RALPH NADER, MICHAEL MOORE DOUBLETEAM OLD ADVERSARY GM Flint, Mich. is example of how NAFTA harms communities while making the rich richer
Flint, Michigan, Sept. 21 — Acclaimed filmmaker Michael Moore and Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, both of whom first came to national attention through high-profile battles with General Motors, today blasted their longtime adversary for putting the bank accounts of corporate executives above the needs of workers, communities and consumers.
Moore – who wrote and directed the landmark film “Roger & Me” about his relentless quest to get GM Chairman Roger Smith to visit his hometown of Flint, which has been devastated by plant closures – said today that Flint continues to feel the harmful effects of GM’s actions. GM has cut the number of jobs in the city from 40,000 in 1995 to just 17,000 today.
“Flint is the best example of how, after eight years of Clinton and Gore, conditions have not improved for working Americans. In fact, things have gotten worse,” Moore said. “The people in Flint were better off when George Bush was president. That’s a sad fact.” Moore cited the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), passed by the Clinton/Gore Administration, as the reason.
Nader, whose best-selling book “Unsafe at Any Speed” exposed GM’s dangerously defective Corvair in 1965, is an outspoken critic of NAFTA and the abuse of corporate power. “What General Motors is doing to the community of Flint exemplifies what is wrong with the current policies of corporate-controlled trade, advocated by both George W. Bush and Al Gore,” Nader said.
“American workers are suffering and unions are losing their bargaining power as jobs are lost to other countries whose workers make well below a living wage under dictatorial conditions that prohibit independent labor unions. Meanwhile wealthy corporate executives are making record profits,” he said. GM reported $5.5 billion in profits in 1999, and more than doubled the salary of chairman and CEO Jack Smith, who received $6.9 million in salary, bonus and dividends last year.
Nader proposes to correct the problem of corporate abuse by outlawing corporate contributions to political parties and candidates, ending corporate welfare and instituting pro-labor, pro-union and pro-consumer safety regulations. Nader said Clinton/Gore have wrecked the car-safety agency (NHTSA), which knew about the Firestone Tire-Ford Explorer tragedies and did nothing for more than two years.
Nader’s platform calls for the repeal of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act and the renegotiation of global trade agreements with labor, consumer and environmental standards that pull communities up, rather than pushing them down toward lower levels abroad.
Nader and Moore visited Flint today as part of their three-day, six-city Non Voter Tour with Phil Donahue, during which they are reaching out to non voters with their message of democratic reform.
# # # # # Paid for by the Nader 2000 General Committee, Inc.
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Carl Remick wrote:
> [Book review focusing on America's "unhappiness epidemic" in the current
> Village Voice. Full text is at
> http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/169/perlstein.shtml]
>
> We all know the catechism. America is cradled within the longest
> uninterrupted - uninterruptible! - economic boom in history. Stock prices
> mint fortunes at the speed of a mouse click. Billionaires live next door.
> Yak herders carry Palm Pilots. And so on, et cetera, ad nauseam.
>
> Just how far, I wonder, can our pundits drift from an accurate picture of
> reality without melting from shame? It's not that growth in the aggregate
> economy is not real, not startling. But as social analysis, to say only that
> is to build a stool missing two legs. Pay attention long enough to
> mainstream media and you can catch an occasional glimpse of the stool's
> first absent strut: the exponentially growing levels of economic inequality
> since the early '70s. But you can look forever and not find a single mention
> of the second. It is America's new problem that has no name: our unhappiness
> epidemic.
>
> Social scientists have been confirming it again and again in recent studies.
> Two sociologists examining the accuracy of the Generation X stereotype
> stumbled upon the fact that not only are people in their twenties more
> listless, cynical, and morose than kids in past decades - so are people of
> all ages. One economist demonstrated a steady decrease in the amount of
> Americans who report themselves to be "very happy" since the end of World
> War II, inversely proportional to the nation's ever increasing gross
> national product. Others show how that trend has accelerated since
> inequality began growing in the '70s.
>
> As with most social phenomena that don't fit into the story the media
> megacorporations and their ilk tell us, it helps to go to academia for your
> corrective. And these days, the best place to start is the work of Harvard
> economist Juliet Schor. The broader public first became aware of Schor
> through her 1992 bestseller, The Overworked American, which argued - with a
> force great enough, according to some, to inspire the Family Leave Act of
> 1993 - that the average American now works a full month longer per year than
> the American of 1969. Her 1998 book, The Overspent American, was something
> like a prequel. It sought to explain how the nation allowed itself to get to
> this pass in the first place: It's all those bills we have to pay.
>
> The heart of that argument is distilled, and argued over by 12 other
> prominent scholars of consumerism, in the excellent new paperback Do
> Americans Shop Too Much? (part of a series put out by the MIT-based
> policy-and-culture bimonthly the Boston Review, a gem among little
> magazines). In Schor's view, what is new about our economy is not so much
> the riches it delivers as the aspirations it enforces. For as long as there
> have been Joneses, Americans have looked to their neighbors for reference on
> what a house should look like and what it should be stuffed with. Now,
> however, our references come not so much from the Joneses as from the likes
> of those wacky kids on Friends with the 4200-square-foot Manhattan
> apartment. She calls this the New Consumerism.
>
> Think of the New Consumerism as a system of taxation - an extra measure of
> money we're compelled to spend just to stay on an even keel. Because even
> the most saintly among us derive a proportion of our well-being from our
> relative position in the status pecking order, when the stock-optioned class
> ups the consumption ante, most of us cannot but feel pressured, in our own
> pathetic little ways, to keep up. It is also like a tax in a more literal
> sense. If you want your child to have an above-average education, you need
> to buy a house in an above-average neighborhood - which now means moving
> into a place that looks like only above-above-above-average neighborhoods
> did a decade ago. And if you want to have an above-average-sized car to stay
> safe on the road, you need to buy a tank (excuse me, I mean SUV).
>
> Think of treadmills. Think of Sisyphus rolling that big rock up the hill.
> Think of being trapped in that garbage-compactor room in Star Wars. The
> American savings rate has gone from 8 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in 1990
> to less than zero percent now. Typical unpaid credit card balances are $7000
> per household (though people always estimate theirs as much lower); to help
> matters, credit companies send out some 2.5 billion solicitations a year.
> Bankruptcies are up from 200,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million now. No wonder
> people are unhappy
>
> [end of excerpt]
>
> Carl
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