Stupid White Men, Michael Moore, Regan Books, 2001, £12.99
Written before 11 September, this book was not allowed on sale until early 2002 and immediately became a bestseller in the USA. Michael Moore, author of Downsize This! and co-author of Adventure in a TV Nation is also a producer who directed Roger and Me, about the devastating unemployment in his home town of Flint and TV Nation, a television series that has been shown on British TV late at night. Moore is hitting the headlines just now at the Cannes Film Festival with a documentary film Bowling for Columbine which examines North America’s obsession with firearms starting with the Columbine high school massacre.
Not everybody likes Michael Moore’s sense of humour, or indeed the fact that he tries to get a laugh out of the grossness of corporate America. His agitational methods also annoy some who object to his message which is ‘get aboard, folks’, join in your local protest group, expose the truth on the streets. But behind the bold chapter headings, the cut-out information pages, the exclamation marks and the bad language there is careful research and serious intent. He sets out to expose the corruption of the US ruling elite, their electoral coup of November 2000, and their lies made so easy by the fact that the media is dominated by six US companies.
Stupid White Men documents in detail the criminal conspiracy that led to the installation of George W Bush as President of the United States. It shows why 20,000 demonstrators jeered him every inch of the way to the White House on inauguration day, January 20 2001 with shouts of ‘Hail to the thief’. It shows how hundreds of black voters were disenfranchised in Florida, how elderly retired Jewish voters were tricked with complicated voting slips so that their hole was punched against the name of the anti-Semitic candidate, how police threatened to arrest those who protested that their names should not be on the ‘felon’s list’, how overseas votes were counted twice. It details the business contributions to the electoral coffers of both Bush and Gore and traces the corporate interests of the new White House staff.
The ‘stupid white’ virus knows no race or gender boundaries but is spread among the ruling group. Secretary of State Colin Powell, sat on the board of Gulfstream Aerospace which makes jets for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait while National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice served on the board of oil giant Chevron, Charles Schwab and Transamerica and served as adviser for JP Morgan banking. All are part of a self-serving elite and Moore makes the context of their power and wealth clear. His Notes and Sources quote from World Health Organisation estimates that 1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. Using cost estimates of $50 per person (from the World Game Institute, www.worldgame.org), the total cost of providing clean water would be $50 billion. Since the Reagan administration, the US has spent $60 billion on the Star Wars project. Over the next 15 years it is planned to spend another $50 to $60 billion on Star Wars military development alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In his epilogue, Michael Moore describes the process of Ralph Nader’s Green Party campaign for the presidency. Initially there was certainty that Gore, who had been Clinton’s vice president, would win and that the idiot George W could never make it. However, following some devastatingly poor showings on television debates it gradually became clear that a vote for the progressive Ralph Nader, standing on an anti-corporate platform, might let Bush slip in to win. In Florida Nader was polling 6% but in days this dropped to 4% and by election day it was 1.6%. That represents 97,488 Nader votes in Florida. Gore lost the Florida vote by 538 and the Democrats blame Nader. Many Americans did in fact transfer their vote to Gore because they feared that they might be helping the victory of a more right-wing candidate in the same way that voters have felt since in both France and Holland.
Michael Moore has a bitter laugh about all this. ‘Don’t blame me’, he says, ‘Blame Monica [Lewinsky]’! Meanwhile there are over 900 Green Campus organisations, a mailing list of over 200,000 activists, a total of 91 Greens currently holding elective office in the USA and, most significantly, the number of Americans who voted for Nader increased by 500% over those who voted for him in 1996. The future, he concludes, must be ours. ‘Use your power. You deserve better’.
Susan Davidson
