Archive for December, 2011

Jake Davison

While researching the history of the City of Detroit’s financial crisis, I pulled one of my all-time favorite books off the shelf. “Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Coleman Young” is an absolute must read for anyone who wants to understand how Detroit got to where it is.

It’s an especially good book for Republicans who accept at face value the idea that all of Detroit’s problems were brought upon itself. Reading this book at the politically impressionable age of 18 made me a much more thoughtful person when discussing Detroit with my fellow white, suburban Republicans.

For instance, did you know that the best working and middle-class black neighborhoods in Detroit were bulldozed in the 1950’s in order to make way for interstates? The Black Bottom neighborhood where Young grew-up in the 1920s and ’30s was technically poor, but was one of the best places an African-American could live at the time. It is now entombed under I-75.

And did you know that the deindustrialization of the city was, to an important extent, done on purpose? It’s true. Early in the Cold War, the federal government decided that having half of the country’s auto manufacturing capacity (and therefore tank and plane capacity) inside the blast radius of a single Soviet nuclear weapon was untenable. Federal policy, including the interstate highway system, encouraged Detroit plants to be removed to other parts of the state and out of the state entirely.

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Gregory D. Lee

Despite the obvious advantages unmanned drones bring to local police and sheriff’s departments, the ACLU and other so-called civil-rights advocates worry unnecessarily that the new technology could be used to “pry into citizens’ lives.”

Even before a single incident of law enforcement abuse of the drones is documented, liberal worry-warts are condemning the devices. They scoff at police agencies who use them as “boys and their toys.” What defense attorneys fear is the challenge of coming up with a plausible defense for their clients who are caught by a drone’s video camera of them committing the crime or fleeing from the police.

Police regard the new technology as a more efficient and cost-effective way to search for lost hikers, locate fleeing felons or conduct surveillance on known or suspected criminals. Drones provide a tactical advantage when faced with high-risk situations. Contrary to the ACLU’s notion, police do not conduct surveillance simply because they can. They conduct surveillance to solve or prevent crimes.

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Robert Laurie

Throughout the past 45 years, there has been one constant in Detroit. Denial.

It began as the signature platform of the Coleman Young administration, and went on to survive the eras of Young, Archer and Kilpatrick. It was still in full force when Mayor Bing took office in 2009, and it looked as though it might be preserved, intact, for whoever follows him. Fortunately, 2011 was different. This was the year that Detroit hit financial rock-bottom. As a result, something happened in Detroit that hasn’t occurred since the aftermath of the summer of 1967.

In an uncharacteristic bout of introspection, 2011 saw the City of Detroit forced to abandon its steadfastly maintained state of denial.

On Wednesday, the Michigan Treasury Department released the results of its initial investigation into Detroit’s finances. There was no sugar-coating the findings. According to the report, Motown holds long-term debt of $12 billion dollars – which is $2 billion more than the city had previously admitted.

The report is just the latest in a long string of very public admissions, each of which has become part of a very grim mosaic. Taken as a whole, it’s become impossible to ignore. Motown’s problems are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the light. The city is being compelled to admit that it needs outside help in the form of an Emergency Financial Manager.

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Dan Calabrese

When Gov. Snyder announced in February that he would be ending film incentives in their current form, inspiring shrieks of indignation from Mitch Albom and others who understand nothing about where jobs come from, he said he would replace the $100 million annual program with a $25 million fund that could be used to subsidize certain projects that would qualify.

So it’s not huge news that he did so yesterday. The new film incentive program authorizes the Michigan Film Office to provide subsidies for film projects that spend at least $100,000 in Michigan and create a certain number of jobs.

At the same time, Snyder authorized the Michigan Economic Growth Authority to negotiate incentives for the development of advanced battery facilities. The incentives are more limited than what the state used to bestow upon this favored industry, and are tied to more stringent job-creation requirements, but like the film incentives, the battery industry giveaways still have a pulse.

Sigh.

I guess this just means that it’s almost impossible to end government meddling in the economy entirely. I suspect that would have been Snyder’s preference, but politicians (even conservative Republicans with their oh-so-principled devotion to the free market) love to be able to say they did something to create jobs.

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David Karki

Washington these days is like a bad sequel to the movie “Groundhog Day,” in which the same events repeat themselves over and over and over again. In this case, it means the quarterly expiration of the continuing resolutions on which the federal government has been operating because scumbag Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hasn’t even tried to pass a budget in nearly 3 years!

This expiration is naturally met with the demagogic screams and wails of the Democrats, bemoaning the supposed death and destruction that mean, evil Republicans are visiting upon the innocent by not giving in to them. And this being the week before Christmas, I’m sure the Grinch comparisons are being hurled with glee.

Heck, Senator Barbara Boxer, one of the stupidest of the hundred arrogant gasbags who make up that loathsome body, went so far as to accuse the GOP of mass murder and even put a figure on it, declaring that exactly 8,100 people would DIE if the Democrats didn’t get their way!

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James Melton

Jamie Dimon wants you to know that he’s not a bad guy and wishes people would stop picking on him and people like him.

Speaking at an investors’ conference in New York recently, Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said: “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it. Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

You’re right, Mr. Dimon, you don’t understand it. If you really think the rise of Occupy Wall Street and the rest of the “99 percent movement” is about demonizing individuals or denigrating the notion of success, then you really are missing the point.

The angst we see in the country today isn’t so much about “hatin’ the playas,” it’s about “hatin’ the game.” By “game,” I don’t mean capitalism, but the way capitalism has been used in recent years to further enrich people who were already wealthy, while the incomes of those in the middle class have stagnated or declined in real (after-inflation) terms. We see that not only in the Occupy movement, but in the Tea Party as well.

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Brett Noel

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Large version for newspaper publication.

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Eric Baerren

The scorn for the legislation sitting on the desk of Gov. Rick Snyder that bans domestic partner benefits among public employees can now be described as universal. Everyone, it seems, from economic development folks to the universities to the Detroit News now believes the governor ought to veto that rotten pig of a bill.

But the question of whether Snyder will veto the bill is less important than how we got to this point.

It is evident in the split opinion within the Legislature whether the law applies to university employees. In other words, the Legislature produced a bill the ramifications of which it doesn’t actually understand. For that reason alone, it is veto worthy. But why would the Legislature produce something it didn’t understand?

Simple. The Legislature is incompetent – perhaps the most incompetent Legislature this state has ever seen, and certainly within living memory. To understand the meaning of that, you have to remember that within the last five years state government has gone into short, symbolic shutdowns because the Legislature couldn’t pass a budget on time.

There is incompetence in being able to do your basic job, and there is incompetence in doing your job without having the first idea of what you’re doing. This Legislature fits into that second description.

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Dan Calabrese

It’s hard to overstate the evil that spewed forth from the now-departed monster Kim Jong Il – a man so loathsome he thought nothing of whisking away his subjects for a lifetime of hard labor and torment at the very mention of any dissent.

And there was much from which to dissent during his 20-year reign of terror in North Korea, where his only real objectives as a “leader” were to keep his people in the dark (which he achieved nicely both literally and intellectually) while continuing to extort economic assistance out of his communist Chinese patrons and gullible western leaders who somehow thought they could buy his acquiescence on matters such as nuclear nonproliferation or basic adherence to human rights.

What a shame it is that Kim died on this particular weekend (not that he died at all – that is a glorious development) when the world’s attention belongs rightly on the passing of a great man like Vaclav Havel, an international hero of democracy as my colleague Jocelyn Benson said so well earlier this morning.

Then again, the demise of the tyrant Kim reminds us of why the world needs heroes like Havel. It’s the advocates of freedom and liberty who show true courage, especially in places that are not inherently friendly to these ideals.

It required no courage, no character, no commitment to be Kim Jong Il. He did not have to earn his mantle of leadership. Once upon it, he did not have to lead. He did not have to work for the consent of the governed. He did not have to level with his people about what he was doing, why he was doing it or what effect it would have on them.

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Jocelyn Benson

Twenty-two years ago this month, the parliament of Czechoslovakia elected Vaclav Havel president. His death on Sunday marks the loss of one of the world’s most strident and poetic voices for democracy.

Havel demonstrated true political courage throughout his service as president – first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic after the nation split.  And as the leader of the country’s Velvet Revolution in 1989 – his greatest legacy – he fought to give “Power to the Powerless,” toppling the communist regime that had ruled his people behind the Iron Curtain for more than 40 years.

Havel was a true public servant. Having no ambition for a career in politics, he sought to empower his fellow citizens through words that communicated the moral imperative of freedom. A self-taught playwright, Havel was denied the education he should have enjoyed. But he worked at his craft, usually having to simultaneously work a variety of odd jobs to make a living. Eventually, his work gained him notoriety and gave him a platform to advocate for basic human rights and freedoms.

He was a fighter dedicated to shining a light on injustice.  His plays were banned for decades. After he published Charter 77, a manifesto calling on Czechoslovakia’s communist regime to adhere to international standards of human rights, he was jailed three times.

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