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Michael Moore
Director, Roger and Me; Creator & Host, "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth"; Author, Downsize This! and Stupid White Men and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation
Thank you very much. I'm on my little California tour with the book. We started in Grass Valley last night. People from Fresno and Stockton go to the website and they see New York, Chicago, L.A., Grass Valley. It's like, "You can't even come to Fresno? You're going to Grass Valley." Of course, my sister lives there. She and her husband and her daughter are here with us today along with my wife, Kathleen. That's because we all love San Francisco so much and have such fond memories of this place.
I'm also supposed to read something here but I'll just explain it as a warning that today's talk has been approved by the Office of Homeland Security. Through your attendance here today you must know that should you go home and incite your fellow citizens against the government of the United States that you'll be violating the Ashcroft Patriot Act and may face death by execution. But as long as your governor continues his connections with Enron, there probably won't be enough juice to execute anyone. Let's not pick on the guy, not good to knock a guy on his way down, that's what I say.
Gray Davis – I've just never understood this guy. But then I don't understand a lot of Democrats, because you want to believe in them, you want to believe they believe in you and they're there for the people and for the working person. So many people who call themselves liberals are willing to compromise and just give in and just start doing the backward shuffle. What is that about liberals? "I guess we can allow some death penalty. I guess we can cut out some of the welfare." No wonder we never get anywhere with these people as our leaders. This is as good as is gets: Gray Davis, Tom Daschle.
The other side, they've got people who've courage of their convictions. The conservatives and the right wingers, the one thing you've got to admire about them is they actually believe in something and they never stop believing in it. They wake up in the morning and they greet the dawn believing in it. We don't ever even see the dawn. We don't even get up in the morning. They just eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch and dinner: "Screw the poor, that's what I'm going to do today." They're so together. We're so loosey-goosey. They never lose their car keys. You ever notice that about the conservative member in your family? They've got little hooks for them when they come in the back door. The Beemer or the SUV. It's just like it's always there. We're like we can't get our act together and we never get anywhere.
It's like with the whole Enron thing. The Republicans on all the Republican networks: "Well, the Democrats took money, too." Well, yeah. For every $90 the Republicans took from Enron the Democrats maybe got ten dollars. You can buy them cheap. They're like the Yugo of politics. Occasionally they will do good things; it will run sometimes. But generally, the reason the Republicans get all the money from Enron is they know how to make money. That's why they're all millionaires. That's why they know how to shake somebody down. It's no surprise to me that they would be doing so well.
This whole thing is kind of surreal to me that I'm even standing here, because this book wasn't supposed to come out. I wrote this last summer and turned it in to the publisher. They accepted the manuscript. They printed, on September 10th, 50 thousand copies of this book on the printing presses in Scranton, Pennsylvania. September 11 was the day they were going to ship it to the stores. Of course we know what happened on September 11. So they said, Let's wait a few weeks. I said fine, great, nobody wanted to do anything those weeks. My wife and I were stuck out here in California, down in Los Angeles at the Emmy Awards. Everything seemed so irrelevant. We had to drive across the country to get back to New York.
So after a few weeks I didn't hear anything, and so I called them up and said, What do you think about the book? When do you think you'll put it out? "Well, we were thinking maybe this book isn't just right right now. It's not in tune with the political climate." I said, What do you mean, what kind of climate? It's like suddenly all these guys are meteorologists. What's the political climate? "Well, Mike, you have to understand that the country is now behind George W. Bush, the 'president.'" (For those of you listening on the radio, I just performed the international sign for quotation marks whenever the word president is used.) So they said, "We think the criticisms of Bush are too harsh. We would like you to rewrite up to 50 percent of the book, tone down your dissent, tone down your criticisms. We don't want you to change your mind about George W. Bush, we're not asking for that. We just want you to tone it down. Don't be so harsh. Maybe you could take out a chapter or two. Maybe you would like to write a new chapter, you know, kind of a post-September 11th chapter."
And I said, I don't know if you would want to read that chapter. The title of that chapter would be "The sad and sordid whereabouts of bin Cheney and bin Bush."
"No, we were not thinking of that chapter."
They said, "You're going to have to rewrite and then you're going to have to give us $100,000 in order to help pay for the reprinting costs of the book, because they were already printed." I said, Are you nuts? You want me to pay you for the privilege of censoring myself. I'm not rewriting 50 percent of one word. So there was this huge standoff for a couple of months. They wouldn't put the book out, I wouldn't change anything in the book. They wanted the title changed, the cover changed, this changed, that changed.
"Change this chapter title called ‘Kill Whitey.' You can't say ‘Kill Whitey' now in America. We'd like you to change that. Whitey is not the problem."
I said, Whitey is always the problem. I'm not changing that chapter.
So, finally they said, "If you are not going to go along, you are obviously out of touch with the American people. This book is not coming out and we are going to pulp this book. We are going to shred it and we are going to pulp it." I had never heard this word before, pulp. As in, to pulp. I remember the exact night when this happened, it was November 30th, when I got the call from the editor, it was eight o'clock at night. I got so depressed, and of course it's at that moment, if you're Irish, you have to make that decision – drink or laugh. I'm just trying to find the silver lining in this very dark cloud and I'm thinking they are going to pulp the book – we should feel good about this in a way. Look how far we have come, those of us who have been for the environment all of these years, that now even the oppressors are thinking of recycling when they're stifling free speech. This is a good thing. They're not just going to throw it in a bin somewhere, they're going to recycle it, they're going to pulp it.
The next day I was speaking out at this New Jersey citizen action meeting. I told them the story about how I got the word it doesn't look like this book is going to come out. I'd like somebody to be able to read it, I brought it with me. I'd like to read you a chapter. I read a chapter from it and apparently there's this librarian in the audience, nobody I knew, who went home and got in all the librarian chat rooms on the Internet, like they actually have such a thing where librarians secretly conspire with one another. She tells this story to all the librarians, and then one of them writes this letter up and sends it out on all of these librarian list-serves and websites, and within days Harper Collins is being inundated with letters from librarians – angry, angry hate mail from librarians. Talk about a terrorist group; you don't want to mess with these people. Think about that: Of all the groups of people in our society, they have had their budget slashed to nothing. Libraries are closed right and left or they're open for three or four hours a day. The books are 30 years old, they're in there scotch taping the covers back on. The libraries are just in the most pathetic shape in this country and those librarians, you think they're just sitting there being quiet? No, they're sitting there plotting the revolution. They don't want you making a lot of noise, because what are they going to do to mess this thing up.
So I get a call from Harper Collins – "What did you tell the librarians?"
I said I don't know any librarians.
"We're getting a lot of hate mail from librarians, very angry hate mail. We'd like you to come over to the office." So I go over to the Harper Collins office, and now they've brought in some vice president of the News Corp. – the News Corp. owns Harper Collins. Rupert Murdoch owns the News Corp. Again, the Catholic in me is saying, You're getting everything you deserve. You want to be in bed with Rupert Murdoch. Oh, you could have gone to some little independent publisher up in Sonoma County, but no, no, you had to go with the devil and now you shall be punished. And I actually felt guilty that it was my fault, not Harper Collins' fault that I dared to conspire with Murdoch to publish this book. So now a Murdoch lieutenant is in the room and he's sitting there at this board table. Right out of that scene in Network, he just slams the book down and he goes, "This book shall not be published in this form, not this title, not this cover. You're going to change these words." Then he opens it up and says, "‘Kill Whitey' – What does that mean?"
I said, Look around the room.
So half way through this meeting, the lawyers and agents and everybody are hassling us, holding out, and I'm just trapped in this weird vortex, spiraling downward. I'm in the United States of America, what is this, what's going on?
"Well, you're out of touch, Mike. The times have changed, we can't put out a book like this." And the guy opens it up and he was going to read something to show me why and he starts laughing, he just starts laughing while he's reading it. Everyone asks, What are you laughing about? He's opened up to "Kill Whitey," and it's this thing about tips for survival if you're black in America. Tip number one: If you're driving a nice car it's probably best to have a white blowup doll in the back seat so that you don't get pulled over by the police; they'll just think you're chauffeuring someone, they'll leave you alone. Whereas if it's your car and you're just driving alone, it's not safe in certain states in this country. He just started laughing at this and I said, You're laughing, why don't you just go with your heart here? Go with your heart. Don't piss off the librarians. Do the right thing.
A couple days later they called and they said, "We've changed our minds. We're going to put out the book uncensored, untouched, just as you wrote it, just as it's printed. Good luck, because it's not going to sell and we're going to send you to two cities on your book tour and good night." In its first five days the book went into its ninth printing. It debuted at number three on The New York Times Best Seller List. It's number one on the San Francisco Chronicle list yesterday. In one week it sold more than Downsize This! did in a year. I tell you this not because I care about number one. If you knew me in high school, that's not where my head is at. There's this feeling that we've collectively felt for five or six months as we've watched these 80 and 90 percent approval ratings: "What's gone wrong with this country, why is everyone supporting Bush in this?" To see this overwhelming response, to see it trounce all the conservative, right-wing books on the bestseller list tells me that there are a lot more out there of us than they think there are and that we think there are, and they don't just live in the Berkeleys and the Ann Arbors and the Madisons of this country. They're all over the place and they've had to shut up for five or six months. The one thing as Americans we don't like to do is to shut up. What's supposedly free about this country is our ability to dissent, to ask questions of those in authority. To be told that you can't do that, that that's unpatriotic, is just so antithetical to everything that we believe in and stand for.
I think that those 80 percent approval ratings honestly are because these are such scary times and they see these guys shredding the Constitution, taking away our civil liberties, people being hauled away for no good reason, charged with no crime. What are you going to do? You're living in Kansas, at nine o'clock at night some stranger calls and says he's a pollster and the guy says, "I have just one question for you. Do you approve of the President of the United States: yes or no?"
Most people are like, "Yes! Yes, I approve, don't come to my house!" That's how he's got this rating. Nobody approves of this guy; he wasn't even elected by the people. This was a coup of immeasurable proportions. We should be so outraged and continue our outrage no matter who you voted for. I didn't vote for Gore. This isn't coming from a partisan place – "Oh, Gore lost" – I don't care. Gore is one of the stupid white men. He couldn't even win his own state. He wouldn't let Clinton campaign in Arkansas. He couldn't convince Senator Byrd in Virginia to endorse him until five days before the election – the dean of the Democratic Senate – and so they lose West Virginia. Three electoral votes, that's all they needed. He only wants to count the four counties in which all investigations have shown if they had just counted Gore's counties, Gore would have lost. He didn't want to count the whole the state, the Democrat didn't want to count the whole state. But every investigation has shown if you count the whole state, Gore wins. But he's not smart enough to know that, and it's not up to him anyway, he's a servant of the people. He doesn't get to decide which counties get counted. Everybody's vote is supposed to count in this country and they weren't counted.
African Americans were kept away from the polls, they were intimidated at the polls. I write about this in my book, about how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, the year before, hired a private firm to go through the rolls to try to take as many African-American names as possible off the voter rolls in Florida. It is an outrageous, disgusting story that you should read about if you haven't read about it elsewhere already. It will sicken you. People died for this right to vote and they have so abused it. To me at this point, anybody who would so knowingly, illegitimately take control of our White House, what else are they capable of?
I was just doing this interview with this woman from the Contra Costa Times, and she said, You've got this open letter to Bush in the book where you ask him three questions: "Are you a functional illiterate? Are you an alcoholic and, if so, are you getting help?" And number three, "Are you a felon?" She said, What other questions would you like to ask him? I said I have a number of questions, and here they are: Why is it while all the planes were grounded after September 11th did you, George W. Bush, allow only one plane to fly around America, a private Saudi jet that went around to four or five cities in this country and picked up two dozen members of the bin Laden family and their associates and scoot them out of the country over the objections of the FBI, who wanted to interrogate the family members? But Bush said, No, you will ask no questions of the bin Ladens.
Well, usually in a murder investigation, the police, when they can't find the murderer, like to ask the family members a few questions. What do you know? Who do you know? Where could he be? What do you think? Usually that's how it works, very basic police work. No. The FBI was told, No, you can't do that.
It sounds like many of you are hearing this for the first time. This is not the Michael Moore black helicopter website that I'm quoting from. You can read this story in the November 12th New Yorker magazine in an article by Jane Mayer, where she goes through and talks about a whole bunch of stuff about the bin Laden and Bush connections and specifically why this plane was allowed to fly around the country and pick up the bin Ladens. Why? I would like to ask that question.
I would also like to know what the financial connections are between the Bushes and the bin Ladens. I haven't done a lot of work, this is all in your mainstream media, this is all just by going to the jump page, which is something I never used to do, because it was too much work to go to the jump page. I never understood how to read the newspaper. Are you supposed to read the first five stories on the front page, are you supposed to read down all five at once and then go and try to remember the order that they were in? Or do you just read one and then jump to 23, read that all the way to the end and then go all the way back to the front page, go to the next story, then jump, read that all the way to the end? Does anybody else have that problem? To me it has always been too much aerobics. I just used to read the headline and the first five paragraphs. Then I started going to the jump page, and on the jump page we learned that the bin Laden family financed George W.'s first oil venture in Texas, back when Daddy got him in the business, before the baseball team, in an oil venture called Arbusto. It is Spanish for Bush, or so I'm told, or so the Bushes think, I don't know. The bin Laden money financed this.
The bin Ladens have been financially in business with George Sr. since he left office in the Carlyle Group. When George Sr. goes to Saudi Arabia in the last ten years he stays at the bin Laden palace. Some will say, Mike, you can't just paint all the bin Ladens with one big brush stroke. You can't blame them for the one bad apple in the family. In this article Jane Mayer goes on to show how there are other members of the bin Laden family who have been funding bin Laden and visiting him and keeping the connections going. It's all very strange in terms of how this thing has come together. The fact is there has been this financial connection between these two families for some years. And that's not being discussed in the media. I would like to ask some questions about that.
I would like to know why on the jump page in The Washington Post shortly after September 11th there's a paragraph that said Osama bin Laden, or Usama bin Laden if you prefer the Fox News Channel spelling – U-S-A-ma, which is more appropriate considering we trained him to be a terrorist – Usama bin Laden has been on dialysis it says in this story, for eighteen months. They've started to now talk about it a little bit more since they can't find him. I read that in the first few days and was Bush saying, It's bin Laden, it's bin Laden, it's bin Laden, he's the monster, he's the big evildoer. And then I read he's on dialysis and I'm going, Bush, you lost me now. You had me for almost half a second. You're telling me that this guy is hooked up to a kidney machine and running from cave to cave throughout Afghanistan? Do you think I'm stupid? Do you think we're all stupid, we're going to buy this? Immediately, the press stopped talking about it because it was off message, it was off the script.
In a good Hollywood script we can only handle one antagonist, one bad guy. There can only be one evildoer, one monster, because we've got to focus the simple country that we've created where we've dumbed the people down and numbed their minds to where they can only handle one evildoer at a time, so here's the one – Osama bin Laden, mastermind of everything, hooked up to a kidney machine, no pot to piss in, he can't even piss in it if he wanted to. Can I even say this on the radio? Can I say any of this on the radio? Will this ever appear? Is there a dialysis machine in every fifth cave in Afghanistan? Am I supposed to believe this? What is going on?
These are some of the questions I have. I think these questions should be answered and I would like to know what the connections are with Halliburton and the Unocal pipeline. Go to the BBC website – in 1995 the BBC did a story on the Taliban delegation that went to Houston when Bush was governor and was hosted by the oil executives in Houston to discuss building the Unocal pipeline across Afghanistan and they were working this thing out with the Taliban for quite some time until finally the deal went south and suddenly the Taliban were evil.
As late as last May, according to the LA Times on May 22nd of last year, the U.S. government gave $43 million in "humanitarian aid" to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. We were giving money to the very people at the same time we said they helped blow up the USS Cole and bombed the African embassies. So which is it? Did they blow up our embassies? Were they harboring Al Qaeda and bin Laden, the evildoers who did this? Or were they people who deserved $43 million of our tax money? Which is it? I would like to go right up to George W. Bush and ask him that question. Which is it? Which one was the truth? Because they both can't be the truth. Which one was it? What are the lies that we are being told here?
I'm not drawing any conclusions from this. I don't have the answers. But as a citizen I think I should be allowed to ask these questions. I think other people should ask these questions. I think when we go silent for five months and don't ask the questions, we find ourselves in a big pile of dog doo, and that's what's going to happen as we invade Iraq or Iran or any of the other axes of evil that they come up with to distract us from the can of worms that exists in the state of Enron. Because that's what they need to do. If you dig into Enron and you see what's really going on there, when you see how this one company and the executives of this company bought and paid for this administration – they were the number-one funders of Bush – what do we have in the White House? We have Ken Lay in there handpicking the head of the regulatory agency that oversees Enron. We have an Arthur Andersen attorney who is now the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission overseeing the stock prices that are supposed to be legit on the stock market. We have an Enron vice president who is a secretary of the Army. We have another Enron lawyer who also ran for office in Texas and took Enron money. He's now the White House counsel. The list goes on and on and on and on.
They can keep saying all they want because "it's just an economic story" or "it's just a business story." Well, it's good business gone bad, Mike, that's all it is. Or we can say this stinks so much that this company and many other companies have also built themselves on this house of cards with all their phony-bologna statistics and their numbers, how many other companies like this. This is the chill that has swept through the country and those of us who are committed to seeing this administration be stopped in all its evildoing, we need to really go out and reach out to the American public and say, Look: You have every right to be concerned that your retirement funds aren't going to be there. If this can happen at Enron, who knows how many other companies it can happen at? You have a right to be concerned about that. These people in Washington, D.C., don't give a damn about you or your retirement funds or the children of Iraq or the people of Afghanistan or anything. They care only about lining their own pockets.
This is nothing but an extension of the greed that was built up in the '80s and '90s. When they tell the American public that there is a recession going on right now, there is no recession going on. I'm glad to say that here in this area. "Oh, the dot-com industry! Oh, so many people out of work!" We come from Flint, Michigan, folks. We went through this in the '80s. Where was everybody? Oh, it was Flint, it was Pittsburgh, it was Geary, it was East St. Louis. Oh! But now it's in the Silicon Valley. Oh! Isn't this horrible.
Let me tell you something. The rich got filthy rich in the 1990s, and they want to now make sure you don't come looking for your piece of the pie. So they have told you, and they're going to make sure they continue the layoffs and continue doing what they do so that you are so frightened you won't even know if you'll have a job tomorrow, you'll never ask for a raise, you'll never ask for any vacation time, you'll never ask for any kind of dental care or health care because you don't know if you're next. You're next? Why should you be next? We just came out the greatest economic recovery growth in the history of mankind. Oh, so there's a little downturn for one year. Then it's like, "Oh it's horrible, nothing for you guys, sorry. We were going to give you something, but then Silicon Valley went under and we just didn't know what to do, so you can't have anything now." They stay on their yachts, and they continue their excessive wealth. October, the month after September 11th, was the number-one month in the history of the automobile for car sales. More cars sold that month than ever before. January of this year, there were more home sales than ever before, the first time it went past the six million mark. Where's the recession? The memo I got from Boeing was the best one. "Due to September 11th and the tragedy resulting therein, we will have to lay off ten thousand people." The airlines all going for their bailouts, but nothing for the worker. People have e-mailed me their inter-office memos. This is great stuff. "Due to September 11th, the office Christmas Party has been canceled." I mean, they just use this – three thousand people died on that day. They died. Some of them were coming here to this town, and you use these dead people to destroy the lives of other people by laying them off or telling them it's belt tightening time or just ridiculous things like, "Due to September 11th, the Mr. Coffee is being removed from the employee lounge." I'm not making this up, am I? What bastards. Have they no shame? Did I tell you that it was a humor book?
I'm just so happy. I wish I could take all of you with me on the rest of this tour so that you don't sit here in San Francisco going, Oh, it's just us. It's not just you. Everybody gets it. Everybody's dying to come out and say something. Everybody wants the questions answered. It should come as no surprise. The majority of this country didn't want him for president. You should take heart in that. Think about that. The majority, the vast majority, 154 million voting-age Americans either didn't vote for him or didn't vote at all – they didn't want him. 154 million out of 200 million voters. He has no mandate. He has no support. Of course people don't want their kids to die over there, so they feel like they've got to be supportive or they're legitimately afraid there's going to be another attack. Humans rally behind the leader. You go with who you've got. That's who you've got. Love the one you're with. That's how it is with a lot of Americans. That doesn't mean they support what he's doing. Bush is like that Australian speed skater, the guy who hung back in last place and waited until the other five crashed into the wall so he could skate through, and he wins the gold medal – the loser wins. That's Bush. He thinks that's the rest of America, we're just all hanging back, let them do all the hard work and we'll just skate through and get the gold medal.
We live in a very liberal, progressive country. Those words are never said. You've never heard that spoken probably – we live in a liberal country. All we hear is, We live in a country that's right of center, it's more conservative, and we have a lot of examples of a lot of rednecks doing a lot of horrible things. But the truth is, if you look at any poll, back when they took polls before our freedoms were reduced and you weren't afraid to answer the pollster, last Labor Day 58 percent of the American public said they support labor unions. They're pro-labor even though only 12 percent belong to one. Fifty-eight percent say labor unions are a good idea. We should take heart in that. Eighty-three percent say they are pro-environment and if asked the question are willing to give something up to protect the environment. Eighty-five percent consider themselves pro-women's rights, that women should be paid the same as men. Sixty-three percent now call themselves pro-choice. Did you ever think you'd live to see that day? On every single issue, other than the death penalty, the American public is very liberal. On the death penalty it's gone from 75 percent support down to 57 percent; it's dropped by almost 20 percentage points.
This is what you have to understand about what's really good about your fellow Americans who don't live here, who live out there. They have a good heart. They don't define themselves politically – liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. They have a good heart and a good soul and a conscience. When they see a bunch of kids at Northwestern University discover that five people on death row didn't commit the crime and they actually find the people that did commit the crime, even somebody who supports the death penalty doesn't want an innocent person to be executed. So once the truth started coming out about this, the American public went from 75 percent to 57 percent support of the death penalty, and it will drop below 50 percent if we do our job and remind people what they've got to do in order to educate people about this – that there could be people dying who did nothing. So go ahead and support the death penalty if you want, but we shouldn't have the death penalty because it's too risky, it's too risky to execute an innocent person.
You have in this state this obscene "three strikes and you're out" law, a thing that I believe started here. I wrote about this in my last book, that most of the regressive ideas come from this state, a state that's actually seen as very enlightened and progressive and healthy. I wasn't here an hour and I was already at Jamba Juice, I was already getting juiced. From Reagan to Nixon to Pete Wilson to your property tax debacle to your death penalty to your three strikes law, you are the foundation for much of the bad stuff that has been spread across this country, and it's happened right here in this state. I can offer you one idea of something that you can do to help out. They're trying to get an initiative on the ballot in this state to change the three strikes law. They think they've found the language where they can convince most Californians, even those more conservative than you, by appealing to people's sense of fair play. That third strike, to put someone in prison for life, has to be such a heinous crime, an act where we would all want this person put in a room away from society for quite some time. But that has to be the standard, that has to be the bar. The crime has to be that horrific.
Instead, what you've got is a guy in prison because he stole a power drill from Sears. You've got a guy whose third strike was stealing a slice of pizza. You got a guy in prison right now because he stole not one ball cap from Mervyns but two, and not from two different arrests. He goes into Mervyns, steals a ball cap, goes to his car and says, I don't know if I like this ball cap. He then goes back into Mervyns to steal a second cap. He's then arrested, but because he committed the crimes separately from each other, minutes apart, it was considered strike two and strike three. Now he's in prison for 50 years to life. Do you want this on your heads? Can you pay your taxes in this state and feel good about this?
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein