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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.
Welfare trap = wealth gap ( The Michigan View 08.28.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 28, 2011
Ignorant of the welfare trap, Michigan’s Left is predictably purple over Governor Snyder’s cutoff of state welfare benefits at four – yes, four – years.
Long live the wealth gap.
“The state’s new 48-month limit on welfare, and tighter enforcement of the federal 60-month limit, is expected to result in more than 11,000 recipients losing benefits Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year,” raged the Detroit Free Press on its front page. “Advocates for poor people called the move heartless. They said it would lead to homelessness and desperation for many single-parent families.”
“This bill takes food away from the parents,” raged Rep. Kate Segal, D-Battle Creek. “We cannot continue to abuse the children of this state.”
Ah, the ol’ heartless, child-abusing GOP. But the caricature doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
In fact, as the Heritage Foundation’s brilliant Robert Rector notes, welfare is a failed system that has created a perpetual underclass of dependency in America – sustaining the very “wealth gap” (now at record levels despite record welfare spending) that liberals claim to decry by providing incentives that weaken the family. And the family is the foundation of success in American culture.
“Marriage not only has a dramatic affect in reducing poverty in the U.S., it also has a major affect on differences in wealth,” says Rector. “Married couple families have substantially higher incomes than do single parent families. The large differences in marriage rates between different ethnic groups contribute strongly to differences in poverty, income, and wealth.”
Indeed, the poverty rate in America has grown from 12 percent in 2002 to 14 percent in 2009 despite $4 trillion in welfare spending.
As Rector notes, this is because Medicaid (up 87 percent in the last decade), food stamps (up 256 percent), low income energy assistance (190 percent) and other direct payments to low wage earners (up 353 percent) create an incentive for single parenthood – destroying the family cradle in which wealth grows.
The result is Detroit, which is far poorer today than before welfare assistance thanks to 80 percent illegitimacy rates.
Of course, you will never read that in the Free Press or other MSM outlets. They would prefer to wash their hands of the poor by handing them welfare, then retreating to their suburban ivory towers to avoid the illegitimacy culture’s offspring: illiteracy and crime.
Welfare trap = wealth gap (The Michigan View 08.25.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 25, 2011
Ignorant of the welfare trap, Michigan’s Left is predictably purple over Governor Snyder’s cutoff of state welfare benefits at four – yes, four – years.
Long live the wealth gap.
“The state’s new 48-month limit on welfare, and tighter enforcement of the federal 60-month limit, is expected to result in more than 11,000 recipients losing benefits Oct. 1, the start of the fiscal year,” raged the Detroit Free Press on its front page. “Advocates for poor people called the move heartless. They said it would lead to homelessness and desperation for many single-parent families.”
“This bill takes food away from the parents,” raged Rep. Kate Segal, D-Battle Creek. “We cannot continue to abuse the children of this state.”
Ah, the ol’ heartless, child-abusing GOP. But the caricature doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
In fact, as the Heritage Foundation’s brilliant Robert Rector notes, welfare is a failed system that has created a perpetual underclass of dependency in America – sustaining the very “wealth gap” (now at record levels despite record welfare spending) that liberals claim to decry by providing incentives that weaken the family. And the family is the foundation of success in American culture.
“Marriage not only has a dramatic affect in reducing poverty in the U.S., it also has a major affect on differences in wealth,” says Rector. “Married couple families have substantially higher incomes than do single parent families. The large differences in marriage rates between different ethnic groups contribute strongly to differences in poverty, income, and wealth.”
Indeed, the poverty rate in America has grown from 12 percent in 2002 to 14 percent in 2009 despite $4 trillion in welfare spending.
As Rector notes, this is because Medicaid (up 87 percent in the last decade), food stamps (up 256 percent), low income energy assistance (190 percent) and other direct payments to low wage earners (up 353 percent) create an incentive for single parenthood – destroying the family cradle in which wealth grows.
The result is Detroit, which is far poorer today than before welfare assistance thanks to 80 percent illegitimacy rates.
Of course, you will never read that in the Free Press or other MSM outlets. They would prefer to wash their hands of the poor by handing them welfare, then retreating to their suburban ivory towers to avoid the illegitimacy culture’s offspring: illiteracy and crime.
Earthquakes? Blame Detroit SUVs ( The Michigan View 08.24.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 24, 2011
Will Washington’s Green Church blame the D.C. earthquake on global warming?
Don’t laugh. Determined to perpetuate a state of fear to squeeze more money from Big Auto and Big Utility to combat the non-Apocalypse, the warmers have teamed up with Big Insurance to blame teutonic plate disasters like the Japanese earthquake on climate change.
“Politicians might not believe in climate change, but insurance companies do,” reports Grist.com. “They track disasters, and it turns out that disasters just in the first six months of this year already cost the world more than any other year of disasters on record. The price tag for 2011 disasters reached $265 billion. Most of that cost ($210 billion) came from the tsunami in Japan.”
We’re not making this stuff up.
The insurance industry has been on this bandwagon since 2008 when an industry study found global warming “the greatest strategic risk currently facing the property/casualty insurance industry.”
By linking all natural disasters from tornadoes to earthquakes to “man-made” global warming, Big Insurance opens up a whole new list if litigants to sue for disasters which otherwise put huge holes in the industry’s bottom line.
Earthquake damage in DC? Blame it on the auto industry production of SUVs.
Hurricane damage? Sue the utility industry for coal plants.
Pols have been quick to sign on to this absurdity. On the very day the 8.9 earthquake struck Japan, the president of the European Union’s Economic and Social Committee said in a statement:
The earthquake and tsunami will clearly have a severe impact on the economic and social activities of the region. Some islands affected by climate change have been hit. Has not the time come to demonstrate on solidarity — not least solidarity in combating and adapting to climate change and global warming? Mother Nature has again given us a sign that that is what we need to do.
Even some green pews blanched at this shameless distortion of science. “Huh? Japan sits astride a subduction zone,” wrote the Washington Post’s lefty Stephen Stromberg, “where one tectonic plate plunges below another into the Earth’s mantle. Consequently, you get big earthquakes there.”
But for a movement led by charlatans like Senator Debbie “I can feel global warming when I fly” Stabenow and climatologist James “Coal trains are like Nazi Holocaust trains” Hansen, this kind of nonsense is too profitable to ignore.
Playing on people’s ignorance by giving them an auto company scapegoat for earthquakes, hurricanes, and other freaks of nature opens the gates for massive damage suits that will make the tobacco settlement (now pouring millions into a state government treasury near you) look like a piker.
Payne: Detroit, Maserati truck exporter to the world (the Michigan View 08.23.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 23, 2011
In 2009, Barack Obama picked Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne to take over Chrysler – for free. The terms? Import the 40 MPG Fiat 500 in order to educate Detroit’s heathens on how to make a fuel-efficient small car.
Two years later, Marchionne is poised to announce that Fiat will export a Detroit-made Maserati SUV to the world.
The extraordinary turnabout is a testimony to Marchionne’s smarts and Obama’s blind green ideology. The Fiat owner has learned that Detroit makes the best trucks in the world ” so good, in fact, that the Chrysler Cherokee will be the platform for the iconic Maserati brand as it exports big-margin SUVs around the globe.
Meanwhile, Fiat cannot make Obama’s little 500 affordably in the U.S. with UAW labor. It is assembled in Mexico. The Maserati truck ” a vehicle class publicly despised by Obama ” will be built right in downtown Detroit employing UAW workers, the very workers Obama claims to represent.
Oh, the irony.
“It’s more jobs for America,” thrilled UAW President Bob King on the news that the Maserati SUV will be a global export. “It’s more jobs for the Detroit community. It’s more jobs for Michigan and Ohio – for the whole Midwest. It’s great news.”
But if Brarack Obama had his way, there would be no Maserati SUV. There would be only Mexican-made tin cans. You can’t make this stuff up.
Payne: The Sin Cruise (The Michigan View 08.19.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 20, 2011
The Woodward Dream Cruise in Detroit this weekend is an orgy of iron celebrating the individual, horsepower, consumer choice, automotive genius, the internal combustion engine, noise, carbon dioxide, crowds, and personal liberty.
In short, it is EVERYTHING that President Obama and his Green Church revile.
To the Religious Left, Woodward is the devil’s playpen. It is immoral. It is the gay (read: happy) marriage of man and machine with no public transportation in sight. No wonder Father Obama avoided Woodward on his Midwest bus swing.
Ironically, Government Motors is smack in the middle of it all, trying desperately to straddle the two worlds of Detroit heathens and Washington prudes. GM is using the Dream Cruise to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Chevy, which has brought out gas-gulping iron from Camaros to Vettes.
But desperate to please its federal savior, Chevy invited a fleet of Volt owners to celebrate with the sinners, making for an awkward display of HP and PC. Volt owners looked as comfortable at the Cruise as priests in a Victoria’s Secret shop.
“I wish it were a Volt Cruise,” one Green Church member and Volt owner told The Detroit Free Press. “The noise at night this week, when you’re trying to sleep —”
“You have to wear earplugs,” finished his wife.
Ewwww!
“I would say more Volt (guy) than Chevy (guy),” said Patrick Wang, all the way from Left Coast Berkley, Calif., whose VOLT 10 license plate alerts everyone of his holy purchase of the 10th Volt built. “But Chevy – it’s getting there. Especially in the office, since I drive a Volt, now that they’ve seen it, they’re more likely to consider a Chevy.”
Ah, California, where a hybrid saves the soul. Out here in meat-eating land, he with the most Corvettes wins.
Whatever GOP candidate wins in 2012 would do well to come to the Cruise in 2013. Take Rick Perry, for example. It would suit his anti-elitist nature (the Texas A&M grad famously clashes with Yalie Dubya) and he would relish the contrast to Obama’s snobbish Martha’s Vineyard retreat.
And it would send a profound message that the EPA’s green inquisition is over and that SUVers aren’t sinners.
Granholm vision fades
Posted by hpayne on August 16, 2011
Anyone checked Governor Granholm’s official capitol portrait hailing her as Michigan’s New Green Economy pioneer lately? Its colors are fading fast.
Evergreen Solar – a company that Granholm and her Washington twin, President Obama, touted as “leading the green industrial revolution” – went bankrupt this week, flushing its taxpayer-subsidized Midland, Michigan manufacturing facility down the drain.
Evergreen was one of a gaggle of corporate cronies that Granholm had showered with hundreds of millions in state tax breaks during her term, including $60 million for Dow’s solar business, a company that has since rewarded her with a seat on the board.
Evergreen follows another Granholm prodigy, Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), into the emergency ward. ECD laid off 115 workers in Michigan last May. Both companies are hugely dependent on government subsidies and have struggled as subsidies have dried up or other countries offered even more tax candy.
ECD laid off its Michigan employees “as it restructures amid cutbacks in government incentives overseas” reported The Detroit News in May. That is, artificially-created solar markets in France and Italy have seen severe subsidy cutbacks as the continents’ fiscal crisis deepens and voters rebel against the abuse of their tax dollars – an abuse that Granholm had cheered as Michigan’s unsustainable business model.
Like Michigan’s ailing film industry – Big Hollywood was another “winner” of Granholmnomics – the ex-governor’s “Green Belt” dream was built on sand. And it is sinking just months after she left office as Michigan tightens its budget belt after her spending orgy.
Even the governor’s most prized “investments” – hundreds of millions more in state and federal grants to build batteries for Granholm’s “vehicles of the future” – also appear in jeopardy as the hybrid market has stalled at 2 percent of market sales despite a 600 percent increase in hybrid model offerings in the last six years.
“We know this is not the full answer,” Granholm said after putting $6 million in taxpayer bucks into solar ECD. “But the ending of this story is a great story.”
Look again, governor. Your portrait is peeling.
Green Beatle gas guzzler (The Michigan View 08.06.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 6, 2011
Rock superstar Paul McCartney also wants to be famous as an environmentalist. Winner of the coveted green Peru’s Order of the Cinchona Tree for fighting global warming with his Meat Free Monday campaign (“Less Meat = Less Heat”), the former Beatle made headlines last year when he took to task those nasty climate deniers.
“Some people don’t believe in climate warning – like those who don’t believe there was a Holocaust,” he told London’s Sun newspaper.
So what was McCartney doing tooling around Detroit in that notorious death-camp vehicle, the 17 mpg Chevy Suburban last month?
Before Sir Paul ‘s recent concert at Comerica Park, classic rock WCSX-FM program director Brent Alberts snapped the superstar as he rolled down the window in his planet-frying limo and gave a thumbs-up salute to his fans. “Everybody was screaming,” Alberts told The Detroit News, “and not just the girls, the guys were screaming, too!”
No doubt they were impressed by his pro-planet ride.
Perhaps the Beatle was trying to avoid his 2008 embarrassment when he had his new $158,000 Lexus LS 600h hybrid flown to him in Britain rather than having it sent by ship. “Environmentalists quickly pointed out that the use of a cargo plane to deliver the car to England completely offset any environmental gains resulting from the car’s use,” reported AP.
It ain’t easy being a green.
EPA’s illegal MPG (The Michigan View 08.05.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 5, 2011
The Obama administration’s new 54.5 mpg fuel mileage mandate is regulatory over-reach, is at odds with the American consumer, is cost ineffective, threatens vehicle safety, and burdens an industry trying to emerge from recession.
And it is illegal.
In its zeal to fight global warming, Lisa Jackson’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has executed a breathtaking power grab by changing the Corporate Average Fuel Standards (CAFE) without congressional authorization. Drafted by Congress in 1975, CAFE authorized the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) to administer the law.
But President Obama has made a habit of making end-runs around the people’s representatives in his rush to transform America to a Green utopia. Congress re-authorized CAFE in 2007 (to 35 mpg by 2020), but then Obama stealthily granted EPA co-administrative authority with NHTSA in speeding up the 2020 standards (to 2015) upon taking office in 2009. Now with its 54.5 mpg diktat, EPA has discarded Congress altogether, pulling an arbitrary number out of thin air without any congressional oversight, and forced it down the throats of U.S. automakers.
Rushing adoption of the standard while two of the government-funded Detroit Three feel compelled to stay quiet (and assured that a compliant mainstream media watchdog won’t bark either), EPA’s power grab is a first step in solidifying the agency’s power over all economic activity in the country.
This action has enraged House Republicans who have just passed out of committee an amendment that would strip EPA of the funds to implement CAFE.
The charge has been led by Republicans John Carter of Texas and co-sponsor Steve Austria of Ohio. Carter’s state is not only home to Toyota’s new Tundra truck manufacturing facility, but one of every four of his constituents buy pickup trucks.
“There is no way that pickup trucks could stay on the market at prices affordable for average Americans under these kind of restrictions,” says Carter. “Washington bureaucrats are so out-of-touch with real life in America they can’t conceive of the personal and economic damage they would cause by effectively taking the American pickup off the road.”
Carter is also ex-Texas judge and knows a violation of the law when he sees one.
“The EPA is saying ‘we don’t care what the law says,'” Carter’s Communications Secretary John Stone tells The Michigan View.com. “We’re going to bypass congressional oversight,” is how Stone characterized the EPA’s attitude.
While Carter’s amendment does not ditch CAFE all together – despite its perverse history forcing automakers to produce cars customers don’t want – it “returns regulation of fuel economy to one federal regulator (NHTSA). Congress never authorized EPA to regulate fuel economy under the Clean Air Act, a law not designed for such a purpose,” reads the bill which also strips the states (that’s you, California) “from regulating fuel economy.”
The EPA justifies its power grab with a liberal interpretation of the Supreme Court’s controversial, 5-4 vote, 2007 ruling which gave the EPA authority to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. The EPA – with the Obama White House’s blessing – interprets the ruling as giving it authority to regulate the entire U.S. economy, says Stone.
“EPA is using the courts to bypass Congress,” he adds.
In its zeal to transform America, the Obama Administration sees Congress as a deliberative roadblock to its ambitious green agenda. Influential green columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times pines for the U.S. to be “China for a day” where its executive branch could accelerate green technology by simply decreeing it.
Obama’s CAFE power grab is one step towards that authoritarian dream.
Payne: Rep. Peters is scarin’ grandma (The Michigan View 08.02.11)
Posted by hpayne on August 2, 2011
In Washington, deception is hailed as good politics. So Michigan Rep. Gary Peters, D-Birmingham, must be one heckuva politician.
Peters – a self-styled “centrist” – let loose with some shameless fear-mongering as the budget impasse reached its climax in the House last week.
“Stand with me today on the 46th anniversary of Medicare and tell House Republicans we will not let their political game playing sacrifice the support we provide for our seniors,” Peters wrote in a letter to supporters. “Contribute $25 today to show your support for Medicare to allow me to stand up for what is right – to protect this lifeline for our seniors. Republican leadership continues to propose massive cuts to Medicare to pay for the tax breaks and loopholes for millionaires and large corporations.”
In truth, entitlements like Medicare weren’t on the table in the debt talks.
Republican cuts to try and avoid yet more national debt were aimed entirely at discretionary spending. Peters’s scaring the glasses off grandma was compounded by class warfare demagoguery which is also fundamentally untrue. In fact, Obama and his Party took off the table the massive tax cuts to wealthy consumers and Big Business to purchase and make green products like electric cars.
Ultimately, of course, entitlements will have to part of a log term solution lest U.S. debt be downgraded and the country thrown into insolvency like Greece. But here again, Peters nose grows.
“Instead of focusing on building a sustainable fiscal future for our nation,” he continues. “They are attacking a proven health care program for our seniors.”
Untrue. In fact, Medicare spending is unsustainable, which is why GOPers have come up with a solution that puts it on a budget by giving seniors a voucher with which they can buy an insurance policy – just like auto or life insurance is purchased in private markets.
What Peters embraces is Obamacare, a radical, government-run, middle-class health care solution that lights a debt bomb under our childrens’ future. So much for the centrist label.
Payne: Obama’s CAFE fairy tale (The Michigan View 07.29.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 29, 2011
“We’ll agree to anything that’s 15 years out,” a highly-placed auto industry insider told me today about the fairy tale 54.5 mpg-by-2025 mandate for America’s auto fleet that Barack Obama and Big Auto execs will finally – officially – announce Friday in Washington.
The rule has no grounding in reality. An engineering rule of thumb is that gas engine efficiency improves by 1.5 percent a year (a gain that, in the cheap gas U.S. market, has traditionally gone to power upgrades rather than mpg improvements). The EPA’s rule will mandate that light trucks gain 3.5 percent a year and cars, 5 percent. Really.
And it mandates that the sun will come up in the west three days a week.
No matter, say Detroit automakers who resisted the edict (well, as much as government-owned entities could resist government mandates anyway) until this week – they can live with it. Why? Because it screws Detroit’s competition (hey, government ownership has its advantages).
The whys of that turnabout is an insight into how much the industry has learned to play the DC game since the imposition of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE) 35 years ago.
Obama is on a mission to increase efficiency standards for ALL products to fight global warming – not just autos. The crucial difference between Big Bulb’s acceptance of light bulb standards (the 20 lumens limit effectively eliminates the incandescent bulb) and Big Auto’s resistance to the 55 mpg standard (effectively eliminating the gas engine)has been one of cost. Big Bulb can make more money on the incandescent’s CFL alternative. Big Auto can’t make money on the gas engine’s electric alternative.
So they poured millions into lobbying to “fix” the standards to their liking – and disadvantage the competition. And that’s changed everything.
The original, 1975 CAFE standard – demanding a 40 percent increase in fuel efficiency – discriminated against Detroit which relied on bigger vehicles for its profits. As a result, CAFE tilted the field to foreign competitors and the Big Three struggled – until discovering the SUV loophole in the ’90s.
This time, a wiser Detroit lobbying team has reacted to the feds’ 100 percent increase in fuel economy by carving out special rules for its truck-heavy lineup, devising easily-manipulated “foot prints” by which each vehicle is judged, and negotiating massive federal subsidies to help automakers build the electrics that will gain the industry credits against the pie-in-the-sky standard (and that Obama has guaranteed the federal government will buy up for its own fleet).
As a result, it’s the foreign makers that are screaming this time. Toyota, Mercedes, and VW have all balked at the blatant foreign discrimination.
“It’s clearly inequitable and favors manufacturers of full size trucks,” one European executive told TheTruthAboutCars.com. “It could have an adverse effect on real world [gasoline] consumption by driving consumers to trucks.”
But they’ll come around. The loopholes in this bill are enormous. And automakers have 15 years to write more. “And if Romney gets elected, he’ll gut the rules anyway,” says my source.
“Remember the ZEV standard,” the source continues, referring to the inane California rule cooked up in 1990 that mandated that 10 percent of automakers’ cars sold in the state had to be “zero-emission- vehicles” by 2003 – or they COULD NOT SELL ANY VEHICLES at all.
This goal -like the 54.5 mpg number – was unworkable and “greens quickly realized that people would only hold on to their older cars when automakers were banned from selling new cars for not meeting the ZEV rule,” says the insider.
The new rule is just as daft. “This is a pipe dream,” the source continues. “There’s no science involved here. ”
Of course, EPA’s green pawns in the news media and environmental movement get a thrill up their leg at the prospect of 54.5 mpg cars. “(The deal) likely will change how drivers shop for, interact with, and think about cars,” bleats The Detroit Free Press’s Aaron Kessler. “It’s really about looking at where we’re headed as a country,” cheered a spokesperson for the lefty Union Of Concerned Scientists.
Nonsense. “Gas prices are the only thing that change consumer behavior,” my source says pointing to hybrid sales’ high water mark of 3 percent of the market in 2008 when prices hit $4-a-gallon.
In short, CAFE has become a play toy for utopians – and a tool for automakers to manipulate against the competition. Its goals are absurd, it’s language convoluted.
“In order to win the backing of the domestic automakers, the White House agreed to a review midway through the period, to ensure the new requirements are achievable, as well as granting credits that will make it easier for the companies to meet the revised standards. If the credit loopholes are too big and if overall fuel economy is not improved to the promised levels, an outcome that is definitely possible with the credit loophole, California could defect again, leaving the entire process back where it started,” reports TheTruthAboutCars.
Got that? No one else does either.
Groundhog Day: D.C. relives Granholm’s budget shutdown ( The Michigan View 07.28.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 28, 2011
It’s Groundhog Day. Again.
We in Michigan are doomed to relive the Granholm era via her political twin, Barack Obama. Gov. Granholm — the charismatic, silver-tongued, pro-labor, Harvard-Law-School-trained, Democratic executive-with-no-executive experience (sound familiar yet?) — brought the state to the precipice with a 2007 budget shutdown.
Now we are watching Obama’s remake.
The similarities between the two crises are uncanny — but the crucial differences teach a lesson in constitutionally-mandated balanced budgets and the need for a steely Republican spine against tax increases. Michigan can only hope its Republican reps in Congress have the courage that GOPers in the state Senate lacked.
In 2007, a liberal governor’s determination to enact permanent big spending and tax hikes set Michigan on course for a budget war. Granholm’s shutdown threat came on the heels of a budget that proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new “investments” — as she and Obama like to call spending — and a new service tax to pay for it. This, even as Michigan’s economy swirled down the drain.
A crucial difference between 2007 and déjà voodoo is that Granholm had won a landslide election the year before, with Democrats regaining the Michigan House and eroding the Republicans’ state Senate majority. But her tax and spend arrogance (didn’t I tell you she and Obama are twins?) provoked an immediate public backlash. A Tea Party-esque movement — led by a tea bag-waving, pig-hauling activist named Leon Drolet — emerged to recall legislators who supported the tax hike.
The lines were drawn. Pro-tax Democrats vs. anti-tax GOPers.
As today in DC, Michigan’s economy was struggling, with an unemployment rate hovering 50 percent above the national average. Ratings services added to the drama by downgrading Michigan’s bond rating from “AA- with a stable outlook” to “AA- with a negative outlook.”
Yet Democrats insisted on tax hikes rather than make structural reforms to state Medicaid entitlements and public employee health benefits, the twin terrors swallowing Michigan’s budget whole. Controlling only one body of the Legislature, Republicans tried to plug the $800 million deficit hole with a cuts-only approach.
Gov. Granholm reacted with a page right of Obama’s playbook. “People will die,” she said, if GOP cuts to Medicaid and other social services passed.
No leadership. No structural reforms. Just a relentless threat that she would begin “shutting down” government. Echoing Obama today, “Granholm has appeared to be disassociated from the process, except to issue occasional press releases criticizing ‘the Legislature’ or ‘Senate Republicans’ for failing to adopt her budget recommendations,” wrote the Mackinac Center.
Republican spines softened in the long, hot summer. Under pressure from the state’s constitutional balanced budget requirement — another crucial difference between Michigan then and Washington now — and after a brief government shutdown on Oct. 1, Senate Republicans agreed to hike income taxes by 12 percent and impose new service taxes on select business activities (ultimately replaced by a 22 percent Michigan Business Tax surcharge) raising $1.5 billion. In return, Republicans got fragile promises of spending reform.
“This budget agreement is the right solution for Michigan,” crowed a victorious Granholm. “We prevented massive cuts to public education, health care and public safety while also making extensive government reforms and passing new revenue. With the state back on solid financial footing, we can turn our focus to the critical task of jumpstarting our economy and creating new jobs.”
Barack Obama couldn’t have said it better. Did it solve the problem?
“Within literally hours of passing the tax hike,” recounts Mackinac Center legislative analyst Jack McHugh, “the Legislature passed bills spending the entire $1.4 billion.” By the time Granholm handed over the wheel to GOP Governor Rick Snyder three years later, the deficit had ballooned to $2 billion amidst a stalled economy.
But the tax mirage isn’t the only Lansing lesson for Washington. The other is that balanced-budget amendments can force divided governments into shutdowns, and force Republicans to accept tax increases.
While today’s Tea Party has helped stiffen Republican spines against the siren-call for tax hikes, they are ironically attracted to a flawed Balanced Budget Amendment. The amendment is — on balance — a positive for states like Michigan, but a disaster for a federal government that is drunk on entitlements and needs budget flexibility for national defense.
Michigan has seen enough of Groundhog Day. Learn the lesson of the 2007 tax showdown.
Green Ferndale goes black ( The Michigan View 07.26.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 26, 2011
Last week, the thermometer in Metro Detroit hit 100 degrees — breaking records set in pre-SUV 1926 — setting off rolling blackouts and completely shutting down the Detroit suburb of Ferndale.
And that’s a problem?
Desperate Ferndale business owners and residents protested DTE Energy’s utility service, but the city — the Berkeley of Michigan – is one of the nation’s loudest when it comes to calling for global-warming mitigation. Its website preaches to residents how they can convert to the Green religion – and the community made national headlines five years ago giving hybrids free public parking.
And in 2008, the City Council passed a resolution urging then-governor Jennifer Granholm, a green zealot committed to converting Michigan to wind power, “to rescind or deny air permits for all coal fired power plants in the best interest of the health and welfare of Michigan citizens.”
The city further “pledged to reduce our global warming emissions seven percent below our 1990 levels by 2012 in an effort to curb global warming.”
Last week’s blackout would seem to be a proactive way of meeting that goal.
But instead, Ferndale’s mayor scrambled to get DTE to bring in diesel generators – fossil-fuel-burning, carbon-spewing generators! – to get the power back on. Apparently the health of the elderly gasping in their homes – three people died from the heat in Metro Detroit — is more important than saving the planet.
Ferndale’s green, hybrid-driving council members suddenly realized that their batteries don’t run on magic. They are coal-powered. So much for carbon independence – unless you want to push your plug-in to work.
Sure, Ferndale greens will says that their anti-carbon measures are necessary to prevent such heat waves – but after record cold temperatures in Michigan this spring and no global increase in temperatures in 15 years, it’s clear that summer happens and communities need to have the baseline coal generation to deal with it.
Didn’t the blackout teach Detroit residents the sacrifice necessary for a post-carbon world? Didn’t it reduce dependence on the “death trains” – climatologist James Hansen’s term for coal-transport rail – that DTE is using to create a planetary Holocaust?
Never mind.
Payne: Presidebt Doublespeak (The Michigan View 07.26.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 25, 2011
Balance the budget by taxing the jet-flying rich? Do the math, it doesn’t add up. Balance the budget with higher taxes on “the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations” like “President Reagan, the first President Bush, (and) President Clinton” passed? If that had worked, we wouldn’t still be in a deficit pickle.
But what stood out to me in the Spender-in-Chief’s divisive, class warfare speech was this intellectually corrupt line:
“How can we slash funding for education and clean energy before we ask people like me to give up tax breaks we don’t need and didn’t ask for?”
In fact, “clean energy funding” and “tax breaks for people like me” are one and the same.
Barack Obama’s rich green friends get $7500 tax break for buying electric cars like the Chevy Volt. Millionaire Elon Musk has received $465 million in federal Energy Dept. loans to build his luxury electric cars. Millionaire Henrik Fisker has received $520 million to build his battery-powered gold chariots. In Michigan alone, Fortune 500 corporations GM, Chrysler, and Ford have received $600 million in federal green loans combined. Millions in stimulus money have gone to giant corps like A123 Systems ($250 million), Dow ($160 million), and South Korea’s LGChem ($150 million). Big Utility DTE Energy got $84 million in stimulus to upgrade its “smart” meters. And so on.
Obama has ruled this corporate candy off limits to cuts. This isn’t just demagoguery, it’s deception.
Obama backs book bailout ( The Michigan View 07.19.11
Posted by hpayne on July 19, 2011
Humor
Ann Arbor, Mich.– President Barack Obama on Monday afternoon announced a $500 million federal bailout for Borders Group Inc., the Ann Arbor-based national superstore book chain, on fears that bankruptcy could destroy American reading and leave millions of children illiterate.
“If Republicans allow this American icon to go out of business,” warned Obama, “American literacy will plummet and our children will not be able to compete internationally for the jobs of tomorrow.”
“Surely Borders was safe, right?” wrote best-selling author Mitch Albom on Sunday in The Detroit Free Press. “Didn’t we have a soft spot for them? Anyone who ever lost track of the hours while cooing at the sheer enormity of the written word, would insist, absolutely and without hesitation, that Borders, like mankind, would somehow survive.”
And survive it will, vowed the president, who said he was determined to save the written word from Tea Party Republicans who think books should be sacrificed to Wall Street’s bottom line.
Obama conceded that Borders – which operates nearly 700 stores worldwide — had failed to modernize against competition from green eBook sellers like Amazon.com, and he pledged federal Energy Dept. loans so that the bookseller could develop the battery-powered books of the future.
The president was joined at the press conference by “Book Czar” Steve Rattner, head of the White House Books Task Force, who said that a “quick-rinse” bankruptcy under an unusual interpretation of Chapter 363 of the bankruptcy code wouldn’t last more than a month.
The president attacked Wall Street bondholders for wanting to liquidate the company to benefit the wealthy — and vowed to give 50 percent of the company to Borders’ 10,700 employees, who. . . .
Aw, we’re just pulling your leg.
There’s no news conference. President Obama has no comment. Those 10,700 employees don’t belong to the UAW. They aren’t even unionized. They didn’t give a collective dime to the Democratic Party last election cycle.
Never mind.
Would you hand your $2 billion investment portfolio to a social worker? ( the Michigan View 07.18.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 18, 2011
Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has a graduate degree in social work. So last week, she invested $2 billion of your tax money in the lithium-ion battery production industry.
Ain’t spending other people’s money fun?
Actually, “invested” is hardly the term you would use for someone who has no background in the financial industry. Financial advisers “invest” your money in anticipation of a financial return. Social workers-turned-pols confiscate their clients’ money through taxation then “spend” it to solve global warming.
Financial advisers consult research analysts and study the structure of a business and whether it is in a viable market. Senator Stabenow just stares into a crystal ball and says batteries are the future. Because, she says, “I can feel (global warming) when I’m flying.”
Stabenow says she will introduce her Battery Innovation Act to coordinate all aspects of advanced battery production, from research and development to manufacturing where she and her colleagues have handed over billions more of your money to politically-connected corporations. All this even though she has never coordinated a parade, much less a battery manufacturing firm.
She says “she hopes (it) spurs a growing market.”
Would you hand over $2 billion of your money to a broker with Stabenow’s resume? Would you hand her $2?
Of course, the skill Stabenow does bring to the table is that she can issue edicts creating guaranteed markets for her “investment.” Where will her batteries be sold? She and President Obama have mandated that all 600,00 vehicles in the federal fleet be converted to hybrid-battery power.
What’s more, she and the president – himself a social worker – want to essentially mandate America’s car fleet be battery-hybrids with a 56 mpg fuel economy standard by 2025.
How does a social worker know the future of the most complicated manufacturing product on the planet? How does a lifetime pol who has never worked in the capital markets know that it will “generate billions in private sector economic activity, creating thousands of jobs and making America competitive in advanced battery technologies”?
Easy. In America these days, social workers mandate the future.
Dim and dimmer ( The Michigan View 7.15.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 16, 2011
Gary Peters represents Michigan’s richest district (Oakland County) and John Conyers its poorest (Detroit). Yet both men voted for the light bulb ban this week that will eliminate the most affordable option for Michiganians’ most common household item.
Why would John Conyers join his Democratic colleagues in voting as a bloc for a government edict that will do demonstrable harm to the state’s poorest and most Democratic district? The answer tells us a lot about where the Democratic Party is today.
It’s not about constituent service, it’s about power.
The development is hardly new. Conyers & Co.’s support of a variety of government regulatory edicts from a ban on household pesticides to federal auto miles per gallon rules have disproportionately impacted their constituents in recent decades.
Detroiters today are feeling the pain of bed bug infestation that is the direct result of the Clinton EPA’s ban – against the advice of the sciencific community – on the common household chemical Dursban in the late 1990s. While suburban leaders like Peters might justify the ban because their rich constituents can afford the Orkin man, poorer communities cannot.
Without Dursban on the shelf, lower-income Detroiters are defenseless and the bed bug infestation has swept the city, especially harming children.
“Hardest hit will be lower-income families in cities like Detroit, who can ill afford a weekly house call from the Orkin man,” warned Michigan writer Diane Katz when the ban was passed. Shame on Peters for discriminating against Detroit, but the real shame here is Detroit’s silent rep.
The prize for both men is more power for Washington — and by extension, themselves.
So too the bulb diktat. While House GOPers tried to preserve the incandescent bulb choice of 85 percent of Americans this week, Democrats voted in lockstep to eliminate 40-cent incandescent starting on January 1 in the name of global warming. In an Orwellian twist of language, Democrats claimed the bulb ban would expand consumer choice.
But the looming ban has already sold Democrat-leaning blue-collars down the river as GE and other bulb companies have shifted production to China to make the more expensive replacement CFL bulbs.
None of those factories were in Michigan, yet Conyers has also sentenced his poor constituents to paying up to ten times more for light — $2 to $5 for CFLs instead of the 40 cent incandescent. What will they do now? Likely be forced to choose between food and bulbs — or take refuge in the black market. Again, while Peters punishes his constituents for their global warming sins, at least they can afford to light their Birmingham palaces with CFLs (even as it burns a hole in his alleged concern for Michigan’s needy).
Which brings us to the Obama Administration’s proposed 56 miles-per-gallon-by-2025 auto mileage regulations. While Governor Rick Snyder has written a (tepid) letter expressing concern over an edict that will force Americans into smaller, more expensive hybrid-electrics, Peters and Conyers have once again sacrificed Michigan workers at the altar of power.
Yet while they will benefit from more campaign contribution from automaker lobbying for regulatory loopholes — not to mention playing broker to the billions in government battery subsidies – Peters and Conyers will perversely jeopardize the Detroit Three’s lock on the truck market.
The resurgence of Chrysler, for example, has been due almost entirely to the production of the Chrysler Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV built in Detroit’s Jefferson North plant. Yet as the Democrats’ mileage edict makes vehicles smaller and more expensive, those profits will diminish, hurting both workers and Michigan’s bottom line.
The question is not just why Michigan Democrats like Conyers and Peters put their interest before their constituents, but why are those constituents still voting for them?
AAA magazine link
Posted by hpayne on July 16, 2011
In this magazine Henry has an animated cartoon for the particle on page 12 ” signs of the times.
Lights Out ( The Michigan View 7.13.11)
Posted by hpayne on July 13, 2011
The Religious Right is in your bedroom. And the Green Left is in every other room in your house.
If Bible-thumping busybodies want to govern your sex life, then the Goracle’s disciples want to dictate what light bulbs to use in the living room, what foods you eat in the kitchen, what toilets you flush in the bathroom, what washers you load in the laundry room, and what car you park in the garage.
Incredibly, the House of Representatives went on the record Tuesday night to ban the light bulbs that 85 percent of Americans choose to use in their homes. We’re not making this up.
Under the hurried conditions under which the Better Use of Light Bulbs (BULB) Act (intended to repeal a sneaky provision of the 2007 Energy Bill) was brought to the House floor, it had to garner 290 votes- a two-thirds majority – to pass. But, largely upon party lines, it passed by only 233-193.
It may be a vote that Democrats — in this tea party era — will live to regret.
Indeed, the movement to repeal the bulb ban marks a watershed in Washington’s relentless effort to impose standards on every aspect of your life. The BULB vote has shown a light on the dark, stealthy plot to remake America to conform to Democrats’ austere, Green religion.
“The vote is disappointing because only five Democrats voted for repealing the ban,” says Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute who organized a national petition to save the bulb. “However, a clear majority in the House support the bill. So the next step will be to bring the bill back under regular rules requiring a majority or add as an amendment to another bill.”
As if on cue, Michigan Representative and Energy Committee Chairman Fred Upton says it ain’t over ’til it’s over.
“A minority of Members chose to stand in the way of consumer choice,” said Upton, who sponsored the original ban but who has since seen the light, in a statement,. “A similar amendment may also be offered on the Energy and Water Appropriations bill later this week, which will need only a majority to pass.”
By design, most Green standardization has been forced on manufacturers, out of view of consumers who politicians fear will hold them accountable for their dictatorial whims. Increase gas taxes to force hybrid-electric cars? Better to mandate fleet miles-per-gallon standards then demonize Big Auto if it can’t measure up. Increase electricity rates to pay for inefficient windmills? Better to force Renewable Power Standards on utilities and then demonize them when the rolling power blackouts come. Remove top -load washers from retail showrooms? Better to mandate water-use standards on washing machines, then demonize Big Business if they raise prices.
But sometimes the zealots go too far.
Exhibit A is Congress’ 1992 Energy Policy and Conservation Act that mandated homebuilders conform to a 1.6 gallon toilet standard. The resulting hassle of multiple flushes to get toilets to clean out has become a national joke. Senator Rand Paul famously flayed Green Priestess Kathleen Hogan, the Energy Department’s deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency, at a hearing this March
“Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house,” roared Paul. “And I blame you and people like you who want to tell me what I can install in my house.”
“Flushing has become an anxious game of chance for all of us. Will it work? Will it clog up?” wrote Michael Heberling for The Mackinac Center in 1999. “Why has using the bathroom become a source of anxiety in my home? It is because I am the not-so-proud owner of three federally mandated, consumer-unfriendly toilets.”
But the edict — despite efforts to kill it (most famously by Michigan Rep. Joe Knollenberg) — stuck, ominously setting the stage for the current insanity. At least consumers have the option of flushing again and again (thus negating the purpose of the standard to save water).
Nixing light bulbs is another matter. Congress’ outright ban — via arcane language in the 2007 Energy Bill— may have slipped the notice of the public in 2007, and again in 2010 as incandescent factories quietly closed, putting hundreds out of work. But as consumers learned the common 40-100 watt bulbs would disappear by January 1, the Green police hit a buzz-saw.
Even if the bulb ban repeal had succeeded, it would have likely been defeated by Harry Reid’s Senate, or vetoed by the dictator-in-chief. But the cat is out of the bag.
“I really find it troubling,” concluded Sen. Paul in March, “this busy-body nature that you want to come into my house, my bathroom, my bedroom, my kitchen, my laundry room.”
Americans have gotten a whiff of the socialist jackals stalking their homes. And now they have names.