The Big Three, or the Big Two?

Have some MI pride: if the auto industry collapses, Detroit will die. While liberal Californian commentators argue that “Detroit must die,” I am sure they wouldn't be so direct if I wrote a column that San Francisco must die. I am tired of taking the brunt of the nation's recessions, while being criticized or ignored for it. Michigan's long-sitting Congressmen are openly attacked by Nancy Pelosi and her "Coasters." These Coasters then attack our hard working Michigan employees as being greedy and lazy. Even Mitt Romney, son of Michigan Governor Romney, dismissed Michigan and blamed those who were responsible for building the arsenal of democracy. Congressmen, try telling the seventy year old retiree who now has carpal tunnel syndrome from working in the shop that she was just too lazy and greedy to expect her retirement. Our industries are allowed to fail without condolences, but with massive applause.

Now, I will be the first person to admit that these CEOs were stupid for taking separate private planes to the same city and the same meeting. Yet, our Congressmen reminded me of angry children who just wanted to get back at the kid on the playground who has all the toys. Our Senators seemed content to sit back and watch it all happen; after all, they won’t be near Ground Zero here in the Midwest when things get chaotic. They will be content down south, to the east, and to the west ruminating about how great their states are doing, while ignoring this national security issue. It is about time that Michigan tell the rest of the Nation that enough is enough, we won’t be the Nation’s crutch like usual.

Cramer may be a little eccentric in the clip above, but boy does he summarize the importance of this bailout and hit the nail on the head. The financial sector is only half the problem here. The problem is systemic and has been slowly gathering momentum since the late 1970’s. American wages have been either stagnate or declining since, while every other cost has been rising. This problem should not be revelation for most rational human beings, but the majority of economists have been ignoring this problem in favor of promoting the trickle-down theory. This is what happens when intellectuals sell out.

Since the end of WWII, the capitalist economy has been based around consumerism, which requires a strong middle class with the resources to spend, spend, and spend. Yet, as mentioned above, wealth has concentrated and the middle class has shrunk. So who picks up the tab necessary to keep this economy circulating? For the last three decades, we have been acting on a binge, spoiled by credit to keep the bubble from exploding. However, our national economic policy has continued this slow pace toward chaos through deregulation, unfair trade agreements, and the destruction of safety net programs designed to stabilize the country after the Great Depression. Let’s not be partisan, this was the general direction even under democratic leadership.

While I am not saying we should move backwards, I also realize the days of trickle-down are over. The concept is antithetical to consumerism. We want as many people as possible to have disposable cash, decent jobs, and low costs. This sounds like a difficult objective, and it is to the point of being practically impossible. But there is some clarity: the assumption that a small group of concentrated wealth will share that wealth in a capitalist economy has been forever tarnished.

The last thing this country needs is 3 million more unemployed, millions of failed pensions plans for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to pick up, the failure of support industries, the fail of small businesses, and the huge numbers of uninsured that will all result from the collapse of the American auto industry. The market will handle it you say? No, they won’t because no one has disposable cash on hand to start up new companies that are more efficient than the current companies. Bankruptcy? I think everyone is misunderstanding bankruptcy. GM will not cease to exist. However, it might as well. Who will buy cars from a bankrupt company that will not honor its past service and parts guarantees?

Bankruptcy mostly impacts employees. GM can void its union agreements. All those pension benefits are still guaranteed by the United States government through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Yet, there is no way they will be able to live up to those pension agreements. Health care? Gone too. Many will lose jobs working at insurance companies. What about the wages we need to maintain a consumer economy? Definitely gone. Oh, and heavy layoffs is the last thing our economy needs to jump start after the financial crisis. Bankruptcy also voids other contracts forcing the burden on small suppliers. If they tank, the Big Three tank.

Next, stop bad-mouthing the UAW. They cut the salaries of their new-hires by half. They picked up millions of pensions and health insurance costs. They have been cooperating with layoff after layoff. Everyone deserves the right to be compensated for their work. Last time I checked, that's the goal of capitalism. Just because the rest of middle class American has collapsed does not mean the last bastion of the middle class should collapse as well. Again, how does that help our consumer based economy??? I'm not saying we should remove all blame from the shoulders of the UAW, but there are deeper problems at work here that are diminishing GM sales.

GM is a company that has lobbied against the future. They have done everything to prevent the natural progression of history and technology. It was only a matter of time until the rest of the world moved on without them. That being said, this is not a company that is unsalvageable. This is a company that needs a new direction that Congress should prepare to give it one like they did during WWII.

Unfortunately, we won't be getting a bailout for middle class working American under this Congress full of Coasters with their economic blinders on. Hopefully, Obama can wrestle these ego-centric and narrow minded senators into making the right choice.

Keith

So, What Now?

Now that Barack Obama has won election, what happens now?

1) There is an economy to fix!!! As of today, President-elect Obama was negotiating a economic stimulus package centered around a middle class tax cut. For all of you Republicans out there, yes, you did read that right. In addition, watch out for the beginning of an Iraq troop withdrawal with the first month in order to bring the federal budget under control.

2) Executive Orders to be overturned. News was leaked upon Obama's arrival at the White House today that Guantanamo may be one of the first executive order on the chopping block. In addition, be on the look out for stem cell research, especially considering Michigan's passage of Proposal 2.

3) Employee Free Choice Act. Many experts in labor relations never thought this day would come, but the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) may be on its way back to Congress. The AFL-CIO has made the EFCA its number one legislative priority and a Democratic victory significantly increases the liklihood of passage without fear of presidential veto. The EFCA legalizes the certification of bargaining representatives by authorization card, thus, removing employer interference in the election process. In addition, the EFCA forces parties to arbitrate over their first contract negotiations if they fail to reach agreement, and imposes monetary damages for breach of labor law.

4) Healing old wounds. We have been left with ghastly partisan battle scars. This old battleline is an antique in such turbulent times. The War on Terror will no longer wait. The stock market will not wait. Our technological decline will not wait. Already, President Elect Obama is beginning to extend the olive branch to the Republican Party. By playing nice with Joe Lieberman, Obama demonstrates his willingness to work with the otherside of the aisle.

5) Transparency and a new age of presidential communication. Check out the President-elect's new transition website for the public. New technology is opening up our government. Did you know that there is a handbook to ease the transition of federal elected officials? It's like the Federal Government for Dummies. In today's digital age you can communicate with the executive branch and follow the daily news of your president all in one convenient website location. Prepare for a digital fireside chat published to one central website.

Those seems to be the five big themes to look forward to in an Obama transition to the White House. Sounds about right so far. Post your comments.

Keith

On Sarah Palin

John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate got me thinking. More accurately, the overwhelmingly positive response she’s gotten from the conservative base has got me wondering what’s going on over there.

See, Sarah Palin’s resume, as we all know, is pretty thin. Being mayor of a small town in Alaska and then governor of Alaska for a little less than two years does not, one would think, qualify a person for the second-highest office in the United States of America, and yet she’s been received as (I’m not kidding) the second coming of Ronald Regan and, for those slightly more history-inclined, Margaret Thatcher, this according to The Telegraph (UK). 

Why? Margaret Thatcher was a Member of Parliament for around twenty years before she became Prime Minister, and Reagan was governor of California for eight years, which, I would certainly contend, is roughly the equivalent of running a second-tier advanced, industrial democracy. Italy, maybe.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to get a better grip on Sarah Palin’s resume, so I did some looking.

Let me first say that I will be the last person to say that pure “experience” is the only qualifier for high office in this country, as a true-blue Barack Obama supporter I couldn’t be so bold. No, there’s more to it than that. There always has been. Lincoln, after all, was a never-heard-of-him Congressman and State Legislator before he became the greatest President of them all. And I also don’t really intend to suggest that simply governing a lot of people by itself counts as experience; I think Kwame Kilpatrick has shown us that, if nothing else.

But with all that said, we can learn a thing or two from statistics. Follow me, if you will, on a journey of discovery. A journey not unlike that of Captain Willard, going up the river in search of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. What, my friends, has Sarah Palin actually done?

I guess we’ll start in Wasilla. She was first elected to the City Council there in 1992 being reelected in 1995 but only serving one year of her second term, running for Mayor in 1996. She won and served two terms, losing her seat in 2002 because of term limits. All this, and most of the rest, from Wikipedia by the way. As much as that might mean to some that this is just another Liberal hatchet job, I don’t think it’s possible to revise things like the mayoral duties or population of the City of Wasilla enough to turn a qualified candidate into an unqualified one.

With that said, I’m now going to quote Wikipedia’s entry on mayoral duties in the City of Wasilla, which is attributed to this Washington Post article:

The duties of Wasilla's mayor are more circumscribed than those of many other mayors in the United States. The mayor of Wasilla supervises the police department, which was created three years before Palin took office, the public works department, the parks and recreation department, a planning office, a library and a small history museum. Firefighting and schools are handled by the Matanuska-Susitna Borough [county] government, and the state government handles social services and environmental regulation, such as storm water management for building projects. Palin described her duties as mayor to the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman newspaper: "It's not rocket science. It's $6 million and 53 employees."

I would call that statement, made (I would hope) before she knew she was going to be running for Vice President, an honest assessment of her job by a small town mayor. Just how small is Wasilla? According to the 2000 Census, it has a population of 5,469. For comparison’s sake, the municipality in Genesee County that is closest population-wise (using figures from the 2000 Census from here on) is the City of Davison, at 5,536. In fact, of the twenty eight units of local government in Genesee County measured by the US Census Bureau (cities, townships and charter townships) no less than twenty two of them have more people than Wasilla. Humble Gaines Township had almost exactly 1,000 more people in 2000 than Wasilla did. To put it another way, if Wasilla city were picked up and dropped in Genesee County, Michigan it would only be the twenty third largest local government in the whole county.

But of course, it’s unfair of me (and possibly sexist, I’m sure) to put Alaska in the context of Michigan. After all, there are no less than three counties in Michigan (Macomb at 788,149, Oakland at 1,214,361 and Wayne at 2,061,162, and Kent and Genesee are in the ballpark) that have more people than Alaska (683,487) has in the whole state. 

Alaska is, after all, sort of a different animal. It’s not what you might call a “normal” state, with a diversified economy and traditional infrastructure. Alaska is primarily a source of raw materials (oil, natural gas, fish, timber, snow, etc.) and, historically like most places on the periphery of an empire, is home to a large military population. They import the vast majority of their food and manufactured goods from the rest of the country. It very much lives up to its nickname, “The Last Frontier.”

What does that mean for Sarah Palin as governor? In my opinion, she largely hasn’t really been dealing with the sorts of problems that the country generally deals with. Surely, the governor of Alaska faces challenges that many other governors do not and I assure you that I’m not trying to minimize them, but Alaska has nothing resembling a large urban area of the kind familiar to most of the rest of the country. Only the Anchorage metro area, with around 360,000 people, comes close, and that’s still around 80,000 fewer people than even the Flint metro area.

Again, I’m not saying that being governor of Alaska is not necessarily enough qualification for being put first in line to the Presidency. But the simple fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin has not been doing the job very long, not even two years. Frankly, I can’t really see how being mayor of a small town and then governor of a state that bears only superficial resemblance to any other state in the union could qualify a person for the second highest office in America.

Which leads to my conclusion, it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. 

Allow me to explain: according the most recent polls, found here, President Bush’s approval rating is somewhere between 28 and 34%, even though most in the field (including a lot of conservatives) are generally coming to regard his Presidency as a failure. Who are these ~31% of us? They’re the reason the Palin bounce happened. They’re the reason it just doesn’t matter that she’s not qualified in any real sense to run the country. The GOP machine, in my humble opinion, could have pushed any arch-conservative, 40-something, moderately attractive woman out onto the stage in St. Paul and talked itself into believing that she was not only qualified for the job, but that all of the strikes against her were in fact strong pluses. Small town mayor? Small town values! Short career? Washington outsider! Governor of the 47th most populous state in the union for less than two years? Executive experience! Pentecostal conservative with unmarried-yet-pregnant daughter? Family values!

Really?

Really!

It’s not Sarah Palin. It has almost nothing to do with her. It’s the groupthink that pervades the GOP establishment that made this monster. I can’t say it enough: John McCain could have picked a two-term commissioner from some county in West Texas and after one good speech at the convention she, too, would have been the next Reagan or Thatcher as far as the base was concerned.

My hope now is that this won’t last, but frankly I’m getting worried. I’m concerned that the traction she’s getting among the “White Working Class” (which is as we know code for the nightmare combination of [1] low-to-middle income blue collar workers who usually vote Democratic but just really aren’t sure they can vote for a black man and [2] those really, really angry women who were Hillary Clinton supporters) is not going to let up, that they really are buying her story as a rough-hewn, huntin’, fishin’, steel worker marryin’ hockey mom in the way that the Democrats were hoping they’d buy Barack Obama’s story of a boy with an absentee father, raised by good, God-fearing, salt-of-the-Earth grandparents who made his own way in life and has devoted it to helping raise others up. They might have had a better chance with a white man who didn’t have the same middle name as some former Arab dictators we know.

But that didn’t help John Edwards much, I suppose. Lucky for the Democrats.

In any case, only time will tell. It could be that this bump is merely the natural side effect of a female Veep candidate and completely to be expected. Maybe all those Hillary ladies will realize how much they’ve been pandered to, and maybe all of those blue collar whites in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania will realize how little the governor of a state that pays you to live there really understands what it’s like to be poor in their dead-broke, job-losing hometowns.

At the very least, I think we’re going to learn a lot about race and gender attitudes in this country in the next couple of months. Probably in the ugliest way possible.

~Will

Biden VP Choice is Great for Genesee County

If you have been asleep for the past nine hours you are just waking up to this news:




Much will be written on Sen. Biden's foreign policy and national security credentials and how we can help the ticket with certain voting blocs. That really is only important to the national leaders of the party and the campaign.

Here in Genesee County, we are interested in how adding Sen. Biden to the Obama Campaign for Change will help our communities and how he will help us bring around those undecided voters who will ultimately decide this election.

First, Sen. Biden has a personal story that hopefully none of us will ever have to endure but that we can all empathize with. After winning his first of six terms in the Senate at the freakishly young age of 29 (He turned the constitutional minimum age of 30 prior to being sworn in) his bright personal story took a tragic detour. While driving with his family they were in a car accident. Senator Biden's young bride and his infant daughter were unfortunately killed. His two young sons were seriously injured.

Facing a new career in the Senate and an unspeakable family tragedy, then Senator-elect Biden gave careful thought to not entering into the Senate. He eventually did what many people here have done which is, he put his family first. He stayed with his sons in the hospital so much that he was actually sworn in as a US Senator at the hospital with his recovering sons. Facing a new challenge as a single dad of two sons, grieving the loss of his wife and daughter, and a brand new Senator he began a balancing act that many single parents here in Genesee County can relate too. Unlike most Senators who buy residences in DC, he stayed in Delaware to raise his young sons and took a ninety minute Amtrak train into the capital twice a day. This is a practice he has done for the past 36 years.

I detail his story to demonstrate that Sen. Biden has a life story that will resonate with the voters in Flint, Flushing, Burton, Grand Blanc, and every other community in our County. His life story is backed up by a voting record protecting women & children, being a great friend of labor, and a champion for civil rights.

I would hope that Senator Biden will have an opportunity to come to area and share his message of change and his track record of fighting for working class communities like Genesee County. In the mean time, we all need to head down to the Campaign for Change HQ in Flint at Fifth Ave. & Saginaw St. and share his and Sen. Obama's message for them.

The Obama Victory Lap Finds Its Way to Troy, MI

Senator Barack Obama is poised to take the nomination tonight and we Michiganders were given the opportunity to share in the celebration yesterday in Troy, Michigan. The primary has obviously worn Obama down. At the Troy rally, the Senator haggardly walked through the hall to center stage as he slowly opened on his address before the town. Obama was visibly tired as he uncharacteristically hunched over the microphone. This body language is a far-cry from Obama’s usually straight posture. However, Obama demonstrated his ability to appeal to the crowd. From Obama reciprocating an “I love you” to an audience member to the electricity of him handing his microphone to an American Axle employee during the question and answer period, Obama lit the crowd up.

Yet, Obama has been on a victory lap since his rally in Grand Rapids over two weeks ago, which has been characterized by Obama going on the offensive against Senator John McCain. The rally in Troy was no different as Obama used all of his time to separate himself from the Republican Senator. Obama was able to overcome his obvious weary and delivered a pitch perfect, intense, crowd pleasing speech that took the campaign from the trenches of the primary and moved it into the war against John McCain. “Because Senator McCain says we have made, and this is a quote, ‘great progress economically’ these past eight year, and he promises more of the same.” The inevitable comparisons to George W. Bush were a damning scorecard of McCain’s transformation into a far-right winger. This is merely a preview of the direction this campaign will follow as we head into late summer leaving me to wonder how McCain plans to shake the baggage that comes from his party’s nomination.

As Obama closes in on the nomination, the VP rumors are flying. Obama had nothing but praise for Hillary Clinton at his rally in Troy, MI on Monday. He even hinted that they would be working closely come November. Also, there is talk that Clinton is warming up to the position of VP. Will he offer her a spot on the ticket or will the delegates/superdelegates force him to? I would be surprised if Senator Clinton does not receive some cabinet position offer. I would also be greatly surprised if the Clinton campaign headed into the convention without an agenda to promote a runner-up prize that could be enforced by the 17 million people who voted for her. One thing is clear, however, the convention is no longer going to be about the presidential nominee, but about the vice-presidential nominee. Tonight, Obama will likely reach the 2, 118 delegates needed to clinch the nomination and the race once again changes.

Keith