Event: The Closing of Flint Central (Part 4 of 4)

Almost to the end.

I'm allowing myself a closing argument.

Flint has been in decline since before I was born, and very soon almost the entirety of its residents will only remember the city's downfall. In the last fifty years, the population has halved, and Flint has gone from an expansionist vision of a future that saw it eclipsing competing cities to the possibility of demolishing whole neighborhoods that have emptied out.

During this time there have been a lot of attempts to resurrect the city in its old glory, and many of them were, frankly, unrealistic. At times the main drag, which is the oldest road in the region and a conduit through four major cities (including Detroit) has been cordoned off for an ill-conceived pedestrian mall. Parking meters and haphazard one-way streets were installed downtown at the same time as free parking was added to the strip malls and plazas of the suburbs. AutoWorld, a hare-brained theme park expected to draw a million visitors annually was probably Flint's greatest embarrassment. However, an era of inept political leadership (two mayors have been deservedly forced out of office in the last ten years alone) has probably been more damaging.

These issues are all surrounded and dominated by the withdrawal of General Motors. In 1978, almost 80,000 people worked for GM locally. That number has shrunk by 90%, and the process continues today. Flint at its peak had 200,000 residents, and the county under 500,000. Even under expert leadership, well-coordinated institutional support, and an aggressively inventive private sector, Flint would have been doomed to a steep decline. In reality, the severity and speed of its actual decline is part of the reason this city is so analyzed, even on an international level.

The last several years have realized, finally, a more pragmatic and well-considered response. A decade of selective investment in the downtown area has prepared the way for a time when several expanding commuter colleges would go residential. In the last decade Kettering University on the West Side built dormitories, and has been followed this year by housing downtown at the University of Michigan campus. The area between the two schools has been approved for redevelopment and park space (several proposals involve brownfield left by GM along the Flint river, which could reflect the Olmstead-style Kearsley Park across town). The idea is that a sizeable mixed-income population will encourage investment and rising property values.

The East Side is instrumental to these plans. While it does not have a residential campus, it is the site of the Cultural Center, which has been an anchor and an asset to Flint for over fifty years. Mott College, which is itself expanding, and the stable neighborhood of the East Village bound this area on the south and east. If anything, this part of the city has helped shore up the downtown area far more than downtown has driven regional commerce. If Flint's current slow-growth development works as intended, in one decade we will see a viable urban corridor running from the western city limits to Dort Highway. Of course, this corridor will still be bounded by the poverty and devaluation of surrounding neighborhoods, and the disparity will be extreme. However, given the severity of disinvestment, it is hard to imagine any permanent progress being made in Flint without some consolidation and growth.

The Flint School District, too, is a critical piece of the puzzle, albeit in a less obvious way, and from a less promising position. The district has cycled through three superintendents in the last several years, and has fallen victim to hare-brained schemes of its own. Earlier this decade the graduation rate was pegged at around 40%. And yet, if you haven't noticed, most of the current redevelopment plans involve higher education in some form or another. Three colleges are in the targeted development areas, and a fourth just outside of city limits. If Flint's progress is contingent on collegiate educational growth, yet city residents are not equipped to participate in that growth, then there is every reason to think that whatever progress does occur will be segmented, or worse, superficial. Therefore: By any means necessary public schools in Flint have to fix their problems. At this point, it is as important a question as GM's continuing presence.

Flint Central and its campus are an asset that cannot be replaced. We needn't rely on sentimental reasons for saving the school. Any short-term gains achieved by demolishing the building (even if another structure is built on-site) would be offset by the inability of future development to fill such a unique and necessary niche in the city's social and geographic landscape (an architect friend of mine has observed that $27 million today could not construct a school in any style of Central's size). Central is emblematic of Frank Manley's community education experiments, which are more relevant to Flint today than ever before, and the campus has ideal access to the city's most successful institutions. True, the problem of retaining the physical structure could be ameliorated by selling the building to Powers Catholic, but the most long-term solution, the solution that enables Flint's population to be the necessary and participatory force in the city's recovery demands that the school remain with in the public school system. Get the money from our foundations and federal stimulus money, beg, borrow, and steal from alumni, find and coerce the genius behind the Kalamazoo Promise, go on Oprah and beg, do whatever it takes. Fix Central, upgrade Northern, and make these two high schools the effective poles of newer, meaner, sharper magnet programming and community education. $27 million isn't pocket change, but it isn't that much either when calculated against the capital of a reenergized city center.

Central High School could be one the most decisive elements in a retooled and realistic master plan for the City of Flint.

And in my mind, when those polished doors swing open again, its the Indians they will welcome home.



Part 1: Here.
Part 2: Here.
Part 3: Here.
Part 4: Here.

Event: In support of Soviet-style Central Planning.

My brother sent me a link to this Kunstlercast. Podcast #64 is about the initiative to shrink Flint city limits, and Jim Kunstler spoke against in general terms against mandated shrinking. He said that he wasn't familiar with the specifics of the situation in Flint, but his overall position seemed to be that city should rely on incentives and zoning to shift population. I largely disagreed with this argument, at least as pertains to Flint, and here is part of my (typically long-winded) reply to my brother:

---

I most disagreed with Jim on the principle of eminent domain. He seemed reluctant to endorse municipal management beyond offering incentives and long-term fixes such as rezoning marginal neighborhoods. He thought that mandated relocation "smacks of central planning" a la the Soviet Union. He talks about eliminating municipal restrictions and bureaucratic red-tape. This half-engaged approach fails to take two things into consideration.

The first consideration is the extent of demographic realignment. Flint's population has dropped from almost 200,000 fifty years ago to 110,000 today, and Genesee County's has decreased slightly since 1980. Industry and capital investment is shrinking. This means that short-term growth in any part of the area is only going to happen at the expense of somewhere else. In Flint long-term strategy has to proceed from short-term strategy because the city is caught in a vicious cycle of disinvestment. In fact, the city and city employers have long offered a number of incentives to repopulate the inner-city, including restricted-tax Renaissance zones. It's not enough to make the necessary difference. If our goal is a smaller, healthier, and more stable Flint, we are unlikely to achieve this without large-scale governmental intervention.

The second consideration is the extent of economic distress. Jim is worried about the abuse of eminent domain. Ordinarily, this is a fine thing to worry about, but the standard of living in the marginal parts of Flint is really wretched. These neighborhoods sometimes have around a 60%-70% residency rate, meaning that 1 out of 3 houses are vacant (a figure that does not consider the vacant lots left by already-demolished houses). Crime and poverty are rampant, many neighborhoods often do not have a school or a supermarket nearby, and infrastructural degradation is so complete that basic things like safe water access and electricity can be spotty. I remember that when Jess and I lived on the East Side, some areas by the river were virtually undriveable by car. I noticed electrical wires down and in the street for days on end. Not long after we moved, an abandoned house two blocks away from ours blew up because of a gas leak. It is a typically capitalist paradigm that property rights are sacrosanct while things like public health are more negotiable, but what logical reason do we have to prefer the rights of a small group of property owners over the obligation of the city to provide all residents with essential services (water, police and fire protection, etc.)? The money residents pay for those services is just as real as the money someone puts down on a house, and (unlike eminent domain) the money will not be returned just because the services are not delivered.

Finally, one other reason I'm not worried about the effort to shrink Flint. Flint has a political scene long mired in corruption and incompetence, but neighborhood downsizing could be an accurate bellwether of administrative progress. Do you remember Woodrow Stanley's plans to cut down and sell all of the trees on public land, or Don Williamson's city-run factory? Part of the reason these harebrained schemes (thankfully) didn't go any further than they did was the lack of political maturity in those administrations. Neither Stanley or Williamson wanted or cared to compromise with their opponents and government entities. Now shrinking Flint is far-and-away a more feasible and reasonable plan, but there's a slew of logistic hurdles and political liabilities involved. Moving populations, discontinuing service, and wholesale demolition requires the careful coordinated effort of public and private entities, each with their own unions, management, and workforces to answer to. So an incompetent government would not be able to pull this off. Pulling any number of voting homeowners out of the neighborhood, even on favorable terms, is a political liability with risks for officeholders. So a completely corrupt government would have a hard time pulling this off. If Flint is actually able to shrink itself, it's a good sign that residents have put the right people in positions of power; that is likely to make as big a difference as downsizing the city.

Event: A hundred Wagoner loads of thoughts will not pay a single ounce of debt.

"Here’s the part I find odd. Now, the government didn’t ask any of those Wall Street C.E.O.s to quit. Isn’t that kind of a double standard? I mean, if you build Cadillacs, you’re screwed. But if your chauffeur drives a Cadillac, you’re O.K. Whew!"
- Jay Leno



Two or three days ago, I forget what it was, the news was packed dense with details on the travails of Chrysler and GM, and most of this focused on the ouster of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner. The Danziger cartoon above encapsulates some of the ironies of the current situation; a career-long affiliation and decade plus executive tenor coupled with an inability to move product. In fact, this is a constant theme in the books I've been reading on the American auto industry: the inability of the executive financial class to reconcile public demand with a speculative market. For a half-century their strategy has favored the latter, and so their decline in actual market share was foreseen and, once started, ongoing.

What I've noticed in the Free Press and among many Michigan politicians (and, surprisingly, late night talk show hosts who usually like to castigate Detroit and the Big Three) is the increasing tendency to contrast the disparity between the treatment of Detroit and that of the New York financial firms. After all, who has been ousted there? There's no question that, at least where the corporate class is concerned, bankers have retained more autonomy and have received less scrutiny than manufacturers, despite the fact that the mistakes made in the financial sector have been by far the worse.

But the ideas and contradictions embodied in the Leno quote are where things really start to get interesting. It prefers conflation by industry over separation by class, which runs somewhat counter to reality. It's actually a pretty funny joke, but not quite correct when we get down to things. Those who "build Cadillacs," that is, the autoworkers and management, are likely to be subject to forced contract renegotiations in the upcoming weeks and months -- in bankruptsy court if not out of it -- and this is where the force of contrast is a source of dark humor. But then Leno also assumed this slight applies to Wagoner personally: "Now, the government didn’t ask any of those Wall Street C.E.O.s to quit." The former GM CEO isn't hurting these days. He received something of a $20 million severance package, so in the words of our president he's "doing fine," he'll "still be affluent." To put it a little differently, in the Danziger cartoon, our sympathies ought to be with the bedraggled dealer who has worked hard to push his unwanted vehicles, not with a hapless and besuited Wagoner.

I don't share the sympathy of the press for GM's former CEO; he had a decade worth of chances, and while he tried harder than some of his predecessors, he didn't try hard enough. The disparity in the government's response is telling, and has more to do with politics than with our economic health. This week is important as the G20 summit will determine whether we will continue to push our economies through aggressive spending (per the US) or whether we will instead pursue aggressive international financial regulation (per the EU). The fact that this is only posed as an either/or proposition shows how unequal governing forces have been to the economic crisis so far. The fact is, we need both.

In the U.S. where we are enacting broad spending programs and will need to enact more, there is no injustice or impropriety in the government's demands on Chrysler and GM. However, we need to see more oversight of the financial sector, and when it comes, it should be in terms as strong as and stronger than the chastisement the auto industry has received this week.

Event: Andy Heller discusses the loan.

The Flint Journal: President Bush saves the auto industry, and Michigan lives to see another day.

EVENT: Thank You, President Bush.

Four words I'm not accustomed to saying.

New York Times: Bush Approves $17.4 Billion Auto Bailout.

Event: Where Does $70/Hour Come From?

Save Auto Jobs: 'Mathematically and intellectually dishonest'.

Anecdotal Conclusions:
Obviously my family didn't enjoy this sort of income growing up; we were always comfortable and the fair income did provide me with some opportunities that nonunion employees wouldn't have had, such as music and theater lessons and the opportunity to attend a prestigious (and expensive) private college.
1) $30-40/hour (benefits and pension included) is a very decent wage, but it isn't the $70/hour legacy burden that is so often shoved off on autoworkers.
2) An observation that is (finally) being made is that legacy costs are more than a drop in the bucket, but are an incidental concern when the Big Three aren't making vehicles that people want to buy.
3) New workers aren't making these wages; their wages are in line with foreign competitors. This is, in fact, more of a liability for the UAW than it may sound on the surface, since pay tiers by date-of-hire impose a wage wedge that can push unions apart. Many corporations have exploited situations like this to sow discord in unions.
4) God Forbid blue-collar workers would earn as much as their betied brethren!

Event: Opinion - Senate Seats and Subsidies.

Detroit Free Press: Senate Seat for Sale.

Some quotes:

“They’ve been throwing taxpayer dollars at Toyota for years in Alabama and no one raises a stink about that” Hayes said. In fact, as Olbermann noted, Alabama alone has given more in tax subsides per job to foreign automakers than Detroit was asking for in the bailout plan to save jobs at American companies.

The Big Three haven’t been competing against Toyota and Honda and Nissan; they’ve been competing against Japan. Unlike America, that nation actually has an industrial policy. While our government talked about the virtues of free trade, the Japanese government worked hand in glove with their automakers to help make them the world leaders.

Japan is aggressively trying to do with autos what they did with consumer electronics – undercut American manufacturers, drive them out of business and capture the American market. Japan heavily subsidizes their automakers, they fund their research, they manipulate their currency, and they erect trade barriers that make it virtually impossible for American automakers to export to their country. Think the fact that Pacific Rim nations buy up 80-percent of our government debt has something to do with keeping our government from enacting policies to level the playing field? The bank that holds your mortgage doesn't dance to your tune, you dance to the tune of the bank that holds your mortgage.

I don’t care what you’re manufacturing or if your CEO is Albert Einstein, if you are competing against a country that actually has universal health care, while you’re forced to add $1,200 to $1,500 to the cost to every unit you manufacture to cover your employees’ health care, you’re not going to be competitive. If your country doesn’t rebate the value added tax when you export your product while your competitor’s country does, not only will you be priced out of their market, your foreign competitor’s government subsidy will put them at a tremendous price advantage on your home turf.

Of course, now I've quoted almost the entire column.

Event: Two More Opinions.

My dad sent me this, from 17 years ago.

Car Talk, April 1992.

When I push (hard) for a loan to the Big Three, I'm not favoring a blank check; I've no desire to repeat the Wall Street bailout. Hopefully the White House attaches strict requirements to any aid it gives.

And this is from Hallie.

New York Times: When the Cars Go Away.

The interesting thing is, deindustrialization effectively shielded cities like Detroit, Flint, and Saginaw from the investment excitement of the eighties and the prosperity of the nineties. I had a stable family life, a healthy material life, and a good education, which was why I could bear witness to all this and then write about it today. Because I do feel that people from my part of the country have been treated to a rare sneak peek of what the rest of the country (or even the First World?) may be experiencing soon:

FLINT, MICHIGAN
COMING SOON TO A CITY NEAR YOU

Event: Another Good Article.

Salon.com: Senate GOP to the UAW: Drop Dead.

Body: "Seems I keep getting this story twisted."

?

?

"Somewhere, someone must know the ending?"

Concept: Link to Zambian Economist.

Today I link to the blog Zambian Economist in the sidebar "cool people" section. Maintained by "Cho" as "a non-political platform for exchanging ideas" the Zambian Economist nevertheless promotes a pragmatic argument to ease Zambian material and economic distress through common-sense reforms and responsible governance. I was particularly taken by the Memo to President Banda, but this blog discusses everything from food distribution to copper mining, and I'm going to have to visit many times before I've absorbed what it really has to offer.

You should drop by!

Event: Digby Weighs in on the Auto-Industry.

Hullabaloo: They Work Hard For The Money.

This opinion means a lot to me. Digby is one of my favorite bloggers, and the fact that we're on the same, or very similar, pages here encourages me. I've never really read anything of hers that isn't reasonable and responsible.

Event: Thoughts on Southern Africa.

Over the last several weeks, as part of my research for Urbantasm, I've been reading about countries in southern Africa. So far I've taken in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and presently, Mozambique.

I don't really have an argument or a bone of contention in this post... but it is one of those subjects where questions lead to more questions. The history courses I took in junior high and high school spent almost no time on the history of Africa which meant that for a long time I had only the popular images of blight and war, coup d'etats and apartheid. In college I quickly learned that most things that seem as though they ought to be complicated actually are, and realized that each tribe, each city, each country, each region had their own dilemmas, traditions, and histories. But that was as specific as I got. With the exception of a few articles I've read here and there and stories that friends have brought home from abroad, this is the first time I've taken a closer look at Africa.

One thing that immediately strikes me is the paradoxical relationship of South Africa to its neighbors since independence. In the early days, when apartheid was in full swing, South Africa's neighbors confronted it (often with the encouragement of the competing West and Soviet states)... while it's debatable what the upshot for the great powers would be, South Africa's retaliation was often devastating to its neighbors. For example, South African support of Mozambican insurgents led to that country's long civil war, which killed or displaced almost 25% of the population. Most South Africans are, themselves, very poor. But the economic engines of Cape Town and Johannesburg are forces to be reckoned with, and easily eclipse that of South Africa's neighbors. This would seem to be why apartheid, in addition to being a human rights nightmare by virtue of what it was, had an outsized impact on southern Africa as a whole. Of course, something that Wikipedia doesn't discuss in detail, but which I suspect is worth considering, is the fact that, as with most proxy wars, the West expressed concern for African states only as nebulously coherent allies. Our only investment was a military investment, and when we did engage in markets there it was in the most rapacious and predatory ways we could. So it's also Europe and America's fault that southern Africa is in the bind that it is today.

I know that these countries are often criticized as undemocratic and oligarchic. In the case of Zimbabwe, the worst observations would seem to hold, even as South Africa itself has come the furthest toward true democracy. But my attention is most held by the other two I've considered here: Zambia and Mozambique. Zambia is diversifying its economy, and Mozambique has joined just about every association from the Commonwealth of Nations to the Community of Portuguese Language Countries as a way to augment their post-civil war influence. Considering the Pandora's box of troubles these states have had to grapple with in living memory, it astonishes me that any sort of functioning state is possible... in some ways, this achievement is more audacious and commendable than the maintenance of the status quo in the relatively safe, powerful, and prosperous U.S.

But this opinion is largely limited and even hazardously uninformed. It is necessarily bookish. So please, comment on this!

Event: More Reasons for the Bailout...

LeftHandedMan posted this brilliant comment on DailyKos:

The GOP never dreamed it would get to kill a massive part of organized labor and have an entire region of the country completely collapse on the Democratic parties watch to boot, but that is just the opportunity that has arisen for the Limbaugh/Coulter wing of the GOP.

A 25 billion dollar loan, with strings attached mandating the auto industry stay the fuck out of monkeying with healthcare reform and making them go green or else, could save hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending over the next 10 years alone.

10 to 12 million jobs lost, boom!, 200 to 1 trillion dollars in emergency social spending to deal with the collapse's impact on the region, the UAW dead and Wal-Mart the biggest employer in the region, Michigan in full economic collapse and millions of voters ripe for being in play in the next round of the Culture War.

The GOP, and the media pundits who are all clamoring for Obama and the Congress to let the auto industry die will be damning us and running against the Democratic Party as the party that 'Let Michigan Die' or 'Let Detroit Die' for a generation if the auto industry is allowed to die.

The auto industry is 4% of our GDP.

If it goes, thats several years added on to the economic crisis that we face.

And probably Bobby Jindal in 2012 running as Ronnie Reagan on a white horse to "save" America.

Event: Letter from the UAW.

This email arrived in my Inbox this morning (four days late). I pass it along in the interest of promoting a respondible loan to the Big Three through congress. Please consider writing a short letter. My thoughts and qualifications are here.

---

Dear Connor Coyne,

Please respond right away to this urgent request by calling your
Senators or Representative through this toll-free number: (877)
331-1223. Or send an e-mail:
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/autojobs

The auto industry needs help in Congress right away -- and if we
don't get it, the jobs and benefits of hundreds of thousands of
our active and retired members and millions of other Americans
are at risk.

Next week the House and Senate are expected to vote on
legislation to provide an emergency $25 billion bridge loan to
GM, Ford and Chrysler to help weather the current severe credit
and economic crises. Without this assistance, there is a real
danger that the three companies will run out of cash and be
forced to cease all manufacturing and business operations in the
near future.

The collapse of these companies would be devastating:

-- In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Big Three workers
who would lose their jobs, up to 3 million other workers could
see their jobs disappear at dealers, suppliers of components and
materials, and other businesses that depend on the auto
industry.

-- Almost 1 million retirees and their spouses and dependents
could suffer cuts in their pension benefits and the loss of
health insurance coverage.

-- The federal pension guarantee program could be saddled with
enormous liabilities, jeopardizing its ability to protect
benefits for millions of other workers.

-- Because of the importance of the auto industry to our entire
economy, the collapse of the Big Three auto companies would
aggravate the current recession, creating further hardships for
working families and communities across the United States.

-- Revenues to federal, state and local governments would be
sharply reduced, forcing drastic cuts in vital social services
at the time they are most needed.

Congress can prevent these devastating consequences. The federal
government has already stepped forward to provide assistance to
Wall Street and financial institutions. It is now time for
Congress to help Main Street by providing urgently needed help
for the auto companies.

You have probably seen or heard some commentators who are trying
to blame you and your fellow UAW members for the current
situation of the companies by attacking our "overly rich" wages
and benefits. We need to rebut these false charges, and make it
clear that active and retired UAW members have already made
enormous sacrifices in the 2005 and 2007 collective bargaining
agreements.

Other commentators have tried to blame the Big Three for their
current situation by saying it is attributable to their
insistence on producing "gas guzzling" vehicles. This overlooks
the major progress the companies are making in bringing forward
more fuel efficient vehicles. More importantly, it ignores the
fact that the current crisis is due to the huge drop in overall
auto sales that has been caused by the larger credit and
economic crises that have engulfed our entire nation.

Auto sales in October were a mere 10.8 million on an annualized
basis, the lowest level in 25 years. All automakers reported
steep declines in their sales. The problem is not that consumers
don't want to buy the quality products that GM, Ford and
Chrysler are making. The problem is that consumers have stopped
buying vehicles from any companies.

Please call your Representative and Senators now. Urge them to
vote for legislation to provide an immediate $25 billion bridge
loan to the Big Three auto companies. Tell them this is
essential to prevent the liquidation of these companies and
devastating consequences for millions of workers and retirees
and for our entire economy.

You can use the following toll-free number to call your
Representative and Senators: (877) 331-1223. Or send an e-mail:
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/autojobs

The legislation to provide assistance to the auto industry will
likely be taken up by the House and Senate sometime next week.
So please call or e-mail right away!

--------------------------------------------------

Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.

http://www.unionvoice.org/join-forward.html?domain=Uawire&r=p1AD3mEqTS5H

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for
UAWire at:

http://www.unionvoice.org/Uawire/join.html?r=p1AD3mEqTS5HE

---

UPDATE: Here is the letter I sent to Jan Schakowsky, Dick Durbin, and Barack Obama.

Dear Senator Durbin and Congresswoman Schakowsky,

I know you're getting a ton of mail on this subject right now, and are well-versed in the pros and cons. I will try to be succinct.

I strongly opposed you both on your support for the Wall Street bailout because I saw it passed with what I saw as a lack of discretion. I registered protest votes due to this (something I haven't done since 1996), because I do think that congress should be penalizing any corporate interest that relies on the taxpayers to save them from bankruptsy. In practice, they are essentially holding the economy ransom to get what they need to continue.

This loan to the auto industry seems more sound to me than the other bailout. It is a much smaller amount (not that billions are anything to sneeze at), and I understand the myriad ways that the automotive industry impacts the American economy at large.

Here's the thing: you shouldn't have to write a blank check in order to help the auto industry. The Big Three have taken some steps in necessary retooling and restructuring; demand that they take more. Eliminate what fluff you can, and pass a bill with stringent requirements. You win with the Big Three for giving them breathing room. You win with the public for representing their interest. And with me, I will both happily and enthusiastically vote for you, because I expect my senators and representatives to fight for me, and I am proud when they do so.

I know that this sort of middle-road and straightforward approach is often taken off the table (and for all the wrong reasons); you cannot help the the environment in which you are debating this issue. But this is a straightforward case, and this is the most reasonable solution.

Sincerely,

Connor Coyne

Event: Bailing Out the Big Three.

---

New York Times: Congress Remains Divided on Bailout.

New York Times: Clout Has Plunged for Automakers and Union, Too.

New York Times: How Many Jobs Depend on the Big Three?

* * * * *

New York TimeS: Saving Detroit from Itself.

Paul Krugman: Cars.

* * * * *

Daily Kos: Ideas for an Auto Plan - GM Edition w/ Poll.

---

The articles above pretty effectively stake out the boundaries of my position. With possibly over three million jobs at stake, it isn't with a lot of pleasure that I watch the Big Three work the nation over now as they've worked Michigan for decades. What do I mean by work over? I mean that they draw assistance from the government (whether in terms of tax breaks, incentives, and now a bailot) to rectify a mess they've made, and in exchange for which the best they can seemingly offer is a non-worst case scenario. If that. In Flint, throughout the eighties and nineties, GM continued to drink that city's tax pool dry in infrastructural and fiscal accomodations as if they were dying of thirst at a desert oasis. And yet they persisted in the manufacturing strategy that has put them in dire straights. The cities and states which invest in these companies, essentially at gunpoint, rarely see such speculations realized. There is a risk of this being mirrored on a national level. The Big Three's market share will presumably continute to dwindle in the near-future, albeit hopefully at a slower rate, they'll close plants and hemmorage jobs, and if everyting goes perfectly, it will still be a long, long time before they can offer a fleet as well-adapted to the next global environment as their competitors.

It's just like the Wall Street Bailout all over again. These were my original reservations with that bailout package, and here is the upshot after just two months.

Let's learn a lesson from this very recent history and not be handing out blank checks.

Let's encourage our representatives to cautiously support a bailout for the auto industry, but let us absolutely insist that it only come with serious and meaningful restructuring that will lead to an industry that can legitimately compete. Symbolic shuttling of executives will not be sufficient (and the Wall Street bailout didn't even achieve that obvious step); any Company that requires taxpayer money to fight for profit is fair game for prudent meddling. It's more than auto plants that will need restructuring; it's the Big Three's entire corporate structure.

---

I wrote more on this at Daily Kos: Don't Be Flint, Michiganized by the Big Three.

Event: "We'll make 'em fit! It'll be fun!"

???

Dear Mr. Danziger,

For several years now I've openly described your work as my very favorite of political cartoonists. Your drawing has a precision that goes beyond a canny resemblance and your cutting captions can sum up an issue in better than a thousand words. Yours is a medium in which cheap shots seem to be both available and abundant, and the care which you take in your selections has always impressed me. After all, any sane critical thinker could spend eight years pummeling the Bush administration; your statements have been fresh and trenchant, and you've had ammo left over for the Democratic primaries, for Chinese domestic and foreign policy, and for all of the other misguided and tragically uninformed errrors in American politics this decade. Which is why I'm so dismayed by the lone autoworker you have exclaiming "we'll make 'em fit! It'll be fun" as he holds an oversized croquet mallet aloft this week.

I come to this personally: practically everyone in my family has worked for GM in Flint, Michigan and Oakland County. My father worked at Buick for almost 40 years before being bought out this year because the last plant in his division (Powertrain North) has closed. My aunt worked at EDS, my grandmother was a secretary at GMI, and my grandfather made spark spugs for AC Delco from the moment he got home from World War II.

Look, I know that doing what you do you are bound to anger people, that you can't be over-sensitive to anger, that calling things as they are is inevitably going to bruise some ribs along the way.

But I've always seen you as being very selective in choosing your targets, and more importantly, in choosing their foibles. In your recent piece you show an autoworker standing like an uneducated buffoon, a "Joe V6" who doesn't know a thing (and doesn't care) about anything other than banging metal on metal. Granted in the past you've called out the American automakers for their incompetent leadership, and maybe even for your perception that our domestic automakers have produced an inferior product. I have disagreed with many of these strips, but this is the first time it seems you've crossed the line.

Actually, excuse me, that's not right.

I should say, instead, that you've failed. After all, there are no lines that you should not cross. The mark of a great political cartoonist is the ability to eloquently disagree, and to render such disagreement visceral and visual to the larger public.

But why have you abandoned the rigor of your other pieces?

Why are you taking cheap shots at our autoworkers instead of their leadership or even their product?

For that matter, if you want to criticize autoworkers, why are you holding them up as mentally incapable, instead of criticizing a union that is as stubborn as it is often ineffective? Or holding accountable a rank-and-file that is often unable to look beyond their next paycheck to address the consequences of the agenda their employer is pursuing?

Why not pick a disagreement worth stating instead of promoting inaccurate misconceptions about the education and drive of our nation's most assertive and robust union workforce?

I could disagree with you on many of these other possible arguments, but these would be disagreements worth having.

Your characterization of the auto-worker in your recent strip is trite, pointless, obnoxious, insulting, and irrelevant. It does nothing to promote a worthwhile political argument, and it is a waste of both my own and your time. I wouldn't be so disappointed if not for the fact that you are my favorite political cartoonist. I hope that the abundance of material these days doesn't mean that your standards (the standards I most admire) are slipping; one could safely argue that an informed and powerful political critique in all media are more important these days than ever.

Sincerely,

Connor Coyne

EVENT: Why I'm Voting Against Jan Schakowsky in the Illinois 9th District Race.

U.S. House of Representative: Illinois 9th District
Incumbent Jan Schakowsky (Democrat) vs. Moe Shanfield (Green) vs. Michael Younan (Republican)

Blue Skies Falling endorses: MOE SHANFIELD (GREEN)

This is, actually, probably the hardest decision for me to make this cycle.

There is little question of the race's outcome, but I need to outline my reasoning, because I vocally supported Schakowsky in 2004. She has really let me down. Her Republican opponent is justly withering in his condemnation of her support for the recent Wall Street Bailout, which was passed without punitive measures for seeking instituions or sufficient regulation or oversight. I am still waiting for a response to the letter I wrote her last month, although I don't expect an answer until after the cycle is over. From the other side, Green candidate Moe Shanfield explains his choice to run thus:

In July, 2007, the 76 members of the House Democratic Progressive Caucus signed a letter to the President: They would vote against any war appropriation bill which failed to include a time table for troop withdrawal.

Then, on August 5, 2007, something changed. A total of 62 of those "progressives", including the 9th District incumbent, cast "Aye!" votes for the Department of Defense annual appropriation bill--providing more than $100 billion to keep the war going. There was no troop-withdrawal time table.

This is absolutely a legitimate point; maybe one could make a case for selective accomodation of conservatives on key issues in swing districts, but Schakowsky has won the last three elections by over 40 points. If any Democrats have the opportunity to forcefully challenge the status quo, it is these, and if Democrats such as Schakowsky challenged the status quo more often, we might be in less of a mess now.

For a few seconds I thought about voting for Younan; he's as progressive as any Republican candidates come these days. His discussion of diplomatic options in the Middle-East and his condemnation of the bailout were thought-provoking and refreshing. But he's still status-quo Republican on way too many issues for comfort: he's against Universal Health-Care and doesn't offer much as far as education funding. And, like most Republicans, he fetishizes taxes far beyond their actual role in the sum of things. An interesting guy, but not somebody who would vote for me on many of the issues I care about.

That just leaves Moe Shanfield.



Well, there he is.

He doesn't really go into his policy position on any other issue, although as a Green his views are probably pretty similar my own. Of course, I feel like all too often the Greens are out of touch with the voters they believe they represent, and their election strategies have been spoilers than Democrats more than I would like.

But there is a time and a place for a protest vote.

In 2006 when Debbie Stabenow enjoyed a comfortable, but not overwhelming, lead over challenger Michael Bouchard, I wrote her that I would not vote for her because of her support for the Military Commisions Act, which was not sufficiently strong against torture. I wrote in my vote for former Flint City Administrator Darnell Earley. Stabenow has since repudiated her own vote and has gone on to have a commendably progressive record. Now Stabenow is a exceptional senator, and I don't think my one vote or letter made that difference. One hopes, however, that the right number of votes and letters, sent at the right time and to the right people, do make a difference.

That is why I will be voting for Moe Shanfield on November 4th.

The Democrats are going to take the Presidency in this election, hopefully a supermajority in the Senate, and will cut even deeper into the House Republican minority.

Once they hold these seats, however, we need them to fight for us.

Event: The Bill Passed.

Now I go from stern to angry.

If the upcoming months show this to pan out the way the "restraint" argument has predicted they will (ie. poorly), then this will be an excellent point for primary race candidates to raise with me. In fact, I will seek out their position on this issue, and be sympathetic to them if they opposed the bill.

IN THE HOUSE:
Dale Kildee voted aye.
Jan Schakowsky voted aye.
Edolphus Towns voted aye.

IN THE SENATE:
Barack Obama voted aye.
Dick Durbin voted aye.
Hillary Clinton voted aye.
Charles Schumer voted aye.
Carl Levin voted aye.

Dabbie Stabenow voted nay.

Again, a thank you to Senator Stabenow. You get an A+.

All of the others have failed the Econ homework today.

Event: House Begins Bailout Debate.

I'm excited, and you should be too, that while both VP candidates performed at their height of their ability last night, viewers overwhelmingly felt that Biden won. Many arguments point to Palin's lack of experience and dependence upon memorized talking points. I would add to that list that McCain has left her with a crap record on the issues most pressing in this election.

And yet, while the election remains of great importance, and shouldn't be underestimated, this is looking less and less like a close race.

Meanwhile, the House is debating the Senate's bailout plan.

DON'T LET THE KITCHEN CATCH FIRE WHILE WATCHING A CANDLE IN THE LIVING ROOM.

New York Times: House Begins Debate on Bailout.

New York Times Economix: Live-Blogging the House's Bailout Debate.

This ghastly bill has a large chance of passing, with absolutely no guarantees or even a reassuring number of favorable models suggesting that it will work. It will ironically exacerbate the environment of deregulation that is behind so many of America's (and the world's) economic instabilities, and that still lacks any robust standards of accountability.

Meanwhile, 200 economists have signed a petition against the plan. The petition includes members of the Chicago School of economics. As an undergrad I railed against these people, because they represent a very pro-market perspective. It is telling that even they, with a whole gulf of idological and philosophical differences separating us, agree that the arithmetic and big numbers involved in this bill are unlikely to take us anywhere pretty.

Consider if the bailout does not prevent a financial meltdown, and we are forced to resort to government programs similar to those that got us through the Depression. Is another $700 billion in debt something we need going into such a crisis?

Keep up those calls and letters!