Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: A Snapshot Of The Voters - 4/28/06

The following two facts are not really in dispute. First, if as high a percentage of African-Americans voted in 2000 as did white Americans, George W. Bush would never have gotten to the White House.

That’s because more than 90 percent of them voted for Al Gore, and the increase would have been more than enough to overcome Bush’s paper-thin margin in Florida, hanging chads or no hanging chads. Second, some blacks and other minorities have been reluctant to vote because of difficulties they may have had with the law,
they fear the authorities may use voter lists to come after them.

And the theory is that they may be even less likely to vote if a photo ID is involved.  Republican and Democratic leaders both believe what I’ve just told you, though they may not be willing to admit it.

They also think that most of those who vote without ID would vote Democratic.  And that is what is really at the heart of the dispute over whether to require a photo ID in order to cast a vote in Michigan.

There are few things worse than anything that prevents anybody from voting. When I was twelve years old, three college students, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner were tortured to death and murdered in Mississippi.
They were killed for trying to register black people – Americans -- to vote. That is part of the reason why I vote in every election.

Today, those who claim to be their heirs tend to oppose requiring  voters to have photo ID. But with all due respect, they are wrong. We live in a modern, technological society.
Photo ID is needed for everything.

I have five different photo IDs in my wallet. You can’t function in the modern economy without one any more than you can without shoes. And anyone who argues that you should be able to walk around without one is doing a great disservice to those remaining 370,000 Michigan voters who do not have a photo ID.

They need to be able to fully function in today’s world. One of the grand traditions of the Democratic Party used to be helping immigrants and minorities to get a leg up so that they could make it in this society. I do not recall anyone arguing that the poor should not be required to get a Social Security Card.   

The Michigan Supreme Court should rule in favor of requiring photo ID on one condition – that the legislature passes Chris Ward’s sensible bill to give a state photo ID free to everyone who needs one.

Nobody should have to pay for the right to vote. Yet making sure they are who they say they are makes perfect sense though I’m not sure you could tell from the average driver’s license picture.

This probably will be moot in a few years, anyway, when they check our identities with a bioscanner. But for now, say cheese, go into the voting booth, and make your bad picture count.

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Interview: Charlie Cain - 4/28/06

Most of us are used to using a photo ID on an almost daily basis…but you don’t need to show one when you vote.   Ten years ago, Michigan passed a law requiring one, but then-Attorney General Frank Kelley said it was unconstitutional.  Now the Michigan Supreme Court has agreed to decide the issue.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Charlie Cain, the Lansing bureau chief for the Detroit News.

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Essay: Ford, With a Touch of Lincoln - 4/27/06

I’ve always thought it made a great deal of sense for President Ford’s library to be in a separate location from the museum.

Serious scholars of the presidency are apt to be better off examining his papers at the University of Michigan, where many other research materials are also available. But Gerald Ford was quintessentially a man of Grand Rapids, and the museum celebrating the only president ever from Michigan belongs there.

There have been those who have wondered why he merits two major institutions. After all, he was president for less than two and a half years, and was never elected to any office other than congressman.

Well, those short years in fact were some very tumultuous times, from the final act of Watergate to the end of the Vietnam War, and inflation, recession and our nation’s bicentennial.

But there is a lot more to it than that. I think it must be hard for anyone younger than 45 to appreciate how important Gerald Ford was when he became president. Our country had lost its innocence in a very real way during the Watergate scandal. We really hadn’t thought our highest officials lied, cheated, and had filthy mouths.

This nation had also just lost our first war, and had learned that we had been lied to from first to last about that. Now we were finding out that the president really was a crook. The Nixon impeachment hearings were nothing like the politicized, opera-bouffe Clinton impeachment a quarter-century later.

In 1974 people crowded around televisions and sometimes hung on every word. Congressmen looked stunned themselves when they voted on the articles of impeachment.

You also need to keep in mind that most Americans had almost no idea who Gerald Ford was when he became president. He had only became vice-president the previous December, after  we learned that Spiro Agnew, in a scandal completely unrelated to Watergate, was getting payoffs from crooked contractors Americans were fairly traumatized. And suddenly, Ford made them feel things were all right again.

Virtually the first words he spoke as president were “Our long national nightmare is over.” And he saw to it that was true. He allowed the press to see him making his own breakfast.  His wife Betty acted like a normal mother of rambunctious twenty-somethings.

Ford’s honeymoon with the American people ended when he pardoned Richard Nixon. Today, many historians think that was the right thing to do. Ten years ago, President Ford told me that he knew it might cost him the election, but that it had to be done.

Otherwise, he and the country would continue being consumed by Nixon’s mess. Two years later Ford indeed lost a very close election. On Inauguration Day, the man who won got it exactly right.

Jimmy Carter looked at President Ford and said, “"I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.”

There are a lot worse ways to be remembered.

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Interview: Elaine Didier - 4/27/06

President  Gerald Ford is the only president from Michigan – and is also the only one whose presidential museum, located in Grand Rapids, is separate from his presidential library, which is on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. That library was dedicated 25 years ago today.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Elaine Didier  the director of the Gerald Ford library and museum.

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Essay: Workers at Will - 4/26/06

Last year, a previously obscure Michigan medical benefits firm called Weyco, Inc. made national headlines when it fired four employees for smoking. Not, that is, for smoking on the job, for smoking on their own time, and refusing to try to quit.

Weyco said this wasn’t about privacy. They said it was about health care costs. There was muttering in the state legislature about a new law protecting smokers’ rights. Nothing happened, however, and it was soon pretty much forgotten. What was interesting was that virtually nobody I talked with perceived this as a workers’ rights issue. They saw it as an issue about smoking, which, I think, changed the way it was seen.

There is perhaps no legal practice less defended than smoking. The product is nasty, smelly, kills its users, sometimes kills those around them, and costs society billions in health care. Far fewer people smoke now than a few decades ago, and even most of those who do smoke wish they didn’t.

But imagine if Weyco had fired employees for being a few pounds overweight, or having a Kerry bumper sticker on their cars, or for how they dressed in their off-hours?  There would certainly been a lot more outrage. People might have picketed the company or even marched on the state Capitol.

However, workers elsewhere have been fired for exactly those things. And an employer in Michigan can fire anyone for any reason, or no reason, unless prevented by a contract from doing so.

So is this a good thing, or a bad thing? If you are now expecting a simple answer, you came to the wrong commentator.

Many of us have been in a situation where the ownership or management of our company changed, and then suddenly everything we had done didn’t matter, and we were shown the door.

That seems brutally unfair. But some employers have been saddled with factories and workers who were no longer competitive. But no-cut contracts said they were powerless to stop paying them. That’s not something we can afford these days either.

It sounds terribly unjust that a loyal and hardworking employee can be fired because his employer doesn’t like his lifestyle choices. But what if those choices cause his employer acute embarrassment?

If I were the only local employee of a conservative financial company, and I insisted on scampering around our small town after hours in a pinafore, it might cast doubt on my professional demeanor.

  What we need, I think, is a national conversation and then possibly legislation to decide on and define the social contract when it comes to work, and the relationship between employer and employee.

Somehow, if we had a common understanding on this, we might have a better sense of ourselves as a society.

And then maybe, just maybe, we’d all be a lot better off.

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Interview: Roland Zullo - 4/26/06

Nearly a century ago, the Ford Motor Company’s infamous “sociological department” spied on the company’s workers.  Henry Ford wanted to make sure they were living what he thought of as properly moral lives. Later, that came to be viewed as paternalistic excess. But last year, the Weyco medical benefits firm in Okemos fired workers for smoking on their own time. They could do this because of a legal concept called “at-will employment.” Roland Zullo is an assistant research scientist at the institute of labor and industrial relations at the University of Michigan. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Interview: Mitch Irwin - 4/25/06

It’s no secret that the manufacturing sector of Michigan’s economy is having a tough time.  But the state’s second-largest industry, agriculture, is doing better. A recent Michigan State University study found that agriculture has a $60 billion impact on the state’s economy, and provided a million jobs. Mitch Irwin, who had been director of the state department of management and budget, last summer took over the agriculture department. Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Cultivating Our Gardens - 4/25/06

Michigan was good farmland from its beginnings. The Huron Indians farmed and gardened before the white man came, and the Menominee harvested wild rice in the Upper Peninsula. The French settlers who followed Cadillac to the wooden fort that became Detroit cultivated funny-shaped ribbon farms, which were up to three miles long but only two hundred yards wide. Throughout the 19th century, we were seen mostly as a smallish agricultural state, with a sparsely populated Upper Peninsula that was ripped apart twice for its raw materials; first for lumber, then for copper.

Farming was seen as so important to our development that Michigan was the first state to start a new kind of university that would be specifically devoted to the needs of farmers.

They called it the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, and the farm boys who were the first students had to help build their own classrooms and dorms. Today, it’s called Michigan State University, and agriculture is still a big part of its mission.

Farmers didn’t, by and large, pay a lot of attention to the ways of the world; they were mainly too busy trying to wrench a living from the soil.  Michigan was the birthplace of the

Republican Party, and it was designed to appeal to a lot of small, independent farmers. But It might surprise you to learn that the mainly rural citizens of Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Washtenaw counties who voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, turned against him in 1864. They were sick of the Civil War, and wanted their sons back home.

Henry Ford was a farmer who hated farming. He was hardly a Communist, but he would have agreed wholeheartedly with what Karl Marx called “the idiocy of rural life.” And the automobile industry he did so much to invent  single-handedly changed Michigan from an agricultural state to a manufacturing state.

Farming never went away, but it took a back seat to the auto industry. Soybeans weren’t nearly as sexy as Corvette Stingrays. The number of farms steadily shrunk after 1910. The census no longer has a separate category for agricultural employment, since so few people work on the farm any more.

And yet, we still have millions of acres under cultivation or which serve as pasture lands, and this much is as true for us as it was for Lewis Cass, Henry Ford, and Nebuchadnezzar. 

We all gotta eat, and we all gotta live, and the cherry trees in Traverse City and East Jordan aren’t likely to be outsourced to India any time soon. Agriculture has outlasted tail fins as it did the Pyramids.

And we shouldn’t be the least surprised. 

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Essay: Autodepression Syndrome - 4/24/06

We have to face the future, and it is going to be a future where the Detroit-based auto industry is never again what it was. Not only will the industry never again employ as many people as it once did - it will never again employ as many people as it does now.

Let's put last week's news in perspective. To show how unreal expectations have become, analysts were happy because General Motors "only" lost $323 million dollars in the first three months of the year.

             They were happy about that, because last year GM lost four times as much in the first quarter. I am not sure what that means, but I do know that if you are bleeding to death, after awhile, less blood trickles out. And by the time you are bone-dry, it is too late.

According to my calculations, if I am lucky I may end up having earned about $3 million dollars before I die, which is somewhat better than average. So General Motors lost in the first quarter as much as I could make in a hundred lifetimes. Last year, however, GM lost almost $11 billion dollars, which is more than I could make before the sun burns out.

As for Ford - well, it is doing worse. Much worse. The Ford Motor Co. lost $1.2 billion dollars in the first quarter. Analysts say that if anything, the picture is even bleaker than that stark number would make it seem. Even Ford's financial services arm, which includes income from selling auto loans, isn't doing well. And for the workers at both auto companies, there is more bad news ahead. Ford plans to erase another 30,000 jobs and close more than a dozen factories in coming years.

General Motors is also eliminating a similar number of jobs and closing factories. Ford is, as far as I can tell, pinning its future hopes on new sales of Sports Utility Vehicles. It is coming out with new versions of its Lincoln Navigator and the Ford Expedition.

But those truck-like cars are today's ultimate gas-guzzling dinosaurs. And gas will soon be spurting past  $3 a gallon. Are workers who fear they are about to soon be laid off going to buy a lot of expensive vehicles whose gas tanks cost $100 to fill up? When it comes to planning for the future, that would make a Soviet economist look like Bill Gates. We need a reality check, big-time.

We have to find a way to come up with good manufacturing jobs that pay decent wages, or doom our people to frustrated and severely downsized lives.

Whatever your politics, and whatever else you think, that's what we should be thinking about.   Not how to get through the day, or the week, but how we can get this state on the right track to prosperity again.

Do that, and we may all succeed. Fail to do that, and we'll all be hitchhiking to North Carolina. Your move, somebody.

And please, make it the right one.

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Interview: Thomas Klier - 4/24/06

Here’s one illustration of the state of the domestic auto industry. Last week, when General Motors announced it lost $323 million in the first quarter, analysts treated that as good news. But there was no good news from Ford. It lost $1.2 billion. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Thomas Klier.  He is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago who specializes in the auto industry.

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