Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Contortions - 3/30/07

Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop said something yesterday I fully agree with.  “We are on a crash course to disaster in this state. The deadline for decisions was a long time ago, and waiting only makes it worse.”

What he didn’t add was that he is as much the problem as anybody else. Senate Republicans sniped at the governor’s proposal for weeks before they came up with a plan of their own. It was based on such enlightened thinking as cuts to education and health care.

Nor did they seek to find some compromise solution with the Democrats, who after all won the election last fall. No, they just rammed their budget through the Senate, the only part of government they control, knowing it would be dead on arrival in the state house and in the governor’s office. Maybe passing this budget made Senator Bishop feel good, like a primal scream.

Next time he should just scream. It would be faster and cheaper, and do the state about as much good. Comrades: At the risk of being rude, I would like to point out that we aren’t playing a game of Risk. Our state is in the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes.

That’s according to a new report issued by SEMCOG, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments. They say Southeast Michigan, the economic engine that drives the state, will continue to lose jobs and people for at least a decade.

The newspapers today, in an attempt to put a positive spin on this, chirped that our population will rebound and there will be more jobs in … 2035. This holds minimal excitement for me. For one thing I expect to be dead then. For another, anybody with half a brain knows that any prediction about life that far in the future is meaningless.

The SEMCOG report does say, as other reports have said, that our only hope is a better educated population. Senator Bishop wants to cut aid to education. But he is not the only irrational one.

Our state’s so-called leaders are off spinning in a million directions. Speaker of the House Andy Dillon wants to guarantee public utilities monopoly status in return for a tax increase, thinly veiled bribe of half a billion dollars or so.  Attorney General Mike Cox said that was nuts.  Well, he got that right. And he is a conservative Republican. Dillon is a Democrat. I don’t know where the governor is.

For all I know she‘s consulting with Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll. She‘d be better off talking to former State School Superintendent Tom Watkins, who has been writing excellent commentaries on the budget crisis.

Yesterday, he said “if Michigan is going to retool for the future it will take bold decisive leadership that will force wholesale restructuring of our schools and government.”

That makes sense. Unfortunately, the governor fired him. The late Harry Chapin once recorded an album called Dance Band on the Titanic. But I don’t think he meant it as a guide to governing the state.

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Essay: Political Bafflement - 3/29/07

Over the last few months, I have asked a number of Michigan‘s top political and business leaders if they have ever seen an economic crisis as serious as this one.

They all said no. Former Governor Jim Blanchard did point out that the deficit was actually worse when he took office in 1983. So was unemployment. But back then everyone assumed -- correctly -- that the state’s key industry -- autos -- would bounce back. The economy would turn around and the crisis would go away.

Today, nobody in the know thinks the present crisis is going away anytime soon. This year, the state is on a collision course with reality, and that is going to mean real pain for a lot of people sometime before September 30.

That‘s when the fiscal year ends, and the budget has to be balanced. Right now, the state is running a deficit that is almost certainly more than a billion dollars. By May, the state is likely to be in the scary position of not having enough to pay bills that are immediately due. What happens then?

Most likely, state employees will be laid off. Parts of state government may shut down. There could even be payless paydays for those still on the job. Things have gotten so bad that the state cannot borrow to cover the shortfall. The state treasurer says Michigan has already borrowed as much as our Constitution allows.

And he has to come up with $1.2 billion to pay short-term loans by September. There is even talk of temporary borrowing from state employee retirement funds to bridge the gap.

And we still have no replacement for the Single Business Tax.

We’re on course to have the roof fall in. And our political leaders are failing us. They knew what was coming. And yet, they continue to play partisan games. We have a Democratic governor who seems too weak to fight hard enough for what she knows is right. We have an obstructionist Republican leadership who seem not to care if the state’s credit rating is destroyed, as long as they can make Granholm look bad and give the wealthy more tax cuts.

What is most baffling to me is why Jennifer Granholm wasn’t out there leading the charge for her service tax from day one. She won by a landslide. She can’t run for re-election and no other elected job is likely to be open to her.

Why won’t she use her political capital?

Instead, she has allowed Mike Bishop, a state senator who represents a fraction of one county, to set himself up as her equal.

We need our governor to tell us openly, without sugar-coating, how bad the situation is and how she would fix it. We need both parties to act as if Michigan matters more than politics.

And we need to tell them to do this right now.

Or frankly, you can stop worrying about Michigan’s future. Because it won’t have one.

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Essay: Bullying - 3/28/07

There is a bill now before the Michigan House of Representatives that would do something about bullying in schools. If you have doubts as to whether such a bill is needed, read some of the testimony from victims of bullying.

Much of it would make a statue cry. Take Fred, from Macomb County: “At age 15 I stole my father’s gun with the intent of shooting some of my classmates. The reason I wanted to do so was the verbal and physical abuse I received from some of them each and every day I went to school.” And he added, “I ended up being so depressed that I shot myself instead of anyone at school.

“Luckily I survived, dropped out and went to adult education to complete my diploma.“ He was far from the only child to shoot himself; the current bill is called “Matt’s Safe School Law,” after a 14-year-old East Lansing boy who committed suicide after being bullied.

I have read a lot of proposed legislation in my life; this is an uncommonly well-written law. Anyone who grumbles about it imposing state control hasn’t read it. It begins, “the board of a school district … shall adopt a policy prohibiting harassment or bullying at school. The content of the policy shall be determined locally,” and “should be adopted through a process that includes “parents, school employees, pupils and community representatives.”

Nothing is as self-destructive as bullying. Countless lives have been blighted and productivity lost as a result of it.

In a civilized society, this bill would be adopted unanimously. But in fact there are those who want to kill or weaken it.

Why? The bill defines bullying behavior as any harassment  “based on a pupil‘s actual or perceived religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability, height, weight, gender identity or socioeconomic status.” But there are bigots who are so blinded by their hatred and fear of anyone gay, or who might be gay, that they would rather put children’s lives at risk.

There are also those who support the haters for cynical political reasons. Two Republican state representatives are fighting to make sure the bill does not protect people based on sexual orientation.

They are doing the work of a hate group misnamed the American Family Association. It is spreading the lie that this bill’s real purpose is to “legitimize homosexual behavior and cross-dressing,” and that this will lead to increased cocaine use in children under thirteen.” You can read this garbage on their web site.

What I know is that the people who want us to see gay people as less than human once did the same to blacks and women. I also know that many kids who are bullied for being gay really aren’t.

And most of all, I know that any country where it is legal to torture and bully anyone has more in common with Nazi Germany than my America. It’s up to you which one you’d rather live in.

 

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Essay: Play Ball - 3/27/07

I have a mildly insane friend who has two passions in life.  The Detroit Tigers and the Democratic Party, not necessarily in that order.

Last year, as the world knows, the Tigers, who hadn’t had a winning season since 1993, shocked all of baseball and all of Michigan by, well, winning. They even ended up in the World Series.

Sure, they eventually lost, four games to one, but you could have become fabulously wealthy if, a year ago you had bet they would even get in the playoffs. That is, if you could have found anyone to take the bet. What they did was, in political terms, roughly equivalent to Dennis Kucinich being elected President.

Before last season started, a few of the less battered and emotionally abused Tiger fans allowed themselves to hope that maybe, just maybe, the team might win as many as they lost.

Instead they won the pennant, which I found exciting but curiously unfulfilling. It took me a while to figure out why I felt that way. The answer, I think, is that you have to work up to happiness. If you want a nice car or career or house, you will appreciate them more if you have to struggle for a few years first.

But suddenly last year we were transformed overnight from the outhouse to the castle.  Just before the World Series, I asked my wacky pal how he felt about it all.

“Well, I’m conflicted. I want them to win, but I don’t really want them to win. Actually, they better not win. It would be better for the country.” I was tempted to ask what he had been smoking.

He then explained. “The Tigers got into the World Series in 1934 and lost. And you know what happened? Big Democratic gains in that year’s Congressional elections.

“Nineteen-forty, year a little like this one. They get in the series, lose it, and a month later, Franklin D. Roosevelt wins his third term.  But then look what happens when they win the Series.

“Nineteen-sixty eight, the miracle team, win the series in seven.  Richard Nixon is elected president. Then they win again in 1984. Ronald Reagan wins 49 of the 50 states.

“Look. The World Series would be nice. But America just can’t afford it this year.” This is a man who takes historical patterns seriously.  But he seems to know what he was talking about. The Tigers got creamed in the series. Less than a month later, the Republican party got creamed at the polls. The Tigers took one for his other team.  I called Nutso just before spring training this year.

Well, what can we wish for this year? “Sky’s the limit,” said he. “It’s an odd-numbered year. Baseball has nothing to do with politics in odd numbered years. So I am glad to clear that up for you.”

Next week, we’ll examine how Piston playoff results are influenced by Michigan’s Single Business Tax.  Till then, play ball.

 

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Essay: On Journalism - 3/26/07

Last week, I was making breakfast while I was listening to Sarah Hulett’s report on life inside a Detroit public school. I could feel it, hear it, and she even made me see it. I understood what was going on in a multi-dimensional way. Her report brought reality home to many people who haven’t been inside a public school for years.

That’s what the best journalism always does, regardless of the medium. Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between having a government without newspapers, or a free press without a government, he’d vote for a free press, without hesitation.

Naturally, he changed his mind after he became president. But the only reason we have a democracy is because our media are perfectly free to write about anything and criticize anything.

Journalism is sort of the nation’s circulatory system. Journalists at their best carry light, air, and information throughout society. We enable America to talk to itself. That doesn’t always make us popular.

Polls show that journalists are held in generally low esteem. In fact, we sometimes rank lower than used car dealers and lawyers.

That’s not surprising, given that our task is often to bring you the bad news. Sallie Smith won’t make it onto the national news tonight if she has a normal day, goes to work, makes dinner, and helps her kids.

However, if she goes berserk, gets down the elephant gun and heads for the mall, we’ll tell you all about it. That’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say. But these days, Uncle Walter says many news programs make him disgusted or angry.

The problem was first defined by Fred Friendly, the great CBS producer. “Television makes so much money doing its worst that it can’t afford to do its best.” News used to be exempt from that rule. But not any longer. Local news is a major money maker for most commercial stations. Earlier this month, the ABC affiliate in Detroit began showing Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s state of the city speech.

They cut away, however, for an update on the burial arrangements for the woman who had been dismembered and scattered around a park. Most newspapers aren’t much better.

For years, cynics have said that the only real freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. And that man is frequently too much owned by his advertisers. Personally I don’t care how rich any press lord is. What bothers me is that I teach college seniors who have no idea that the state of Michigan is facing an economic crisis, or why. They can’t find Iran on a map, or North Korea. They don’t know when World War II was, or what the electoral college is.

But they know whether Britney Spears is out of rehab. Doing good journalism and getting people’s attention is an enormous challenge today. And I think the future of America depends on it.

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Essay: Prison Reform - 3/23/07

Michigan’s prison system is broken and spiraling out of control, and nothing anyone is now proposing is going to do much to fix it.  Now before I go any further, I want to emphasize that I am not  an expert on criminal justice.  My personal experience with prisons consists in interviewing a few convicts behind bars.

However, I am not a railroad engineer either, but I know a train wreck when I see one. And the more you learn about our prison system the more horrified you are bound to become.

We are talking about a system that is locking up four times as many people as it did a generation ago, and whose population of inmates does nothing but continue to rise, year after year, always faster than the corrections experts predict.

The system isn’t rehabilitating the prisoners. The recidivism rate is now 48 percent, which means half of all released inmates are back in jail within two to three years. You can’t assume the rest go straight; some of them die, or get killed, or fall through the cracks.

We are paying a terrific cost -- almost $2 billion a year -- to keep 51,000 of our fellow Michiganders locked up. But though we are spending a lot on warehousing them, we aren’t even doing a very good job of that. This has, in fact been a horrific year for Michigan prisons. For starters, the system accidentally let a homicidal maniac named Patrick Selepak out on parole.

He promptly tortured and murdered three people. Last month, 60 Minutes did a major piece on the plight of the mentally ill in Michigan prisons. It centered on a young man named Timothy Souders who, the program said, died of thirst after being tied up and forcibly restrained for up to eighteen hours at a time.

Other mentally ill inmates were also said to have died needlessly of hunger, thirst and torture here.

And this came less than two years after revelations of a continuing pattern of sexual abuse of women inmates by guards.

So Michigan’s out-of-control corrections system is clearly a mess. The easiest thing to do would be to call for the director’s firing. But whether justified or not, that would do nothing to address the system’s major long-term structural problems.

What we need to do is reinvent the corrections system and our corrections policy. Governor Granholm needs to appoint a high-powered bipartisan commission and charge them with coming up with an entirely new corrections policy for the state.

Then, the governor and the legislature need to do whatever they can and spend whatever it takes to make it happen.

This needs to be a policy designed to protect society at an affordable cost in a sensible way. If it takes billions up front to make it happen, it would well be worth it. What we have now is bankrupting the state, and failing everyone. There has to be a better way.                                                                                                                                                      

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Interview: Patricia Caruso - 3/23/07

Michigan’s prison population is at an all-time high, and so are the costs of running the corrections system. Prison officials are attempting to put in place a number of reforms. Patricia Caruso has been in charge of Michigan’s Department of Corrections since 2003. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her. 

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Essay: Citizen Ambassadors - 3/22/07

Back in the early 1960s, there was little doubt in my working class Detroit neighborhood that the Russians were evil brutes with no regard for human life who would, at the first opportunity, try to kill us all.

They were said to be fanatic communists so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they would cheerfully start a nuclear war to speed up the inevitable triumph of communism. This perception was helped by the poor PR skills of their leader, Nikita Khrushchev, a bald, fat guy who wore rumpled and ill-fitting suits. He was given to stunts like taking his shoe off at the United Nations, banging it on the table, and bellowing phrases like “We will bury you.”   

But when I finally got to the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s, I found out that the Cold War image of the Russians was nothing like the reality.

The Russian people were generally warm, expansive, friendly, fond of children, and wanted most of all to avoid another war.

They were more anti-war than any other people I ever met. That’s because they knew all about war. The entire eastern third of the country had been wrecked in World War II. More than twenty million people had been killed. There were very few men my father’s age. In Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, I saw where a million people who starved to death were buried in giant plots that held ten thousand bodies each. The survivors weren’t out to bury anyone else. That doesn’t mean that the Soviet people didn’t have some bad leaders. But the  people did not want another war.  And I think the Russians we met came away with a different perspective on Americans.

All that is why I think that so-called citizen diplomat programs like the one that just visited Iran are immensely valuable. No, common citizens can’t make foreign policy. But they can make connections. If you know someone personally, it is harder to see them as devils. It may even be harder to drop bombs on them. The fact is that both President Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have been flaming each other for years.

We see them as fanatics; they see us as decadent.   There may be some truth in both views, but putting things like that is hardly a prescription for better international relations. This country was turned on its head a generation ago when the pro-American government of the shah was overthrown.

We didn’t see it coming. Americans didn’t know many Iranians back then, and thought they virtually were all thoroughly westernized.

That was a mistake that we are still paying for. Thirty years later, we still don’t know many Iranians, and think they are all radical Islamic maniacs. Frankly, I would rather we didn’t make a second fatal mistake involving the same country twice in one lifetime. 

And I am in favor of citizen ambassador programs or anything that makes it less likely that will occur.

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Interview: Rudy Simons - 3/22/07

America doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Iran.  But a group of  “citizen diplomats” spent two weeks there this month.  They were on a trip sponsored by an interfaith group, the Fellowship for Reconciliation. Southfield’s Rudy Simons, a longtime peace activist, was one of the delegation.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him. 

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Essay: The Other America - 3/21/07

There are moments when I wonder whether our government and major corporations are really being run by revolutionary Communists. I’m not kidding. If you have read the classics of Marxist literature, it would be easy to reach that conclusion.

Let’s see. We are transferring wealth at an astonishing rate to the richest one-tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, big corporations are shipping jobs to other countries where they can pay workers a tiny fraction of what labor would cost here.

We are waging an imperialist war that many think is really about oil, and many of the soldiers fighting in it are members of underprivileged or minority groups who would have a great deal of difficulty getting a job back home.

Meanwhile, the number of those who are not just poor, but starvation-level poor, is skyrocketing. There are now sixteen million people living on an annual income of less than five thousand dollars. That’s just about equivalent to the entire populations of Michigan and Indiana combined. Think about that. Think about a family of four trying to survive for an entire year on less than ten thousand dollars.

To me, what is especially depressing about this is that nobody seems to care, or if they do, they don’t think there is anything that can be done about it. Once upon a time, when we were less rich than we are now, we thought poverty was the shame of this nation.

What’s more, we thought we should try to do something about it. Journalists worked hard to expose the depths of the problem. When writer Michael Harrington published The Other America: Poverty in the United States in 1962, it caused a sensation. President Kennedy actually read it, and ordered a federal war on poverty three days before his death. Lyndon Johnson took up the cause, and launched a full-scale war on poverty.

Today, those who remember that war on poverty mostly believe that it failed. In fact, it scored some remarkable successes. A few of its programs, such as Operation Head Start, are still making a difference. But then as now, some who wanted to work with the poor were put off because the other America, as Harrington reported, are not white-collar intellectuals down on their luck. They are, as he found out, “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” That’s not, however, why the war on poverty failed. The resources for it were soon bled away for the War in Vietnam. We did lose that war. Now we are embarked on another expensive foreign war that we are losing.

Meanwhile, civilians are losing the economic battle here at home. Marx and Lenin may not have been as dumb as we thought two decades ago. They may just have been ahead of their time.

What does happen to a dream deferred? Langston Hughes asked. His answer was that “maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”

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