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Payne: Wealthy Peters embraces Occupy Detroit ( The Michigan View 11.06.11)
Posted by hpayne on November 6, 2011
Grand Circus Park, Detroit – Michigan Congressman Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Hills, a millionaire representative of Michigan’s richest city and a major benefactor of corporate campaign money, became the first major politician to embrace the anti-corporate Occupy Detroit movement as he joined the 99 Percenters for a rally at Grand Circus Park Sunday.
Democrats have been noticeably shy about Occupy movement’s extreme rhetoric and occasional violence – despite Barack Obama’s sympathy with the movement. Wearing a “We are the 99 Percent” button, Peters (net worth: $1.9 million) embrace is notable as he is a wealthy former financial manager for Merrill Lynch who has styled himself as a moderate while representing Michigan’s 9th District – home to Oakland, the 60th richest county in America.
Occupy Detroit has used its public park camp to march on the downtown offices of Bank of America and DTE Energy, major campaign contributors of Peters. Both companies are campaign donors to the congressman. Last election year, DTE Energy gave $13,750 to Peters campaign while the Oakland rep has raked in $5000 from BoA this year.
Nevertheless, Peters denounced the financial industry and said he has been an Occupy Wall Street supporter “since the get-go.”
“I can’t speak for others,” he said when asked by The Michigan View why his fellow Democrats were absent, “but (the Occupiers) speak for a broad segment of our population. This is something we need to support.”
Peters seemed unaware of Occupy Detroit’s broad-brush condemnation of all corporations, and defined the movement as anti-Wall Street bailout. “The autos were a victim of Wall Street,” he said, defending GM’s $50 billion own federal handout. “We had to give them the resources necessary to prevent collapse.”
Peters Occupy appearance is part of the congressman’s sharp move left since his election in 2010.
Facing stiff GOP opposition, Peters distanced himself from President Obama’s $50 billion summer stimulus, saying that “the right way to spur immediate job growth is through supporting private sector growth and investment, not pumping more money into an already backlogged list of transportation projects. ” He also supported extending tax cuts for wealthy Americans.
Fast forward 12 months, and Peters is now a strong supporter of Obama’s $450 billion stimulus pouring money into the same infrastructure programs and “paying for it” with a tax hike on the rich.
With a president making class warfare his 2012 campaign theme, reps like Peters are embracing the party’s fringe activists and Big labor puppeteers that could alienate moderate voters. Indeed, Peters appearance Sunday seemed forced by the UAW which has rallied behind the 99 Percenters – even as union members have seen larger income gains in recent years than average Michiganians.
Green steel? ( The Michigan View 10.28.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 28, 2011
Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars designated for green manufacturing are being spent on one of America’s most carbon-intensive heavy industries: Big Steel.
The Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan is an icon of old American manufacturing – the steel mill that anchors the legendary Ford Rouge complex that has produced everything from Model As to WW2 airplanes to today’s F-150 pickup. It is now a symbol of how President Obama’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program to build earth-friendly electric cars has run amok: the Energy Department has approved a $730 million subsidy for the Rouge mill (now owned by Russia’s Severstal) to produce steel.
Huh?
The logic is that the steel will find its way into the more fuel-efficient cars that Obama has mandated. But automakers have been demanding lighter and stronger materials since the invention of the automobile. And the steel business is locked in an eternal competition with the aluminum industry to meet auto industry specs. By Washington’s skewed supply-chain logic, Detroit Edison’s Detroit coal plant – which supplies power to Rouge – should also get green loans because it endeavors to deliver cheaper energy to make steel.
Severstal’s owner, Russian billionaire Alexei Mordashov (one of the world’s richest men with a net worth of $19 billion) has understandably made headlines given that his huge multinational didn’t need taxpayer money because high-strength steel is already in significant production. “It would seem to be a waste of taxpayer funds to subsidize (Rouge) when there is already more than enough production available for this material,” Rep. Darrell Issa wrote to Energy Sec Steven Chu.
But there’s the larger question: When, asks Issa, did Obama’s green casino start classifying steel as a green auto component?
The Energy Department’s explanation – that steel production supports 260 jobs and 2,500 more in the construction industry – sounds more like a jobs program than “advanced technology research.”
Indeed, like the bailed-out GM and Chrysler, the White House seems to be motivated as much by green tech as sustaining an industry with Big Labor ties (United Steelworkers Union represents Severstal workers).
Your tax dollars at work.
Cain & The Obamas play Motown (The Michigan View 10.26.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 27, 2011
She came. She collected. She left.
Just five days after Herman Cain’s empathetic campaign visit to Detroit in which he brought a message of change to Detroit’s entrepreneurs, Michelle Obama’s glitzy campaign fundraiser with Detroit One Percenters offered a dramatic contrast in how Republicans and Democrats view America’s urban ills.
In a hurting city with a top-rung murder rate, 50 percent adult illiteracy and an 80 percent illegitimacy rate, only GOPers seem to care. Democrats accept the status quo.
Like her husband before her, Michele Obama’s came to Detroit to meet with Democratic Party honchos in order to ensure that the money spigot remains open. In recent visits to Detroit (Labor Day) and Lake Orion (GM plant), President Obama parachuted in from 30,000 feet, held a small rally with Big Auto and Big Labor leaders, then went straight back to the airport. No stops in battle-weary Northeast Detroit. No tours of the once-thriving Hamilton Avenue. No acknowledgement of Detroit’s mean streets.
For her part, the First Lady’s motorcade slipped into the parking garage of Detroit’s luxurious Book Cadillac Hotel Tuesday. There she milked One Percenter Democrats at a campaign fundraiser, then left for another fundraiser in Chicago. Occupy Detroit protestors huddled in Grand Circus Park just two blocks – two blocks! – away from the majestic hotel. Yet, despite her administration’s vocal support for the 99 Percenters, the First Lady did not visit them. Indeed, she didn’t even give them a nod in her speech.
The bejeweled First Lady has devoted herself to the idle hobbies of the rich: organic foods and glitzy fashion. In her Book Cadillac comments, she praised naming female justices to the Supreme Court and something called the Lilly Ledbetter Act – a notorious sop to the Democrats’ trial lawyer lobby.
The issues couldn’t be more irrelevant to the problems of besieged, poverty-stricken Detroit families. The devastation wrought by 80 percent illegitimacy rates is invisible to her.
By contrast, Herman Cain chose as the backdrop of his visit – not a swanky hotel – but Detroit’s infamous symbol of destruction: The Michigan Central Depot. His audience was not narrow special interests, but Detroit entrepreneurs. His message: I am here to help.
Cain talked about making Detroit more pro-business with “community zones” and his 9-9-9 plan. His message follows on Republican reformers like Governor John Engler who reduced city taxes – or Rick Snyder who has tried to restore sanity to a broken welfare system. In short, Democrats talk of candy for the politically-connected. GOPers talk of cutting taxes for all.
The Obamas claim to represent the Party of Compassion. But their haughty Detroit visits tell a different tale.
Barack buys Leo a new car (The Michigan View 10.24.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 24, 2011
This summer, Barack Obama bought Leo DiCaprio a luxury sports car made in Finland. With your money.
While the Democratic Party has dragged out the old chestnut of class warfare as their 2012 election theme, they have in fact presided over an audacious transfer of wealth to America’s One Percent. Billions have gone to politically-connected corporations – from Solyndra to Michigan’s own Dow and Ford – to make politically-approved green products.
But the most eye-opening welfare for the rich has been handouts to auto millionaires like Fisker Automotive’s Henrik Fisker and Tesla’s Elon Musk – builders of electric chariots for the well-to-do. Fisker has received $529 million in taxpayer money and Musk, $465 million.
When the $95,000 Fisker Karma rolled off the line this year, Hollywood superstar DiCaprio – a staunch Democrat who pockets $20 mil a film – got the first one. Next in line? The needy Al Gore and Colin Powell. DiCaprio also owns a $100k Tesla. And thanks to Obama & Co., both his vehicles also came with a $7500 federal tax credit for buying coal-powered vehicles.
But wait, there’s more.
Obama has also publicized the importance of rebuilding American manufacturing. California reps like Pelosi and Feinstein pushed hard for Fisker subsidies under the pretense that Detroit only builds dinosaurs and that the hi-tech electric cars of the future should be built by Silicon Valley.
DiCaprio’s Karma, however, is being built with U.S. subsidies in . . . Finland.
“(This is) about getting the governments of the world to implement environmental policy.” DiCaprio told the London Daily Mail. “We should be the ones paving the way, the ones other countries look up to.”
Your tax dollars at work.
Detroit 9-9-9, starring Herman Cain ( The Michigan View 10.21.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 21, 2011
Forget Detroit 1-8-7. The new show in town is Cain 9-9-9.
Detroit is the poster child for urban dysfunction, so Herman Cain wants to make it his poster child for urban renewal. Standing in front of the shell of Michigan’s Train Depot – a shrewd touch of Hollywood theatrics – The Hermanator announced this morning a new exemption in his zero exemption 9-9-9 Flat Tax proposal. He calls it Opportunity Zones.
Or “Empowerment Zones” as he refers to them on his website. The details are understandably in flux as Cain has scrambled to stem a tide of criticism that his catchy plan is a recipe for taxing lower incomes and hiking taxes for most Americans. Indeed, his quickly scheduled Detroit visit was reportedly moved up a week so that Cain could get back on offense.
A successful black businessman, Cain’s presence before the wrecked train façade in a city of so much black despair made for a dramatic picture as his voice boomed over a mixed crowd of black and white. “The American dream has been hijacked,” he said. “I know that because I have lived the American dream.”
“Opportunity zones, in conjunction with the 9-9-9 plan, will turn the whole country into one giant opportunity zone. Some of the most attractive features will be zero capital gains tax, immediate expensing of business equipment and no payroll taxes are factory-installed in the 9-9-9 plan for the whole country to benefit,” Cain said about his plan targeted at Detroit entrepreneurs.
This is the war flat taxes must always fight – despite its simplification benefits to the larger economy. So many special interests are dependent on the current code’s loopholes that flat taxes suffer a death by a thousand cuts. The MSM – and with a boost from Cain’s GOP debate opponents – quickly pounced on a report by the liberal Tax Policy Center which said low-income families would be hardest hit.
“Households making between $10,000 and $20,000 seeing their taxes increase by nearly 950 percent,” reports class warrior AP. “Households with the highest incomes, however, would get big tax cuts.”
Of course, AP didn’t site other analyses showing the economic benefits of new jobs –
“The bottom line, folks, 9-9-9 means jobs, jobs, jobs,” said Cain – for lower incomes. But such is political reality. It is also why Rick Perry’s more conventional 17 percent flat tax on income (with exemptions for lower incomes) will not be as complicated a sell.
The Boondoggle Boys (The Michigan View 10.19.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 19, 2011
Governor Rick Snyder cares how your precious state tax dollars are spent. Your federal dollars? Not so much.
Michigan’s CEO has earned applause for a long overdue tightening of Lansing purse strings. So why was he playing deputy to Transportation Chief Ray LaHood this week as Big Ray announced yet another Big Government scheme to swindle Americans of their tax money and send it to Michigan unions?
Call Snyder Deputy Boondoggle.
In May, Snyder played elf to Santa LaHood as LaHood (and Santa Levin and Mrs. Stabenow Claus) came with a $200 million “high speed rail” set for Democratic unions to build. As the Cato Institute’s Randall O’Toole reported for MIView, LaHood’s rail is a fraud (the average speed would only increase from 60 to 64 mph saving a mere 12 minutes of travel time) based on fraudulent accounting.
Now comes LaHood with more millions to prop up Detroit’s bus unions as well as convert their buses to the green religion. “The troubled Detroit Department of Transportation will receive $6 million of the $46.7 million in funding statewide to replace buses,” reports The Detroit News. “Troubled” is an understatement. And it has nothing to do with old buses. DDOT’s unions are famously intransigent, idling while half the department’s rolling stock is in disrepair.
As The Detroit News has editorialized, the solution is to eliminate the dysfunctional DDOT and contract with the suburban SMART system. No DDOT, no intransigent unions. But LaHood’s DDOT gift will only reward union tactics and waste taxpayer money. It is something Sheriff Snyder would stop as governor. But since its federal tax money, well – SOOOOOEEEEE!
This is the downside of the “businessman governor.” The green eyeshade Snyder fights for what’s good for his “company” — the state, in this case — regardless of how irresponsible that may be for the nation’s fiscal sanity. Like the $2 billion the drowning-in-red-ink feds are using to buy off Snyder to build the new Canadian bridge across the Detroit River.
Deputy Boondoggle also gets an eco-halo courtesy of your wallet.
SMART gets nearly $5 million in new hybrid biodiesel/electric buses. Never mind that biodiesel comes with massive federal subsides. Never mind that electric buses, reports the Mackinac enter, cost FOUR times as much as regular buses. The money comes from the federal “stimulus” con which was sold as helping America bridge the financial crisis — but which is really a bridge back in time to money-losing government transit schemes.
It’s fun to play with other people’s money.
Snyder’s co-Deputy Boondoggle, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, said the federal funds “will allow the city of Detroit to put new buses on the street and improve maintenance on the rest of our aging fleet” after he gets the city’s troubled bus system under control in the “next 30 days or so.” Good luck with that. The federal dollars, in fact, just became his enemy as unions will demand more rather than reform with less.
But wait, there’s more.
LaHood and his deputies also sank $2 million more — on top of $25 million already flushed — into The Woodward Light Rail Project. “The Woodward Avenue Light Rail project holds enormous promise,” LaHood said. Promises, promises.
The People Mover too came with lots of federal dollars and promise. “The elevated train opened its doors to the public in 1987 amid great expectations,” reminds MIView’s Bill Johnson. “When completed, the costs were SEVEN TIMES the original $30 million estimate. Federal transit officials originally projected the train would carry 71,000 passengers per day. That was lowered to 35,000 and later to 10,000-15,000 a day. A taxpayer subsidy was required to keep it on track.”
It’s Groundhog Day. Here we go again.
Is it any wonder this country’s in debt up to its eyeballs? It would be nice if The Boondoggle Boys and their media lapdogs would bark at this boondoggle. But pork always tastes good. Especially when someone else pays for it.
Two-faced Clooney ( The Michigan View 10.10.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 10, 2011
Just in time for the political season, George Clooney’s “Ides of March” is a cautionary tale of the perfect candidate corrupted. Think Barack “The One” Obama meets Bill “The Intern” Clinton. But in pre-release interviews, Clooney – a committed Democrat – wants audiences to know that despite the film’s cynical message, his lead character’s left-wing policies on green energy and taxation are to be taken seriously.
“This is the one I think should be used by the Democrats,” he says in reference to one of the impassioned, Obama-esque speeches his character, Governor Mike Morris, gives in the film. “I would run on this as a candidate. ‘My campaign, my administration, is vehemently against the distribution of wealth by the government to the richest Americans.'”
No he’s not. Clooney, like his character, is not what he seems.
In truth, the multi-millionaire Clooney received a 42 percent Michigan production subsidy – amounting to $4.9 million in 2010 – to make part of “Ides” in Michigan.
As a producer of the film, according to the Mackinac Center’s Michael LaFaive, Clooney (who also directed the film) received specially-targeted, Big Hollywood corporate “cash subsidies, redistributing income from Michigan families and existing businesses to a handful of film producers.”
Ken Braun, editor of Michigan Capitol Confidential, calls this welfare for the super-rich “morally repugnant.”
Despite the cynical transfer of wealth from Michigan taxpayers to himself, Clooney maintains the outward facade – like his character – that he is pure as snow. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the star says that he won’t go into politics because he could never compromise his ideals.
“Every two years, somebody tries to bring my name up and talk about politics in the real world — ‘You should run for governor!'” he says. “I’m not getting in politics. I have no interest in politics — because of the compromises you have to make. ”
But as Clooney’s Michigan windfall shows, he is plenty compromised. His production partner, Grant Helov, says “Ides” is “about a character who starts out one way and ends up completely having sold his soul.” Apparently it was based on a true story.
How did Steve Jobs do it without Granholm? (The Michigan View 10.06.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 6, 2011
How did Steve Jobs do it without Jennifer Granholm and Barack Obama?
In barely three decades, Jobs helped create a tech revolution – from product to infrastructure – without a dollar of federal help. While snake oil salesmen Granobama claim to know the future and blow taxpayer dollars on it, Jobs and his peers created ideas that attracted billions of dollars of private capital. The result is a digital infrastructure that spans the globe totally independent of government subsidy.
Currently flogging her Big Government treatise, “A Governor’s Story,” the ex-governor claims new technologies will only get off the ground with government subsidy – what she calls “a partnership with business.” Granobama claims that private markets are incapable of leveraging the “interstates of the future.”
Yet Apple’s digital revolution did exactly that. The iPhone and its predecessors spawned consumer products in such demand that investors sunk billions – hundreds of billions of private dollars – into a cellular infrastructure that covers nearly every inch of America and beyond. And it’s not just phone service. You want alternatives? Think 3G and 4G digital networks, wireless infrastructure, cloud computing, and other innovation that Big Government never saw coming.
Jobs’ digital revolution did nothing to humble these Harvard Law-trained Masters of the Universe.
They blindly spout dogma that they alone know the “technologies of the future.” Solar. Wind. Hybrids. Indeed, we are fortunate that Jen and Barack were not in power when Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak first innovated the PC computer. They might have tried to strangle it.
Today, America is in the midst of an energy revolution as entrepreneurs like Harold Hamm of Continental Resoruces innovate horizontal drilling technologies promising to double U.S. oil reserves.
Yet when Hamm joined other businessmen in a meeting with The One recently, he got the cold shoulder. “I told him of the revolution in the oil and gas industry and how we have the capacity to produce enough oil to enable America to replace OPEC. I wanted to make sure he knew about this,” Hamm relays to The Wall Street Journal.
The president’s reaction?
“He turned to me and said, ‘Oil and gas will be important for the next few years. But we need to go on to green and alternative energy. [Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu has assured me that within five years, we can have a battery developed that will make a car with the equivalent of 130 miles per gallon.”
One can hear Obama now. . . “Oh sure, Mr. Jobs, coal-powered PCs will be important for the next few years. But Chu has assured me that within five years, we can power mainframes with wind turbines.”
Government know-it-alls ignore the capitalist incentives that unleashed Steve Jobs. Granobama claim that startups cannot compete against Big Business and their army of lobbyists – so they pour millions of tax dollars into Tesla and Fisker in order to “innovate” the “battery-powered cars of the future.”
Wrong again.
The cellular industry took on that most entrenched establishment – Big Telecom and landline telephony – and won. Investor billions poured into handheld startups once they proved that cell phone tech was viable as an alternative to landlines. Why don’t markets invest money in the solar industry? Because it cannot compete. Solyndra’s owners needed federal funds because – unlike Jobs – they had failed to prove its viability as an alternative technology.
Steve Jobs is proof that private capital discovers the tech of the future. Granobama never saw it coming.
Payne: Peters’ failed compassion ( The Michigan View 10.04.11)
Posted by hpayne on October 4, 2011
“We know that almost two thirds of the people affected by this decision are children and because of that, I oppose this policy on both economic and moral grounds,” demagogued Michigan Rep. Gary Peters about Governor Snyder’s new law limiting Michiganians to 4 years of welfare benefits.
But it is Peters who is playing Scrooge.
Snyder’s law of capping welfare is exactly the remedy that frees Michiganians of the dependency culture and gets them back to work. What the Oct. 1 deadline has starkly revealed is that Democrats have little concern for the poor outside of using them as political props.
Living in posh Oakland County, Peters & Co. use welfare as a Cadillac bumper sticker to advertize their compassion. Divorced from the mean streets of Detroit, they never do an accounting of welfare’s unintended consequences in destroying the family and creating a permanent underclass that is dooming generations of children to poverty.
So here are some accounting numbers for you: Over 40 years, the War on Poverty has spent $16 trillion with Obama’s 2011 budget spending a record $953 billion. Welfare spending since 1964 has increased from 1.5 percent of GDP to 5 percent and now accounts for 1 in 7 of every federal, state, and local dollar spent. The result?
In 2010, the national poverty rate climbed to a record 15.1 percent of the population, the highest recorded in the Census Bureau’s 52 years of record-keeping.
“I’m sure there are some people who game the system,” said Mayor Dave Bing on the Frank Beckmann Show today. In fact, as revealed by Governor Rick Snyder on the same program, MOST game the system: over 20 percent of welfare recipients are on welfare 11 years or more, 70 percent for 8 years or more.
This isn’t a leg up – it’s a way of life.
Talk to social experts like the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector or Section 8 landlords who reveal a dependency culture that uses a web of government programs from Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers, utilities subsistence and so on to live on. It is a culture that nurses single parenthood and dooms thousands of children to fatherless homes, crime, and the vicious poverty cycle.
What Snyder and his GOP colleagues are trying to do (their reforms exempt the disabled and elderly) is return welfare to a support program – not an income program.
“I wish we could have pushed off this decision,” says Bing, fearing the effects of a tight jobs market. No, punting will not solve the problem but prolong it.
“We need to focus on policies that will help get Michiganders back to work rather than put them on the streets,” says Peters. But that is exactly what welfare limits will do.
Detroit’s welfare dependent are unemployable as long as the government pays them not to show up for work or not to get an education. Talk to Detroit employers: Adults who are illiterate and not punctual are unemployable – both a direct consequence of family implosion.
If Democrats really cared about the poor they would hold a daily press conference explaining that the lack of a 2-parent household is the #1 cause of poverty – not Governor Snyder’s welfare caps.
Built Ford Not-so-tough (The Michigan View 09.28.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 28, 2011
From firing its CEO to dictating the location of its headquarters, bailed-out Government Motors has predictably been at the mercy of Obama. But who knew the White House also ran Ford?
The Blue Oval has gained new life as “America’s car company” for being the only Detroit automaker not to take the federal bailout – and it has exploited the opportunity in sales and with a brash new ad in which a customer boasts that “I wasn’t gonna buy another car that was bailed out by the government. I was gonna buy from a manufacturer standing on their own. That’s the American way.”
Trouble is, Ford is hardly the frontier cowboy it claims. Today, it pulled its much-ballyhooed ad under White House pressure.
“Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early ’09 and again when the ad flap arose,” reports Detroit News columnist Dan Howes.
“I’m a little bit disappointed,” Chris McDaniel, the real Ford customer featured in the ad, told the Frank Beckmann Show after learning of the ad’s demise. But then he voiced what everyone fears of a White House that once threatened Chrysler’s secured bondholders to take the bailout terms. “But I understand their decision. This gets back to intimidation. This is not the business of our government. It’s disappointing our government can intimidate.”
Maybe. But while Ford may not have dirtied its hands with bailout money, it did lobby for its alleged cross-town harlots to take the money. Why? Because Ford shares the auto supply chain with its rivals and would have been dragged under with them had the feds not intervened.
Okay, but can’t Ford brag about having the courage to forgo federal welfare even if it meant putting itself at a disadvantage to its unprincipled rivals?
Well, no. Because Ford has since fed greedily at the federal trough of green subsidies, borrowing millions under the DOE’s Section 136 retooling program to build its Ford Explorer SUV and Focus compact. Indeed, Ford CEO Mulally himself has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with President Obama praising these taxpayer “investments.”
An ad campaign that seemed a no-brainer to the ad department surely got sticky when Ford’s front office got pressure from Washington’s front office.
“With President Barack Obama tuning his re-election campaign amid dismal economic conditions and simmering antipathy toward his stimulus spending and associated bailouts, the Ford ad carried the makings of a political liability when Team Obama can least afford yet another one,” sighs Howes. “Can’t have that.”
And CEOs apparently can’t afford the indignity of not being invited to Rose Garden photo-ops. Or to Letterman.
The Ford ad fiasco is a painful reminder that romantic tales of rugged individualism are hard to come by in Obama’s America where corporations from Big Light Bulb to Big Auto all feed from the Big Government trough.
Mittigan ( The Michigan View 09.25.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 26, 2011
MACKINAC ISLAND – “Perry’s got his hard luck story, and Romney’s got his wife’s,” snarked a wag at my table as keynote speaker and silver-spoon born Mitt Romney tried to match Rick Perry’s inspiring, up-from-the-bootstraps tale with the “coal-miner’s granddaughter” story of his wife, Ann.
But the only roots that really mattered at the Republican Leadership Conference this weekend were Mitt’s Michigan beginnings.
Romney was on home turf, and he was clearly at ease talking about a state that drives “more Chevys, Fords, and Dodges than Kias, Nissans, and Toyotas.” At a luncheon speech earlier in the day Texas Gov. Perry joked that “there may be smoother candidates and slicker debaters – but I know what I believe in.” But slick has its place, and the Mackinac crowd ate up a skilled Romney speech that hit all the right notes on American pride and symbolism.
His speech had a generous helping of red meat lines like “the NLRB is stacked with union stooges.” And it was peppered with stories and Reaganisms like “it’s not that liberals are ignorant, it’s that what they know is wrong.” By speech’s end, Michigan’s native son had the crowd eating from his hand.
“What works best for the world is a strong America,” said Romney to a thunderous, standing ovation, “and we have a president who doesn’t believe that.”
But beneath the slickness were troubling contradictions that will not be so easily overlooked outside Romney’s backyard.
Michigan pol after Michigan warm-up pol spoke this weekend of an election that “is a defining moment for America” because Obama’s spending has put the nation on course for a European-like debt crisis. Yet, as Massachusetts governor, Romney drafted Romneycare, the blueprint for Obamacare – a European-like, universal care, budget-busting health program that is the greatest threat to America’s long-term fiscal health.
Romney featured “the rule of law” as one of his four pillars of a renewed America. Yet, Romneycare – like Obamacare – mandates an unconstitutional requirement that citizens buy health insurance.
Romney boasted of his impressive business background of managing the Summer Olympics and creating Bain Capital. Yet, as governor his health reform has driven business health care premiums to the highest in the nations in part due to onerous regulations on the insurance business.
All politics is local, and for all the talk of the national historical moment, Michigan Republicans this weekend liked Romney for the very parochial reason that he would be good for Michigan.
“Romney fits Michigan,” former GOP state chairman Saul Anuzis told The Detroit News. “He understands the auto industry. His family is from here. His father and mother have a great reputation and a history.”
He would never forget his roots.
But the roots that Romneycare put down are also now the giant trunks of Obamacare. Romney has vowed to chop it down if he becomes president – if Mr. Perry doesn’t hang him from it first. The question remains: If Romney lacked the vision to see Romneycare’s predictable horrors, what other crises will he be blind to?
Got your $5k signing bonus? (The Michigan View)
Posted by hpayne on September 21, 2011
One of the scandals of the Great Recession is that as Americans struggled to keep their heads above water, their tax dollars were propping up fat public employee union benefits while state budgets went underwater. In Michigan in 2009, for example, average compensation per employee (including benefits) was down 2.0 percent for private sector employees – but state government employees saw their pay increase 3.6 percent.
Now comes word that taxpayer-supported auto unions – among the highest paid manufacturing workers in the nation – will get a thousands of dollars in bonuses even as taxpayers are expected to lose $15 billion on their Detroit investments.
Welcome to the UAW Bailout 2: The Hangover.
While GM – the lead company in the first contract negotiations since the Detroit automaker (and Chrysler) emerged from bankruptcy in 2009 – has insisted on profit-sharing formulas rather than giving back union pay concessions gained in bankruptcy (pay cuts which brought the UAW to pay parity with its Japanese competition), there is this obtuse language in the agreement:
“General Motors Co. will give its hourly workers a $5,000 signing bonus,”reports The Detroit News.
A signing bonus? You mean like some financial firms offer to lure away top workers from the competition? Like millionaire athletes get to sign with a new team?
No, a signing bonus for every blue collar worker who simply agrees to the new contract. We’re not making this up.
As Mickey Kaus puts it: ” I’m sure there are sophisticated arguments for why the UAW members shouldn’t pay back the taxpayers who bailed their employer out of bankruptcy before they negotiate a deal that gives them each a $5,000 bonus. I just can’t think of them right now.”
When was the last time the average American taxpayer got a $5000 bonus for showing up to work? Having bailed out GM and its union with $50 billion while their own income dropped by 3.2 percent since January 2009, these same taxpayers are now on the hook for $243 million in signing bonuses for GM’s 48,500 workers.
Taxpayers -GM stockholders – are being had. While GM promised to return to competitiveness, it is, in fact, still uncompetitive with the fastest-growing automaker in North America: Hyundai. The Korean maker, says The Center for Automotive Research, pays its non-union Georgia workers $40 a hour which allows it to make cars more cheaply than GM’s $58 an hour workers – thus gaining footholds in the market. Another non-union transplant – VW – is pursuing a similar strategy.
Why isn’t GM doing the same? Because it has a union – and because you, dear taxpayer, will bail them out if they fail.
Another CEO: ‘Obama’s understanding of business is not there’ (The Michigan View 09.18.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 18, 2011
“The understanding of business is not there. The president has no business people around him. The fundamental understanding is not there.”
So said Conoco-Phillips CEO J.J. Mulva to The Detroit News editorial board this week – another of an extraordinary parade of American CEOs who say a major obstacle to their business today is Washington and its anti-business president.
While President Obama tours the country selling his American Jobs Act as the solution to 9.1 percent unemployment, he is ignoring the advice of the job creators: cut regulations and reform the tax code. As noted in MIView in recent weeks, our president is so divorced from business reality – so hostile to business – that CEOs from Home Depot to Boeing to Michigan’s Wee Discover Child Daycare feel compelled to speak out.
“I think we’re really hurting our economy,” said Mulva of the myriad of anti-energy regulations that have hampered growth of his industry, a major job producer. “People are starting to talk about it. (Washington) has been trying to accomplish with regulation what they couldn’t accomplish with legislation.”
Obama’s pet MSM has all but ignored this story. But it is everywhere.
Mulva says that Obamacare is stifling development in labor-heavy service industries, but that it is not a major concern in equipment-heavy energy manufacturing. Instead, Obama’s Green Church is costing his industry thousands of jobs and millions of dollars – in the middle of a recession! – with restrictive regulation and ideologically-driven foot-dragging that has hampered development of a transcontinental pipeline bringing oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Anti-Gulf production regulations have also cost “thousands of jobs in the region,” adds Mulva.
The White House’s anti-fossil fuel religion has also spread to Conoco’s natural gas fracking operations, with green NGOs attacking a new energy industry that is an untold American success story.
Think of the perversity of what Obama’s Green Church is doing here: While publicly calling for oil “independence,” it is strangling the production of domestic natural gas and oil from our Canadian ally.
The fracking story is particularly remarkable.
“In the 1980s we thought we were running out of natural gas,” says Mulva. “But thanks to new technologies, fracking has given us access to more than 100 years of reserves. This is no less than a modern industrial revolution.” So much for the green crystal ball predicting the demise of fossil fuel reserves.
While the MSM channels green claims that yesterday’s wind tech is the future of energy, in fact the new tech of fracking has made cheap energy more abundant than ever.
“We also face stiff political resistance to opening new areas of exploration. This despite the fact that the public favors expanded domestic energy development,” Mulva says. Lift the roadblocks and the CEO estimates another 1 million jobs could be created – raising $800 million in government revenue. “We are blessed to have this much gas.”
But we are cursed in having politicians committed to sacrificing this potential on the altar of global warming
Nanny Nerd ( The Michigan View 09.15.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 15, 2011
Once upon a January, back before recall-crazed Democrats tarred Rick Snyder as the Great Satan, the nanny state tendencies of Snyder-Calley raised conservative eyebrows. Those concerns came roaring back to life this week as Nanny Nerd unleashed an avalanche of Big Government on Michigan in the guise of “health.”
By the time the governor jumped the shark by – we’re not making this up – banning smoking on beaches, Republicans had to wonder whether Jennifer Granholm had snuck back into the governor’s mansion.
The beach ban is not only a caricature of Big Brother run amok, it is also unenforceable. Second-hand smoke is a hazard on the wide-open vistas of Lake Michigan? Really? What’s next, a ban on beach campfires?
So let’s focus on the more serious nannyisms.
First, Snyder followed through on his long-forgotten State of the State promise for a government registry of kids’ weight. Then, incredibly, he resurrected Lt. Guv Calley’s failed, backdoor, lame duck insurance mandate forcing autism coverage.
When the guv first called for a government system to “encourage a healthier, active lifestyle in our state” at his State of the State address in January, his Republican base went deathly silent and the small, Democratic section of the statehouse chamber erupted in cheers.
What is it with businessmen-turned-public officials telling us what to eat?
New York Mayor Bloomberg has become a Health Nazi poster child by forcing salt off New York tables and mandating calorie counts at ice cream shops. Now Snyder wants Big Brothermonitoring kids’ Body Mass Index.
Doesn’t Lansing have enough on its plate monitoring its own BMI?
In an interview, Snyder told The Detroit News editorial board that his mandate that doctors report your child’s weight to the government is merely an extension of “the childhood registry that’s been focused on immunization. The idea is to add one more field.”
But that non-sequitor is a huge expansion of the government’s charge. Vaccinations are required for communicable diseases to protect public health in schools. Policing children’s’ weight is a personal intrusion that would make the Obama Administration proud.
“What we’re going to be doing is urging (doctors to report children’s weight), because it’s a step in a very important direction” said Snyder spokeswoman Michelle Obama – er, Sara Wurfel.
Democrats – those alleged champions of “privacy” – applaud this kind of nosiness as pro-public health. Would they feel the same if Snyder mandates urine tests for drug use? But Snyder’s BMI obsession will get a chilly reception from Republicans (House Speaker Jase Bolger panned the ida on Frank Beckmann’s Show this AM) who will wonder what happened to the small gov. guv they’ve been fighting alongside all year.
More serious, however, was Snyder’s resurrection of his Lt. Governor’s autism mandate – an edict that is straight out of Obamacare.
Last December, Calley teamed with then Democrat Majority Leader Kathy Angerer to sneak the autism mandate through a lame duck session of the Legislature – an audacious move given Republicans like Calley and his boss had just been elected to shut down such anti-business regulations. The mandate died in the Senate.
What makes Snyder-Calley think it will survive now in an even more Republican Lansing?
Indeed, the edict enraged a chief Snyder ally, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, obviously wondering who had kidnapped their business-friendly governor and installed this imposter. “We are very disappointed and strongly opposed to the call for costly new health care mandates,” said a stunned Chamber CEO Rich Studley in a press release.
Calley (whose daughter is autistic) claims that by denying certain treatments, insurance companies are discriminatory. No one doubts the pain of the disease and its toll on families. But in fact, the mandate would discriminate against thousands of Michigan children by driving up costs and leaving families priced out of the market. In mandate-crazed New Jersey, for example, such edicts have made insurance so unaffordable that 10 percent of NJ kids lack insurance coverage – compared to just six percent of Michigan kids.
Snyder shrugs off the expense, saying that it would add “only one percent or less in insurance costs.”
Never mind that the Council for Affordable Health Insurance estimates the mandate would drive up health insurance costs by one-three percent – a Lewin Group study found that for every one-percent increase in insurance premiums, an estimated 300,000 fewer people get employer coverage. That’s a lotta hurt.
What happened to the anti-regulation, pro-business Snyder? His power grab even made headlines on the Drudge Report – “State to begin tracking children’s weight” – the kind of headline normally associated with lefty California.
Suddenly, Snyder’s reinvention looks a lot like a Granholm reprise.
Payne: Conyers on 9/11ZZZZZZZZ ( The Michigan View 09.14.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 14, 2011
Well, at least he wasn’t reading Playboy.
An alert Oakland Press photographer caught Detroit Rep. John Conyers napping during the “Remembrance and Unity” candlelight vigil on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn (that’s fellow Democrat John Dingell behind him). Conyers has a habit of getting on film in embarrassing ways. The Michigan View caught him ogling the women of Playboy in coach on a flight bound for Washington last year.
“For some of us, 911 is an opportunity to remember those that lost their lives, and that evil does exist in this world, and needs to be met head on,” writes Chris Kobus at TheBlogProf.com. “For others, it’s nappy-nap time.”
No doubt such sober ceremonies aren’t nearly as entertaining as Democratic Party rallies. Conyers was last on a Detroit stage with President Obama and Jimmy Hoffa on Labor Day when Hoffa lit into tea partiers as “son of a bitches.” That term is best reserved for the monsters that brought down the twin towers ten years ago – though Governor Snyder, also attending the 9/11 event, seemed to think the partisanship is the problem.
“Our country is not what it should be today because we fight too much, argue too much,” said the governor whose fiscally-prudent budget passed without a single Democratic vote. “It’s a time for unity. It’s a time for understanding. It’s a time to find common ground.”
Then again, no wonder Conyers was asleep.
Outsider Durant vs. Insider Hoekstra? (The Michigan View.com 09.13.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 13, 2011
Republican strategist Dick Morris frames the GOP presidential primary as a battle between the party establishment and the grassroots Tea Party phenomenon. It’s establishment Romney versus tea partier Michele Bachmann, says Morris, with Rick Perry making a strong bid to unite both factions and carry the nomination.
Is the same dynamic at play in Michigan’s Republican Senate primary?
With his June announcement that he would seek the nomination, party heavyweight and former Congressman Pete Hoekstra seemed to have the nomination locked up – previewing a slugfest with Debbie Stabenow in a key race as the GOP seeks to retake the Senate and take down the monster Obamacare with it. Serious contenders dropped one by one upon Hoekstra’s announcement.
But for one. Clark Durant, founder of Cornerstone charter schools in Detroit, has taken up the Morris narrative, challenging Hoekstra as the only true conservative in the race.
“Clark wants to put an end to the Washington Way of career politicians and restore the American Way,” reads Durant’s website in a not-so-veiled stab at ex-Rep. Hoekstra.
In an interview with Frank Beckmann on August 31, there was nothing veiled in Durant’s contrast between himself and Hoekstra in what he described as a battle between “career politicians and outsiders” who have “been in the private sector.”
“Both Debbie and Pete have stood on the sidelines, they’ve increased debt, they’ve voted for bailouts,” Reagan’s former Legal Services director said. ” Are we better off today than 18 years ago when Pete entered the Congress? No, we’re not.”
This week, Durant’s “outsider” chops were strengthened by an endorsement from straight-talkin’ auto guy Bob Lutz, who echoed the outsider them: “Clark is running against two career politicians (Hoekstra/Stabenow),” wrote Maximum Bob in his endorsement letter, “both of whom have stood on the sidelines during their lengthy tenures in Washington D.C. while our economy has deteriorated. ”
But are Morris’s tea party vs. establishment battle lines really so clear here?
“The problem with the Durant narrative is it fails because Hoekstra is one of the founders of the tea party,” says respected Michigan pollster Steve Mitchell.
Indeed, Hoekstra co-founded the Tea Party Caucus while serving in the U.S. House, gaining national cred as a grassroots conservative. In 2009, Citizens Against Government Waste named Hoekstra a “taxpayer hero,” praising him for putting “the interests of taxpayers ahead of politics by consistently voting to cut wasteful spending.”
Oh.
Hoekstra’s “private sector” credentials are impressive too as his stock stump speech attests. Hoekstra routinely refers to lessons learned as an executive at Herman Miller.
Sure, Hoekstra has a wall-full of party establishment endorsements from current Gov. Snyder to past Gov. Engler to the Chamber of Commerce to Oakland County’s L. Brooks Patterson. But Durant is no slouch in the insider department either with endorsements from former state party boss Betsy DeVos and ex-Sen. Spencer Abraham. In raising money for his successful charter schools, he also has courted Michigan’s establishment.
In short, both Durant and Hoekstra are strikingly similar candidates, but with one major difference: Hoekstra’s massive name recognition.
“Like those candles on a birthday cake, every time we would blow him out (with a series of negative ads) he would come back on,” says Mitchell, who worked for Hoekstra opponent Mike Cox (another Hoekstra Senate endorser) in the 2010 governor’s primary. “It’s his positive name ID from working Fox News all those years.”
Engler has even gone so far as to suggest that Durant pull out of the race in order to consolidate monies behind Hoekstra before the expensive battle against Stabenow. Naturally, this has only fueled Durant’s claims that the establishment is out to get his outsider candidacy.
But in truth, there is no Bachmann or Romney in this race. There are only two “Perrys” who appeal equally to the establishment and the grassroots. And with Hoekstra’s big edge in fund-raising and name appeal, there is little doubt who Stabenow expects on the other side of the ring.
Henry Payne is editor of The Michigan View.com
Obama speech: President Alinsky ( The Michigan View 09.09.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 9, 2011
A student of Saul Alinsky, the radical social activist, President Obama lives by Alinsky’s credo: “In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue.” His “jobs” speech Thursday night was vintage Alinsky.
It was about maintaining power in the crucial election year ahead. It had nothing to do with jobs or fixing the economy.
“The millions of Americans who are watching right now: they don’t care about politics,” began Obama. At that moment, you knew this was not a serious policy speech. It was only about politics. Consistency is not a virtue. Indeed, the substance of the speech was warmed over talking points of the last three years of stimulus and payroll tax candy.
Alinsky Rules of Power Tactics #4 is “make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”
Bang! There it was in graph nine: “I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away. It’s called the American Jobs Act. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that’s been supported by both Democrats and Republicans ” including many who sit here tonight. ”
But perhaps the speech’s most offensive piece applied Alinsky Rule #13 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
“This larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own ” that’s not who we are,” lectured Obama.
If you want to help the country, you persuade, not polarize. Yet this gross caricature of conservatism was the equivalent of GOPers dismissing Democrats as Communists – in the people’s chamber. This was a declaration of campaign war, not economic construction. It has been his theme for three years of the most divisive presidency in modern American history.
And in this he may have violated Alinsky’s Rules of Power Tactics #7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
Yes, it has.
Payne: President Hopeless ( The Michigan View 09.09.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 9, 2011
What was shocking about Obama’s speech was not just that it was bad – the Labor Day speech was indeed a harbinger – but how little effort the president made to be bipartisan.
Think about Clinton after the 1994 tsunami election and his tack to the middle. There is no middle for President Alinsky. There is only divisive, partisan, Chicago politics.
It’s all the more unnerving given the obvious opening for a bipartisan solution.
Conservatives have been talking for weeks about the potential for tax reform. Obama would give the GOP lower, simplified tax breaks, The GOP would happily close up corporate loopholes from jets to oil companies in return. Everybody has a win for their base. Everybody gains. Most importantly, the economy gains from a less burdensome, pro-taxpayer tax code.
“There could be some areas where we can agree,” said Michigan’s own Rep. Candice Miller afterwards. ” I would support fundamental, pro-growth tax reform.”
But Obama, according to reports, didn’t even reach a hand towards Republicans. There was no dialogue. Only finger-wagging. The sense of disappointment was palpable in Republicans’ comments afterwards – a party that, after all, just won a landslide election in the fall to make changes.
“I feel like I’ve just been to the principal’s office,” said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, ” It was equal parts platitudes and scolding. It was vacuous. You knew what it was, but some of the talk made me scratch my head. Retention of teachers? It was just lines thrown out there for applause from the Left, without any real connection to what we need to do.”
Like the health care “debate,” there is only political war from this president.
Payne: O is MIA in the D ( The Michigan View 09.06.11)
Posted by hpayne on September 5, 2011
It has been a murderous summer in Detroit with some 254 shootings and 52 dead. But President Barack Obama’s Labor Day speech here had no time for citizens under siege. This visit was about Big Labor politics. The president’s choice of Motown as a backdrop was meant to highlight what appears to be a national success story: the renewal of Detroit in the wake of his administration’s managed bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler.
In truth, however, Detroit represents the greatest failure of this president.
Determined to transform America into a green, centrally-planned state, Obama’s agenda was too Utopian. Trying to graft European Democratic Socialism onto American individualism was always a Frankenstein-like proposition. The result is a mess, with America more politically divided than ever, and its mighty economic engine crippled under heavy-handed regulation and misguided spending.
Had Obama instead focused on simply transforming America’s inner city – Detroit is America’s poster child of urban dysfunction – he could have made a real difference in curing America’s most vexing problem: the permanent underclass.
Spare us presidents with Big Ideas. Give us leaders who understand the small fundamentals.
As America’s first black president, Obama had a unique opportunity to tackle the inner city’s chronic crime by personally connecting with people to transform a family culture of dependency. This high-profile family man could have taught by example the importance of family and security. Instead, Obama’s orgy of welfare spending has only exacerbated Detroit’s problems – further dooming a generation of black children to violence.
Obama’s auto fairy tale never held water to begin with. As Dick Cheney reminds in his new autobiography, it was George Bush who first bailed out the auto industry (Cheney was opposed) before Obama came to power. Indeed, Obama then used Washington’s involvement to corrupt the bankruptcy process by stripping bondholders of their legal rights and favoring Big Labor.
But the Detroit that Obama spoke of on Labor Day is a fiction. It is no longer synonymous with the storied middle class created by Big Auto’s high wages. That middle class, black and white, has fled to the suburbs -run out by crime and rotten schools caused by the implosion of the urban family.
That family collapse (echoed in lower-class families of all races) has created the pathologies that haunt urban Detroit: a 24 percent high school graduation rate, 49 percent adult illiteracy, 30 percent male incarceration rates, and 47 percent black teen unemployment.
Barack Obama could have made a profound difference.
But he won’t because these ills are the direct result of the Big Ideas of social-engineers before him. As the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has documented, the fall of the Detroit family came with the rise of the Great Society. With welfare programs from Medicaid paying for births to food and housing subsidies, government has replaced fathers in the home. Obama has overseen spending on these programs to record levels.
Without fathers, poverty inevitably follows. Indeed, the lack of a two-parent family, Rector notes, is the leading cause of poverty in America.
But instead of helping Detroit’s suffering children, the president – the acclaimed “Chicago social activist” – seems aloof from their pain. He parachuted into this city’s sanitized, heavily-securitized downtown square-mile of corporate headquarters and Whole Foods markets – safe from the murderous streets of the city’s other 138 square miles that have claimed 250 lives already this year and put Detroit on path for a staggering 50 per 100,000 residents murder rate in 2011.
After his speech, the president was quickly swept back to 30,000 feet again to work on Big Ideas – his rock-star image unsullied by the bloody streets of Detroit.
Henry Payne is editor of The Michigan View.com.
Dick Cheney, anti-corporate activist ( The Michigan View 08.31.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 31, 2011
Aren’t Republicans supposed to be slaves to Big Corporations? To Wall Street? To rich CEOs?
So how come Democrats’ bête noire, Darth Vader Cheney himself- opposed bailing out the biggest crony of them all, General Motors?
Of course, that’s not how Democrats (or most folks in Michigan) will react to today’s revelation from The Detroit News’ Dave Shepardson that in his new memoir, “Cheney says he disagreed with President George W. Bush’s decision to rescue GM with a $13.4 billion bailout in the final days of his term.”
The Big Three are synonymous with Big Labor and therefore should help themselves to the public trough, goes conventional liberal wisdom. But who’s really looking out for the little guy here? Contrary to Halliburton caricature, Cheney took the taxpayer’s point of view: GM should fix their mistakes. That’s how the market works.
Politically, of course, neither Bush (nor any other president) would have left GM hanging in the midst of a financial crisis. “The president decided that he did not want to pull the plug on General Motors as we were headed out the door,” Cheney writes.
But in so doing, GM also missed a golden opportunity to rid itself of its historic disadvantage against America’s foreign transplants: the UAW.
That ball and chain is back with a vengeance as UAW Chief Bob King is putting renewed pressure on the Big Three to raise wages because “we’re very concerned about that entry-level member having a middle-class standard of living.” So much for wanting to make the industry competitive. King is a headache GM’s competition doesn’t have to wake up to every morning.
“I would have preferred that the government not get involved and was disappointed,” writes Cheney, “when the Obama administration significantly increased the government intervention in the automobile industry shortly after taking office.”
The Democratic Party – slave to corporate America.