Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Election Reform - 2/28/06

I think we all lost our innocence about elections in this country during the great Florida recount of five years ago.

Most of us knew that elections have sometimes been stolen. Yet in a sense, what we learned from Florida in 2000 was even more shocking than actual vote fraud would have been. What we found out was that there was no way to tell exactly what a valid vote was. And as it turned out, that meant we never actually knew who should have become president.

We did learn about things like pregnant chads, punch cards that hadn’t been punched through all the way. We met the infamous “butterfly ballot,” which was so out of whack that a voter who tried to vote Al Gore, may have dropped one in for Pat Buchanan instead.

Some of us wondered then – could all this have happened here, in Michigan? The answer, fortunately, seems to be no.

That’s because we had our own crash-and-burn election here in 1950, when we had a governor’s race that looked very much like the presidential race did in Florida a half-century later. There were recounts and squabbles for weeks. After it was over, the state began the process of reforming its election procedure.  Our only other major bump in the road came in 1970, when Detroit became one of the first cities in the nation to try punch card voting. That time it took three days to learn who the next governor would be.   

Yet there is always room for improvement, and Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land has come out with a package to twenty reforms which are in the process of being taken up by the legislature.  Frankly, I am impressed by nearly all of them.

They appear to be generally non-partisan. Republicans are often accused of wanting lower turnouts in most elections, since higher turnouts are often thought to favor Democrats.  Secretary Land is a proud Republican – but there are a number of provisions here designed to make it easier to vote, and especially to get young people to vote.

On the other hand, Democrats have traditionally opposed provisions requiring a photo ID to vote, partly because they fear some voters may feel intimidated. But in today’s modern society, everyone has to show ID all the time. I needed my driver’s license to write a check for a pile of produce at the fruit market yesterday.

Having to show a bad little picture of ourselves at the polls only makes common sense. Secretary Land wants to require us to do so, after a lawsuit over this issue gets through the federal courts,

There is one place where I think she didn’t go far enough – and ironically, it is the one thing Florida does right. The sunshine state has a provision for an automatic recount any time the margin is less than one-half of one percent. That sounds only fair to me.

Make sure everything works, guard against fraud, and recount the cliffhangers. Now if she could just do something about guaranteeing us candidates who actually keep their promises . . .

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Interview: Terri Lynn Land - 2/28/06

Elections are taking place in more than 40 counties today.  This is the second year of the consolidated election law – it limits the number of elections and required that they take place on certain dates. Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land has made election reform a major priority.  Now, she is unveiling a broad package of changes that she says will make elections easier and more efficient. Her reforms include proposals to clean up voter lists. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.

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Essay: Flying Right - 2/27/06

Thirty years ago, I first flew Aeroflot, the Soviet state airline.  The cabins were fairly primitive, and reeked with a strange sickly-sweet disinfectant I have never smelled anywhere else.

But the fares were cheap -- there were peasants on some flights carrying produce, and even live chickens. The pilots believed in military-style takeoffs and landings; straight up and straight down.

Once, I dozed off only to be awoken just before arrival by an enormous flight attendant, who insisted on giving me a piece of sour hard candy. “You suck on it,“  she said. “For the pain.”   She meant my eardrums, and it did help . . .  a little bit.

But I have no idea what would help the pain of the U.S. airline industry. Capitalists are fond of pointing out inefficiencies in the public sector as prime examples of why socialism doesn’t work.

The airline industry, however, may be a key example of a failure of capitalism run amok. Following deregulation, venture capitalist raiders bought airlines, stripped them of their assets, ruined their reputations, and threw them on the rubbish heap. I flew a lot, almost every week, back in the 1980s, before the full effects of deregulation kicked in. Fares were higher then, though not all that much.

But the service was far better. They fed you, smiled at you and would even get you a blanket if you needed it. You could get a flight to places like Blue Earth, Minnesota or Lacrosse, Wisconsin without waiting a month and selling your children’s stem cells. Now, there are precious few airlines left.

I know of no one who looks forward to flying on commercial airlines, and like myself, many people who have no fear of flying will often drive great distances rather than face the hassle.

It seems to me that we decided to fix something that wasn’t broken. For once, I even know who to blame: Cornell University economics professor Alfred Kahn, who Jimmy Carter appointed head of the now-extinct Civil Aeronautics Board.

Kahn sold Congress and the President on deregulation. He said that if the airlines weren’t regulated, service would improve, prices would drop like a rock, all the airlines would get stronger, and lots of healthy and exciting new airlines would appear on the scene.

I don’t know where Alferd Kahn is now, but I really hope it is on Braniff. There’s a moral to this story: Never trust a professor, never trust a professor, and never trust a professor.

I sure hope my students aren’t listening.                                                                                                                                                      

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Interview: Peter Rachleff - 2/27/06

Northwest Airlines is losing more than $3 million a day, has filed for bankruptcy, and says it needs to cut its payroll costs by $1.4 billion a year. The airline and its major unions have been negotiating over concessions. A U.S. Bankruptcy Judge has given the company and union negotiators until Wednesday to reach a settlement. If there is no agreement the Judge has the power to terminate the union contracts — a decision both unions say would prompt a strike.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Peter Rachleff --  a professor of labor history at Macalester College in St. Paul Minnesota.

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Essay: It's All Happening at the Zoo - 2/16/06

I have seldom been as pessimistic about the future of our state as I am now, thanks to the Detroit Zoo crisis.

That’s not because of the threat that the zoo might close.  I am pretty sure that in the end, a way will be found to save it.

The zoo in fact is one of the few bright spots about the Detroit area; it is a far better place than it was in the city’s glory days.

But whatever happens to it, what may be more significant is how close to the surface are our deep distrusts and racial hatreds.   

I’m not all that distressed that the mayor dropped the supposed zoo transfer plan on the council at the last minute, and then, in a spectacularly insensitive move, took off for a junket in Africa.

Even the city council’s silly and immature decision to reject the zoo’s transfer to the Detroit Zoological Society wasn’t the worst legislative decision in the history of the human race.

The problem lies in why they did it, and what was said afterwards. Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins bizarrely explained her vote by saying “This is not a plantation. Black people are no longer owned by white people.”  L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland County executive, quickly climbed into the mud with her to proclaim that he would rather own a 1948 Buick than own Barbara-Rose Collins.

That’s what passes for political debate these days. What that exchange makes clear is that too many blacks in Detroit hate, distrust and fear whites in general and the suburbs in particular. And too many whites regard the city and its leaders with utter contempt.

I talked to a suburban mother of two yesterday who was appalled at Council member JoAnn Watson’s call for Detroiters to boycott suburban stores. “Does she know how happy we would be if they stayed out of our neighborhoods?” Then she stopped, appalled. “This is what happens to every generation, isn’t it?  They just get exasperated and give up.”

Yes. And we all suffer a little more for it. Thirty years ago, we had a governor who tried to do something about it. He was a Republican from Traverse City named William Milliken, who worked hard to help Detroit for the benefit of the entire state. Nobody else has done that since. Detroit is in appalling shape these days, and most of those who could afford to leave have left.

Yet somehow we still don’t understand that we are all in this together. Detroiters need to recognize that what remains of their city cannot make it economically on its own.

Everyone in Michigan needs to recognize that we can never compete successfully as Detroit is a bleak ghetto containing hundreds of thousands of ever more desperate and impoverished people.

If we don’t do something about that, it won’t really matter what we do about the zoo. Because to the rest of the nation, we will be the zoo.

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Interview: Roman Gribbs - 2/16/06

          The crisis over the Detroit Zoo has left many wondering about the city’s leadership.  Last weekend City Council essentially voted to close the zoo rather than give up control of its operations to the Detroit Zoological Society. Since then Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been conspicuously absent; he’s been with his mother U.S. Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick on a congressional fact-finding trip in Africa. That’s brought up questions of just what leadership roles a city’s elected representatives should play. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Retired Michigan Appeals Court Judge Roman Gribbs, who was mayor of Detroit in the early 1970’s.

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Essay: Our Overmedicated Society - 2/23/06

For years, our government has been trying to frighten us with the thought of terrorists under our bed. Well, here is something that frightens me much more. The thought of little kids huddling behind the elementary school, taking hits off asthma inhalers and trading pain medications they have secretly brought from home.

What is this all about? And when did it become accepted wisdom that in order to make it through elementary school, kids have to be on Prozac or Ritalin or Zoloft? Newsweek a few years ago said that something like eleven million children were on some kind of mood-altering medication. Now there is new evidence that even the kids who aren’t on medication are taking other people’s drugs.

And that scares me. I am now about to risk becoming a boring old you-know-what, but I distinctly remember being in a working-class elementary school 45 years ago. That was a time when nobody was on anything, except one little girl who was a diabetic and took insulin.

The rest of us were horrified that she had to get shots every day, and nobody ever dreamed of asking for a hit of her insulin.  And as far as I know, most of my unmedicated generation got though childhood in one piece. Later, of course, all of us had the usual adolescent traumas. I was a child then and am not a physician now, but I really don’t think we’d have been better off on mood-altering drugs.

Nowadays, however, we’re living in a world filled with parents who think another pill is the answer for everything,   Small wonder, then, that their children have gotten the same idea.

The University of Michigan's Carol Boyd has been studying how kids abuse prescription drugs. She has found that nearly one-quarter of girls and one out of every ten boys admitted to using prescription pain medications prescribed for someone else. 

Television broadcasts a steady stream of public service announcements designed to convince kids that illegal street drugs are bad. The kids get that. But they told Professor Boyd’s researchers that they weren’t worried because they were taking prescription drugs. Naturally, they have no idea what a proper dose might be or the way drugs interact with each other, or what happened to Marilyn Monroe.

What we know, thanks to Carol Boyd, is that the kids who take Mommy’s pills are eight times more likely than other kids to use other illicit drugs. The fact is, we are now in fact a nation of enablers raising a generation of junkies. Our primary excuse is a term invented by the American Psychiatric Association back in 1987: “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” ADHD has made the pharmaceutical industry very rich. But just think about what it is doing to the rest of us.

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Interview: Carol Boyd - 2/23/06

We’ve been hearing troubling reports for years that today’s kids are the most overmedicated generation in history. But they’re not just using prescription drugs, many are abusing them.  This afternoon, University of Michigan professor Carol Boyd is presenting research at a congressional briefing that shows a substantial number of children are using other people’s prescription medications. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.

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Essay: All Wetlands - 2/22/06

Here’s the one thing not in dispute about the two Michigan wetlands cases that the United States Supreme Court has agreed to decide. Whatever your politics, they are important. Hugely important.

The developers – John Rapanos and Keith and June Carabell, think the federal government has no right to oppose their ability to do what they want with their own property.

Rapanos failed to apply for federal permits before he filled in 54 acres of wetlands in Midland, Saginaw and Bay counties. The Carabells were denied a permit to fill in 15 acres of forested wetlands to build condominiums in Macomb County.

Their lawyers say the developers are fighting to preserve private property rights against the federal government’s abuse of power. But the government says this is a matter of not only saving our environment, but of obeying federal law.

Specifically, the Clean Water Act, which was passed in 1972. One major argument is over whether the act was meant to apply to so-called interior wetlands. Some say that it was not, that it is exclusively concerned with waters ships travel on.

But two of the congressmen who helped write the Clean Water Act, John Dingell and John Conyers, say that is nonsense, the act applies to interior wetlands too.

What does seem clear is that the Clean Water Act was meant to be about . . .  clean water. Geologists know that when you fill in a wetland, it loses its ability to soak up rain. That often means there is nothing to stop all the pollution on the ground from reaching  our great rivers and great lakes.

It’s anyone’s guess how the U.S. Supreme Court will decide -- and on what grounds.

The problem, as I see it, is mainly one of terminology. Thanks to the words various legal codes use, John Rapanos thinks he “owns” those 54 acres of former wetlands, and the Carabells think they “own“ their land in question, in the same way they own their eyeballs.

But they are, at best, stewards of that land. Legally I own the plot of ground on which I live. But in half a century, I will be dead, and someone else will be the steward of this land.

In the meantime, I can plant whatever kind of flowers I like there. But I have no right to make it a toxic waste dump.

That isn’t communism. John Rapanos and the Carabells can make all the money they want. But nobody has the right to fill in the Grand Canyon, or threaten the air and water for future generations. That’s not ideology; it’s common sense. Common sense so clear, in fact, that maybe even the Supreme Court can figure it out.

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Interview: John Flesher - 2/22/06

The Supreme Court yesterday heard oral arguments in an important Michigan.  The case involves whether the Clean Water Act gives the federal government the right to regulate what can be done with interior wetlands such as swamps. The cases involved two Michigan developers – John Rapanos from the Midland area and Keith Carabel who lives near Mt Clements  - in both cases they wanted to develop wetlands on private property without government permission. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with John Flesher.  He’s the environmental writer for the Associated Press and has been following this case.

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