Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Party Time 9/29/06

Every few years, somebody makes a notable run for office as a third party or independent candidate. Sometimes they even win, as when Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota.

And people start saying the two-party monopoly on power is finally about to be broken. But it never happens.

Nor are things about to change, anytime soon, especially in Michigan. The candidates of the Green, U.S. Taxpayer and Libertarian Parties have every right to be on the ballot.

They have some interesting ideas. But they aren’t going anywhere. Not only will they not win, recent history suggests that none of them will get even one percent of the vote.

There are a number of reasons for that. I think one of the biggest is our psychology, which really sees life as a duopoly.

Man against man. General Motors against the United Auto Workers Union. The Detroit Tigers against the New York Yankees.  Ask any baseball fan if he’d like to swap the World Series for some complex six-team derby where the best overall record wins.

Stuff that. We want a clean contest here. In elections it is the same thing. We don’t want anyone mucking up the big showdown. There are times to be sure, when what look like third party candidates make a splash. H. Ross Perot, for instance.

He got an eye-opening 19 percent of the vote for President in 1992, both in Michigan and nationally, more than any other third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party in 1912.

But Perot wasn’t part of a third party at all, though he pretended to be head of something called the Reform Party. He was on an ego trip; people were mad and wanted to cast a protest vote.

No Reform Party candidates were elected to Congress; few even ran. Today, the party and Perot have essentially vanished from the scene. Sometimes third parties spring up around a particular issue and do well for awhile. But if they start gaining some success, one of the major parties co-opts their issues.

Shiawassee Drain Commissioner Bob Tisch led a property tax rebellion in Michigan in the early ‘80s, and ran for governor on the issue. But the Republicans adopted his cause, stole his thunder, and he got less than three percent of the vote.

Someday, an individual third party candidate might win in Michigan. But the odds are overwhelming against any group establishing a successful party nationwide or even statewide.

That would take millions, and years of building a network of support systems. Yet never say never.

Once, when an old radical was asked what he thought about a third party, he said “Well, I’d like to see a second one first.”

Right now, it seems to most people that there is a big and meaningful difference between the red and the blue. But if the time ever comes when Americans feel that neither party is listening to their needs, things in Michigan, and the nation, just might change.

 

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Interview: Bill Ballenger 9/29/06

Everyone knows that Dick DeVos and Jennifer Granholm are in a close race for governor of Michigan.  But what about Doug Campbell, Bhagwan Dashiarya or Gregory Creswell? They’re on the ballot too.

Could this be the year that a third party candidate makes a difference in a Michigan election?  Bill Ballenger owns and writes the political news letter Inside Michigan Politics.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry asked him about the upcoming election.

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Essay: Climate Change - 9/28/06

Last year was the second warmest year on record, the Arctic sea ice shrunk to its lowest level ever, and hurricanes devastated Louisiana and Florida. Things haven’t been as bad this year. But then even the people I’ve known who were terminally ill with cancer had good days, right up until the end.

You don’t have to be a scientist to know that global warming and climate change are a reality, whatever the current administration says. Nor do you have to perform detailed calculations to figure out what would happen to Michigan if the polar ice caps begin to melt.

My wife always wished we could afford to live on the water. Living under it, however, presents problems.  Climate change is a more important issue than anything else to everyone on earth. That’s not a political statement. Nor do I say that from a liberal perspective.

The earth has had radical climate changes before, long before we had Halliburton or even any humans to blame it on.  Radical climate changes occurred at the end of the Permian era, the Cretaceous era and during the later ice ages. Trouble is, you can’t ask a dinosaur or a wooly mammoth what that was like, because, thanks to climate change, they’re all dead.

Frankly, I would rather avoid extinction, at least as a species and as a planet.  My deep scientific knowledge of the reasons behind what’s happening wouldn’t fill a thimble.

Much of what I do know comes from “An Inconvenient Truth,” the absolutely essential movie produced and hosted by former Vice President Al Gore. He says he has given up elective politics to try and save our planet, which seems like a pretty fair trade.

What’s clear is that climate change is a reality. It’s also clear that most of us have very little idea what can or should be done about it. That’s why next year’s first-ever high-level conference on climate change is very much needed.

Rosina Bierbaum, now dean of the school of natural resources at the University of Michigan, makes no secret of the fact that she believes that the environmental policies of the present administration are a howling disaster. She was, after all, a science advisor in the Clinton White House. But she also knows that the last thing we need is an overtly partisan conference designed to bash anybody.

Even if the Greenest politician you can imagine became president tomorrow, and we all turned off our air conditioners, even in August, the climate wouldn’t return to 1906.

What we need to do is learn how to manage and control what we have, When it comes to assessing climate change, we need an honest exploration of where we are and how we got here.

We need to determine what can be done and what MUST be done. Next year’s climate change conference will be crucially important. They probably won’t have it in Michigan Stadium.

But the clock is running out, just the same.   

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Interview: Rosina Bierbaum - 9/28/06

Former President Bill Clinton sponsors an annual Global Initiative conference that aims to bring together world leaders to come up with solutions to pressing problems. This year’s conference was last week, and Rosina Bierbaum was the featured contributor in the area of energy and climate change.  She’s dean of the school of natural resources and the environment at the University of Michigan.  And Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.

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Essay: Why We Better Care - 9/27/06

The thing most wrong with public education in Detroit is the way we and our politicians are thinking about it.

Here’s how one story from the Free Press this week began: “The latest crisis for the Detroit Public Schools is driving talk in Lansing of drastic solutions to the district’s long-term financial crisis.”

That’s the heart of the problem, right there. Yes, the district does have a huge money problem. But that isn’t what really matters.

What matters is that there are still a hundred thousand students in the Detroit public schools, few of whom are going to emerge with an education good enough to give them any hope of a decent future.

Many won’t graduate at all. Others will eventually graduate, but be essentially unable to read or write. They will have no marketable skills, and little or no understanding of how to get any. I think that is far scarier than Osama bin Laden.

Think about what that means. We are creating a vast army of those without hope in the heart of our state and the middle of one of the poorest areas in our nation. What do you suppose that means for Michigan’s future? What do you suppose that means for your future?

There are no assembly line jobs for these folks. Even the military won’t want more than a very few. What we have here is a ticking time bomb, and that’s no racist statement.

We are looking at this problem in the wrong way, a too short-sighted way. Yes, money is one key to what went wrong with the schools. The money and the businesses and the upper and middle class people left the city.

Yet in other communities and other times in America, poor citizens, black and white, have fought successfully to educate and better themselves. William Sanders Scarborough was actually a slave boy when he secretly began to learn Latin and Greek.

He rose to become not only a college professor, but a college president. The same is true for innumerable immigrant children who scratched their way to success in a lot of drafty and underfunded schools with names like “PS 131.”

Things seem to be different now, and I think I know why. Forty years ago, there was a huge study of equality of educational opportunity called the Coleman Report. As one Harvard professor summed it up, “Coleman found that schools make no difference, families make the difference.“

Too often, kids in the Detroit schools today come from families where education is not a value. Too often, they have little family support structure at all.  And some African-Americans who do well in school are attacked by their peers for “acting white.”

How do we fix this? I do not have any solutions. But I do know what Langston Hughes suggested long ago happens to a dream deferred, to a raisin in the sun. You might want to look it up.

We all should.

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Interview: Jeffery Mirel - 9/27/06

Today is “count day.”  It’s the day on which the number of students in any Michigan public school system determines how much money that system gets this year.  Detroit ’s system was already strapped for cash -- and a teachers’ strike at the start of the year drove the number of student dangerously down. Jeffery Mirel is associate dean for academic affairs in the University of Michigan’s school of education, and an expert on the Detroit schools.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: Stem Cells - 9/25/06

If Michigan Citizens for Stem Cell Research wants to educate the public as to what this science is really all about, I know just where they should start. They need to counteract the lie that embryonic stem cell research involves killing babies.

The embryos scientists use for this work are leftovers from fertility clinics. Not only are they in very, very early stages of development, they are embryos that never would develop. Most of them have some irregularity that would prevent them from being successfully implanted in a womb. In any event, if they can’t be used for stem cell research, they get destroyed.

How could anyone say that using these tiny masses of cells to help cure some deadly disease is less moral than flushing them down the drain?  Canada has no prohibition against this wonderful research, and as a result, here’s what happened last week.

Researchers in Toronto announced that they had used stem cells from these early human embryos to save the eyesight of laboratory rats suffering from a disease similar to macular degeneration.  In this country, macular degeneration has robbed millions of older people of the ability to read or drive or even distinguish the faces of their loved ones.

Can you imagine the joy if this technology is easily transferable to humans?  Embryonic stem cells are far more valuable than adult stem cells because they are so flexible. Put with retinal tissue, they produce healthy retinal cells. Put in a spinal cord, they may be able to rebuild healthy spinal cord tissue.

Scientists think it isn’t too far-fetched to hope that stem cell research can help reverse Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and possibly the effects of injuries that cause paralysis.

“People are saying this is decades away,” said American scientist Robert Lanza who was involved in the Canadian eye research. “We’re saying no. You can do this sooner.” He suggested that the macular degeneration work is ready for clinical trials on human beings. If that isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is.  Yet Michigan lags behind.

That’s partly because President Bush opposes any federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. But Michigan laws are even more backward than the federal ones. When California voters heard that Washington wouldn’t fund stem cell research, the voters approved spending $3 billion on it.

Meanwhile, Michigan has appropriated less than one percent as much. We are dooming ourselves to be hopelessly behind, at a time when our economy could use a high-tech boost more than ever. Just imagine if we became the place to come to get macular degeneration reversed. That is not that far-fetched. The University of Michigan has superb medical facilities and a promising Center for Stem Cell Biology.

All they need is for our politicians to take their chains off.

If Michigan Citizens for Stem Cell Research can help move the public to pressure them, it will be a great service for us all.   

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Interview: Macia Baum - 9/25/06

One of the hottest and most controversial issues in biology today is stem cell research. A new non-profit group, Michigan Citizens for Stem Cell Research and Cures, aims to spread information about the potential benefits of this research to try and gain support for it. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Marcia Baum, the group’s director.

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Essay: Our Legislature - 9/22/06

Michigan had a rudimentary legislature of sorts even before it was a state. That meant the politicians were ready to hit the ground running once we were admitted to the union in 1837. That first state legislature cranked out 146 laws and a bunch of resolutions our very first year. Not bad for a state that back then had fewer people than Grand Rapids does today.

The lawmakers moved from Detroit to Lansing ten years later, and haven’t slowed down since. We have ten million people now, and our lawmakers now churn out, on average, about 400 public acts a year, a few profoundly important, others profoundly forgettable.

What state government does has more impact on most of our lives than what goes on in Washington. You wouldn’t know that, however, because they don’t get much media attention. Periodically there are attempts to change the legislature. Some want to make it either a part-time body, as they have in New Hampshire, or have a legislature with only one house, like Nebraska.

Those concepts work pretty well in those small and largely rural states. Michigan, however, is a sprawling, diverse, mini-nation of sorts. We have, however, made one big change in our legislature.

And we changed it for the worse. That’s when we enacted term limits a little over ten years ago. This has worked to ensure that nobody in either the House or Senate has any institutional memory of crises past, and no great expertise at working together.

So we get Speakers of the House who are in their early 30s. We lose seasoned, thoughtful veterans like Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema. And we have given more power to the executive branch, the bureaucrats, the lobbyists and the special interests.

This fall, after the elections, the legislature must come back and do a job more important than any they did all year: They have to find a way to replace the $1.9 billion the state lost --- and desperately needs -- when they did away with the Single Business Tax.

Among those making that decision are some, like Ken Sikkema, who will be out of office a month later and can never serve in the legislature again. Others will be gone in two years, or four. They aren’t going to face the long-term consequences of their actions.

That, to me, is deeply dangerous, and deeply wrong. We always had term limits to begin with. They are called elections. We can vote a lousy officeholder out of office any time we like. We can even impeach or recall him or her earlier if they really screw up. And if we keep electing stinkers, and are too apathetic to find better leaders, we deserve what we get.

That’s how the Founding Fathers meant it to work.

Now, with term limits, we have a situation where the only citizens legally disqualified from holding elective office in Michigan are those who are repeatedly approved of by the voters. What a state this is.

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Interview: Rick Pluta - 9/22/06

The Michigan Legislature has wrapped up its pre-election session.  Most of  the lawmakers are turning their efforts to campaigning for their own re-elections.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Rick Pluta about what the legislature has accomplished.  He is the capital bureau chief for Michigan Public Radio.

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