Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Granholm's Future - 5.28.09

It seems the state’s 2010 race for Governor has begun. Yesterday, Attorney General Mike Cox announced he was running; as are Congressman Pete Hoekstra and Secretary of State Terry Lynn Land. This has got Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinking about our current Governor’s future…

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Someone asked me what I thought Jennifer Granholm’s chances were now of a major job in the Obama Administration. This was right after the President announced Sonia Sotomayor was his choice for the vacancy on the Supreme Court.

The answer, of course, is slim to none. Or in other words, what part of “no thank you,” do Granholm supporters not understand?

Since he took office, the President has not only nominated a Supreme Court justice, he has filled his entire cabinet, including having to pick an embarrassing three Commerce secretaries. Governor Granholm wasn’t offered any of those jobs.

And my guess is that if he had to pick a fourth Commerce secretary, or a fifth, it wouldn’t be she either. Now I know the governor has said she doesn’t want to go to Washington, that she feels she needs to stay here and work for hard-hit Michigan.

I myself have never wanted to pitch for the Detroit Tigers , either. While I feel certain they could use my considerable talents, which include being able to throw a ball almost twenty feet, I think I was meant to stay here and enlighten and inform all of you.

Naturally, I would have to talk to the Tigers if they called to ask about offering me a contract; that would be nothing more than common courtesy. You understand.

Right. To be brutally honest, something our state’s media have mostly not done here, there is little reason we should ever have expected the President to appoint our governor to a top job.

Think about it. Jennifer Granholm was a Hillary Clinton supporter early last year. Worse, she was a party to the bungled attempt to break the rules and hold Michigan’s Presidential primary earlier than allowed. Barack Obama took his name off the ballot, the primary was a farce, and the resulting mess helped nobody.

Then in November, Obama won Michigan by a landslide so overwhelming that Granholm’s belated support was hardly necessary.

After the election, the bashing of the auto industry by a bunch of Republican Senators in the South, and their refusal to even allow a vote to bail Chrysler and General Motors out was probably enough to make sure Michigan stays blue in the next ten presidential elections.

Meaning, in other words, that the President scarcely needs to make a grand gesture to hold on to Michigan. More important, Governor Granholm doesn’t exactly have a record that would make him excited about appointing her. True, she is charismatic, telegenic, and there’s no whiff of any kind of scandal.

But neither can she point to any major accomplishment. She has often been vacillating, and ineffective. For example, her much-ballyhooed promise to consolidate 18 departments into eight seems to have been forgotten. Even the one department she pledged to eliminate, History, Arts and Libraries, doesn’t seem to be going away.

Now, never say never. Michigan Democrats would love for Granholm to be appointed to something. That would allow Lt. Gov. John Cherry to get out from her shadow and run as an incumbent next year. But the message from Washington is pretty clear: Don’t hold your breath.

Essay: Government Motors - 5.28.09

Michigan Radio's Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about Government Motors... oops, we mean General Motors...

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Two things happened today that are being billed as news, but which actually have been certain as sundown for a long time. Mike Cox, who has been industriously running for governor for at least a year, officially announced he was … running for governor.

And General Motors is now certain to file for bankruptcy protection sometime in the next few days. To no one’s surprise, the now famous, if shadowy, bondholders seem to have overwhelmingly rejected what’s being called a debt-for-equity swap.

They were asked to trade the money that GM owes them - $27 billion, all told, for a small ownership stake. Since Wall Street values GM these days as next to worthless, the bondholders said no. That would seem to make sense, till you consider that when the company goes bankrupt, the odds are that they will get close to nothing.

What actually is going to happen is that General Motors will now become Government Motors. Two governments, actually. Under bankruptcy reorganization proposals being bandied about, our federal government will own more than half of GM and the government of Canada would get perhaps 20 percent.

Most of the rest would be owned by the United Auto Workers union. Yes, I this sounds exactly like some socialist-syndicalist novel from the revolutionary 1920s. How will this all play out in the real world? Who will make the major investment decisions? How will new cars be approved? I haven’t a clue. There are hints that the U.S. government may sell off its share once General Motors gets healthy again. But no one can really say.

By the way, the Canadian stake in all this is much larger than commonly realized. Bloomberg reports that our federal government is going to propose lending a bankrupt GM about $30 billion, while Canada is to come up with about $9 billion.

When you consider that Canada’s economy is only one-tenth our size, that is a huge investment for them to make. But if GM were to disappear, Ontario’s economy would be as devastated as our own.

Everything indicates this will all go smoothly, though I am not optimistic that GM will emerge from bankruptcy as quickly as Chrysler. Chrysler’s problems were simpler, and had a bridegroom named Fiat waiting at the altar.

General Motors essentially has to heal itself. They’ve been doing a lot to prepare us for this bankruptcy. But still, there may be lumps in a few throats. This was once the biggest corporation in the world. GMs was an American icon in the 1950s, a company of which a Secretary of Defense once said, “if it’s good for America, it’s good for General Motors, and vice-versa.”

You can’t really imagine saying that about Microsoft. Yesterday Matthew DeBord, who is essentially a California-based wine critic, wrote this on Slate’s Big Money website: “Anyone in America who really values his freedom and citizenship owes a debt to GM.

“From a cultural perspective, GM’s impact was pervasive. It introduced a sort of tenure for the middle class.” We’ve lost our tenure now, and are struggling to retool for our future.

Let’s hope Detroit’s next chapter is a little less.

Essay: Invisible Crisis - 5.26.09

Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the future of the news…

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I was talking to Phil Power the other day about what’s happening with newspapers in this state. Specifically, the fact that so many are disappearing, either in print form or altogether. “This is a crisis so big that it is invisible,” said Power, who used to publish 60-some community papers. Now, your first reaction might be, “huh?“ If it is that big, how could it possibly be invisible? But I knew exactly what he meant.

Those of us who live in communities without newspapers won’t realize how much we’ve lost until something really bad happens, like our schools lose accreditation or local politicians steal us blind.

Newspapers are how communities have talked to themselves. You followed how the high school teams were doing. Learned how your city council proposed to spend your money. You had people called reporters, who wandered around asking impertinent questions. Questions necessary to a free society.

When newspapers totally disappear from places like Ann Arbor, where the paper is closing July 23, or Rochester and West Bloomfield and Troy, where the papers are closing at the end of this week, those communities will be harmed.

Too many people will have little idea what is going on where they live. Nor will they have the faintest idea how to find out.

Yes, we will always be able to find national news on the Internet, such as today‘s announcement that Sonia Sotomayor is being nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. But who will help us sort out and make sense of what’s happening closer to home?

Yes, we have blogs. But with a few exceptions, bloggers are not trained journalists who know how to read city budgets, for example. Journalists are people who know how to get information and present it fairly. At the same time, part of their job is to highlight the essential while condensing or leaving out the non-essential stuff.

That‘s what newspapers have always done. They have served as filters and gatekeepers who put the information we need to know into coherent and manageable packages.

Now, I know that what’s important is not the physical form of how we get that information. Yes, I still like newsprint. But I also know the reason so many railroads went out of business is because their executives thought they were in the railroad business. They forgot they were really in the transportation business.

Newspapers need to realize they are in the community information business, and must find a way of delivering that information in a form that will both reach the public and make a profit.

It is hip and trendy to be high-tech. But even printed newspapers may not be dead. Last month, the Hamtramck Citizen went out of business. The community started a successor, the Review. After Gannett, the nation’s biggest newspaper corporation, announced the Birmingham Eccentric was going to close at the end of this month, the citizens protested. And last weekend the paper won a reprieve. It will keep publishing, at least for a few months, while the staff scrambles to get new subscribers.

I don’t know any magic formula for dealing with invisible crises. But the first step has to be making people see that they are there.

Essay: Memorial Day - 5.25.09

On this Memorial Day, Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry shares a story about some veterans who are trying to brighten up their city…

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Paul Palazollo cares about veterans, all veterans of our wars. He remembers being a scared young soldier, arriving in Vietnam on the same plane that would carry coffins back home.

He also remembers what he felt like when he came back in 1969. Nobody was much interested in what he’d gone through.

Since then, he and a few buddies have devoted much of their lives to helping Michigan veterans get their lives together.

Paul’s also a history buff, and knows that Michigan has more than done its part in America’s wars. Not just in the young men it sent to the battlefields. During World War II, Detroit was called the Arsenal of Democracy for a good reason.

Michigan was the number one state in war production, most of it in and around Detroit. These days, the ranks of the World War II vets are dwindling. New veterans are taking their place, from Desert Storm and Afghanistan and the current Iraq war.

The World War II and Korean vets didn’t do much to reach out to those who served in Vietnam. That made a powerful impression on Paul, who told me that his generation is determined that never again will veterans of one conflict turn away from other veterans.

Especially that is, on a day like Memorial Day. And Paul and some of his buddies have been working for years to create a park that would commemorate all Michigan veterans of every war this nation has ever fought, an Arsenal of Democracy park.

They have a tax-approved non-profit corporation and a plan. Thirty years ago, they bought an abandoned restaurant on Woodward Avenue. They took baseball bats and drove off the junkies and fixed it up. Officially, it is the headquarters of Vietnam Veterans of America, Chapter Nine. But they reach out to all veterans, and for all these years, they have watched over a vacant one-acre lot next to it. They want to build their park there.

They aren’t looking for money from the city; they intend to raise it themselves. They’ve had a first-rate architect draw up plans for a park that would considerably beautify the area. There would be a plaza and flagpoles, trees and a sculpture.

Soothing water would run along a stone wall. Panels would commemorate all of America‘s wars, and ivy and screens would hide some of the blight in the background, and the immortal words from the Gettysburg address would be displayed in stainless steel.

They think they can get it done if they can just get permission from Detroit. They were told they were about to -- but then their paperwork disappeared, and the Kilpatrick administration began allowing a private operator to use the land as a parking lot.

The veterans are hoping for better luck from Detroit’s new mayor. Something like a million men from this state have put their lives on the line since Michigan first formed companies just a few blocks down Woodward to march off to the Civil War. Seems to me our veterans have more than earned the right to build a one-acre park for themselves, and for all of us.

Essay: Easing The Blow - 5.22.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the possibility of a General Motors bankruptcy...

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It now seems all but certain that sometime in the next few days, General Motors will file for bankruptcy. The Washington Post says, in fact, that this is a done deal. The government and the once-mighty corporation refuse to confirm this, but everything indicates it is so.

Now for the good news. When this happens, it is likely to cause scarcely a ripple of panic, and the stock market averages are unlikely to plunge. If Chrysler and GM had declared bankruptcy in December, instead of May, you might have had a panic rivaling 1929.

Indeed, you had prominent figures like Jennifer Granholm running around saying that nobody would buy a car from a bankrupt automaker. Rick Wagoner, then the GM chair, kept repeating stiffly that “bankruptcy is not an option.“ He’s gone now, and in a perverse sense it seems he was right. Bankruptcy is not “an option.”

It is the only option. But judging from what seems to be happening at Chrysler, it may not be fatal. People are still not buying many cars, but some of those who do are still buying Chryslers.

In fact, there are also signs that a revitalized, if smaller, Chrysler Corporation could emerge from bankruptcy as early as the end of next week. That’s because the ailing bride has a suitor ready and willing to take Chrysler to the altar - the Italian automaker Fiat.

And it is also because all this was carefully and intelligently planned by both Chrysler and Obama administration officials. Now it’s not certain that Chrysler will emerge from bankruptcy that quickly.

That’s up to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez. Next Wednesday, Chrysler is expected to ask him to both approve the sale to Fiat, and waive the normal ten-day waiting period.

Indications are that he may well do that. If he does, the Obama Administration has indicated it will give the automaker a $4.7 billion loan as a sort of wedding present.

Chrysler won’t be out of the woods. The sale is being challenged by some unhappy investors, and some in Congress aren’t happy about the dealership closings.

And then there is that pesky little problem they’ve yet to solve, one that plagues all our car makers, that of getting back to actually making a profit again. General Motors faces that problem too.

Even Ford, the one automaker not now a ward of the state, is still losing money, though less than it was.

Solving that problem of profitability isn’t likely not something the government can help any of these automakers with, not very much.

But whatever happens next, the Obama Administration has done two things I consider remarkable. Using loans and a creative use of bankruptcy as a surgical tool, the government has forced these automakers to make the hard decisions they had avoided.

Even more amazing may be that the government has gradually helped lead all of us to see that Chapter 11 doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world for Chrysler and General Motors.

So, congratulations, Mr. President. And oh yeah -

Now for the hard part.

Essay: The New Economy - 5.21.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about our nation’s debt...

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What’s going on with the economy in this country reminds me of what used to happen to Americans traveling in Italy in the days before the Italian lira was replaced by the euro.

One dollar was usually equivalent to something like fifteen hundred lira, so it was nothing to spend thirty thousand lira for dinner.

At first, tourists tended to be intimidated by these seemingly large sums. But then after a day or so it all seemed like play money, so people got slap-happy. “A million lira? Hey, no problem.”

By the time they left, they often found that they had in fact spent more, sometimes far more, than they had intended.

Today we have a situation where, in the last year, any number attached to the federal deficit has become meaningless. Ten years ago, when Bill Clinton was President, the U.S. budget was actually running a significant surplus for the first time in our lifetimes.

There was talk of surpluses far into the future. Then came Sept. 11 and war, and deficit spending resumed.

Now we are in uncharted territory. Last year, with the economy starting to weaken, the federal government deficit was an all-time high - $455 billion dollars. This year, the federal budget deficit will be - are you ready for this - at least four times that. Almost two trillion dollars. Most economists say there is nothing wrong with deficit spending, as long as it is no more than three percent of our entire economic output. This year, it will be 13 percent.

The last time we had a deficit that size was during World War II. Spending off the charts was brutally necessary then, and it paid off. We had full employment, and won the war. A lot of people are convinced that this much spending is utterly necessary to prevent our economy from collapsing into something like the Great Depression.

I suspect they are right. But at some point, you have to worry that we won‘t even be able to service all this debt.

Michigan, which by law has to balance its budget every year, will hit the wall a lot sooner. We will probably be able to balance the budget this year and next by using most of the $7.6 billion in federal stimulus dollars. That’s not what it is supposed to be for, but we are doing it anyway. Two years from now, that money will be gone, the piggy bank will be empty, and the state will face something like a $3 billion deficit. And doing so, it now would seem, without a plan.

Many of the politicians don’t care, because they are term-limited and will be gone. But we will still be here.

We need to demand some kind of statewide summit conference aimed at coping with the post-2010 future, and demand it now.

Our state is staring at something like a serious cancer of the economy. We can choose to cope with it now, and likely take some very unpleasant treatments. Or we can ignore it, and let it kill us.

That’s something I hope we are not willing to do.

Essay: Emissions Standards - 5.20.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry shares his thoughts on the new fuel efficiency and emissions standards that were announced by President Obama yesterday...

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President Obama has made it official: The government is going to require fuel efficiency and emissions standards for cars that are far higher than anyone could have imagined only a few years ago.

Current standards require new cars to average 27.5 miles per gallon; trucks have to get 23 miles a gallon. But here’s what those figures will be just seven years from now: Cars will have to average 39 miles per gallon. Trucks will have to get 30 miles per gallon.

I have never even driven a car, other than a hybrid, which got that kind of mileage. But that is going to be the required standard, less than seven years from now. For years, the automakers have fought savagely against increased mileage standards.

Their bulldog on Capitol Hill was Congressman John Dingell, Detroit’s human truck, as they called him. He’s been in Washington and on guard for the automobile industry since 1955.

Yesterday, here’s what he had to say about the agreement: “This is a remarkable environmental and national security accomplishment in an era that requires aggressive action to combat global warming and free our nation from foreign oil.”

Six months ago, if you showed me those words, I would have thought they came from Ralph Nader, or Greenpeace.

So - why does everyone all of a sudden think these drastically heightened fuel economy standards are a good idea? For a number of reasons, perhaps the biggest of which is that it doesn’t make any sense to have different state standards for emissions.

There are plenty of areas where the states should have broad leeway to make their own laws. But we all share the same atmosphere. California cannot prevent Nevada air from blowing across the state line. From the automakers’ point of view, having different standards for fuel economy doesn’t make sense either.

They are barely staying alive. They can’t afford, as Congressman Dingell said yesterday, “to be concerned about meeting a patchwork of different state standards.”

For years, California has had far tougher fuel standards than the rest of America. What Detroit wanted was for California to be forced to back off. But that isn’t happening. The nation’s biggest state is immensely rich, and immensely powerful, politically and otherwise.

Plus, for all intents and purposes, Chrysler and General Motors are wards of the government. They are depending on federal financing to keep them going, and help them through bankruptcy.

They are in no position to rock the boat. We are facing a new world here, and Detroit is going to have to be brave. What nobody knows, however, is whether the automakers can possibly achieve these fuel efficiency targets in less than seven years.

In past years, targets have been set, but then amended, pushed back, watered down. It’s possible that the mentality in the boardrooms is, as Free Press columnist Tom Walsh said yesterday, to say anything about 2016 that you need to say in order to survive.

Possibly. Yet things aren’t what they used to be. Every day, Michigan sees a little more clearly just how true that is.

Essay: Remembering Bath - 5.19.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been remembering a particularly horrific event in Michigan’s history… Please be aware that the following does describe, in detail, a violent event.

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Last month, there was a lot of airtime devoted to the tenth anniversary of the Columbine school massacre. April also marked the second anniversary of the murders at Virginia Tech.

One radio report - not on this station - referred to those events as the worst examples of school violence in American history. Some commentators blamed the murders on modern times.

They seemed to say that something like that could never have happened in the good old days when we were a simpler people with traditional values, unsullied by the mass media.

Well, just about all of that is dead wrong. The worst school violence in American history took place eighty-two years ago this week right here in Michigan, on May 18, 1927, in the largely rural town of Bath, about ten miles from Lansing.

The events of that day were so shocking and incomprehensible that they seem to have been have been almost blotted out of collective memory, in an act of self-protective mass amnesia. Indeed, many lifelong Michigan residents have never heard of what happened at Bath, or have only the foggiest notion.

That may change now, thanks to a just-published excellent new book by Arnie Bernstein, called Bath Massacre: America‘s First School Bombing. It is a story of tragedy, heroism and poignant suffering. And it is a spellbinding study of one of the most mysterious mass murderers in American history, Andrew Kehoe.

Kehoe was a 55-year-old farmer who worked in his fields in a suit and tie, something just as bizarre then as it would be now. He had a sickly wife, Nellie, and had trouble making a go of it.

He had a bizarre personality, given to flashes of temper. But he was very handy and was an expert electrician, and the school trustees were grateful when he volunteered to do maintenance work on the gleaming new Bath Consolidated School.

What he was in fact doing was meticulously packing the school with dynamite and another explosive called pyrotol. At 8:45 that fatal morning, there was a blast that could be heard for miles.

Meanwhile, Kehoe had calmly blown up and burned down his own farm, carefully tying up his horses to make sure they would burn to death. He murdered his wife. Then he drove to the school, called the superintendent over to his car - and blew both men to eternity, along with one little boy who had managed to escape the wreckage of the school.

Back at the farm, Kehoe left a hand-lettered wooden sign that read: Criminals are made, not born.

He also left behind forty-five corpses, three times as many as at Columbine. To this day, nobody really knows why he did it. The standard theory is that Kehoe was upset over taxes and was about to lose his home. But Bernstein’s book, which deserves to be made into a movie, establishes that this was simply not true.

Instead, Andrew Kehoe seems to have been a quintessential psychopath. Years after his death, a radio villain would ask, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?“ Sometimes, not even the Shadow knows.

Essay: We Need a Plan - 5.18.09

Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks that state is lacking something for the future: a plan…

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You have to respect economist Patrick Anderson. This is a guy who was at the World Trade Center on September 11, survived, and isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. And last week, he summed up nicely the biggest problem is with today’s state government

“We have no strategy,“ he said on Tim Skubick’s public TV show Off the Record. “We are going from debacle to debacle.”

If you have been paying attention, it is hard to disagree with him, no matter what your politics. Our lawmakers are behaving like the dance band on the Titanic. Our state’s economy has been hit hard, and even bigger icebergs are ahead. And all our leaders do is careen into more of them. Anderson ticked off just a few examples: Our lawmakers vowed to use the federal stimulus money on a variety of new projects to get the economy going.

Instead, they will use virtually all of it to plug the budget deficit, rather than cutting services and raising taxes on those who can afford to pay. Two years ago, they reassured us that the new Michigan Business Tax would be stable, secure, and an improvement on the old Single Business Tax.

And it was, for about a week. Then the lawmakers stuck a 22 percent surcharge on it, because they were too gutless to balance the budget in any more responsible way. Nor have they done anything since to address our massive structural budget problem.

You see, even in good times, the state is guaranteed to take in less money every year than it plans to spend. Deficit spending is illegal, so we get last-minute budget cuts.

Now, with the recession, the crack has become the Grand Canyon. This year, state lawmakers can plug most of it with the federal stimulus money. Next year the deficit will be far larger, and even bigger the year after that, when the federal stimulus money will be gone. And thanks to term limits, the governor will be gone too.

What we need to do is be preparing for the hurricane that is about to hit. Yes, we need to create a new basis for our economy.

But first we have to prepare to survive the next few years, and preserve what is essential for our state’s future prosperity, education being one major tool.

One thing we could do fairly easily is eliminate a lot of waste and inefficiency. We have literally hundreds of governments in this state, from townships to special assessment districts. Two months ago, the Commission on Government Efficiency identified billions in potential savings, largely from consolidating services.

But nothing has happened. That’s partly because of a couple of laws that need to be changed to make cooperation easier. But the real problem are the vested interests whose lobbyists for years have prevented the legislature from doing the right thing.

We can’t afford to keep doing the wrong one. We are facing the edge of a cliff, and we need to demand that if our leaders can’t make our landing soft, that they try to make sure we can at least survive.

Essay: Sinking In - 5.15.09

Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about the Chrysler and General Motors dealerships that will soon close their doors…

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Yesterday, as nearly everyone in the state knows by now, Chrysler notified 789 dealers that the parent company was pulling the plug. These included thirty-nine dealerships in Michigan.

That’s seven more than in California, which has nearly four times as many people as we do. Michigan dealerships to be closed include the only Chrysler dealership in Holland, and Victor George in Flint, which has been selling cars since 1926.

A dealership in Birmingham, Alabama open for more than a century was terminated, as were some of the best-known and most storied franchises in the Detroit area.

Birmingham Chrysler/Plymouth, which is actually in Troy, produced some of the state’s wackiest commercials over the years. Tamaroff in Southfield was once a high-volume Oldsmobile dealer. When Oldsmobile vanished, it turned to Dodge.

Now it will be selling foreign cars, thank you. The Chrysler announcement, devastating as it still is, was in a sense a warm-up act for what came today. More than a thousand General Motors dealers are scheduled to find out that they are closing, too.

Their franchises won’t be renewed, that is, when they expire next year. What’s more, these are only about half of the total number of dealerships to be closed. Many, though not all of the rest will come through attrition. You know that to some degree, internal politics and infighting had to have played a role in who survived and who didn’t.

For the Chrysler dealers who are being closed, death is coming brutally fast. Because of the nature of the bankruptcy process, they have to shut down by June 9, a mere three weeks from now.

They can’t even turn their stuff back in to Chrysler for a refund, thanks to the way bankruptcy works. Instead, they were told “we will match you with an accepted dealer to buy your parts, tools and vehicles.” But what if you don’t like the price they are willing to pay? Somehow this reminds me of the poor Americans of Japanese descent who got stuck in concentration camps during World War II. They frequently had to sell their farms and businesses to neighbors, often at a terrific loss. I’m not saying that this will happen here.

What I am saying, however, is that what’s happening with these dealerships may really bring home what’s happening to the auto industry in this country to some people who haven‘t felt it before.

There are always plant closings and layoffs, even in comparatively good times. However, there are people all over the country who have been buying their cars from the same dealer for decades who won’t be able to do that any more.

Chrysler clearly had too many dealers. Their franchises were selling an average of less than one car every two days, as opposed to four a day for an average Toyota dealership.

Still this is sad. When I was in college, a classmate told me that if he finished his degree, fine. If not, “you can always make good money selling cars in this town.” Well, as the music we grew up with put it, these times, without a doubt, are a changing."