Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: The Media and The Mayor - 2/29/08

Patriotism, Samuel Johnson said in the 18th century, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. These days, when scoundrels get caught, they first thing they do is blame the media.

Now, that doesn’t mean the media doesn’t deserve blame for its failings. In fact, the media makes me cringe daily, especially when I see the word “news” next to the words “Britney Spears.”

I was sometimes ashamed to be a journalist during the later Clinton years, when the rising tide of al-Qaeda was largely ignored in favor of coverage of stains on a blue dress.

And, I have probably been the most relentless critic of the Detroit Free Press. Too often, the newspaper’s coverage has been dumbed down, especially since the paper was sold to Gannett in 2005. Two years ago, the newspaper utterly ignored a historic joint lecture by three Nobel Peace Prize winners in Detroit.

Instead, they ran a story on the front page the next day about how the editor liked to eat peanut butter right out of the jar.

But in its coverage of what is being called “Textgate,” the newspaper has been doing work in keeping with the finest traditions of American journalism. Indeed, I think the paper deserves a Pulitzer Prize for public service, if not investigative journalism.

Both Detroit papers, in fact, have been admirably serving the public in their coverage of the mayor, and I find very little to criticize what they have done. And their jobs haven’t been easy.

Detroit is nearly ninety percent black, and its two newspapers are each owned by out-of-town corporations. They worry about being seen as carpetbaggers and closet racists.

The current mayor is a talented, charismatic man-child who has charmed the business community. But he also has behaved as if being mayor meant the city is his playpen. The newspapers documented a vast range of mayoral abuses throughout 2005, and the voters then reelected Kwame Kilpatrick anyway.

I worried then that the papers would stop scrutinizing the mayor. But their reporters stayed alert, and relentless. Let me make something clear – whatever anyone says, this isn’t about race, and it isn’t really about sex. It is about a pattern of abuse of power that already has cost the taxpayers of one of the nation’s poorest cities more than nine million dollars.

It took lots of hard work, many man-hours and a considerable amount of money to bring this to light. This is what journalism at its finest does. This is a public service that, whether the citizens appreciate it or not, is absolutely essential to a free society.

Journalists are a scruffy and unpopular lot. When we do our best work, we are normally telling you that your food is tainted and your water is polluted and your politicians are corrupt.

You mostly don’t want us at your banquet. But deep down, you know you really need us, and what we do. And if you ever forget that, our democracy will clearly be down the drain.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Ben Burns 2/29/08

For the past month, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been caught up in an unfolding scandal. The Detroit Free Press uncovered documents that appear to show he lied under oath in a whistle-blower lawsuit against the city. The mayor says he did nothing criminal and that the media is persecuting him. Ben Burns is a professor of journalism at Wayne State University. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about the media’s relationship with the mayor.

Hear Audio Story   

Environmental Bankruptcy - 2/28/08

Here’s something that puzzles me. When the governor presented her budget message a few weeks ago, I didn’t hear anything about the Department of Environmental Quality being out of money.

You would think somebody would have sort of noticed, or tugged at her sleeve, or sent an e-mail. And you would expect department director Steven Chester to be that someone.

Michigan has a lot of pollution problems. Nobody knows that better than Mr. Chester, who took command of the department five days after Jennifer Granholm became governor.

For something like seventy years, we manufactured cars and poured heavy metals and industrial chemicals and motor oil into the ground with abandon. That was largely because we didn’t fully understand the effects. And also, because for most of the time, laws against such behavior were inadequate.

Now, we’ve been cleaning things up. But we’ve got a long way to go. There are old gas stations that have contaminated land and are awaiting a cleanup in Arenac, Midland, Iosco and Gladwin counties. There is a major proposed brownfield redevelopment in Bay City.

But now the DEQ can’t even take applications for new projects. And, as Steven Chester himself says, thousands of toxic sites will just sit there until more money turns up.

Here’s what’s wrong with this picture. Two weeks ago was the first time most of us heard about this. The DEQ knew they were running out of money well before that. They certainly had to have figured it out before last year’s budget crisis. The way I see it, Chester had a moral obligation to alert his boss, the governor, and then tell the rest of us that he was running out of money to do his job.

But he didn’t do that. Why? I don’t know, but my guess would be that he did tell the governor, who was hip deep in the budget crisis.

The last thing she needed was an announcement that yet another program was going to need more money. She may have feared voters would be less willing to support a tax increase if they knew they would also have to come up with new money for the DEQ.

But once the budget was passed, I think it was Chester’s obligation to make some noise. If he was told not to do that, he should have resigned his job on principle. He doesn’t need his state paycheck.

Prior to joining state government, Chester was a principal at Miller, Canfield, the extremely well-heeled law firm. He could go back to practicing law for far more than he makes running the DEQ.

But instead, he is watching his department’s most important work grind to a halt, Why isn’t he running around trying to get our attention?

Why isn’t he in Lansing trying to get a bond issue put on the November ballot?

The voters have been willing to spend money to clean up the pollution left to us by the past. It would be nice if our leaders had as much courage as they

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Steven Chester - 2/28/08

Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality has run out of money to clean up toxic sites and brownfields. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Steven Chester, director of the department, about how the shortage in funds will affect Michigan residents and clean-up efforts.

Hear Audio Story   

Essay: Airline Merger - 2/27/08

Back in the bad old days of the early 1980s, before the effects of airline deregulation had fully kicked in, I used to fly to Washington or someplace else nearly every week. I didn’t mind flying. There were lots of airlines to choose from and they usually fed you on any flight longer than the hop to Toledo. All you generally had to do was take the keys out of your pocket when you went through security. Once, I was running way late and they just waved me on.

Now, of course, there are far fewer airlines. What you have to go through to get on an airplane these days is worse than what you used to have to do to get in to see Howard Hughes.

Well, that’s life. And not everything about our brave new world is bad. For example, it is now cheaper to fly to Lacrosse, Wisconsin than it used to be. If you can find a flight, that is. And if you want to go to Lacrosse, which I really don’t.

But I do know this. When I hear the words “proposed airline merger,” I want to put my hand on my wallet and scream for my congressman. Mergers are always portrayed as being good for the consumer, and they have mostly been exactly the opposite. However, Phil Power, chairman of the non-partisan Center for Michigan, believes this one is different. He thinks a merger between Delta and Northwest could be very, very good for the entire state’s economy. In his column this week, he forecasts that a merger “would make Detroit the premiere gateway to Asia, and a tremendously attractive hub for travelers going to Europe and South America.”

Not only that, but he thinks this could be the final piece of the puzzle needed to make a decades-long dream possible: “Airport City.” That would be a bustling, job-rich, consolidated passenger and freight-handling center that would stretch from Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus to Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti. Warehouses, modern-day marshalling yards and assorted businesses would spring up in the 27,000 mostly undeveloped acres between the two airports, creating thousands of jobs.

This was the dream of the late Ed McNamara, the longtime Wayne County executive. I always thought that was a great idea. One of those great ideas, unfortunately, that would never happen. But this merger just might be the tipping point that would create the critical mass that would prove me wrong. That, coupled with the opening up of Asia and the tremendous growth of China.

Still, I have my reservations. I don’t want Northwest-Delta to be the only passenger airline in Detroit. I would like to see some kind of assurance that this will not choke off competition, especially from the new low-cost carriers like Spirit and Jet Blue.

What I want is a system that works pretty well for all of us -- sort of like we had in the bad old days of regulation, only better. I hope you don’t think that would be un-American.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Terry Trippler - 2/27/08

Northwest Airlines, the dominant carrier at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, may be close to a merger with Delta. If the merger goes through, it would create the world’s biggest airline.  But would that be a good thing for Michigan? And are all the bugs likely to be worked out? Terry Trippler has been a nationally recognized expert on the airline industry for decades.  Michigan Radio's Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

Hear Audio Story   

Essay: Poverty in Michigan - 2/26/08

There was a time in America when we thought we were all in this together, and nobody should go without.

That was back when a lot of us baby boomers were growing up in the mid -1960s.

Those were years in which I think we felt more self-confident about who we were and what our nation’s place in the world was. We had won the greatest war in history. We had overcome the Great Depression. We were finally doing something about the biggest scandal in American history, the fact that we had systematically deprived black Americans of their rights.

And while all that was going on, President Lyndon Johnson came to the University of Michigan in May 1964 and proclaimed that we were going to build a Great Society. One of the key building blocks of that was to be a nationwide War on Poverty.

People got behind that idea. The popular myth is that a whole lot of money was thrown at the problem, but poverty proved impossible to cure, and eventually, we just gave up.

Conservatives, however, are still known to snort that too much money is being wasted on poor people.

The truth is that far less money was spent on the War on Poverty than commonly realized. And it was far more successful than almost anyone remembers. The government spent about $20 billion in today’s dollars, fighting poverty in the mid-1960s.

After that, appropriations dwindled as money was siphoned off for the Vietnam War. But over the next decade, as society gradually felt the impact of the various anti-poverty programs, the national poverty rate was cut almost in half, to barely over eleven percent.

Yet the way in which we felt about ourselves had changed. We weren’t as sure as we used to be that we could solve all the problems. Vietnam had something to do with that.

There was also an ominous shift in ideology. We no longer saw the poor people as us; we saw them as… them. Most of us were openly skeptical about whether most of them could be helped.

I think some of that came from experiences people had during the War on Poverty. Some of the starry-eyed were disillusioned when many of the poor turned out not to have good work habits.

They also tended to be lacking in social skills. Helping them proved to be harder than just finding them a job interview.

Well, guess what. Most really important things aren’t easy to do. If they were, someone would have done them already.

I don’t expect that most of the people I see standing outside the mission will manage to escape poverty themselves.

But there are more than half a million children in this state who are poor through no fault of their own. If we don’t do what it takes to help them, we aren’t even a good, let alone great, society.

And if they don’t have any future in the long run, neither will we.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Ismael Ahmed - 2/26/08

Poverty in Michigan has been increasing over the years. Currently, in the state, one in every three residents lives in poverty. Ismael Ahmed is Director of Michigan’s Department of Human Services. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about how to raise awareness of the problem.

Hear Audio Story   

Essay: Loan Sharks - 2/25/08

There are people who romanticize the Middle Ages, and I'm not one of them. I have an enormous bias against epidemics, and in favor of indoor plumbing, hot showers, shampoo and painkillers.

But there were a few good ideas around during the Medieval era, and one was the notion that usury, or excessive rates of interest, are a bad thing. From time to time, various characters - like Robin Hood - also floated the idea that ruthlessly exploiting the poor and vulnerable was a bad thing as well.

And all that leads me to believe that if anyone had offered “instant refund” loans in the Dark Ages, they would have been boiled in oil, stretched on the rack, or pressed to death under large stones.

In recent years, there has been an absolute explosion of places offering both “refund anticipation loans” and their close cousin, “payday loans.” Both generally offer rates that make the local Mafia loan shark look like St. Francis.

According to a study by Consumer Affairs.com, the effective interest rate for one of these loans starts at fifty percent and can range as high as five hundred percent. But that’s not all.

When you include the various fees that the lenders also tack on, such as a spurious “refund account fee,” effective annual interest rates range as high as twelve hundred percent.

How does any lender get away with this? Simply, because they are taking advantage of people who are not very sophisticated.

Upper-middle class people don’t apply for instant refund loans. I have a friend who works for the IRS, a man who is sympathetic to the plight of the poor, because he grew up poor himself.

He tells me that the people who do apply for these loans are often in need of whatever money they can get, right now.

They don’t quite understand that their income tax refund is their money. They see it as some kind of unexpected bonanza, and as such, don’t mind parting with a big chunk of it to get the rest quicker.

Steve Tobocman does understand that. His bill is an valiant attempt to do something about this obscene exploitation.

He would require providers of these loans to tell the truth about them up front, and also to be truthful about how long a taxpayer would have to wait for a refund if they file electronically.

Sadly, his bill does not make any attempt to regulate out-of-control interest rates. I wish he had done so because, frankly, his bill isn’t likely to pass anyway. The Republicans who control the state senate are apt to see it as unfriendly to business, and kill it.

By attempting to ban obscene service charges and interest rates. Tobocman might at least have drawn public attention to this shocking problem. Nine million taxpayers took out refund anticipation loans last year. Stopping their grotesque exploitation might be a good idea. Otherwise, we may be helping to push more people back into lifestyles that have too much in common with the Middle Ages.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Steve Tobocman - 2/25/08

This year, millions of low-income taxpayers will get good news – they have a tax refund coming. But many of them will opt to get the money instantly with a Refund Anticipation Loan. These loans offer quick money… as well as extremely high interest fees. The Michigan House has just passed a law to regulate these loans. Democratic State Representative Steve Tobocman sponsored the bills. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

Hear Audio Story