Obama appointed Jim Kolbe to his Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. The reader can draw his or her own conclusions. The audience responded with wild applause. Yup, that’s how we roll in the United States—a bunch of corporate executives sitting in a room and just nominating the president! The Japanese banker sitting at my table, who had earlier taken slight umbrage at the “Asian” remark, took it all in with detached amusement.
“What you see here,” he said to me, “is just the beginning. GM will close those nine plants in the U.S. in the coming year and many more in the years to come. This is the future—and some people are going to do very well.” I looked around at the crowd that was giddy over the thought that they were the chosen ones to pack up the U.S.A. (or at least its most precious national resource—its jobs) and move it to sunny Mexico.
It was both nauseating and breathtaking, the scope of what I had witnessed over this weekend. A well-oiled machine was already revved up and in motion to snuff out the American middle class. And, I thought, “Nobody knows this!” Here I was, wining and dining among the plotters. In the ensuing years, I would witness the wholesale destruction of towns like Flint across the country, and I would think, I was there! I saw the murder being planned! The plot to kill the American Dream was hatched and enacted right in front of my eyes. A witness to an impending execution—and the executed had no idea yet that the gun had been fired and the bullet well on its way.
On the plane ride back, the seersucker suit neatly packed in the overhead, I thought long and hard about all of this and what I was planning to do.
Gratitude
I KNEW NOTHING about making a movie, and I wish I could tell you some cool story about how I started shooting films when I was six on my dad’s 8mm Bell & Howell, or that I went to NYU film school with Spike Lee, and that Martin Scorsese was my teacher. All I knew, all I did, was go to the movies. And I mean go. In a good week I would try to see at least four or five films at the local multiplex (in other words, everything that opened that weekend). If I was lucky, I’d get to borrow the car and head down to Ann Arbor to one of the half-dozen film societies that showed a classic or foreign movie every night. A really special Friday night would mean a trip to the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. On the rare occasion, I went on a foreign journey to Chicago because I couldn’t wait the month or two for the film to open in Michigan.
And then there was that insane, pure batshit-crazy, spur-of-the-moment