Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Environmental Scandal - 2/22/08

We don’t think nearly enough about the environment. In fact, despite Al Gore‘s best efforts and many worsening problems, it seems to me that we are thinking less and less about it.

In fact, a lack of debate over the environment has been one of the few disappointing features of our otherwise fascinating presidential campaign. In part, that is the fault of the Bush administration, which is sometimes wrongly labeled conservative.

If the current regime has an ideology, it might be better characterized as aggressively committed to suppressing the truth. That‘s true in this as in so many things, from national security to foreign affairs.

Clearly, that’s what has been going on with the Centers for Disease Control’s suppressed report on the public health implications of pollution in the Great Lakes basin region.

Congress should hold hearings, and someone deserves to be exposed and punished for keeping this information from the public. Your tax dollars paid for it, by the way.

The study is incomplete, and admits as much. Far more research is needed, and it says that also. But what it shows beyond doubt is that we have serious health problems stemming largely from environmental contamination, far worse than most of the country.

The report is written in extremely cautious language. But it concludes that when you look at the overall state of pollution here and also “the health status of residents when contrasted to comparable populations,” we should be very concerned.

For in the words of this report, the affected regions “compare unfavorably,” with places elsewhere that are otherwise like ourselves.

Besides pollution, the indications are ones of “elevated levels of disease beyond the norm.”

Sheila Kaplan and the Center for Public Integrity deserve high praise for bringing this report to light and writing about it.

We need more people to do so. By the way, here’s something ironic the truth-suppressors in the Bush regime apparently didn’t realize. They might have been far better off if they had just quietly released this report, maybe on a day when there was a lot of other news. Why do I say that? Because this is one of the worst-written reports I have ever read. Here’s a sample sentence: “Lake Huron has only one U.S. AOC that continues to be affected by the release of IJC critical pollutants as indicated by TRI and NPDES data.“

Most of it is incomprehensible to humans. In an age where few news operations have environmental writers, it might have sunk beneath the waves like a barrel of nuclear waste. Well, now it is out.

And we need to follow up, pronto. David Carpenter, a professor of environmental health at the University of Albany read this report.

“I think it’s being held up because it raises some very serious health problems that are hard to deal with. And dealing with them will be very expensive,“ he told the Detroit News.“

But you know what? Not dealing with them will cost all of us a whole helluva lot more.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Shelia Kaplan - 2/22/08

Last year, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed a study of the environmental toxins in the Great Lakes region. But they’ve refused to release it. Shelia Kaplan is an investigative reporter who obtained a copy of the report. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her.

Hear Audio Story   

Essay: Corporate Recall - 2/21/08

Imagine for a minute that Meijer Corporation was a person, which it actually is, in the eye of the law. Let’s say there was considerable evidence that this person had made illegal campaign donations to a committee seeking to recall public officials.

In fact, the person formerly known as Meijer admitted he made these donations because he wanted to get these officials out of the way for his explicit monetary gain.

And let’s add that it turns out that he made a legal, but substantial, contribution to the state attorney general’s campaign fund. In the political world, that would mean a special prosecutor. Now I am not a lawyer and certainly not a judge, but it seems to me that what Meijer did here is extremely serious.

I am not, by the way, anti-Meijer. I vastly prefer their stores to K-Marts or Wal-Marts. I serve on a committee with Meijer’s president, Mark Murray. He is a man of intelligence and integrity who was a superior president of Grand Valley State University.

But the corporation really messed up in a major way in the Acme Township affair. This was, as the Michigan Campaign Finance Network has correctly charged, an assault on democracy by a powerful corporation. Meijer has enough intelligent lawyers on call to know that what they were doing was flat-out illegal.

What is baffling to me is why they did it at all. The giant, still privately held corporation wanted to put one of its immense hyperstores in Acme Township, right outside Traverse City.

The township officials told them no. So, Meijer illegally poured in money – laundering it through a third party – to try and get them removed from office. It wasn’t a lot of money – maybe $34,000.

But it was illegal, and it didn’t work. If you know that part of the state, you know there is a lot of open space along M-72 on the highway between the prosperous towns of Charlevoix and Traverse City. You also know by driving through that there aren’t nearly jobs.

My guess is that Mejier could have used that money much more efficiently to launch a charm offensive, to persuade the people of Acme Township that the new Meijer store meant jobs.

Failing that, there are all sorts of other towns and townships in the same general area which may be even more in need of cash flow.

It is very hard for me to believe that Meijer couldn’t find a willing partner for a new store somewhere along M-72.

People up north think nothing of driving twenty or thirty miles to go to the store. In any event, our legal and judicial system has to send a message that trying to secretly sabotage democracy won’t be tolerated. Two years ago, Michigan voters outlawed using the power of eminent domain to seize land for corporate benefits. The Founding Fathers were business-friendly, but they still wanted us to have government by the people, not by the corporation.

It’s up to us to keep it that way.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Rich Robinson - 2/21/08

Grand Rapids-based Meijer Corporation recently admitted to secretly trying to tamper with two local elections in Acme Township. Meijer illegally diverted corporate money to fund an attempt to recall township officials who opposed a new Meijer store. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Rich Robinson, Executive Director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.

Hear Audio Story   

Essay: Driving Insane - 2/20/08

If you needed any more proof that Michigan’s political system is a major mess, the drivers’ license fiasco is it. It’s different in a way, however, from most of our recent political train wrecks.

This time, the culprits costing our state embarrassment, and probably jobs, were both Republicans. Indeed, the roots of this scandal, if you can call it that, may lie in how they regard each other.

Attorney General Mike Cox and Terri Lynn Land arrived in Lansing at the same time, New Year’s Day, 2003. She won in a landslide; he got by in a squeaker. Each was easily reelected two years ago. But they are term-limited now, and out of a job in 2010.

Politically, the question for both is where to go next.

Many think they may be running against each other for the Republican nomination for governor in a couple years. That means, politics being what they are, that neither Mike Cox nor Terri Lynn Land has any interest in making the other look good.

But what happened in the driver’s license fiasco made the entire state look bad, and probably hurt our economy in more ways than we will ever know. But consider this. For several weeks, it appeared that even legal immigrants couldn’t get driver’s licenses.

Foreign businessmen who wanted to check out the possibility of opening a plant here were told they wouldn’t be able to drive. Neither would international students, or desperately needed specialists.

The other night I had dinner with some Canadian diplomats whose co-workers had been on an international trade mission when this nutty policy was announced. They were convinced it had hurt our ability to attract business and investment, long-term.

And this was all so silly and unnecessary. Michigan has had its problems over the last few years, but hordes of illegal immigrants tooling around with drivers’ licenses aren’t among them.

However, it has now become politically correct to bash illegal immigrants. So Mike Cox issued this long surprise opinion two days after Christmas, when nobody was paying much attention.

The Secretary of State, who is not a lawyer, then decided it applied to everyone who wasn’t a permanent state resident.

That meant more than four hundred thousand legitimate visitors would not be able to get licenses. Everyone then looked to the state legislature to fix this mess, fast.

But they dragged their feet. The state Senate tried to package the fix with a set of bills that would get Michigan into compliance with the federal Real ID act, which essentially mandates more secure drivers licenses. They dropped that when it proved too complicated.

So now things are “fixed“ … or at least they think so. So here’s hoping some computer doesn’t deny the next brain surgeon the University of Michigan manages to recruit a license to drive to work.

And here’s a suggestion. The next time the attorney general or the secretary of state gets an idea for some great grandstanding national security scheme… let’s talk about it first.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Terri Lynn Land - 2/20/08

For several weeks, legal immigrants and foreign students living in Michigan weren’t allowed to drive. This was due to a legal opinion by Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox. However, the legislature seems to have fixed the problem, and foreign residents are once again allowed to apply for drivers licenses. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Michigan’s Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land about the confusion.

Hear Audio Story   

Essay: Student Loans - 2/19/08

When I was going to college back in the 1970s, it was sometime before I realized what I really wanted to do.

Well, actually I wanted to be among the idle rich, but that didn’t seem to be a viable option. What I didn’t want to do was come out of school owing a vast debt. So I prolonged my education, took time off to work and save money so I could pay as I went. I’m not sure that I would do it that way again. Actually, I am not sure if I could do so today, even if I wanted to. Education costs more now, and there aren’t as many good paying summer jobs, or jobs at all, for that matter.

But what I do know is that we need a far better educated workforce in this state. You are essentially doomed to poverty if your education stops when you leave high school, unless you marry money or become a major league baseball player. Our society needs to help young people get an education, by any means necessary. That’s especially true for Michigan, where the number of young adults with higher education has fallen below the national average.

Our national income has also slipped below the national average, and there is nothing coincidental about those two facts.

The suspension of the MI-LOAN program may not seem important, but it will have a ripple effect. The hundreds of students who were counting on getting those loans will have to get the money from somewhere. Not many are likely to drop out of school, but a few might. And I am not utterly convinced that MI-LOAN is only an isolated local phenomenon.

The U.S. government is projecting a record $400 billion deficit this year, and a recession would make the deficit even bigger. What that means is that the government will suck up a lot of the money that’s available for borrowing. That leaves only so much to go around.

Our system of funding higher education is convoluted, confusing and often haphazard. Some people know how to work the system, or have parents who do.

Others come up with the short end of the stick.

It seems to me that our state government, in collaboration with the universities, should help identify worthy students and help educate them about all their various financial options, including loans. I think Michigan needs a rigorous supplemental loan program that is based not only on ability to pay, but on likelihood of contribution to society.

And I think we should offer such loans at low interest rates. If loan money is scarce, we ought to give priority to those who seem to have it figured out, who have a clear sense of direction as to what they want to do. We also shouldn’t limit these loans to traditional college students. Higher-end vocational students also should be able to qualify. Whatever the short-term cost to the state would be more than made up by what we got back in the end.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Mark Delorey - 2/19/08

For eighteen years the Michigan Alternative Student Loan Program, or MI Loan, has helped students partially fund their education. But, last week the state suspended the program.  Mark Delorey is Director of Financial Aid at Western Michigan University.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about what the loss will mean to students.

Hear Audio Story   

Essay: Super Delegates - 2/18/08

There’s a pendulum in politics as in life, and it swings back and force between reform and reaction. Here’s how the whole phenomenon of “superdelegates” came about.

Back in the bad old days, party insiders controlled the entire delegate selection process in most states. This became a big problem in 1968. The vast majority of Democratic primary voters, 85 percent of them, were against the war in Vietnam and wanted either Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy as their candidate.

But the party apparatchiks stayed loyal to the administration, and the war, and nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

That led to the famous riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and contributed heavily to the party’s defeat in November.

The reformers then won total control of the process four years later, and the result was a mess of a completely different kind.

At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, the states were called in random order. Longtime party leaders like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago had their credentials stripped from them.

The balloting was a nightmare. More than eighty names, some of them not real people, received votes for vice-president, including Martha Mitchell, Dr. Spock, Chairman Mao and Archie Bunker, the sitcom character on the hit TV show all in the family.

By the time the presidential nominee got to make his acceptance speech, it was three in the morning and no one was watching. The end result was one of the worst defeats in history. In that fall’s election, Democrats carried only one state.

Four years later, the reformers nominated Jimmy Carter. He won the election, but was commonly judged a failure as president.

So as a reaction to all this so-called reform, the party elders instituted the idea of super delegates. Actually, the official Democratic Party rules don’t use that term. They call them PLEOs, for “party leaders and elected officials.”

Superdelegates or PLEOS played their first major role in the 1984 race between Walter Mondale, the establishment candidate, and the exciting new face that year, Gary Hart. The contest was almost as close as the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But the super delegates voted almost unanimously for Mondale, who had been a loyal functionary for decades.

Unfortunately, his charisma appeal was pretty close to zero. Mondale couldn’t have sold heating systems at the North Pole, let alone compete with Ronald Reagan‘s sunny personality. Once again, the end result was one of the worst defeats in history. In that fall’s election, Democrats carried only one state.

That was the same showing they made twelve years earlier, when the reformers ran amok. How all this shakes out this year is anybody's guess. But if there is a moral to the story, I guess it’s this:

If you don’t like the way the Democrats nominate their candidates, don’t despair. If they screw up again, you can look forward to watching them reinvent the wheel once again ...

Next time.

Hear Audio Story   

Interview: Robert Ficano - 2/18/08

The tight race for the Democratic Presidential nomination has suddenly focused attention on superdelegates. Superdelegates are Democratic Party officials and office-holders who are allowed to vote for whomever candidate they want. There are more than 700 of these super-delegates. Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano is one of them. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

Hear Audio Story