Michael Moores Roger & Me Essay -- Documentary Films General Motors E

Michael Moores Roger & MeRoger & Me is a documentary get chronicling the sourings of one of the worlds heavy(a)st corporations, General Motors, as it most turns its hometown of flint, Michigan, into a ghost town. In his quest to discover wherefore GMs counselling and board of directors would do such a thing, filmmaker Michael Moore, a Flint native, attempts to meet the chairman, Roger Smith, and invite him divulge for a few beers up in Flint to talk things over. Moore is the son of a Flint autoworker and a completely family of autoworkers. Roger & Me examines how Moores hometown of Flint is affected when General Motors closes down a series of factories in order to set up production in Mexico. The town is devastated, economically and spiritually, because GM was practically the only game in town - the urban center was built around GM.Since 1983, car sales had steadily risen and GM has posted record profits of nearly $19 billion. So why lay off all of these people? Moore point s out that he and his friends were elevated on the American Dream which promised that if you worked hard and the company you worked for prospered, you would prosper, too. Now, it seems GMs board of directors has changed the rules you work hard, the company prospers- and you lose your job. Roger & Me shows that capitalism is not always consistent with this American Dream.Roger & Me shows that GMs board of directors used company profits not to create spic-and-span jobs, but to buy already existing assets, such as selective information processing companies (EDS) and weapons manufacturers (Hughes Aircraft) at inflated prices, and to automate their current assembly lines, and reconstruct new plants in Mexico and in Asia -- destroying jobs in the United States in the process. In Mexico, GM pays the worker... ...t be done in work. This man is also bewildered because the point of unions is to increase the workers strength in bargaining with employers. The union understandably did not h elp in the case of the GM workers in Flint.Roger & Me is a great documentary film. It captures a lot about our form of capitalism. Moore shows the problems that large capitalist companies make, in a way that appeals to a broad audience. Since it is a real story, it is not telling some story of how things could be or would be, but how things really are. Fred Ross must evict numerous people out of their homes daily so that he has a roof over his notch and food for himself. While one half of Flint is receiving some human body of Government Welfare for being unemployed, Roger Smith is giving himself a $2 million raise. In a better world profit maximization would not be the goal of an economic system or a society.