Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Glorious Fourth - 7.3.09

Tomorrow is Fourth of July. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry reminds us about the importance of the day’s celebrations...

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The Fourth of July is tomorrow, which means we will sacrifice plenty of hot dogs, apple pie, ice cream and fireworks here in Michigan. Actually, if you know your history, today might be just as good a day to celebrate our independence.

You see, while we tend to think that the Declaration of Independence was passed, signed, sealed and printed in all the textbooks on July 4, 1776, it didn’t quite work that way.

The Continental Congress actually declared independence from Great Britain on July 2.

The Fourth was the day they adopted the Declaration itself. However, it took time to properly inscribe the thing on parchment, people had to take off for awhile, and so most of the delegates actually signed it on August 2nd.

What matters, however, is what it symbolizes, which is that we are one nation. Back then, Detroit was a French town of 2,000 people under British rule in one of the empire’s least interesting provincial backwaters. The rest of Michigan was largely swamp or primeval forest. Things have changed a lot since then. We’re facing some hard times now. The key industry that defined our state for a century will never again be what it was.

Yet we are a scrappy band of comeback kids, with an odd bit of twisted and zany thrown in. Yes, Michigan put the world on wheels, but it is no accident that we‘ve also produced Dr. Death, Iggy Pop and any number of other nuts, lovable and otherwise.

And most of the time, when the chips are down, we somehow come through, maybe not in the most elegant of ways, but we do.

So does our nation. You have to wonder what the founding fathers would think if they could see us now, still living under basically the same form of government they launched with that Declaration and later created with the Constitution.

That Declaration will be a little more real this year than ever before. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. When those lines were written, most American black men were not even legally men. Exactly eight months before this Fourth of July, a species of American became extinct one Tuesday night:

Little black children who never before could believe they could rise as high as everybody else. Nearly seventy million Americans, the vast majority of them white, voted to install a black man as president.

It’s hard to know whether the founders would be more stunned by that, or that he barely beat out a woman for the top job.

What we know is this state, like this nation, has prevailed, time and again. On July 4, 1863, dawn rose over the mangled bodies of hundreds of Michigan men littering the wheat fields of Gettysburg. They didn’t know it, but their sacrifice had helped save the union.

News of their victory would come to a farmer’s wife in Dearborn, who gave birth to a baby that same month.

He would end up changing the world himself; his name was Henry Ford. When I watch the fireworks tomorrow night, I’ll be wondering about what will happen next.

Essay: Shame on Us All - 7.2.09

After Tuesday’s shooting in Detroit, Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks its time to discuss gun control...

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What was perhaps most shocking about what happened in Detroit Tuesday is how little shocked we were by it all.

A bunch of teenagers just out of summer school for the afternoon were waiting for a bus on a busy street on the west side of town. Suddenly, a minivan pulled up, and two masked gunmen began spraying the kids with bullets. Seven were shot, and several seriously injured. Miraculously, none died. That ought to have been enough to outrage the whole city. One might have expected to see Mayor Dave Bing on television, vowing to bring the killers to justice.

One might have expected to see mothers marching to city hall and demanding their kids be safe. But none of that happened.

The mayor merely issued a statement saying “it is the responsibility of everyone -- government, police and community at large - to do whatever is necessary to end this foolishness.”

You might have thought he was talking about throwing eggs at cars. The fact is that he has no idea what to do.

Neither does anybody else in power. Oh, they will probably catch the shooters in this case, and send them to prison for a while.

But that won’t change the culture that produced them.

The people in that neighborhood know what they want: To get out of Detroit. They don’t have any hope of making things better.

The real harm behind an incident like this is far greater than the carnage. Somewhere there was a family thinking about maybe moving into Detroit, giving the city a chance. Now, forget it.

Nobody who can help it is going to move into a town where 14-year-olds get gunned down at a bus stop in broad daylight.

Now, some will blame all this on poverty and a lack of jobs and hopelessness, and they won’t be wrong. But there is another culprit too, one we have given up thinking we can do anything about.

Guns.

We have the highest murder rate of any industrialized country because virtually everyone of any age can get their hands on a gun, often even an automatic weapon, with no questions asked.

Gun control is something our politicians have given up on. They did this even before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the District of Columbia could not ban handguns, that people had a constitutional right to have them in their homes.

For years, the gun lobby has been strong and well-financed. Yet that Supreme Court decision was only 5 to 4. And the court has never said gun ownership could not be regulated. Almost certainly, the criminals who shot those students had no right to a firearm.

Fighting the gun culture won’t be easy. But it is necessary if we are to save our cities and our nation. If you read the Second Amendment, it says we have the right to keep and bear arms because a well-regulated militia is necessary. We have the arms. What we need is some regulation.

This Fourth of July weekend would be a good time for all of us patriots to start thinking about how to get there.

Essay: Questionable Priorities - 7.1.09

Michigan Radio’s political analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking what the state cuts to Medicaid are going to mean for Michiganders…

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I’m not sure what the weather is where you are. But it is a bleak day for thousands of Michigan adults who have been managing their vision, hearing and dental problems with the help of Medicaid.

Due to our budget problems, the state, as of today, is no longer paying for a number of formerly covered services. This includes routine eye and dental exams, glasses and fillings.

Now, the state will pay for dental emergencies. Which is usually what happens when you don’t take care of your teeth. That will also cost the state a lot more than routine care would have cost.

I’ve had six root canals, and I know. But hey. Nobody ever accused our politicians of too much common sense. Incidentally, if you didn’t know about these new restrictions, that’s not surprising.

So far as I can tell, there has been next to nothing written about this in any Michigan newspaper, although they are killing acres of trees to report that Michael Jackson is still dead.

Last week I received an outraged letter from Jamie Wierenga in Kalamazoo. He isn’t on Medicaid himself, but he knows about vision. He is a certified optician. A successful one, but not a selfish one.

“I worked hard to get where I am,” he told me.

“But I also share the roads with the people who, for whatever reason, are on Medicaid.” What bothers him most is that, “folks who should be wearing medically necessary eyeglasses to drive are not going to be able to drive. How are these people going to be able to get to work? How can they function? Won’t this change in Medicaid coverage lead to more layoffs? How can these people ever get off Medicaid and welfare support if they cannot see?”

I also heard from a former student, Miriam Braunstein, a brilliant writer whose body is being destroyed by the ravages of mitochondrial disease. She has struggled fiercely to be independent, and lives in a small, wheel-chair friendly house.

When she got the “Dear Beneficiary” letter from the state, Miriam and her caregivers scrambled to get her the hearing aid she was beginning to desperately need.

Fortunately, it came yesterday, a day before it would have cost them $2,000 they don’t have. What she isn’t sure of is her teeth, since the letter from the governor only said that if the state had started fixing them before the cutoff, “they may still pay for it.”

She understands that our state has a massive budget crisis. Yet, how much money is cutting off adult Medicaid likely to save? The dental portion saves a puny $2.9 million. The rest of the cuts probably save no more than that.

We will spend $2 billion this year on our prisons, some of which goes to keep elderly cons and small-time druggies locked up.

It seems to me that somebody’s priorities are screwed up, and it isn’t Jim and Miriam’s. If you agree, you might want to let your state legislator know. And think about this. If we live long enough, we will eventually need these type of services too.

I’ll see you at the charity clinic.

Essay: Does the System Work? - 6.30.09

After disgraced financier Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison and Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers resigned… Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry wonders: has justice been served?

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When I got to my office yesterday, one of the secretaries smiled at me. “There, you see, the system does work,” she said.

She was happy for a couple of reasons.

Monica Conyers, possibly the most flamboyantly bizarre politician in the history of Detroit City Council, was quitting.

Last week she confessed to accepting bribes in a sludge-hauling scandal, and is expected to be sentenced to prison.

While that was happening, a federal judge was sentencing crooked investor Bernie Madoff to the absolute maximum -- a century and a half in prison. That’s pretty symbolic, since Madoff is 71, but it was meant to send a message.

Unfortunately, I think it is the wrong message. In my view, the system isn’t working, and works even less well in Michigan than it does in most other places in this country. To deal briefly with Madoff, yes, he may finally have gotten what he deserved.

But so what? His stiff sentence does nothing for the thousands whose savings he destroyed and whose lives were ruined.

If the system worked, some regulatory body, or bodies, would have caught on and stopped him a long time ago.

The same is even more true in Michigan. Yes, Monica Conyers was, thanks to determined effort by law enforcement agencies, caught accepting bribes. Last year Detroit’s mayor was forced to plead guilty to two felonies and resign. Three years ago council member Alonzo Bates was convicted and went to prison.

So does the system work? Guess what. If your health care plan only kicks in once you are diagnosed with terminal cancer, you don’t have very good medical coverage. If our national, state and local justice systems are only able to catch crooks after they’ve bilked the public for years, does that mean the system works?

By the way, don’t think this is a Detroit problem. Corruption may be a little more rampant in our biggest city for a number of reasons. The residents are poor, feel under siege, and may be more vulnerable to those who would exploit them.

But we’ve had plenty of bad actors elsewhere. And I fear that we have more than we know about, because once you get away from the major population centers, there are all too few watchdogs.

Print journalism is dying, and even where papers are still publishing daily, they don’t have as many of those pesky, scruffy, nosy people called reporters as they used to. Even in Detroit, many things are still left unexplored. For example, nobody has yet completely traced Ambassador Bridge owner Matty Moroun’s interlocking financial and political connections.

And when it comes to financial disclosure requirements for public officials, The Center for Public Integrity ranks Michigan dead last, in a tie with the tiny states of Idaho and Vermont.

It may soon get worse.

Michigan has outlawed direct political spending by big corporations on behalf of political candidates. But yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court said it would reopen that case, and the odds are that they may overturn that ban.

We could end up with the worst government that money can buy. I don’t know about you, but that scares me.

Essay: Something Goes Right - 6.29.09

Two “generals” announced they’ll be setting up shop in the state. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry gives us the low-down on the good news…

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There’s an old Paul Simon song, part of which goes like this:

***

when something goes right

Well it's likely to lose me

It's apt to confuse me

because it's such an unusual sight.

***

That’s a familiar feeling in Michigan these days. But last week, something did go right. Two somethings, in fact.

On Friday, General Motors announced it would build a new small, fuel-efficient car at a plant in Oakland County’s Orion Township. That means twelve hundred jobs were saved that would have been lost. Michigan was competing against Tennessee and Wisconsin, and we won. Nobody knows exactly why GM made that choice, but this much is clear: Michigan officials pulled together and worked hard and creatively in order to make it happen.

Originally, a factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee appeared to have all the advantages. As the Detroit Free Press’s Katherine Yung noted last weekend, Spring Hill is a more modern plant.

It also has a paint shop. The factory in Orion Township didn’t have a paint shop, and you might have figured that was that. Especially since it costs around $180 million to build one. But spurred by pressure from Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation went to work.

The MEDC set up what amounted to a war room, where staffers monitored what the other states were offering. Eventually, they cobbled together a bunch of business tax incentives and offered GM a tax credit package worth $779 million.

The governor lobbied GM intensely, and in the end, it all paid off. Now, there are those who think this whole decision may have been political. After all, the government now owns most of General Motors. Michigan has the nation’s highest jobless rate, and state Democrats could use a break before next year’s elections.

Tennessee, on the other hand, is hopelessly Republican. Did the President intervene here? People in the know say not. The governor was told flatly that this would be a business decision, and Obama’s auto task force would not be involved.

The day before that welcome auto news, the state scored another coup that could have even greater potential implications.

General Electric announced it would hire more than a thousand workers for an operation in western Wayne County that will focus heavily on renewable energy, especially the form the governor is most passionate about: wind technology. In this case, there is evidence that the President pushed GE to consider Michigan. What matters, however, is not how we got the project, but that we did.

The governor has long had a vision of the state turning to wind power, not only as a source of energy, but as a major source of new jobs making the components that make wind energy possible.

We simply don’t know how much long-term economic potential this will have. But it seems clear that it ought to position Michigan as a national leader in wind energy technology.

We aren’t out of the hole yet, by any means. But this may have been Jennifer Granholm‘s best week in office. And this time, she deserves considerable credit for making both things happen.

Essay: Running in Place - 6.26.09

Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land has announced that she will not run for Governor in 20-10. The Republican has, instead, endorsed Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard for the job. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry doesn’t think we’ve seen the last of Land…

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What do Terri Lynn Land and Michael Jackson have in common? Well, they were both born the same year, 1958.

And yesterday, one of them wanted to make headlines, and the other actually did. For a politician, the most maddening thing about the news cycle is that you can never control what else is happening.

Yesterday, Land, who is Michigan’s Secretary of State, decided to end her brief campaign for next year’s Republican gubernatorial nomination and endorse Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard.

Unfortunately for them, they held their press conference the same day that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died and GM decided to build its new small car at its factory in Orion Township.

The net effect of all this was that Bouchard and Land ended up as a very small story deep inside most Michigan newspapers.

That’s life. On the other hand, you just know that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has to be wishing that he could have held his famous press conference yesterday. Instead, he wound up making his bizarre confession the day before, when virtually nothing else was happening. That left him as the main course on the 24-hour-news cycle menu pretty much all Wednesday.

But back to Terri Lynn Land. When I heard about her announcement I was startled, but not really surprised.

She has been one of the best Secretaries of State Michigan has had. She has improved service in a largely non-political way. She is also a throwback to an earlier, non-ideological era.

She is from Grand Rapids. Her political hero is former President Gerald Ford. I have a sneaking suspicion that she would eventually like to go to Congress from his old seat when the incumbent, Vern Ehlers, retires some day.

But her heart never really seemed to be in the race for governor. She never articulated a vision for this state. I suspect she began running because she was term-limited out of a job after January, and people told her governor was the logical next step.

There is also someone who she really doesn’t want to see as governor: Attorney General Mike Cox. Land and Cox hold each other in, as the saying goes, minimum high regard.

This announcement was calculated to help Bouchard, and it should. Cox, who is a tremendous campaigner, is probably still a slight favorite, but Bouchard is the only candidate who has won a state-wide GOP primary. The party’s other heavyweight, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, can’t be counted out, but is still virtually unknown outside his congressional district.

Some are asking today is whether Land traded her endorsement for a secret promise to be Bouchard‘s pick for lieutenant governor. The answer is almost certainly no, though she would be an excellent choice for gender and geographical balance.

Trouble is, they are both moderates, and their party increasingly leans hard right. In any event, Bouchard would be politically foolish to announce his choice till after he is nominated.

But whatever happens, I think we haven’t seen the last of Terri Lynn Land. Three years ago, she was reelected by a landslide in what was a big Democratic year.

If Republicans are lucky, she’ll be back.

Essay: Not-So-Silly-Season - 6.26.09

Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry is declaring the unofficial start to the media’s “silly-season”…

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Here’s an indication of how serious our problems in Michigan are. Yesterday, I had a hard time finding anyone who seemed the least bit interested in the South Carolina sex scandal.

That’s the one involving the governor who was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian trail, but who instead was off pitching woo in Buenos Aires. I did, however, hear one quintessentially Detroit comment from a middle-aged secretary. “Couldn’t he find an American woman to fool around with?” she said. Bet she isn’t driving any foreign car.

We are at the beginning of summer, and that often amounts to what you might call our silly season. Suddenly, the news media tend to forget about budgets and deficits and wars.

Instead, there always seems to be some sort of bizarre scandal juicy enough to dominate cable TV for months.

Sometime this summer, if it is typical, someone will call in what police deem a credible tip about Jimmy Hoffa, and someone’s backyard will then be destroyed by a backhoe.

Later, a reporter will discover a growing movement in the Upper Peninsula to secede from the rest of Michigan and then either join Wisconsin or enter the union as the new state of Superior.

Stories will be written about this, local TV news crews will troop north, and then the ‘movement’ will mysteriously vanish, until next summer. In keeping with that frivolous spirit, Michigan’s largest newspaper, the Free Press, wasted paper yesterday to offer us an astonishing editorial on the wretchedly dysfunctional Gosselins, a family made famous and then destroyed by reality TV.

However, this year is different. I don’t sense that we’re in a silly mood. Michigan is facing conditions that in many ways resemble a depression, and things seem unlikely to get much better soon.

In Detroit, everyone is waiting to see when and if federal prosecutors will follow up on their hints and charge City Council member Monica Conyers in connection with a scandal allegedly involving bribes and a sewage contract.

Across the state, people are waiting to see if General Motors and Chrysler can emerge from bankruptcy and become profitable again. Those who follow politics more deeply are worried about whether our state can stay solvent.

The legislature is now attempting to come up with a budget, which by law has to be balanced. That’s seldom easy in good times. Today, putting together a budget that satisfies the bottom line without destroying essential services may be close to impossible.

Crafting one that both parties can live with may be much harder. We’ve had a state government for years that is as dysfunctional as the Gosselins, at a time when we can least afford it.

Somehow, I don’t think most people are willing to put up with this much longer. We are fighting for our lives in many parts of this state, fighting to stay here and give our kids a future.

We need leadership that will help us do that, by any means necessary. Those we’ve elected to lead us need to step up to the plate, regardless of party, inspire us and get it done.

Michigan really deserves nothing less.