Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Holiday Shopping - 11.27.09

Many people set their alarm clocks for the wee hours of the morning today in order to take advantage of all of those shopping deals. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks he knows why people do it… and it’s not necessarily for the sales…

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This morning, people all over this state got up at some ungodly hour, left their warm homes and went to be first in line for holiday bargains. This has always struck me as being about the most unpleasant thing I could do that didn’t involve a catheter.

My idea of shopping is to visit the Internet from my desk. After all, I am absolutely sure that the woman in my life would love a set of Soviet World War II memoirs.

Actually, the last time I did try shopping on this day, someone who was obviously full of the holiday spirit stole two poinsettias out of my cart. Later, a man tried to cut in front of me outside the Honey Baked Ham store, and a woman very nearly ran over me in a parking lot. She then swore at me, perhaps because I survived.

Earlier this week, I drove an elderly lady to Detroit from Ohio, so she could spend Thanksgiving with her daughter. She told me that sure enough, the year before she had stayed over night while the girls got up at four a.m. to enlist for the shopping mall wars.

But then she said something else intriguing. “They thought that maybe if they get there early enough, they might get on TV.”

So that‘s it. Last week, I talked to someone whose teenage daughter had stood in line with a friend to see Sarah Palin in Grand Rapids. I was a little puzzled by that, since I didn’t think the girl wasn’t very political. “It was a happening,” her mother told me.

“She’s a rock star,” she said, meaning the former governor. “Besides, the kids thought TV cameras might be there.”

Indeed they were, though to the presumably great sorrow of my friend and her daughter, they didn’t make the nightly news.

As everyone knows, despite the astonishing rise of the Internet, television remains the dominant medium of our society. That’s what I tell my journalism students, anyway, though lately I think I may have been wrong. In reality, sometimes I think television is our society.

My own mother, who died three years ago, thought my various journalism awards were nice. But she was far more impressed every time I was on TV.

For her, local access cable trumped the New York Times. That’s not to say I am anti-television. I myself have a weekly show in Toledo, called Deadline Now. It is sort of a Meet the Press format, and I like it because it allows me to talk to interesting people. Once, I got a nice note from a woman who lives outside Ann Arbor who told me she loved my show because it helped her sleep at night.

She meant this as a compliment. But possibly the best perspective on our television age was offered by my goddaughter Nora, when she was four. I was on TV in Detroit, and her parents had her watch. “Look! There’s your godfather.’

She looked. “Is he going to jail?” she asked. Her mother laughed. “Not yet.” she said. Nora said, “Oh,” and walked away. Later, she told me that I was normally too silly.

“But on TV, you are boring.” I can’t imagine why a four-year-old wouldn’t be fascinated by politics and economics.

At least she didn’t say that I had a face made for radio.

Essay: Giving Thanks - 11.26.09

On this Thanksgiving Day, Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has some things we should be thankful for…

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Here’s an arresting statistic: If the Detroit Lions somehow win their traditional Thanksgiving football game today, they will have won as many games this week as they have in the last two years.

True, the oddsmakers say that’s a long shot, but if it happens, then Michigan’s long-suffering Lions fans will indeed have reason to give thanks today. Frankly, it’s been a pretty barren year on the sports front in Michigan. The Spartans and Wolverines have had dismal seasons. The Tigers should have been in the playoffs, but blew it. The Red Wings are struggling and the Pistons are worse.

Back during the Great Depression, we depended on these teams to distract us from our economic troubles. In 1935, the Lions, Tigers and Red Wings all were national champions.

But in this recession, our sports heroes seem to be dropping the ball. Perhaps this is all part of some cosmic plan to teach us the virtues of patience. We’ve had a difficult year in Michigan.

For many people, especially the hundreds of thousands without jobs, it might seem like there isn’t very much to be thankful for. But I think there are some glimmers of hope.

Last week I spent some time talking to Detroit’s new mayor, Dave Bing, who coincidentally, lifted the city’s spirits forty years ago when he was a National Basketball Association superstar.

Bing is that rarest of creatures - a truly reluctant politician. He resisted appeals to run for mayor for years, till he finally feared that perhaps he was the only one who could save his adopted city.

I’ve talked to every mayor Detroit has had since the 1960s, and none of them has been as candid or as honest as Dave Bing. He didn’t sugarcoat the situation. There was none of the usual rah-rah about “Detroit’s best days are still ahead of it.” Bing knows his patient is in intensive care, and the future is anything but certain.

His goal right now is to make sure Detroit has a future. He isn’t taking a salary, he isn’t sure if he’ll run for a second term, and he says he won’t run for anything else, ever.

People in the Motor City this month also voted to rewrite their horribly flawed city charter. They voted for new school buildings. And they elected what appears to be a far better and more responsible city council. Detroit and its troubles may seem far away if you live in Grand Rapids or Traverse City or even Ann Arbor or Grand Blanc.

But as long as Detroit is a dysfunctional mess, everyone in Michigan pays a price that’s only partly economic. Who can feel good about coming to or being from a state where the most important city is a postcard for financial and social devastation, political corruption, and violence? The good news for Detroit is that the city’s leaders now admit they have a major problem.

The good news for all of Michigan is that we now realize the auto industry is never again going to be our economic salvation.

We are finally facing reality. Now, the trick is to take our considerable assets, including our formidable manufacturing talents and great universities, and turn them into some version of gold.

We’ve got a lot going for us, and life hasn’t licked us yet. I think today, we should all give thanks for that.

Essay: Pay Back - 11.16.09

General Motors announced this morning that it intends to start paying its taxpayer loans back early. But Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks there’s more to this deal than there seems…

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We have become so used to bad news from the automotive industry that any good news these days comes as a shock.

Today, there is bound to be considerable excitement. General Motors intends to start paying its government loans back ahead of schedule. In fact, they plan to give Uncle Sam a check for a billion dollars on New Year’s Eve.

Now, as your mama might have said, never count your money before it is in your wallet. But it looks pretty certain that GM will make that first payment. If they keep it up, tossing a billion back to us every quarter, they will end up free and clear of their obligations to the taxpayers less than two years from now.

That’s far earlier than the payoff date originally agreed to, July 2015. Additionally, GM sales were up last month for the first time in a long time. This is all legitimately good news.

For old timers, it is bound to evoke good memories of the nation’s first auto bailout, Chrysler in 1979. That time, the automaker completely repaid its loans ahead of schedule, and returned to profitability faster than anyone imagined.

However, the situation is far different today. For one thing, the government never really lent Chrysler a dime, way back when.

What Washington did was promise to guarantee loans for the automakers, so that Chrysler could get credit. The total amount of those loan guarantees was less than two billion dollars.

Even with inflation, that‘s far less than the $50 billion in direct aid the government has given General Motors. That‘s not the only difference. Here’s another: GM is never going to pay back the vast majority of that money. They don‘t have to.

For one thing, you may have forgotten, but we bought them. You and me and all of us now technically own more than 60 percent of General Motors. The hope is that someday the government can sell the stock in the private sector and get our money back.

We may have to wait a long time. Steven Rattner, the former White House auto czar, thinks the taxpayers already have lost something like $25 billion dollars on GM.

And General Motors only has to repay $6.7 billion of the money we gave them. Now, when they cut us a check for that first billion next month, where do you suppose it’s going to come from?

Would you guess from new profits they now are making? Not at all. General Motors is going to use some taxpayer loan money they hadn’t spent yet. There are no profits. GM is still losing money, especially in the key North American market. Now it is true that some signs have gotten better. Economists are a bit more hopeful.

Still, while the symbolism of paying us off earlier is nice, I’m not sure they should. That’s because GM has almost $13 billion in underfunded pension obligations. Earlier, GM’s chief financial officer suggested the company pay some of those off first.

But appearing to pay the taxpayers back may be better public relations. We all need to hope GM’s recovery continues. We’ve got a lot of cash tied up in this baby. If you think I’ve been too pessimistic, remember that it is always better to keep your eyes on the road.

And whenever you are offered a deal, pause to kick the tires.

Essay: Past Forgetting - 11.13.09

They say that those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry worries that today’s students know far less than they should.

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The other day, when I was talking about Veterans Day, I mentioned that most of my university students seemed to know virtually nothing about World War I, not even when it was fought.

That observation drew irate comments from one listener, who wrote “Isn't anybody studying any history at all in high school?”

“Don't college-level journalism students need to have a passing knowledge of history?” he asked. Well, indeed they do.

But many don’t, and the situation is even worse than I let on. One course I teach examines the history of American journalism and the legal framework that grew up around it, beginning with the first battles for press freedom back when we were just a sparsely settled jumble of colonies on the eastern seaboard.

To stimulate the students’ interest, I try to make this stuff as compelling as possible. I know they prefer watching TV to hearing lectures. So whenever possible, I teach them media history through fascinating documentaries. One of the best of these is “Soldiers Without Swords,” a film about the African-American press.

However, when I read their midterms this year, I learned that many of them did not realize that slavery had been ended by the Civil War, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

For a long time, I thought that every fourth-grader knew that. But a stylish black woman in her thirties wrote that in the 1930s, the black press inspired slaves in the south to hop on a train and head north. “What abolished slavery?” I asked her.

“The newspapers, I guess,” she said. I asked the class when the Civil War was. “I don’t know.” several said. Finally, one said he thought it was 1863. This was a class of mostly college seniors.

When was World War I? I asked. Not a clue. Prodded, one guessed 1941. Now, there may have been some who knew the answers and kept silent. But I was appalled.

I don’t expect them to know about the Battle of Borodino. But knowing how slavery was abolished and when our major wars were should be part of every American’s basic intellectual furniture, right up there with the names of the planets and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Today’s kids don’t know. Nor is it just this class. A radio reporter asked me recently if more people had been killed in World War II, or the Iraq war. One student asked if I remembered World War II, though she knew that I am in my 50s.

Turns out she thought the war took place in the early 1960s, though she was none too sure about that, either.

Now, I can adjust my teaching style, and give my students a time-line and all the context I can. They can’t, after all, understand why Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts were so important unless they know about the Great Depression.

But I can’t exactly solve what seems to be a terrifying national problem by myself. For months, I have idly wondered why more young people didn’t get more energized when comparisons were made between our wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Now I know the answer. When you mention Vietnam, they have no idea what you are talking about. They do know, however, all about Miley Cyrus. If this doesn’t worry you, it should.

Essay: Lest We Forget - 11.9.09

Veterans Day is Wednesday. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry suggests we think a little more about what the day really means.

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Wednesday is Veterans Day, which means that the banks will be closed, there won’t be any mail delivery, and a lot of government workers will get the day off. For most of us, that’s what the day means. For too many of us, that’s all that it means.

This day was once the most eagerly greeted day in history. At eleven o’ clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Nov. 11, 1918, the guns stopped firing and World War I came to an end.

Nine million had died, most of them young men in uniform. The United States, which got into the war quite late, got off lightly, losing only 116,000, more from disease than battle. Yet millions of young men in France, Germany and Great Britain were wiped out.

History had never seen a war like that before. Nobody thought they’d see one again. When the veterans came home to America, first different states, then the federal government, made this day an official national holiday. They called it Armistice Day, because the signing of an armistice ended what was then called “the Great War.“

Back in the 1920s and 1930s, a lot of people in Michigan and elsewhere thought that if we kept the memory of the horror alive, it might not happen again. Governors and Senators would say that at Armistice Day ceremonies. Yet their hopes for peace were doomed.

The peace treaty that ended World War I was so unfair it led to the coming of another war that was far more terrible. When it ended, with far more dead, Congress changed the name to Veterans Day, and suggested that we use it to honor all veterans of all wars.

Yet today it gets overlooked. For one thing, we have another veterans’ holiday, Memorial Day, which happens on a three-day weekend in spring when the weather is usually nice.

People have picnics and cookouts then. Nobody does anything fun on a Wednesday in November. But there are a few who do the right thing, and remember. There will be a parade in downtown Grand Rapids Wednesday night, starting at 7. The University of Michigan-Flint will hold a free remembrance concert that morning.

And those who still care will gather for ceremonies in cemeteries and town halls in Flushing and Burton, in Clio and Swartz Creek and many other places all across this state. At Detroit‘s historic Elmwood Cemetery, they will honor the graves of the 102nd Colored Infantry Regiment from the Civil War.

Today, there is only one man still alive in the nation who was in uniform the day the guns stopped firing in World War I. Frank Buckles is a Missouri native who is 108 years old.

He was told he was fighting a war to end all wars, but he lived to see wars happen again and again.

Most of the college students I teach know almost nothing about World War I, not even when it was. That strikes me as not only disrespectful of the past, but highly dangerous for the future.

Cliches are sometimes true. If we don’t remember the past, we do indeed tend to repeat it. When I read the headlines about Afghanistan, I remember growing up in the shadow of Vietnam. And sometimes I ask myself …“I wonder what Frank Buckles thinks?”

Essay: Ford and the Future - 11.3.09

Rank-and-file union members at Ford overwhelmingly turned down a new round of contract concessions yesterday. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry says we shouldn’t be all that surprised by the news…

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Ford Motor Company learned an ancient and painful lesson over the last week: You simply can’t have it both ways.

Throughout the crisis now gripping the auto industry, Ford has maintained, with increasing smugness, that it was different. Different from Chrysler and General Motors, in two significant ways.

Ford, alone among the once-big three, did not seek government loans, and did not declare bankruptcy. Near as I can tell, there were three reasons for this. Ford had borrowed up to the hilt in the private sector back when big corporations could still do so, before the Wall Street crash of September 2008.

Ford had shrewdly recruited Alan Mulally from Boeing, and this savvy executive helped set the House that Old Henry built on a turnaround path. And finally, Ford has, all things told, better cars right now than GM or especially Chrysler, which, when it comes to future product, is in ghastly shape, unless you want a Jeep.

Not only that, Ford surprised everyone by posting a nearly $1 billion dollar profit in the third quarter of this year - including a tiny profit in the place that really counts, North America.

The last time that happened was nearly five years ago, when George W. Bush had just started his second term.

So is it any wonder that, when asked to grant the company the same kind of concessions that GM and Chrysler got, Ford workers overwhelmingly said no? Frankly, I can’t blame them.

Today, most of the analysts are beating up on the rank-and-file United Auto Workers for turning this deal down. I don’t agree. Ford management asked for this in a couple of ways.

First, by trumpeting their success. Second, while Mulally is a business genius, he makes mistakes too. And one of the biggest was telling a congressional committee a year ago that there was nothing wrong with his $13.6 million compensation package.

“I think I am OK where I am,“ he said. Well, as Free Press business columnist Tom Walsh shrewdly observed, though Mulally later did take a big pay cut, Ford UAW workers think they are OK where they are too. Actually, they don’t think that.

They are very worried about the future. There were a hundred thousand Ford UAW workers the last time the company made a profit, back in 2005. There are exactly half that many now.

Ford workers have already taken two rounds of concessions. This time, they were being asked, among other things, to give up a union’s most powerful tool, the right to strike, for seven years, no matter what. Small wonder that three-quarters of the workers ignored their leaders’ advice and said no.

Ford now has to figure out how to cope with this. By the way, there is another way that the company is different from Chrysler and GM. It has to cope with an enormous burden of debt - $27 billion worth. Chrysler and GM shed most of their debt in bankruptcy court.

Henry Ford the First had a lot of wacky ideas, but I know this about him. He wouldn’t have gone bragging about how well he was doing, and then expected his workers to give him charity.

That’s a lesson Mulally and company might do well to heed.

Essay: Now For the Hard Part - 11.2.09

Governor Granholm and the state Legislature finally agreed on a budget last week… but it’s a document that no one seems happy with. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry looks at what it really means…

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On Friday, Governor Jennifer Granholm signed the final bills completing the long-overdue state budget. Then she put down her pen and said these rather bizarre words:

“This is the budget we have, but not the budget we need. It is a budget I don’t agree with and don’t support.” To which I wanted to say, What do you mean? You just signed it. You are responsible for this. And we now will suffer the consequences.

In a sense, the above, milder version, reminds me of one of history’s most infamous moments, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sold out Czechoslovakia for what he said would be “peace in our time.” Winston Churchill then growled, “England has been offered a choice between war and shame.”

“She has chosen shame. She will get war,” later. That is, of course, exactly what happened back in 1938. What our governor is apparently arguing in 2009 is this: She had to choose between signing a terrible budget and ruining the state.

But she has chosen to do both. With this budget our lawmakers have betrayed our hope for a better future. What we have witnessed is an absolute failure of political will and leadership.

Our state’s lawmakers have passed a budget that ignores the changing economy of Michigan, and our needs. In a world where our only hope is better education, our leaders have voted to make sure more public schools fail. In a world where higher education is Michigan’s only hope to again become competitive, and the younger generation’s only hope for a future, our lawmakers have betrayed a promise they made to help 96,000 students with college tuition.

But neither the governor nor the legislature made the faintest effort to move this state to a graduated income tax, that would assess the burdens of civilization according to our ability to pay.

Nobody seriously proposed taxing services, even though we have become a service-based economy. Nor did our lawmakers consider raising the state income tax by a few tenths of a percent, instead of cutting what we spend to educate our kids by as much as $600 a child. And they certainly never dreamed of raising the tax on a bottle of beer instead of cutting the promise grant or cutting payments to nursing homes that care for the poor and disabled.

By the way, the tax on beer hasn‘t been changed since they lowered it forty-three years ago. The beer industry is well served by its lobbyists. Better than we are by our legislators.

If this bothers you, you might consider getting vocal about it. You have now seen that you cannot depend on our leaders to act with your best interests in mind, and this is just the start.

Next year will be worse. We’ll have another huge budget deficit, but with a difference: We plugged half of this one with federal stimulus money. By next year, that all will be gone.

This budget, according to House Speaker Andy Dillon, was “child’s play,” compared to what we face next year. If you want schools and parks and roads and a future, you need to fight for them.

Civilization costs money, especially when times are tough.

But the alternative will cost us all far more.

Essay: The Hero and The Bum

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is back in court… and back in the news this week. This has got Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinking about what it means to be a hero…

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This is a story of two very large men, former athletes, who have been looked up to by a lot of people. We lavished attention on both of them, and hoped they would be good to us.

One became an authentic hero, who like most real heroes, gets, if anything, too little attention. The other is a bum, who continues to betray all of us. Yesterday, a lot of journalists had to spend time on the bum, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, a convicted felon who has been dragged back into court because he hasn’t been paying back money he was ordered to pay.

Kilpatrick, you may remember, charmed and beguiled the voters of poor Detroit into electing him twice. He also seduced some of the city’s top business leaders into bankrolling him.

They put up the money that enabled him to beat a decent, honest man, three years ago. Last year it turned out that Kilpatrick, whose high-living ways were notorious, had lied under oath to cover up an affair. Worse, he pressured his poor city to pay nearly $9 million to the cops he had unjustly fired for investigating him.

Eventually he resigned and did a little time.

The court ordered him to pay back a million of the money he cost the city. But he hasn’t made his full payments, even though a high-paying job was found for him and the business leaders he charmed gave him a $240,000 loan. He and his wife spent more than a million dollars last year. He just doesn’t like paying what he owes.

Fortunately for me, yesterday I got to sit on a stage with a man as large as Kwame, but who is worth his weight in gold. Joe Dumars, the Detroit Pistons’ President of Basketball Operations.

Macomb Community College has been doing a series on the role of sports in society, and asked me to interview Dumars before a large crowd. The man is pure class. Quiet integrity and brains. When his playing days were almost done, Pistons owner Bill Davidson did something unheard of in sports. He asked him to run the team. Not to coach it, to run the entire business operation.

That was ten years ago. Dumars hs been doing it ever since, with class and success. He also has his own foundation and does a vast amount of charitable work that barely gets noticed.

Along the way, Joe D has pulled many an arrogant young hotshot aside and told him what it takes to be a real man.

Dumars was the youngest of seven kids. His dad drove a produce truck, and taught his kids to treat people with humility. Later, when Joe was making seven million dollars a year, he’d go home to see his parents. His mother would make him put the garbage out, and his dad would send him to the store. Kwame Kilpatrick was the son of politicians, who treated him like a little prince.

Yesterday, I found myself wondering if we’d all be better off today if Joe D had been Kwame K’s big brother. I doubt that Joe Dumars has ever thought of running for anything. But if he ever wanted to run my state, that would be just fine with me.

Essay: Threatening Agriculture - 10.27.09

Michigan’ s agricultural extension programs have been helping the state’s farmers for nearly a century. Now, the program may be threatened with extinction. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry explains.

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Gov. Jennifer Granholm has not specifically said she will veto funding for agricultural extension programs, but she has been strongly hinting that she might do exactly that.

And it would be very hard to imagine anything worse that could come out of the dangerous game of chicken our so-called leaders have been playing for months with the state budget, and with us.

We aren’t talking about much money here. The network of Agricultural Extension programs and offices and the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Stations get a paltry $64 million from the state. That compares to nearly two billion dollars Michigan taxpayers spend each year on prisons. But if the governor vetoes funding for agricultural programs, that will mean statewide devastation.

That‘s the word Jeffrey Armstrong uses to describe it. He‘s the dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University. It would mean, for one thing, the loss of millions more in federal matching funds for our second biggest industry.

“The Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station system and MSU extension are providing the research, development, and education for Michigan’s emerging green economy,” Armstrong said.

If that funding is eliminated, or even if it is withheld, he says it would “destroy our ability to build the one economic sector in which Michigan has an advantage,” he says.

What that would mean is that MSU would have to shut down its 83 extension offices -- one per county - plus 15 agricultural and biological research stations and some other programs.

That would also mean a loss of nearly three thousand more jobs. Now, if you are a city dweller like me, you may think that what we are talking about here is a bunch of 4-H clubs.

Well, they do fund those clubs, which reach a lot of urban kids as well. But MSU’s agricultural extension programs are also helping the City of Detroit to convert brownfields into places that grow crops for energy production. They are helping seven thousand families eat better and assisting others with child care and breast feeding.

Extension programs have developed a method they say is close to wiping out the Emerald Ash Borer. In Macomb County, they’ve helped more than a hundred families avoid foreclosure.

That’s only a small sampling of what these programs do.

They have been run for a century by Michigan State, which was founded in 1855 to improve agriculture and help bring the benefits of what were called the “applied sciences” to everyone in our state. Now, Michigan is struggling to cope with a huge budget deficit.

The state still hasn’t finalized a budget that was supposed to have been done a month ago. Last week, the state unexpectedly withheld the October payment from the extension services. The governor’s office won’t say if she plans to kill the programs entirely.

Republicans were quick to denounce her for this, and just as quick to say they still won’t agree to new revenue, no matter what.

What is very clear is that destroying these programs will have a devastating effect on the common good. Last time I checked, that’s what those we elect to serve us are supposed to be looking after.

Something seems to have gone terribly wrong.

Essay: Sacrificing Our Kids - 10.22.09

Lawmakers are now battling Governor Granholm’s veto of some money for some school districts… which came at the same time that the Governor was calling for more money for the schools. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at what’s really going on…

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American values have evolved over the years, but one thing has been consistent since the first immigrants came off the boat.

We’ve always wanted our children to have more chances than we did. Americans believed in sacrificing for the next generation.

That‘s why our ancestors died at Valley Forge and Omaha Beach, and that‘s why we established and funded public education.

That is, until now. Our politicians in Lansing have already damaged our children’s future, and are now using Michigan‘s children to play a dangerous game of chicken.

Whatever happens, we all lose. In an effort to cope with a huge and growing deficit, the legislature agreed on a compromise earlier this month to cut the amount of money they give the schools by $165 a student. Now, keep in mind that this is for the ongoing school year. This is money the schools were promised and counted on, and now are losing in the middle of their budget year, which means these cuts are much harder to make.

This is happening now because the lawmakers did not do their jobs and agree on a budget when they were supposed to.

And if you think that is bad, this week things got much worse. Governor Jennifer Granholm shocked just about everybody when she vetoed some funding for some of Michigan’s largest school districts.

This means some middle class districts are really going to be clobbered. Harper Woods, a small middle-to-working class district, will lose almost $500 a pupil. A woman I know with a child in the system wrote her state representative. Democrat Tim Bledsoe, to complain, saying, “Our community and our families are working class to middle class and don’t have a lot of money.

“How does this make sense?”

Bledsoe agreed. “I am angry that the Governor and Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop would use our schools as though they were poker chips in a high-stakes political game,” he told her, adding he would do what he can to fight it.

Bishop says the governor is doing this to try and force Republicans to agree to a tax increase to save the schools, but vowed once again that it wasn’t going to happen. As for Bledsoe, while he may think the cuts are terrible, he opposes the one serious attempt that has been made to get new revenue, a small tax on physicians. You see, he has a lot of doctors in his district.

Meanwhile, members of both parties scrambled to try and find the votes to override the governor’s veto of that appropriation.

But it looks like they’ll fall short.

And then yesterday, the governor said, “We must invest in our children, who are going to be the workforce of the future.” She then called on Senate Republicans to be, in her word, “reasonable.”

By the way, she said that after also vetoing a $1.6 million appropriation that has been helping provide a good start for disadvantaged children under the age of three. I think that’s called cognitive dissonance. It is clearly a mess. More school districts than ever are now in danger of receivership. Our leaders have failed us, and the system has broken down.

And somehow, we need to find a way to force them to fix it.