Here Comes Trouble (44 page)

The room was filled with bankers, executives, entrepreneurs, and consultants—all of whom were primed to help those of us who had come to Acapulco to learn how to close up shop in the U.S. and move our operations south of the border. I did my best to blend in, and on the first day no one suspected otherwise when they saw me. I forgot that just being a nicely dressed white male was what the majority of these guys simply call “showing up.”

By late 1986, many American companies had quietly begun making their move to Mexico. Not so much, though, that anyone had taken any real notice. General Motors had only 13,000 Mexican workers (a drop in the bucket to GM’s American workforce, which numbered over a half million); General Electric had 8,000 employees in Mexico. American corporations had set up factories in the dozen or so border cities—on the Mexican side of the border. Some of these American facilities were barely five hundred feet outside of the United States. It was just like being at home—except you paid your workers forty cents an hour, made them work ten hours a day, and made sure they had no rights. Seventy percent of the Mexican workers in these plants were women, often under twenty-one and sometimes as young as thirteen or fourteen. U.S. corporations did not want to hire male heads-of-households, as they were more likely to unionize or demand a bathroom break. The young women were more pliable. The only real problem with them was that they, like young women everywhere, were prone to getting pregnant. They were also malnourished and hungry. So GM and the others did something nice: they handed out free birth control to stem the high turnover rate, and they provided a free breakfast (because fainting on the assembly line caused things like windshields to miss the front of the car).

Al Cisneros, of the Texas Economic Development Commission, spoke glowingly of General Motors’ plans to become “Mexico’s number one employer.”

“They are going to have a total of twenty-nine factories in Mexico,” he told me. “They are opening twelve in the coming year alone!”

He told me that the chairman of General Motors, a man by the name of Roger Smith, had recently said that “moving to Mexico is a matter of survival.”

I thought about this for a moment and wondered, what planet was this guy Smith on?
“Survival?”
In the previous year, 1985, General Motors had posted a profit just shy of four billion dollars. In the year before that, they broke their all-time record with a profit of $4.5 billion. They were the number one corporation in the world. And yet they were constantly talking about how they were “struggling” to survive. It was all a con game to somehow convince the public that if they didn’t move some of their production to Mexico, they might go under—and then the economy would collapse with them. It was a Big Lie, but at least the Reagan administration bought it and was here selling it. They were selling it because Reagan, the former union leader, wanted to crush unions. He won the presidency by getting a lot of white union workers to vote for him. Appealing to their fears—of Iranian hostage takers, of black people, of the government—he rode a wave that would eventually drown the very people who put him into office.

Of course, I could say none of this to Mr. Cisneros—partly because I did not know the future then, and mostly because I would definitely blow my cover. I worried that even the look on my face was such that every word of that last paragraph was written all over me.

“Absolutely,” I responded. “GM has to remain competitive. If it doesn’t cut costs, it… it…” I struggled to find the end of that sentence. I should have practiced my lines better. “Well, all hell’s gonna break loose.”

“Indeed,” Mr. Cisneros agreed (to what, I’m not sure).

Cisneros had another concern: Communism. He was worried that if corporate America did not get down to Mexico and establish a capitalist foothold, Mexico could easily go the way of Castro or the Sandinistas.

“Free enterprise is the only thing that’s going to save Mexico from a Communist revolution,” he said. “If we don’t help Mexico develop, we’re going to have another Nicaragua at our doorstep.”

Ha! Of course. How else could the Reaganites rationalize and sell the exporting of American jobs to Mexico? Because we have to save Mexico from the commies! By raising the standard of living of every Mexican by having them work for us, they will not want socialism because they will be enjoying the middle class life.

“I expect in less than fifteen years, these Mexican border towns are going to look like American suburbs,” Cisneros added.
⁹

Paul D. Taylor, Reagan’s deputy assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, earlier that year had stated that if we began to build American factories in Mexico, it could help stem the Red Tide on our southern border. U.S. factories could help Mexico “reorient” its economy from its socialist tendencies to the capitalist nirvana of its northern neighbor.

“We are making history here,” one of the speakers announced. “Those of you here tonight will be remembered as the pioneers, the heroes, who helped move America from a manufacturing-based economy to a service economy, a high-tech economy. And you will be able to say that you were here when it all started!” He stopped short of comparing this historical moment to the Wannsee Conference, or the gathering of the family heads by Don Corleone. But the headiness of the moment—the importance of who they were and what they were up to—was not lost on anyone in that room in Acapulco.

I discovered that there were executives from at least ten or so Michigan companies at the conference, including top people from Iroquois Die and Manufacturing, Deco Grand, and Dynacast. I thought it wise to avoid them as they would know I was not running an auto parts company in Flint. But I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to know why these turncoats were planning to sack fellow Michiganders. I wanted to look in their eyes, I wanted to know if they went to Ohio State.

I took off my name tag and sat down at a table where some of them were gathered. Arthur Goodsel was the president of Huron Plastics. He had ten plants around Michigan and the United States. He told me that the move to Mexico he was considering was not voluntary.

“The automakers are moving here, there’s no doubt about that,” he said with the tone of resignation. “They won’t admit that too publicly, but this is where they’re coming. And they’re telling suppliers like me if you want to do business with us, you’d better move here, too, to be close to us. If not, then bye-bye. So what am I supposed to do?”

That was the story I kept hearing from the smaller businesses. They were being coerced and extorted into making this move. From the looks on their faces I could see the invisible gun being held to their heads. They did not look like they were down here on vacation.

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Don’t you think when people in Michigan find this out they’re gonna tar and feather us on our way outta town?”

“Oh, I don’t even know how I’m gonna break the news to my employees,” a man named “Bill” said sadly. “Some of these guys have been with me for twenty years. They have families. But, I guess they’ll find other jobs. There’s lots of work in Michigan to go around.”

“You got that right,” I added.

Forgoing the parasailing and the jet skis, I attended all the lectures and presentations. They were mesmerizing. Up on the screen they laid it all out, how this or that American governmental agency would help grease the skids for “your move to Mexico”! Little time was spent on trying to justify it (“Think of all the shipping and trucking jobs this will create in the U.S.!”). One speaker after another told the assembled about the fields of gold that awaited them south of the border. And if they did not get in on this gold rush, well, they were just going to be left behind like the buggy whip manufacturers were at the beginning of the twentieth century when they pooh-poohed the new “horseless carriage.”

One nice feature in the presentations was the racism. And the generous plantation mentality that was expressed. Speaker after speaker kept using the generic name “Pancho” whenever they referred to the hypothetical Mexican worker they were so excited about exploiting.

“Pancho will do this for you! Pancho will do that for you!”

“Pancho won’t be joining any unions.”

“Pancho is an obedient worker.”

Pancho, of course, was not present at the gathering, other than those Panchos serving us our filet mignons and flaming fried ice cream.

By the third day, I had, remarkably, not been caught. It was slightly disappointing on some level that I looked that believable in the role of CEO. But I knew my auto parts well enough to talk the talk, and I knew all the appropriate slags to make on the unions and the greedy factory workers. One guy did say he had never heard of my company, and he kept pressing me for more info until I finally told him that “my company has just invented a breakthrough device—and I’m prohibited by Chrysler from saying any more.” Then he stopped. I could see that it made him happy to think of himself saying in six months that he knew the guy when this invention was top secret!

The closing-night dinner was held outdoors, where a whole pig was roasted on a spit for us. The keynote speaker was Republican congressman Jim Kolbe from Arizona. Kolbe was a big backer of the move of American business to Mexico because, as he pointed out, “70 percent of the wages these Mexicans get, they come across the border and spend them in El Paso and Yuma—so it’s a win-win for us!”

Everybody was now wearing the W
ORK
M
AKES
E
VERYTHING
P
OSSIBLE
stickers on their outerwear. And Kolbe’s main point?

“These American factories in Mexico do not take away jobs from the U.S.,” he said with a straight face. “They
save
jobs!”

Kolbe said that “a free country has to allow U.S. business to operate freely.” And besides, he added, if we didn’t make it easy for corporate America to operate in Mexico, “then these cars and other items are going to be made in Asia.” The crowd snickered. Ha! Americans buying Asian cars! Please! And pass me some more of that pig.

When Kolbe finished, the Mexican official who was the evening’s emcee made a “motion” to “nominate Congressman Kolbe for president of the United States!”
¹⁰
In 2010, Barack Obama appointed Jim Kolbe to his Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations. The reader can draw his or her own conclusions. The audience responded with wild applause. Yup, that’s how we roll in the United States—a bunch of corporate executives sitting in a room and just nominating the president! The Japanese banker sitting at my table, who had earlier taken slight umbrage at the “Asian” remark, took it all in with detached amusement.

“What you see here,” he said to me, “is just the beginning. GM will close those nine plants in the U.S. in the coming year and many more in the years to come. This is the future—and some people are going to do very well.” I looked around at the crowd that was giddy over the thought that
they
were the chosen ones to pack up the U.S.A. (or at least its most precious national resource—its jobs) and move it to sunny Mexico.

It was both nauseating and breathtaking, the scope of what I had witnessed over this weekend. A well-oiled machine was already revved up and in motion to snuff out the American middle class. And, I thought,
“Nobody knows this!”
Here I was, wining and dining among the plotters. In the ensuing years, I would witness the wholesale destruction of towns like Flint across the country, and I would think,
I was there! I saw the murder being planned! The plot to kill the American Dream was hatched and enacted right in front of my eyes.
A witness to an impending execution—and the executed had no idea yet that the gun had been fired and the bullet well on its way.

On the plane ride back, the seersucker suit neatly packed in the overhead, I thought long and hard about all of this and what I was planning to do.

Gratitude

I
KNEW NOTHING
about making a movie, and I wish I could tell you some cool story about how I started shooting films when I was six on my dad’s 8mm Bell & Howell, or that I went to NYU film school with Spike Lee, and that Martin Scorsese was my teacher. All I knew, all I did, was go to the movies. And I mean
go.
In a good week I would try to see at least four or five films at the local multiplex (in other words, everything that opened that weekend). If I was lucky, I’d get to borrow the car and head down to Ann Arbor to one of the half-dozen film societies that showed a classic or foreign movie every night. A really special Friday night would mean a trip to the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. On the rare occasion, I went on a foreign journey to Chicago because I couldn’t wait the month or two for the film to open in Michigan.

And then there was that insane, pure batshit-crazy, spur-of-the-moment “Get in the car! I
refuse
to see
Apocalypse Now
in Flint because it does
not
have the new surround sound stereo
and
the ending that Coppola
wanted!
” The studio would play
that
version only in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto. And so I drove the three hundred miles to Toronto so I could see the alternate ending.