Documentarian Michael Moore’s first film, Roger & Me, opens in theaters on December 20, 1989. The film follows the economic impact of GM shutting down several auto factories in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan.
Though Moore leavened his movie with goofy anecdotes and absurdist set-pieces, the humor did not disguise his rage at what had been done to Flint, a city that had once been so thriving that people came from all over the country in hopes of landing one of its thousands of blue-collar jobs that paid a middle-class wage.
By the end of the 1980s, however, Flint was falling apart—in part because of mismanagement at GM and in part because of forces beyond the company’s immediate control, like deindustrialization and globalization. Abandoned factories dotted the landscape, houses fell down and displaced auto workers did anything they could to make ends meet. At the end of the 1980s, “Money” magazine called Flint “the worst place to live in America.”
In the late 1970s, GM plants employed almost 100,000 people in Flint; today, they employ fewer than 7,000. General Motors CEO Roger Smith, who never bothered to see Moore’s film—“I’m not much for sick humor,” he said, “and I don’t like things that take advantage of poor people”—died in 2007.
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Must be something in the water.
Just learned about black people and smoke detectors.
If it is good for the General, it is good for the nation.
And yet an “American made automobile ” now costs an obscene amount of cash .
We are an obscene society. It seems only natural.
It’s a great movie, and very entertaining, if you don’t pay too much attention to the fact that he lies throughout the whole thing
Favorite part: the lady selling rabbits for ‘pets or meat’,….gotta love Detroit
Michael Moore on politics,
is Michael moron politics.
“…and put some STANK on it, Mike!”
Doesn’t the moron realize it was Clinton and the Democrats that created the Rust Belt and killed GM…and this bastards is still a raging Leftist. I think calling the cunt a moron is charitable.
When did Michael Moore become Michael Most?
When the scale passed 600lbs.