Moore is more

On Amy Goodman's Michael Moore.

I have long admired Michael Moore's committed idealism, but have known little of his slowly sliding into media. I grew up in Detroit (1930-50) and worked in three different factories to finance a Ph.D. in American Literature. I taught college for almost thirty years then became a free lance media critic where I could do more to change opinion. The most salient point in the interview is the analysis of Reagan's deliberate deindustrialization of America through his Acapulco secret meetings.

First, auto execs shifted production from Michigan to the union free South, then Mexico, the anywhere cheaper. This was an egregious treachery which we must report to the American people like this Goodman interview does. From "Every American can be President" to the sleazy shift from workers making a decent wage to Bushed-up execs becoming millionaires.

Chris Hedges has pointed out how Ike's fear of the military industrial complex has come true with America having almost 800 bases around the world and a military budget more than the entire rest of the world. Bless Michael for digging in up in Northern Michigan (where I spent grand summers) before Reaganism deindustrialized the state.

Patrick D. Hazard, Weimar, Germany, where I'm researching a book on the idealism of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus. Incidentally, German industrialists, having learned painfully from the Nazi era, would never break its unions nor deindustrialize cynically for a quick Euro.