« November 2006 | Main | January 2007 »
Should companies be allowed to withdraw water from the Great Lakes, bottle it and sell it? The Michigan Court of Appeals has said this is a beneficial use of water and reversed a decision that would have closed Nestle’s Ice Mountain plant near Mecosta. Noah Hall is a law professor at Wayne State who specializes in water law. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
Here’s something about British politics that has always amazed me. Their elections come at no set time. They just have to hold one at least every five years. The Prime Minister decides when to have an election, and sets a date a couple months away.
So let‘s say Tony Blair announces that there will be a national election on, say, Thursday February 1st. Imagine his party then loses. The very next day, he goes to see the Queen and resigns.
Later that same day, the Queen will send for the leader of the Conservative Party, and ask him to form a government.
Blair immediately moves out of 10 Downing Street, the British White House. the new guy moves in, the Tories immediately take over the government, and everyone is ready to rock and roll.
None of this lame duck stuff for the Brits; they like their ducks freshly installed.
Meanwhile, here in the colonies, we muddle along for almost two months between elections. That's a relic from the days when it took a long time to get to Washington by stagecoach.
In fact, until the 1930s, new presidents didn’t take over until March, which was a huge problem when the country was paralyzed by inaction during the Civil War and the Great Depression.
For a long time, I thought the British system was better. And it is better -- for them.
Their system is different. The Tory Party already has what is called a shadow government. They know, with a few exceptions, who is going to be minister of what if they get in power.
We don’t work that way. And here is something Jennifer Granholm said on this program last week that impressed me. Many of the new lawmakers coming in don’t understand tax policy yet. I know that's true; in fact, when I interviewed Dick DeVos here in January, he didn’t even know how the Single Business Tax worked.
The governor thought since the old lawmakers not only knew about it but had done the easy part -- abolishing the hated old tax -- they should be responsible for figuring out how to replace it.
Makes sense to me, even though they didn’t get it done.
Now, a new legislature will take office in less than three weeks and have to deal with some of the worst economic problems Michigan has faced since the Great Depression. Many of the issues they will face are very complex -- politically, socially, and especially economically.
And thanks to term limits, nobody in Lansing, including the governor, has been in their elected jobs longer than four years. That’s not a lot of institutional memory.
But there are people in Lansing who have been on the job a lot longer. Representatives of special interests and the status quo, namely lobbyists and bureaucrats. Phalanxes of them are waiting to “help” the new lawmakers from places like Ubly and Cassopolis and Iron Mountain.
That’s reassuring . . . isn’t it?
The Michigan Legislature’s so-called lame duck session is ended this week, after passing a boost in the Merit Scholarship program and failing to pass a replacement for the Single Business Tax. Chris Christoff is Lansing Bureau Chief of the Detroit Free Press.
Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about this legislative session.
If there is a single place where you can say the 20th century was invented, it is a still-standing sprawling red-brick factory a block east of Woodward Avenue in Highland Park.
Starting in 1908, fifteen million Model T Fords poured out of that building. They put America on wheels, fueled a demand for roads, and changed the way we thought about time, speed and distance.
Highland Park was once a fashionable and upscale place to live, and in the 1930s, a stylish, Art Deco Sears and Roebuck store was built on Woodward across the street from Ford.
For half a century it flourished before it was doomed by time and changing fashions. They tore it down, and the plan was to put a combination of housing and some commercial stores on the eight acres plus that the Sears site occupied. But then, bad news.
Before there was Sears, there was apparently an early service station, or garage, which poured contaminates into the ground. I remember seeing gas stations do this with old motor oil as late as the 1960s. So the Sears site was too contaminated for housing. And there it sits, with a fence around it, looking like an inner-city cow pasture. Michigan has thousands of places like that.
Many, I am sure, are far more contaminated than the Sears site. I was surprised to learn that we really don’t know how many brownfields there are, or of what kind. What was more startling is that we don’t even have an agreed-upon definition of what a “brownfield” is, except for a site that may or may not be contaminated.
What isn’t much clearer is who is responsible for cleaning up these sites. When it doubt, responsibility seems to devolve to the federal or state governments. But the federal government has been starving the Superfund for years. The state is strapped for cash.
Eleven years ago, Michigan set up what appeared to be a wise and sensible policy to encourage brownfield cleanup and re-use. Standards were changed to dramatically reduce cleanup costs.
New owners were protected from liability for existing contamination. Other standards were relaxed to reduce the cost of cleaning up a site, especially any site destined for redevelopment.
Yet how much has that helped speed the cleanup of ancient environmental damage? Richard Hula, chair of MSU’s political science department, isn’t really sure that it has helped, very much. It may have just eased the way for sites that would have been redeveloped anyway.
What he is sure of is that we aren’t doing enough about brownfields from a public health standpoint. I am no expert. But it seems clear that we need to create a statewide register of these sites.
We ought to find a way of ranking them by type and level of pollution. Common sense would indicate that from a public health standpoint, as well as a redevelopment one, that ought to be a priority. But as we all know, common sense isn’t really very common at all.
They are known as brownfields -- abandoned land parcels where development is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination. Michigan’s older industrial cities are full of such sites -- and the state has tried a major initiative to encourage their redevelopment. But is it working? Richard Hula is chair of the political science department at Michigan State University and he has studied the issue. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
Back in the prehistoric era, when I was young and the glaciers were still receding, television only got three channels. Now there are hundreds. However, I still watch only three: CNN, PBS and the History Channel.
Very occasionally I watch something else, such as when there is important news in Canada. But mostly, I try to avoid watching television at all, except for rare breaking news events. That isn‘t snobbery. It is just recognition that time and my lifespan are not infinite.
Television is pretty close to the only thing in my life I have ever done in moderation. But most people don’t. They watch eight hours a day of what Newton Minow aptly called the vast wasteland. Especially since the coming of cable, television has had a vast potential to be the greatest cultural and educational force in history.
Most of the time, however, it is the greatest time-waster in history. Fred Friendly, who was Edward R. Murrow’s great producer, used to say that television makes so much money doing its worst..that it can’t afford to do its best. That changed somewhat with the coming of cable, however; with so many channels, some were bound to fight for the tiny market niche known as quality.
The theory of capitalism celebrates competition. The idea is that the more competitors there are, the more quality will increase and price decrease. Individual capitalists, however, secretly hate competition. They want it all. Now, when the governor’s signature is dry on the new cable bill, AT&T plans to pour hundreds of millions into Michigan to more or less corner the cable market.
And what do you suppose will happen after they do? My guess is that they will want to make their money back. Can’t imagine what that will do to both rates and quality. My own state senator, Gilda Jacobs, who lives in my neighborhood, is hollering about this.
But her fellow Democrat, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, is expected ti sign this bill, which her press secretary says “will be good for Michigan consumers and good for Michigan jobs.”
But cash-strapped communities are howling. Many of them have come to depend on franchise fees, especially now that state revenue sharing funds have been severely slashed.
So - is this a good thing or a bad thing? I suggest the answer can be found in the words of a state senator named Buzz Thomas from Detroit, whose goal in life is to someday succeed John Conyers in Congress. He likes the new bill.
He told The Detroit News it will create “an environment free from regulation. This is not something we should fear.“
Why, of course not. Don’t you remember how much better everything got when the airlines stopped being regulated? I hope you feel better now.
Voltaire, the 18th century French writer, virtually invented the modern concept of the intellectual. He was amusing, cynical, and irreverent. But there were a couple of things he respected.
Namely, science -- and religious tolerance. He once wrote that "if there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness."
Adam Smith, the intellectual father of modern capitalism, liked that idea, and so did our Founding Fathers.
The American ideal has been one of religious tolerance. We are free to believe whatever we want to believe about the nature of the divine – or to believe nothing at all.
There are only two limitations. First, the understanding is that we leave religion, as far as possible, out of the marketplace, and especially, out of anything in the public sphere.
And most importantly, we are expected to extend the same tolerance TO all other Americans that we expect FROM them.
We haven’t always lived up to that ideal, though for most of our history, we’ve come steadily closer to it. Anti-Semitism of the grossest variety virtually vanished after World War II.
Nobody, so far as I can tell, voted for or against John Kerry because he happened to be Roman Catholic. In fact, he lost the Catholic vote, while winning Jewish and Muslim voters by wide margins. But what does worry me is that in the last few years, there seems to have been a renewed attempt by supporters of fundamentalist Christianity to improperly inject religion into civic life.
Some of it stems back to the Scopes trial. More of it began with Roe vs. Wade, and the belief by those most opposed to abortion that the state was sanctioning murder. And some is certainly traceable to September 11. Americans were badly shaken by the appearance of fanatics who proclaim that they have no tolerance for our way of life or our religion and who openly vow to kill us if we can.
That has helped lead some fervently Christian Americans to circle the wagons in praise of their own dogmas. For some, that includes an inflexible belief that the earth was literally created in six days, some six thousand years ago. And the belief some intelligent creator made all species the way they are now.
But to the extent that anything can be proven, science has proven those things are as false as the idea that two plus two equals one. I suppose everybody has the right to secretly believe that all of nature and human knowledge may be a grand illusion.
Yet you cannot offer that as an alternative view in engineering school. Religion needs to support science, in this world at least, or leave it alone. Our Founding Fathers clearly understood that. And Osama bin Laden -- like Pat Robertson -- doesn’t have a clue.
The debate over whether to teach evolution in high school classes has led many to think science and religion have to be rigidly opposed to each other. The Reverend Harry Cook doesn’t think so. He’s the pastor of St. Andrews’ Episcopal Church in Clawson and co-founder of a new group, Science and Citizens United. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
Fara Warner has done business a favor, or tried to, with her book The Power of the Purse. She notes that smart businesses are changing their marketing approaches in belated recognition of the fact that women are no longer an important market, they are the majority market.
But, as she says, that doesn’t mean it is enough to merely “paint things pink.” Rather, corporate America and Madison Avenue need to realize that the “women’s market” is every bit as complex as the traditional male-oriented markets, if not more so.
Actually, I am not sure her fascinating book provides a whole lot of easy answers, except that corporate America could use more common sense – and involve more women in product planning, advertising and marketing campaigns.
Asking what women want is, after all, sort of like asking what women eat. What is easier to figure out is what women don’t want, which is to be patronized. We’ve come a long way. I teach a course where we view early TV commercials in which women are seen in two ways: Either as decorative cuts of meat, or as child-like creatures obsessed with finding paper products that really absorb fluids.
Now Madison Avenue – and some companies – seem too often to be working too hard at marketing to women. They do this largely in ways that make me vaguely uneasy. Sometimes they treat women, with polite deference, like creatures from another planet.
When I see commercials for products, like the Oxygen network, marketed “for women only,” I have to wonder how many women really long for a ghetto of their very own.
Remember how you felt when you were a child and was encouraged to read books “just for kids?”
Nevertheless, it is clear that intelligent corporations need to do more to see the world as significant fractions of the female public do. Detroit’s automakers seem to lag woefully behind in this, as in other ways. I know several women who now drive foreign cars in part because of the way they were treated by domestic auto salesmen.
One of them, who at the time made a six-figure income and whose husband was unemployed, picked out a car and was asked if she was sure her choice was all right with her husband.
Another car dealer tried to steer someone else I knew towards a soccer-mom style van, when she had no desire for one. My own wife wanted to be loyal to the manufacturer who had employed her father, who was an automotive engineer. That ended after she asked whether she could get a small pinstripe on a car and was told by the salesperson, “this is normally seen as a white man’s car, lady.”
She leases Volvos now. The last time she got one. I went along and sat there and read a book. The salesman never asked me anything, except for when I thought we would get out of Iraq.
I told him I hoped before the lease expires.
Recent Comments