- Search Cartoons
- Comic Archive
-
Payne
Store
Henry Payne RSS
Articles Blog
Missing: The airport security sequester crisis
Posted by hpayne on March 12, 2013
My wait in Detroit Metro’s airport security lines Friday were longer than normal, but that was due to the seasonal spring break migration south — not a change in Transportation Security Administration staffing.
That’s not the sequestered chaos the Obama administration had been hyping.
“If you’re traveling, get to the airport earlier than you otherwise would,” warned Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last week, alleging that major airports had seen lines ballooning to 150-200 percent their normal size. “There’s only so much we can do with personnel.”
Not true. TSA officials confirmed that there have been no cuts in staffing and that lines were no longer than usual at Detroit Metro — or anywhere else. Like White House administration fear mongering over Capitol Hill janitors losing pay and teachers getting pink slips, the airport scare was a cry of wolf.
But Napolitano’s ploy was even more cynical because the TSA runs on fees paid by airline passengers, not general fund taxes.
“They run on dedicated revenue,” said U.S. Rep. Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township, who sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security, which overseas the TSA. Indeed, explains Miller, since Sept. 11, passengers pay significant fees funding everything from customs inspections to TSA pat downs so the agency is self-funded — precisely so airport security is insulated from the unpredictability of the federal budget.
“Our fees have not been cut one penny, yet we’re being threatened with draconian cuts,” consumer advocate Charlie Leocha, director of the Consumer Travel Alliance, tells CBS News.
Every time we step on an airplane, we pay a $2.50 security fee for TSA security. Add aviation security fees and excise taxes paid by airlines and the total — $3.8 billion in 2012 — is enough to fund the budgets of TSA and customs and immigration controls.
“This (budget mess) shouldn’t be our problem,” Leocha said.
The White House, in other words, has not only fibbed about cuts that haven’t happened — but is also willing to scare Americans over airline security that the federal government has carefully isolated to prevent such fears. What kind of public servants engage in this kind of public abuse?
Michigan has seen this movie before.
In 2007, former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s second term also kicked off on a doomsday schedule as the Democratic governor and a Republican Senate played chicken with a government shutdown. Despite high unemployment, Granholm insisted on tax hikes to close the state’s yawning budget deficit rather than reform Michigan’s long-term benefits liabilities.
“People will die,” scared Granholm, if Republicans did not relent on their preferred spending cuts.
Today, Michigan’s perennial budget showdowns are a thing of the past thanks to Gov. Rick Snyder and GOP legislators who eschewed the politics of fear to balance the budget by making hard spending choices. “(The sequester) illustrates what a mess Washington is,” a frustrated Snyder told The Detroit News editorial board. “Do a budget. Do tax reform. Deal with the long-term debt issues. We’ve done all that in Michigan.”
Miller is also incensed by the Obama administration’s tactics. She is concerned about the impact of sequestration defense cuts on Selfridge Air Base in her district — but notes that local Macomb municipalities have had to deal with 30 percent cuts in hard times. Her own committee has had to cut its budget by 4 and 6 percent the last two years. Detroit-based Compuware this month announced a 5 percent cut in operations, closing 16 offices around the world. No drama. No predictions of Armageddon.
Now the White House can’t find 2 percent in the federal budget to cut without alarming airline passengers and teachers?
Kwame me, me, me, me, me
Posted by hpayne on March 11, 2013
In the autumn of 2003, Kwame Kilpatrick swept into our Detroit News editorial offices as we had come to expect – with swagger and purpose. Young, tailored, and charismatic, he instantly took charge of the room. With a beautiful wife and family, he represented a new generation of Detroiters focused – not on refighting the old civil rights wars – but the new challenges of broken schools and broken families.
But that day he gave a preview of the selfish pol that would ultimately self-combust in today’s 24-count racketeering conviction. Robert Thompson, a Metro Detroit construction millionaire-turned philanthropist, had offered the city $200 million in 2003 to build 15 charter schools promising Detroit families more education choice. But city unions resisted the competition. They held protests in Lansing and staged a work stoppage in Detroit. City Council, ever in Big Labor’s pocket, resisted Thompson’s generosity. Now was the moment for the young mayor to send a message that Detroit must stand for its kids, not the politics of the past.
“We don’t need anyone on a white horse riding in to save Detroit,” sneered Kilpatrick to The Detroit News editorial board.
Our hearts sank. Despite having two kids of his own in charter school. Despite a quarter of a billion dollar education gift. Despite a chance to build bridges with a Michigan businessman. . . Kwame chose the easy racial exit.
And so it would be for years to come. With him that day was his Chief-of-Staff Christine Beatty, though we did not yet know that she was his mistress in a text scandal that would send him to jail. Nor did we know of the criminal enterprise he was building with Bobby Ferguson that would rob the city – one of America’s poorest – of millions of dollars. But we did know then of his penchant for excess – for example, the outsized entourage that he liked to bring with him on such media visits.
Ultimately, Kwame Kilpatrick was about Kwame Kilpatrick. Not the people he was elected to serve.
The smart money was on Kilpatrick being acquitted today. The feds RICO case had reached for too much, the experts said. A hung Detroit jury wouldn’t convict one of their own, the pundits opined. But this 8 woman, 4 man, half-minority jury showed that a jury of one’s peers works. Call it Kwame fatigue, but his peers were disgusted at hearing a mayor steal from them – a bankrupt city.
“I thought that he could be a good leader,” said one juror after today’s unanimous verdict, “and sitting here on trial for the past six months I saw a lot that really, really turned my stomach and I couldn’t believe these things were going on.”
Her words echo those of a city that thought Kwame Kilpatrick represented the the future – only to reinforce the caricature of its past.
No Candice, no favorite for Levin seat
Posted by hpayne on March 8, 2013
With Sen. Carl Levin’s retirement, the silly season’s in full swing with speculation on who will run to replace him. But the first question when a major position opens in Michigan these days is:
Will Candice run?
With women the majority of voters in a politically moderate state, the moderate, savvy, plain-spoken, 58-year old, Republican rep from MacombCounty always tops the wish list of potential candidates. In the past Miller has refused to run for governor, for example, reportedly because she likes her seniority and committee assignments as a Macomb rep – and because the job security helps her support her retired husband. Miller didn’t wait long in throwing cold water on suggestions that she should run for senate.
“I will not be a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2014. It is my sincere honor to serve the people of Michigan’s 10th District in the United States House of Representatives and in 2014 it is my intention to seek their support for re-election,” she said in a typically matter-of-fact press release.
Other top GOPers already written off: Schuette (wants to be governor after Nerd), Cox (law firm start-up), and Durant (been there, done that). Gary Peters tops the Dem list. To the starting gates, boys and girls – the Levin seat is wide open.
School tour hostages? Obama jumps the shark
Posted by hpayne on March 8, 2013
“He’s jumped the shark in Iraq,” said a Democrat friend 10 years ago of George Bush’s Iraq invasion. It stuck with me – not just because it was the first time I had heard the phrase, but also because my friend was ultimately right. At the pinnacle of his post-Afghanistan invasion power, Bush’s strained campaign to take us into war in Iraq was overreach. And his undoing.
Barack Obama jumped the shark this week with the sequester.
In all his post-election arrogance and glory, the president played his sequester card too long. He predicted the apocalypse. And when it didn’t happen, he shut schoolchildren out of White House tours. He “jumped the sequester” in Wall Street Journal Kim Strassel’s (one of the best journalists in D.C. – who thought Paul Gigot could be followed by someone of equal talent?) memorable phrase.
“The act was designed to spark outrage against Republicans, yet the sheer pettiness of it instead provided a moment of clarity,” writes Strassel. “Americans might not understand the technicalities of sequester, but this was something else entirely. Was the president actually claiming there was not a single other government item—not one—that could be cut instead of the White House tours?”
Most of the D.C. media – and their late night heroes Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert – were too mesmerized by Rand Paul’s 13-hour drone filibuster sideshow (Obamadrones are going to attack Arab-Americans in Dearborn cafeterias! Seriously, Mr. Paul?) to notice at first. But then a sixth-grade class posted a Facebook video pleading with the president to let them have their tour.
The White House did what? Were they really so heartless as to use kids as hostages in a political battle? They weren’t going to let them tour the people’s house?
By Jay Carney’s press conference Thursday, reporters were peppering the White House spokesman with when-are-you-going-to-stop-beating-the-kids questions.
President Obama, knee deep in polling data showing his disapproval plummeting, already knew the sequester gambit had backfired. After not meeting with Republican leaders since New Years until the day of the sequester deadline, he suddenly scheduled meetings with Republicans for dinner Wednesday and lunch Thursday to try and change the narrative. “In that moment, I think, a lot of Republicans realized that the ground had shifted in this debate. The president overplayed his hand, and he knows it,” a Senate aide told the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.
In this White House, the end is always politics (POTUS hasn’t put up a serious budget in four years), so the bipartisan window-dressing is temporary (the day of the GOP dinner, I got a mass email from Obama operative Stephanie Cutter telling me “$43 million for food programs for seniors” had been cut because Republicans “wouldn’t support closing tax loopholes for millionaires and billionaires — for things like yachts and corporate jets.”). But it’s a sign that something has changed.
The president jumped the shark.
Fat cat Levin, fat cat fighter
Posted by hpayne on March 7, 2013
Carl Levin’s retirement announcement today was delicious.
The millionaire Michigan senator who gifted himself a $7500 tax break to buy his $40,000, 2012 Chevy Volt said his Number One priority in his last two years in office is cleaning up fat cat tax breaks. We’re not making this up.
“(My wife and I) decided that I can best serve my state and nation by concentrating in the next two years on the challenging issues before us,” said Michigan’s longest serving senator on his website today. “Years of bipartisan work by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that I chair have shed light on tax avoidance schemes that are a major drain on our treasury. They add to the tax burden of ordinary Americans who have to pick up the slack and accelerate the economic inequality in our country.”
Present company excluded, of course. Levin meant corporate tax breaks. We’re still not making this up.
But Levin’s prize hypocrisy will forever be his outrage at banks for their part in causing the 2008 financial crisis. In truth, the crisis began with pols like Levin and their forced mandates on banks to lend to poor credit risks. Levin’s part was as a pit-bull supporter (see his 1999 defense here) of the Community Reinvestment Act which he protected from reform even as other federal officials saw disaster coming down the tracks.
Good politics for Levin was bad economics for the country. The bad paper issued by mortgage companies – and mandated by senators like Levin – was passed through Fannie and Freddie Mac then bundled into financial instruments by Wall Street (shame on them too) where they hid as a ticking time bomb under America’s economy.
“This was a man-made crisis, the product of reckless risk-taking,” said Levin in 2008 hearings. “Had tougher regulations been in place earlier, it’d be a heck of a lot less severe.”
He should know.
The One Percent solution to Detroit blight
Posted by hpayne on March 7, 2013
The theme of the 2012 Democratic campaign was that the One Percenters are the problem and government the solution. The reality on the ground is the opposite – were it not for the innovation of Detroit’s successful entrepreneurs where government has failed, Detroit would be even more of a basket case.
From Gilbert to Ilitch to Karmanos, Detroit’s wealthy have been willing downtown back to life. Now comes another billionaire, homebuilder Bill Pulte and his grandson, with a bold, innovative approach to finally tackle the city’s blight crisis – a crisis that effects crime, emergency resources, and property values.
“Government has been wasting money doing blight demolition in a non-concentrated manner,” Bill Pulte Jr. tells me. “We’re bringing free market principles to the problem.”
Indeed, Big Government has been an utter failure in blight intervention – throwing up permitting, paperwork, and cost barriers to getting the job done. Meanwhile, a pilot project by the Pultes cleared a neighborhood at HALF the cost per house of government efforts. Pulte Homes became America’s biggest homebuilder by innovating scaled-production, subdivision housing. Their blight solution? Reverse engineer the process by clearing whole neighborhoods.
Jillian Kay Melchior, a former Detroit News intern now reporting for National Review, has the details:
Unlike previous municipal-led efforts, the Blight Authority is hiring contractors based solely on which bid offers the highest quality and lowest cost, taking union and open-shop bids alike. Whereas previous demolition efforts attacked one building at a time, hopping around the city, the Blight Authority seeks to target whole regions. The goal, Lieutenant Colonel Henderson says, is to maintain around 2,000 structures in the queue at any given time. This concentrated, large-scale approach helps the group save on transportation and complete the project more efficiently. And when they leave, the neighborhood is clean.
The Blight Authority is also taking a whack at the red tape that’s held up previous efforts. It has negotiated with the city and DTE Energy to waive some of the fees and permitting expenses. . . . Finally, where previous efforts took the waste material from a demolition to the landfill 40 to 80 miles away — another expense — the Blight Authority recycles around 80 percent of the rubble.
“I don’t know if government and government administrations are designed to solve problems,” Henderson says. “I think they’re designed to administer regulations and keep the status quo. . . . But an undertaking of this magnitude will always overwhelm a city. That’s why we have [a philanthropic sector] that will come in and assist.”
The White House wants to confiscate more of Detroit’s entrepreneur dollars to feed Washington’s bureaucratic black hole. Detroit is evidence that businessmen’s money is most efficient at home where it can be concentrated on solving problems like Detroit blight.
The Obamaconomy’s private equity boom
Posted by hpayne on March 6, 2013
Democrats claim they’re for Main Street, not Wall Street. Yet only Wall Street has thrived under President Obama’s job-killing policies, freezing unemployment a t 8 percent while Wall Street has soared on corporate earnings. On Tuesday, the bulls were running again to a new high (asObama punished Main Street with his mindless sequester cuts) – but a closer look at the numbers reveals another irony.
The president’s demon private equity industry is making out like bandits in the Obamaconomy.
While the president roasted private equity firms like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital as evildoers, 2012 brought them a mountain of money. Dividend payments alone topped $100 million apiece for Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo executives.
Why? Because while Obama’s regulatory juggernaut flattened job growth, Ben Bernanke’s Fed has tried to keep the economy alive on a drip feed of low interest rates. Cheap money is honey for private equity which has gone on a debt-fueled buying binge.
“It makes financing leveraged buyouts much less costly,” reports Forbes, “and thus potentially much more lucrative.” For example, Carlyle Group private equity poured $6 billion into takeovers in the third quarter alone, bidding up companies like King Collision Repair Centers, TCW Group, and Getty Images.
The buyout feeding frenzy has driven up stock prices and fattened One Percenter paychecks (KKR’s twin CEOs took home a total of $208 million in dividends last year – up 62 percent from 2011).
Viva La Obama!
The Fed’s extraordinary stimulus, however, has many fearing a financial bubble. In a market driven by debt, what happens when interest rates rise again? “Carlyle and its peers have generated healthy earnings because of the amount of leverage they are able to pile on to the companies they acquire,” continues Forbes. “Make that debt more costly, and the tailwind becomes a headwind.”
Uh-oh. Warren Buffett – an Obama booster – worries, saying markets are on a “hair trigger” because ”an awful lot of people (will) want to get out of a lot of assets” when the Fed has reversed direction. And when that happens – hey, just blame George Bush.
More evidence of Obama’s ‘Chicago Way’
Posted by hpayne on March 6, 2013
From Chrysler creditors (see my column today) to liberal Ron Fournier to conservative National Review, the testimonials continue to come corroborating Bob Woodward’s account of a White House culture of intimidation.
Detroit native – and former Washington AP bureau chief – Fournier is a veteran member of Washington’s media establishment. Yet, like Woodward, he is stunned by the Chicago Way tactics of the Obama administration.
After White House spokes-pitbull Jay Carney accused Woodward of being “willfully wrong” in exposing the White House sequestration fib, “I was struck by the fact that Carney’s target has a particular history with White House attacks,” writes Fournier in The National Journal where he is now editor. “I tweeted: ‘Obama White House: Woodward is “willfully wrong.” Huh – what did Nixon White House have to say about Woodward?’”
“My tweet was not intended to compare Nixon to Obama,” continues Fournier, “but rather to compare the attack to the press strategies of all the presidents’ men.” Fournier should know. He recounts how he too was at the receiving end of similarly abusive language from an Obama official – including phrasing that Woodward complained of from Obama official Gene Sperling: “You will regret staking out that claim.”
Goons do have a way with words.
Over at the conservative National Review, Victor Davis Hansen was the headliner Tuesday with a history of Obama’s brass knuckle tactics.
“There are plenty of reasons to assume that Barack Obama has established the tenor and methodology of press relations from the very outset of his administration, characterized by expectations of unfailing support, coupled with a general vindictiveness toward his few critics among the press corps,” writes Hansen who then goes on to catalog the Obama team’s Nixonian habit of threatening liberal columnist Lanny Davis, leaking opponents’ divorce records, making enemies lists, warning state reps that they would be punished if they criticized the stimulus, and so on.
While much of the D.C. press – see the ever-loyal New York Times – has been quick to throw Woodward under the bus, others have been shaken by the attack on someone of his stature. “It’s a little embarrassing none of the rest of us was as aggressive as he was,” writes liberal Time magazine’s Mark Halperin.
Much of that lapdog journalism is ideological – but it is also the effect of intimidation. And as the lawyer for Chrysler’s bondholders, Tom Lauria says, there is nothing more threatening than Washington’s most powerful office.
The Green Church of Washington
Posted by hpayne on March 5, 2013
The governing class’s obsession with Green religion can seem eccentric were its public policy intentions not so greedy.
This winter – like all winters – is the most brutal on the human condition as the homeless scramble for refuge from frostbite, sudden snow squalls tragically blind drivers, and early freezes cost fruit farmers millions in lost revenue. Yet there was President Obama – he of the gas-guzzling limo fleet and Air Force One – introducing his climate warriors, EPA nominee Gina McCarthy and Energy Dept. nominee Ernest Moniz, in the White House Monday.“They’re going to be making sure,” said the president, that “we’re doing everything we can to combat the threat of climate change.” Outside the coal-heated confines of the East Room, D.C. was shivering in unseasonably cool , 30-something temps.
At a time of 8 percent unemployment, falling incomes, and inner city crime mayhem, claiming dominion over the global thermostat is an odd priority. But then politicians have much to gain if they can regulate carbon dioxide – the essential emission of industrial society. So, like the political necessity of invoking God (whether a churchgoer or not), pols reflexively memorize the Green catechisms.
My Politics colleague Dale Hansen recently compared climate science denial to the denial of evolution. But in almost 30 years of covering environmental issues, I find the better analogy to climate change is creationism. It is faith, not science.
How else to explain the change in “scientific ” terminology in just 40 years? During the frigid winters of the 1970′s, a “consensus” of scientists claimed global cooling threatened the world (my favorite solution: “melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot” – Newsweek, 1975). Just 20 years later , the droughts of the late ’80s inspired a “consensus” on man-made global warming. As that fever cooled, the “consensus” moved to climate change – that any weather extreme is caused by industrial emissions.
Like pagan gods that change depending on unexplained threats to the tribe, the definition of global warming shifts with the political winds. There has never been a consensus on climate (the latest poll of scientists findsonly 36 percent believe in man-made climate catastrophe), other than that we are in a warming period after the Little Ice Age of the mid-1800s – and that the Kyoto international treaty’s draconian emissions cuts, even if achieved, would have no effect on temperature trends. Climategate exploded global cooling-warming-change science in 2009 – revealing that top scientists like Michael Mann had doctored their research, exposing them as the carnival snake-oil salesmen (a lucrative trade that bags millions in government research dollars) that they are.
Yet the media persists in promoting their wares. There was USA Today’s hysterical, front page report last week scaremongering over individual weather events and citing Al Gore’s favorite huckster, James Hansen, as a “leading climate scientist” when Hansen was discredited years ago for advocating vandalism against coal plants and comparing climate change to the Holocaust.
We need a government class that protects the needy – not the phantom victims of Green bogeymen.
The Beltway bubble’s clueless Romney-for-EM punditry
Posted by hpayne on March 4, 2013
This just in from Planet Washington: Mitt Romney ought to be Detroit’s emergency manager.
That wisdom, dispensed by pundits Charles Lane of The Washington Post and David Weigel of Slate show why the D.C. Beltway deserves its reputation as a bubble divorced from the rest of America. This half-baked half-wittery seemed to emerge from the Romney is a Michiganian School of Analysis – that is, since Romney is from Michigan, then he will win Michigan (wrong). Similarly, just because Romney hails from Metro Detroit doesn’t mean he’s the best EM for the City of Detroit.
“His hometown of Detroit, right now, has just been put into state receivership or it’s about to be,” said Lane mindlessly. “I wonder if there is no role for him in the restructuring of Detroit. He’d be the perfect person to do it. He has got the expertise, he’s a hometown guy, and he is a kind of a political free agent at this point.”
“Romney’s ties to the city are tighter than most city emergency managers, roving technocrats who do a few years at a time in troubled metro governments,” added Weigel.
What nonsense.
To begin with, Romney’s native Bloomfield Hills is a long way from Detroit, though it may not look that way from the beltway. And anyone following the EM tale knows that Governor Snyder has been careful to build bridges to Detroit leadership. His appointment as EM of Detroit Public Schools, for example, was Roy Roberts – a high-ranking black executive with GM. His Detroit EM is likely to be a similarly nuanced choice. Why would Snyder roil Detroit’s Democratic political waters with an unpopular Republican who tried to unseat Barack Obama?
But with the big microphones of the MSM’s Washington-centric coverage, such drivel quickly becomes American political currency. So naturally, Snyder had to respond to these beltway emissions first thing Monday morning. No, Snyder predictably told the Paul W. Smith radio show, Romney is not a candidate for EM.
Under Obama, Wall Street thrives, Main Street dives
Posted by hpayne on March 2, 2013
From Barack Obama to Virg Bernero to Big Labor to Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic class war mantra has been that their party looks out for Main Street, not Wall Street.
But the data betray that message. Take this week’s headline stories.
“The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 35.17 points to 14089 to notch its third-highest close of all time,” reported The Wall Street Journal Friday. Meanwhile, “Americans saw their income drop so dramatically in January that it marked the deepest one-month decline in 20 years,” reported CNN Money.
Why? While demon Wall Street has been buoyed by corporate cost efficiencies and the return of the banking sector to health (more irony since banks are Democrat Enemy #1), business growth has suffered under President Obama’s anti-business agenda – from jobs-killing coal regulations to Obamacare mandates chilling new hires.
This disconnect between Democratic rhetoric and reality is nothing new. Since Obama entered the Oval Office, household income has dropped$4,019 in real dollars – down $2,544 since the recession ended in 2009, or nearly 5 percent of Americans’ income.
So while Democrats claim to defend Main Street, the only numbers they can crow about belong to Wall Street.
Woodward, Chrysler, and the Chicago Way
Posted by hpayne on March 1, 2013
Obama White House intimidation of writers like Bob Woodward over sequestration will come as no surprise to Detroit, where the administration’s bullying tactics were legend in the auto bailouts of GM and Chrysler.
Call it the Chicago Way.
I reported for National Review – and Frank Beckmann for his radio show – in 2009 of White House Auto Task Force intimidation of Wall Street bondholders who resisted the administration’s illegal efforts to move its Big Labor allies to the front of the line ahead of secured debt holders.
“One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight,” lawyer Tom Lauria, representing Perella Weindbergtold Beckmann in March, 2009. Lauria later disclosed that the brass knuckles belonged to Auto Task Force leader Steve Rattner.
Take da deal or we break yer legs.
As with Woodward, this White House does not treat kindly those that refuse to give the president his way. In the case of Wall Street bondholders, presidential intervention from a man who controls the IRS and SEC is intimidation enough as Obama unloaded on them publicly, accusing them of being “speculators” out to destroy an American industrial icon.
Lauria’s account of private pressure also conveyed White House confidence in its lapdog press corps (“the full force of the White House press corps”) to press the president’s agenda.
Thanks to White House tactics, the UAW ultimately made out like a bandit in the Chrysler deal, winning 55 percent of the company while bondholders were forced to take 29 cents on the dollar – gutting the savings of their police and teacher cpensions clients.
Business Insider reported that its “sources, who represent creditors to Chrysler, say they were taken aback by the hardball tactics that the Obama administration employed. One person described the administration as the most shocking ‘end justifies the means’ group they have ever encountered. . . . Both were voters for Obama in the last election.”
The president campaigned on “hope.” He’s governed on “the ends justifies the means.”
Duggan: ‘My car insurance doubled’
Posted by hpayne on February 28, 2013
Mike Duggan has volunteered to save Detroit’s listing ship.
We figured that was going to happen as early as a year ago when the ex-DMC CEO bought a house in Detroit’s upscale Palmer Woods neighborhood. So the mayoral candidate has seen Detroit from the ground floor. Making the media rounds this week, Duggan visited The Detroit News editorial board and we asked him what the biggest shock was when he moved into the city.
“The doubling of my car insurance,” said Duggan without hesitation. He now pays $6000 a year on three cars – two Ford sedans and a PT Cruiser – instead of $3000 when he lived nearby in the ‘burbs. Call it the Detroit insurance tax.
Actually, that’s a bargain in one of the nation’s auto theft capitals. Most Detroiters pay nearly three times the state average in auto insurance. “My wife will be happy to hear it could be worse,” added Duggan.
The would-be mayor also allowed that its’ hard to find a movie theater in the city (the RenCen cineplex is all the 138 square mile city has to offer), a hardware store, or a restaurant outside of downtown. Welcome to Detroit – which is why the middle class has disappeared.
Duggan’s experience will help inform him of Detroit’s challenges. As will city council members living in districts – instead of at large. Finally.
Joe Biden’s black history hypocrisy
Posted by hpayne on February 28, 2013
Wednesday night, Joe Biden hosted a glitzy reception at the vice president’s residence celebrating Black History Month.
Make that Liberal Black History Month.
This is the same Joe Biden who as a chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee 22 years ago presided over the public humiliation of black Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas (which this writer covered) – a process so racist that Thomas called out Biden’s committee for staging a “high-tech lynching.”
But such historical details were conveniently forgotten last night as Biden dined on Peking Duck Crepes and preened before a who’s-who list of Washington’s liberal black establishment. Democratic Rep. John Lewis of the Congressional Black Caucus hailed Biden as “tireless warrior” and a “fighter” for civil rights. Biden aw-shucks’d his way through his own remarks lamenting that he didn’t participate in civil rights marches as a kid and then telling his black guests that “I love you guys.”
Too bad the love doesn’t extend to Justice Thomas who was not in attendance.
Thomas’s remarkable life story brought him from dirt-poor poverty in the segregated south of Pin Point, Georgia to Yale Law School, to Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to Biden’s committee in 1991 as a nominee to the Supreme Court. But Biden voted against Thomas’s nomination after his committee leaked unsubstantiated claims that Thomas was a sexual predator and porn addict (how’s that for black male stereotyping?), then put him on public trial by hearsay that featured testimony by Anita Hill, a feminist academic once in Thomas’s employ who vehemently opposed the nominee’s legal views.
“This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace,” said Thomas, seething with rage in his statement before Biden’s mob. “And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.” (Video here)
Despite Biden’s efforts, Thomas narrowly won a vote of the full Senate to become only the second black man on the U.S. Supreme Court. Thank you, Vice President Biden, for your contribution to black history.
The proud presidential legacy of Rosa Parks
Posted by hpayne on February 27, 2013
If Barack Obama’s promised hope to be a national unifier was an illusion, his personal significance to this country can never be underestimated. For all of his failings as a leader, Obama’s re-election re-enforced America’s pride in their first black president.
That history was on display in Washington today as Obama unveiled Rosa Parks’ statue.
The first black president honored the first black woman to gain a full-length statue in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall – 58 years after she refused to yield her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus (the bus is on display here in the Henry Ford museum). That’s a powerful and enduring moment for a nation that has bulldozed its segregated past in two generations.
“Rosa Parks’s singular act of disobedience launched a movement,” said Obama. “The tired feet of those who walked the dusty roads of Montgomery helped a nation see that to which it had once been blind. It is because of these men and women that I stand here today. It is because of them that our children grow up in a land more free and more fair; a land truer to its founding creed.”
Powerful stuff. The stuff American dreams are made of.
Washington planting seeds for Detroit-like debt crisis
Posted by hpayne on February 27, 2013
A Detroit Financial Review Team has delivered the grim news that Detroit’s long-term liabilities are unsustainable and that the city’s $14 billion debt
has delivered it to bankruptcy’s doorstep. With 30 percent of Detroit’s budget devoted to fixed costs like paying off long-term pension liabilities, Michigan’s largest metropolis has arrived at a cash crisis that threatens basic services. Washington’s own long-term liabilities bear a remarkable similarity to Motown with non-discretionary federal spending on entitlements and interest payments on $16 trillion in debt eating up nearly 30 percent of the budget.
So what might a federal financial review team say about Washington’s current fiscal structure? Actually, Washington got a similar review — if largely unreported in the media — just this January from the General Accounting Office. The verdict?
“Absent policy changes,” writes the GAO, “the federal government continues to face an unsustainable fiscal path. Under current policy (U.S. debt is) projected to grow to 78 percent in 2022, 145 percent in 2042, and 395 percent in 2087.”
Unsustainable. Detroit, meet Washington.
Like Motown decades ago, Washington is planting the seeds for Greece-like insolvency in the future. Yet while Detroit’s top pol, Dave Bing, at least recognizes his city’s disease, President Barack Obama blithely ignores the cliff on the horizon, scaremongering that a mere 2 percent sequester cut in federal fat would devastate the economy, starve children, create chaos in our airports and leave America defenseless.
The president’s denial is irresponsible in light of the GAO’s warnings.
America’s debt-to-GDP ratio in 2012 was a stunning 73 percent, a post-World War II record, and closing in on the Eurozone average of 88 percent. That is still well shy of Greece’s on-the-verge-of-default 160 percent, but Greece and Detroit are reminders of the dangers of kicking the can down the road. Currently, U.S. interest on its debt consumes “only” 6 percent of the budget (at $220 billion a year, that amounts to one-third of the defense budget) thanks to low interest rates. But, the GAO warns, the longer Washington ignores its spending crisis the higher that cost will go.
Indeed, in just 30 years, the U.S. will face debt-to-GDP ratios like Detroit/Greece, which means that U.S. debt will likely incur corresponding debt downgrades. Short-term debt in Greece today costs a stunning 23 percent in interest. In Detroit, few are willing to loan to the city at all. Who will loan the U.S. money in 2045?
“We’ll be spending over $1 trillion a year on interest by 2020. That’s $1 trillion we can’t spend to educate our kids or to replace our badly worn-out infrastructure,” says Erskine Bowles, Democratic co-chair of the deficit-reduction commission the president commissioned — and now ignores.
How deep is Washington’s hole? The GAO reports that just sustaining our current debt-to-GDP ratio will require that the government average surpluses equal to 2.7 percent of GDP over each of the next 75 years. To put that in perspective, the federal government has only run surpluses in four years — 1998-2001 — since 1970. This year, the deficit is 7 percent of GDP, down from record post-WW2 levels of 10 percent in 2010.
“This 75-year fiscal gap has important implications for the well-being of future generations,” warns the GAO in its typically sterile prose. “It is estimated that the magnitude of reforms necessary to close the 75-year fiscal gap increases by nearly 20 percent if action is delayed by 10 years and for more than 50 percent if action is delayed 20 years.”
Detroiters may wonder whyits leadership put the city on its current, unsustainablepath. In putting politics over fiscal sanity, the current White House is giving them a good example.
Obama: ‘Imagine if a CEO ran his business this way’
Posted by hpayne on February 25, 2013
With just four days before a federal meat cleaver is due to bring $85 billion in cuts that Democrats claim will cause untold damage to lives, children, and the economy . . . President Obama was on the campaign trial.
Is this how serious CEOs manage when threats loom? No, but Barack Obama is not a serious manager. He is a serious pol.
Faced with such economic calamity, an executive would be huddling with his board, his top managers, and trying to work out a fixable solution. Obama, on the other hand, hadn’t spoken “in weeks to top Republicans in Congress” until a single phone call last week. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the president’s brief “outreach was Obama’s first since New Year’s Eve.”
Today, Obama was back on the trail in Virginia, predicting catastrophe and bashing the GOPers he should be home negotiating with. If it looks like the president wants to inflict pain on the American people, you would be right. Pain means gain for this president and an opportunity to advance his 2014 mid-term campaign theme that Republicans cause it.
The president’s remarks in Newport News Shipbuilding were breathtaking in their dishonesty.
“Keep in mind, nobody is asking (Republicans) to raise income tax rates,” said the president one month after Republicans agreed to raise tax rates. “All we’re asking is to consider closing tax loopholes and deductions that the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, said he was willing to do just a few months ago.”
But, despite GOP offers at tax reform, Obama has refused to close those loopholes – indeed, his tax breaks for rich corporations in last month’s cliff deal were worth billions.
“We’ve got to . . . to stop having these crises manufactured every month,” said the president who is manufacturing these crises every month. “I mean, think about if (Newport News CEO) Mike Peters ran his business this way.”
Yes, imagine if Peters ran his business like Barack Obama. He’d be fired.
Media Chicken Little cries sequester
Posted by hpayne on February 24, 2013
For years Americans have read about billions in government waste like the pork barrel Bridge to Nowhere, taxpayer-funded green companies like Solyndra and Ener1, the V-22 Osprey, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Medicare reimbursement fraud, university grants to fund the development of robo-squirrels, and so on.
Yet as Washington faces a 2 percent of federal spending sequester on March 1, President Obama and his media disciples tell us they can’t find a single program to cut that won’t cripple America.
Politicians do what politicians do to retain power, and President Obama is all politician. But the sequester freak-out is also about a partisan American media that can’t see past White House press releases to the reams of investigative work detailing the federal government’s epic waste.
Take the New York Times and Detroit Free Press newspapers on your doorstep Sunday warning of Armageddon if Washington cuts a mere $85 billion from its $3.6 trillion budget. Freep Washington bureau reporter Todd Spangler wails that military cutbacks will throw out of work “people with disabilities or other barriers to employment (who operate) call centers for the State Department or sewing cold-weather gear for American soldiers” (remember when military spending was busting the budget?), that harbors won’t get dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers (remember the Corps’ program waste in Iraq?), that the EPA won’t be able to certify emissions standards (remember Washington’s $3 billion in aid to foreign countries to fight global warming?), and on and on. This journalism is cynically calculated to scare readers (the so-called Washington Monument method in which pols protect their pet special interest boondoggles by threatening to maximize voter pain by shutting down public tourist icons).
It is lazy reporting.
And it is a disservice to Americans whose president has put this country in record debt the last four years, piled up historic 10-percent-of-GDP deficits in peacetime, and provoked a first-ever downgrade in U.S. bonds. More taxes have only fed the addiction with Congress spending $1.17 for every $1 of new revenue according to a Joint Economic Committee study for Congress. NONE of this information is mentioned in the Freep-NYT Chicken Little stories.
The sequester is an opportunity, not a panic. It is a chance to cut fat from an out-of-control Washington spending diet.
Payne: Obama’s non-union, right-to-work manufacturing model
Posted by hpayne on February 19, 2013
Obama visits non-union Linamar power-train plant in North Carolina. (AP Photo)
On the eve of the Michigan Legislature’s historic right-to-work vote last December, President Obama came to a unionized Michigan diesel power-train plant to denounce right-to-work laws as a threat to America’s middle class that will “take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions.”
Last Wednesday, the same president made a non-union, diesel power-train plant in right-to-work North Carolina the first stop in his post-State of the Union tour touting American manufacturing. Not surprisingly, the White House made no mention of these inconvenient facts.
Indeed, the Canadian-owned Linamar facility outside of Asheville contradicts the entire industrial policy that Obama has made the cornerstone of his second term.
“I believe we attract new jobs to America by investing in new sources of energy and new infrastructure and the next generation of high-wage, high-tech American manufacturing,” said the president, echoing his State of the Union themes to 160 workers. “And that’s why I wanted to come down here to Asheville, because there’s a good story to tell here.”
But Linamar didn’t open in an abandoned Volvo plant two years ago because of Obama’s policies. It opened here because North Carolina is a right-to-work state with low energy costs driven by traditional fuels like coal, nuclear, and natural gas.
That is, North Carolina is leading America’s resurgence in manufacturing for reasons that Obama and his union and green allies vehemently oppose. “The U.S. will have an export cost advantage of 5-25 percent” over its competitors, concluded Boston Consulting Group last year. “Among the biggest drivers of this advantage will be the costs of labor, natural gas, and electricity.”
Take right to work. Union-puppet Obama has not only fought this national trend in Michigan, but his National Labor Relations Board has opposed firms like Boeing from moving to right-to-work southern states. Linamar’s biggest customer is North Carolina-based, Big Labor-enemy #1 Caterpillar Corp. which has brought a steady parade of manufacturing jobs to the right-to-work south (part of a “southern strategy” that unions loath) — and away from Obama’s Big Labor Illinois. That should be a lesson not only to Washington but also to Michiganians who shy from marketing the advantages of their new right-to-work status.
“Right to work is something we talk about in our marketing,” says Ben Teague, a spokesman for the Asheville Chamber of Commerce who says both Caterpillar and Linamark find North Carolina’s labor climate attractive. “We feel it is a competitive edge. It means you get workers that want to work at a reasonable wage.”
The White House ignores this reality.
“Caterpillar, which I know you guys supply, they’re bringing jobs back from Japan,” the president told the Linamark crowd. “We’re seeing this trend of what we call insourcing, not just outsourcing. And the reason is because America has got outstanding workers.”
Another big factor driving insourcing is that manufacturing firms are fleeing Obama’s green, European energy model of high-cost alternatives for America’s more competitive energy prices driven by its vast reserves of coal and natural gas.
North Carolina, which gets over half its electricity from coal and another 34 percent from nuclear, has 8.6 cents per kilowatt hour electricity costs, which are more than four times cheaper than Germany. Michigan’s cost is 10.6 cents/kWh).
The president joked at his Asheville plant stop that he and Michelle may want to retire one day to its Smoky Mountain beauty. At least he understands North Carolina’s tourism attraction. But better understanding North Carolina’s attraction to industry is crucial for this country’s manufacturing future.
King Obama’s warming edict
Posted by hpayne on February 13, 2013
President Obama’s court jester, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, has taken lately to mocking opponents for claiming Obama is a “dictator.”
His liege isn’t making it any easier on him.
Consider this line from Tuesday’s State of the Union address:
I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change. . . . But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution.
Executive edicts that bypass the will of the legislature? Not good. The president has already been slapped for unconstitutional Labor Board recess appointments – and Appalachia is riddled with the jobs victims of his EPA greenhouse gas edicts. Obama is a long way from King George – but surely Stewart can find something there to satirize?