Michael Moore: Nine Suggestions For Transforming GM

(Image: "'62," (cc) TW Collins, via Flickr)

At the deathbed of General Motors, says Michael Moore, "the company's body not yet cold, and I find myself filled with–dare I say it–joy." As the federal government and courts "reorganize" the auto giant, Moore proposes a plan to President Obama "for the good of the workers, the GM communities, and the nation as a whole." Here's the first of those nine steps:

Twenty years ago when I made Roger & Me, I tried to warn people about what was ahead for General Motors. Had the power structure and the punditocracy listened, maybe much of this could have been avoided. Based on my track record, I request an honest and sincere consideration of the following suggestions:

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.

Goodbye, GM (Daily Beast)

• [Anonymous]

  @ 13

  Retool? It’s not a cracker factory switching from saltines to silicon chips. You honestly think it takes more time to program a set of vectors into a welding bot than to retrain an undereducated labor force on new build specifications? Billions?! Programmers are a dime a dozen in this economy and twice as cheap in china or india. Robots don’t ask for healthcare.

• [Brainspore]

  Please Michael, don’t go for the idiotic “war” metaphor that the right uses for whatever their cause of the week is. A “war” for the environment is just as stupid a concept as a “war” on drugs, poverty, or terror. Moore himself pointed out the impossibility of a war against a noun in his own book “Dude, Where’s My Country?”

  Also:

  There are 1.1 cars for every American on the road today.

  Even if there were that many cars in our country (which I doubt very much) then they certainly wouldn’t all be on the ROAD at the same time, unless a whole lot of people were just towing their extra cars around.

• [Timothy Hutton]

  The US is in for $100,000,000,000 ($10BN), how in the world will GM ever pay U.S. back? And if they can’t pay U.S. back, what is the impact to the economy?

  I’m surprised MM didn’t also suggest putting a 31 year-old with no practical experience managing a business (of any size), making payroll, dealing with labor unions, or making a profit. That’s our Car Czar in a nutshell.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  We’ll see…

• [sworm]

  I always find it amusing that we’re supposed to cut carbon emmissions and pollution to protect nature and the environment..

  NEWS FLASH: nature, the earth, plants, animals and trees will survive even if global temperatures rise 10°C.

  We need to stop global warming to protect human civilisation. Not nature.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    NEWS FLASH: nature, the earth, plants, animals and trees will survive even if global temperatures rise 10°C.

    Actually that’s incorrect. In a slow climate change, plants (in particular) can evolve or move to a new territory. With rapid climate change, evolution obviously isn’t going to keep up, and plants move territory very slowly what with the whole not having legs thing. Species which are marginal for their current climate will die off and the fauna that depend on them will die off as well. A 10° C rise over a couple of centuries could kill off half the plant and animal species on the planet.

• [Timothy Hutton]

  Ray DelMundo joked:

  Yeah those lumber tycoons really did a job on the forests. There are hardly anymore of those left.

  If you want to protect something, let people own them.

  This is what is saving the Buffalo.

  This is what is saving some elephants in parts of Africa.

  And this is what helps protect the forests for lumbermen.

  (Lumbermen need trees, so they replant trees and manage their “crop”. Where forests are being clear-cut it is because the land is owned by a farmer who has no use for the trees – let a lumberman harvest and manage a portion of the rainforests, and they will survive and (likely) prosper, becuase it is in the lumberman’s best interest that it survive and prosper.)

• [Takuan]

  when you cut down a tree that took a thousand years to grow, are you “managing a crop”?

• [failix]

  @Sworm,

  True… sorry I said “nature-friendly”, I should have said “human-friendly”. Thanks for the reminder, like George Carlin used to say, we shouldn’t be so self-important to think we could “destroy the planet”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q3upFx4FcA

• [AGC]

  There are 1.1 cars for every American on the road today.

  Cuba still has cars on the road built in the 1950s.

  Even if GM stopped building cars today, it would still be several decades before the majority of people would resort to driving electric cars. Electric cars get a fraction of the distance of a gasoline car, they are powered by coal, they use heavy metal batteries that must be recycled every 4-5 years.

• [Anonymous]

  @Falix

  If you want to turn this into a carbon footprint issue, then we should stop producing cars, even electric cars. The most carbon efficient means to buy a car is to buy a used car.

  Even if we all bought electric cars it wouldn’t make a serious impact unless we changed our car buying habits. We need to keep our cars for longer than 2-3 years.

  That and as mentioned, the energy for electric cars will shift the pollution from the tail-pipe to the smoke stack.

  There is no magic button on this issue and Michael Moore and others seem to purposely try and simplify the problem in an act of populist politics.

• [Anonymous]

  Even if GM stopped building cars today, it would still be several decades before the majority of people would resort to driving electric cars.

  Conditionally true. The sooner we get started the sooner we’ll get there.

  Electric cars… are powered by coal

  Today, in the US, about half our electricity comes from coal so this is basically true. However once you have an electric car you can get electricity from anything you want, it doesn’t have to be a fossil fuel..

  they use heavy metal batteries that must be recycled every 4-5 years.

  I’m not familiar with any production all-electric cars, so I don’t know what battery chemistry you have in mind. I do know that the Nickel metal hybride batteries that you find in a Prius (I know, only half electric) lasts at least a decade and recycles with ease.

• [Anonymous]

  So… we just have to wait a few decades before everyone is driving electric cars!? Seriously, people won’t start buying electric cars until it becomes cheaper to do so than run gasoline engines. We saw that when gas went up to $4 a gallon.

• [thatguyruste]

  Mankind wants to die… Cigarettes? Alcohol? Methamphetamine? Exhaust fumes? Nuclear Warheads? The list of destructive man-made forces, both big and small, goes on and on and on… If mankind wanted to live, then why would he invent such things? I know I’ll be looonnnggg gone before the destruction of mankind (at least I hope so), and honestly, I crack a little smile every time I think about this planet of ours, and all our shiny things, overgrown with vines and laying in ruins…because then…Mother Nature can rebuild it as she sees fit. She did a pretty damn good job settin it all up for us, too bad we took it all for granted.

• [Anonymous]

  The gist: If we’re gonna be socialist, we might as well do it right.

• [johnfoster]

  MM is going to get too much credit for this list of his. lots of people have been saying these very things long before he numerated them.

• [dbarak]

  I’m a pretty liberal guy, but I learned long ago to ignore most of what this guy has to say.

• [agentouchie]

  moore saves the world AGAIN – if he hadn’t invented environmentalism i don’t know where we’d be today!

  but seriously, some interesting (rehashed) points but i just can’t get passed michael moore’s enormous ego.

  it’s creepy that it takes MM’s special brand of spielberging for people to pay attention to this stuff when other more qualified people have been talking about it for decades.

• [Anonymous]

  i was with him until #9

• [hawamahal]

  the more the merrier, if MM is willing to call for radical change, good on him. however, I think the focus of the nine points are rather too heavily fixed on large scale transit systems. What we need is A LOT of number seven (namely to retool those dead and dying factory floors so that they can produce alternative technologies that we need…not just solar cells, but highly efficient modular housing components). We also need to think locally, which is to say that we need to get people out of their toxic bombs, and onto greenways. Is it too much to ask for green corridors that are safe for bicycles and pedestrians to get around our cities? Even as the the planet is dying and the automobile is the root cause of endless sprawl? I think it’s quite a modest demand…ten percent of all permeable surfaces must be converted to non-motorized traffic paths. Ten percent, now.

• [Cicada]

  #1 May have a point. Does anything really bother to think about _why_ we’re trying for a long-term solution to ecological issues? Why not have a good time now and let the species die out or go through a mass extinction or whatever?

• [nosehat]

  @#2 JohnFoster:

  That’s kind of an odd complaint. If it’s a good idea that you agree with, hopefully you are happy as more and more high-profile people endorse it.

  GM’s bankruptcy is a great opportunity for real change here (although some of Moore’s specific ideas seem a little impractical, I like his general thrust). Alas, I’d put my money on “business as usual” rather than “change” on this one.

• [Timothy Hutton]

  AGC claimed:

  There are 1.1 cars for every American on the road today.

  Are you saying that for every ten cars on the road driven by Americans, ther is one more car on the road that is being driven by Legal and/or Illegal Aliens?

  That seems high. And unprovable.

  You are claiming that there are 330,000,000 cars in the U.S. (assuming 300 Million “Americans”), that seems just a wee-bit high:

  This website says there were about 136M autos in the U.S. in 2005, just four short years ago, and

  This website says there were about 288M “Americans” in 2005,

  Making the ratio more like (136M/285M) 0.48 cars per “American”. Adding in all cars and trucks only gets you about 241M Cars, trucks, and busses, still shy of your claimed 1.1 cars per “American”. (241M/285M = 0.85 cars, trucks, busses per “American”)

• [Anonymous]

  Moore is a necrophiliac trying to keep GM
  alive. Appealing to the mil-industrial
  complex of past error-wars is the worst,
  from a guy like him. And his climate
  hysteria is just lame parroting.

  He could do better.

• [Anonymous]

  @7: On the contrary, good ideas are far more likely to come to fruition without Moore’s endorsement. His brand of hyperbole and shrill delivery pretty much discredits any cause he adopts, its own merits notwithstanding.

  One day I want to see the guy write about flowers or something. “The petals explode outwards like the shattered bones of children in a genocide hushed up by high paid lawyers! The aroma reminds us that evil corporations are hellbent on destroying everything good in the world, no different than Pol Pot at his worst! But flowers age and die! Like victims of the Holocaust or the gun lobby!”

• [thatguyruste]

  #7 That’s not really what I meant, heh… I don’t WANT the extinction of man, but it seems that man, as a whole, doesn’t care enough about long-term sustainability, instead, doing exactly what you mentioned…they’re just having a good time now, cranking out debts and babies without ever stopping to think that one day their babies will inherit the debt. It’s a shame really… Because we really COULD be a beautiful species. If you’ve never heard of the group That Handsome Devil, you should listen to their song Elephant Bones… I can’t say it better myself :)

  http://www.myspace.com/thathandsomedevil

• [ill lich]

  A lot of people won’t listen to anything Moore has to to say, simply because he is Michael Moore, which is too bad. However, I’m not completely on board with him here– it’s good that he’s offering ideas, but I think some of these ideas are not 100% there yet: a $2 a gallon gas tax will just enrage everyone, it’s better to offer big tax incentives for buying/using a bike or hybrid car, or have states/municipalities create a Zip-car-like system that has a gas discount.

• [thatguyruste]

  Oh, for the record… I have nothing to do with the band, sorry, wasn’t trying to “advertise”, just honestly thought that song was prudent at this juncture ;)

• [Anonymous]

  What I find sort of amusing about MM’s first point is the complete avoidance of paying for all those mass transit vehicles. We are already dumping billions into GM just to keep it afloat with the factories idling and cars being sold.

  If in some magical land we could re-tool a multi-billion dollar car/truck plant overnight and started pumping out mass-transit and alterna-fuel vehicles, who is going buy them? Oh, the local/federal goverment. So now as a tax payer we get fleeced both ways. Genius.

  The truth? It would cost billions to re-tool manufacturing plant, its not an overnight thing. In 1942 a man and a wrench built the cars. In 2009, a robotic machine does it. The other inconvenient truth? GM and other companies made absolutely massive profits during WWII. They didn’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. The taxpayer paid for the factory conversions, paid a premium for all those tanks built by workers on overtime, and paid to have them shipped to Europe.

  So nice idea but a complete pipe dream.

• [Anonymous]

  I would add that mass transportation would also save precious oil which is often considered just a source of energy and not also a major prime matter for many and not replaceable materials. Just think of rubber and insulators to name a few. Too much oil is already wasted in packaging and use-and-dispose/recycle plastic containers. Too much has already been wasted in large single passenger cars. It’s time to rethink the use of oil.
  Alessandro
  Genova
  Italy

• [Ray DelMundo]

  Yeah those lumber tycoons really did a job on the forests. There are hardly anymore of those left.

• [Anonymous]

  I read through the comments on the actual site the article was posted and had to smile about the bulllet trains and public transport being advertised so much, and (Western) Europe and Japan being stated as prime examples.
  The best public transport to date I have encountered was in Prague, where you could go anywhere in the city by metro/tram/bus within 45 minutes. Even the trip to the airport was quicker by metro and bus than using a taxi and cost about 1.5 US$. And of course, Europeans are very fond of riding (push) bikes, there is even one town in Germany, where bike is the main means of transportation (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrradstadt)

• [ackpht]

  Imagining that the government can decree these changes gives too much credit to government- not to mention human nature itself.

  Change will come -is happening now- but is driven by technology and economics and human population growth.

  All government can do is point in the right direction- assuming anyone knows what the right direction is.

• [Takuan]

  yes. they did.

• [Clay]

  Ah, yes, expensive oil, the perfect answer. Gets everyone to switch to electric vehicles.

  Except for those pesky folks who can’t afford a new car and now have to pay even more to fuel the old clunker they have to drive 45 minutes to work from the only housing they can afford.

  Ah, but they shoulda thought of that before being poor!

• [Anonymous]

  Hmm, I really don’t think we want products with the technology and lifespan of those made in WWII in Flint do we? I mean, a WAR is a build it-blow it up-make another proposition isn’t it? Would you really want to ride around in mass transit vehicles or live under solar cells that where rushed to manufacture? Not me, thanks.

• [Anonymous]

  No one in the industry will do anything about peak oil until it’s either upon them (or if they have any brains at all, *almost* upon them) at which point the car-recharging plug on every lightpost, complete with locking plug and electric company credit card swiper will arrive overnight.

  As Moore indirectly points out, that’s how America works — knee-jerk overreaction and/or overproduction to everything. The danger in this is for the people and places where electric is truly inconvenient (long haul trucking) or actually not feasible (rural Africa) who will have no options. Someone will probably find a way, but it might take a while.

• [Slizzered]

  The government might not be the best answer when it comes to which clean tech to adopt, but could jump-start investment in new technologies by legislating serious caps on pollutants.

  Moore’s general thrust is perfectly sensible. If Uncle Sam’s gonna own a fat chunk of GM, what’s so radical about modernizing the company? Wouldn’t it be crazy *not* to?

• [broken_fingers]

  There was a post on Jalopnik relating to Moore’s comments that I think contains some good points:
  Link to it

  There are other people pursuing these ideas, and I think the last thing they need is to have the rug pulled from beneath them. The volume of money we spend on war would easily get some of these new ideas up and running to the point of real viability–let’s let the people who’ve been actively pursuing them continue their work.

  I’m all for efficiency, especially small cars, light rail, and high speed rail, but the fact is GM is not the place to go for any of these.

• [failix]

  “What I find sort of amusing about MM’s first point is the complete avoidance of paying for all those mass transit vehicles.”

  I don’t get it, what about the costs to produce these big useless polluting luxury cars? And all the fuel these engines waste… On a long term, it’d be way cheaper to switch to nature-friendly (and wallet-friendly) cars.