Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Fixing What's Broken - 1.29.10

Governor Jennifer Granholm yesterday supported the idea of a new Constitutional Convention. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry explains why this may be the time for a so-called “Con-Con.”

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Sixteen years ago, Michigan voters who went to the polls in November found this question on the ballot: Should the state of Michigan call a convention for the purpose of writing a new state constitution? I was asked about that by a friend.

What do you think? Would that be a good idea? “Absolutely not,” I told her in 1994. “Our constitution works pretty well and is only about thirty years old. If we try to write a new one, we risk getting a convention full of delegates who are single-issue voters; labor union hacks, right-to-lifers and anti-gun control fanatics.”

The vast majority of voters then agreed. But I have completely changed my mind. The present system is broken and under the present rules, is unlikely to be fixed.

We have a mess now in Lansing. Term limits have destroyed all institutional memory and nearly all chance of bi-partisan cooperation.

Our constitution, a fine, state-of-the art document in 1963, has become weakened by too many amendments. That’s happened because, these days, it is all too easy for special interest groups to come into Michigan and pay people to collect signatures to put proposed laws and constitutional amendments on the ballot.

We saw that dramatically affect our policies on affirmative action and domestic partner benefits. Most of all, we’ve seen the constitution and the legislature fatally weakened by the worst system of term limits in the country, something else that came about through a constitutional amendment, one that most voters thought was meant to apply to federal officeholders, like congressmen.

The way it works now, you can serve only six short years in the house and eight in the senate, and then you are barred for life.

Not only does that mean that and nobody has much experience at the complex task of governing, it means that our lawmakers spend their last year on the job looking for their next job.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, for example, wants and needs the Republican party to nominate him for attorney general this year. That’s not even a decision voters get to make.

The party does it. That is bound to affect the actions Bishop is taking now in the legislature. Well, this year we have a golden opportunity to fix things. We will again be asked, as we are asked every sixteen years, if we want to call a constitutional convention.

For the last two years, I have been urging people to strongly consider this. At first, most looked at me like I was nuts. But as state government has floundered, more and more are coming to reluctantly agree. Yesterday Gov. Jennifer Granholm publicly endorsed the idea of a Constitutional Convention.

State Sen. Tom George, a deeply conservative Kalamazoo Republican, also thinks we need a con-con. If the voters say yes in November, then we all get a chance to elect the right delegates to write it in the spring. And the process has a safety net.

If they write a new constitution that is worse than the old one, we can always vote it down. We live in one of the most beautiful and compelling states in the union, and it is in trouble.

We owe it to ourselves, our children and our Michigan to fix it.

Essay: Still a Bad Idea - 1.28.10

Michigan Democrats are talking about “pre-selecting” some of their party’s candidates at an endorsement convention this spring. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks that’s a bad idea…

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You’ve probably heard the famous saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. Up till now, however, nobody has known just who the author of that statement was. Some attribute it to Albert Einstein.

Others, Benjamin Franklin. But yesterday, I discovered who the real author has to have been. The Michigan Democratic Party, or, more specifically, Mark Brewer. Here’s how I found out.

The Democrats in this state really don’t like democracy very much. At least, not within their party. Here’s what I am talking about:

The way the system works, most candidates for office are chosen in primary elections in August. Some candidates, however, are not chosen by the people themselves, but by party activists at state conventions that take place after the primaries, usually in late August. Those include the candidates for lieutenant governor, state attorney general, secretary of state, the Michigan Supreme Court and various boards of education.

Both parties do it this way, in part, to help balance the ticket.

Actually, however, I suspect the system was set up that way largely in order to give the political parties more control. In any event, that’s how it works. My feeling is that it cuts the people out of the process. True, the way our system has evolved, candidates for President of the United States get to pick their running mates.

So it makes some sense to allow the candidate who has won a tough primary for governor to select his or her nominee for lieutenant governor, though that choice has to be ratified by the state convention. But the jobs of state attorney general and secretary of state are highly important, highly visible, and I think we should have the chance to choose those candidates in state primaries.

That, however, would take a state constitutional amendment, or perhaps even a new constitution. So while the people don’t have enough say, Mark Brewer now wants to give them even less. He wants to call a special party “endorsement convention” to pre-select these non-elected candidates in April or May.

They would get together, endorse candidates for these jobs, and thereby put pressure on the delegates to the August convention to ratify their will, instead of picking the candidates themselves.

The oddest thing about this is that Mark Brewer has forever been trying to preempt the process and select candidates early, only to see it blow up in his face. Twelve years ago, he and his allies tried to muscle the party into nominating for governor Larry Owen, one of the most lackluster candidates in state history.

The voters revolted and nominated Geoffrey Fieger. This time, Brewer decided a year ago the best way to retain the governorship was to push everybody out of the race except John Cherry. This time, his horse metaphorically dropped dead in the starting gate.

Democrats need to show a little patience, trust the voters, and allow the right candidates to emerge naturally. If they want to fix something, amend the constitution to give the people more power.

Looking back at the record, it’s hard to see how the voters could do a worse job picking candidates than the party hacks.

Essay: One Cheer for Experience - 1.27.10

Democrats are still scrambling to find candidates in what promises to be the most open race for governor in state history. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry is wondering if experience matters…

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When I’m asked who the next governor of Michigan will be, the answer is simple: Nobody knows. We don’t know who the Republican nominee will be, and we don’t have a clue who the Democrats will nominate. There hasn’t been a race this open in the last sixty years.

What I do know is this. The Democrats are in disarray. Many expect them to lose the governor’s race, and, perhaps, everything else in sight. Last week State Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, who had been running for the Democratic nomination for Attorney General for the last year, pulled out, saying she suddenly discovered she wanted to spend more time with her children.

I do not know Senator Whitmer well and would not accuse her of dishonesty, but in my experience, that’s not the sort of thing politicians do who think they are likely to win in November.

This threw Democrats into further disarray. The senator was an extremely attractive candidate and, many party leaders felt, their best chance to take back the office they lost eight years ago.

However, never say never. Things can change; Michigan has experienced historic upsets before, and it’s a long, long way from January to November. But if Democrats are going to have any chance of retaining the governorship, they need a candidate.

Right now, they have only a single officially declared one: State Rep. Alma Wheeler Smith. She has a lot of legislative experience in both the house and senate, and has a gutsy plan to raise revenues and balance the state budget in a responsible way.

Plus, she has a compelling personal story. However, she has almost no name recognition outside of Washtenaw County, and hasn’t been able to raise a lot of money. Smith would also turn seventy a few months into her first term. So, Democrats are scrambling to find more candidates.

The logical front-runner is Speaker of the House Andy Dillon. He is handsome, charismatic, but has two drawbacks. One is that he is tied, just by virtue of what he does, to the mess in Lansing. Never mind that he has proposed some intelligent solutions.

He is also mildly anti-abortion, something that makes him unacceptable to some Democrats, just as being pro-choice makes some candidates unacceptable in the Republican party.

I wonder if it ever occurs to these people that the governor of Michigan has no ability whatsoever to change Roe vs. Wade.

In any event, many Democrats are looking for a savior to ride to their rescue. Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero is offering himself, but the response has been restrained. Now, there is a move to draft Denise Ilitch, of the famous pizza-and-sports-team owning family. She is smart, attractive and well-educated.

Plus, she is rich and might be able to finance her own campaign. There’s a slight problem, however. Ilitch has no experience in government. Michigan currently has a governor who, everyone agrees, has been ineffective partly because she had little prior governing experience. Denise Ilitch has even less.

If I have a major operation, I don’t want to be my surgeon’s first patient. A lot of people have the peculiar idea that the problems of governing are best tackled by those who don’t know anything about it.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Essay: Truth in Advertising - 1.26.10

This is an election year, and we’re all bound to be deluged with political advertising. Michigan Radio’s political analyst Jack Lessenberry has already seen one ad that was downright misleading.

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The other day, I got a call from a woman who was a former student of mine. “Our Census form came in the mail, but it says we need to give money to the Republican Party. Can they make you do that?” No, I told her, that can’t be a real census form.

The U.S. Census bureau can’t and doesn’t ask you to give to the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or anything else, I told her. “Well, that’s what I thought,“ she said. “But it looks like a census form.“ I asked her to send it to me.

She did, and it really does look like an official census document. It says “Census Document Registered to,” and lists her husband’s name. It has a “Census Tracking Code” and, in all capitals, the words “2010 Congressional District Census.“

Her husband was directed to respond to this by February 11. When you study the document more closely, however, it is clear that it is a piece of clever, and misleading, political advertising.

Political advertising, in fact, intended to solicit a campaign donation. In very small type, under the word census, it says “Commissioned by the Republican Party.”

While some of the questions appear to be normal census-type questions - they ask her husband‘s age, for example - most of them are clearly politically charged and meant to evoke a certain response.

Some of them are based on premises that are clearly false, or at least debatable. “How much does it concern you that the Democrats have a total control of the federal government?”

I‘ll bet President Obama wished he did have total control right about now. “Do you think the Obama Administration is right in dramatically scaling back our nation’s military?” it adds.

At the end, this so-called “census form” asks the recipient to certify that the answers are his own, and then asks him to send the Republican party $500, or maybe $250 if he is feeling a little pinched.

My former student, a woman in her forties who cares for the elderly, was indignant. She isn’t very political and doesn’t mind getting political advertising from either party.

What bothers her is that she can easily envision some older person getting this in the mail and feeling they have to respond.

Feeling, in fact, that they have to send money. The papers are filled with stories of the elderly getting hoodwinked into losing their money all the time. I sent her letter to Rich Robinson, who runs the non-partisan, non-profit Michigan Campaign Finance Network. It is a group of people and organizations who are concerned about the influence of money in political life, regardless of where it comes from.

Robinson thought the letter was highly inappropriate, even outrageous. He was especially bothered that the word “census“ was capitalized, as if it were the official census.

But he saw no signs that this was illegal. And he said he expected to see a lot more of this kind of misleading advertising this year, especially now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that there can be no limits on corporate campaign spending.

He’s worried about what means for our democracy. Maybe the rest of us should be worried too.

Essay: Zero Tolerance Nightmare - 1.25.10

Zero tolerance and high-stakes testing policies have been the norm in schools for some years now. So, how are they working out? Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at a new report…

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As with so many things, they seemed like good ideas at the time. Twenty or so years ago, educators, politicians and parents became increasingly concerned about drugs and violence in the schools. So many states, including Michigan, began a new policy.

They called it “zero tolerance,” meaning that the schools would not put up with bad behavior under any circumstances. What that meant in practice was a huge increase in police and security forces, often stationed right in the schools themselves.

The schools also adopted a series of incredibly harsh punishments for any offenses. In Detroit, for example, students can be suspended for up to 20 days for holding hands. For worse behavior, there and everywhere, the penalty is very often expulsion.

The theory is that this is necessary to prevent a few rotten apples from ruining good kids’ chance at an education.

About the same time came a shift to a drastically increased reliance on test scores as an infallible measure of student progress.

Parents and legislators who wanted to make sure their schools were accountable helped push schools to an ever-increasing reliance on standardized tests as a measure of achievement. In Michigan, the the MEAP, short for Michigan Educational Achievement Program test, became the holy grail for measuring performance.

Other states evolved similar tests, and classroom curricula began to be based on “teaching to the test,” meaning that if something isn’t going to be on the all-important exam, schools aren’t going to have the time to teach it, period.

Well, both sets of policies have now been in place for up to a quarter century. So, how are they working out for our kids and our society? We got some answers last week from a new report.

And they aren’t what a lot of people probably want to hear. A Washington-based group called the Advancement Project conducted a study of zero tolerance and test-based educational policies across the nation. The results were just published in a document called “Test, Punish and Push Out: How ‘Zero Tolerance’ and High-Stakes Testing Funnel Youth Into the School to Prison Pipeline.”

It makes devastating reading. While there is scanty evidence that zero tolerance policies do much good for students who are trying to learn, it seems very clear that there is no safety net for those who fail, especially those who end up expelled or driven out of school.

Even a well-intentioned high school dropout has little or no chance of making it in today’s world. What zero tolerance policies seem to do best is create a new manpower pool for state prison systems, at an enormous social and financial cost to society.

High-stakes testing has also been devastating, driving more students out of school, or into believing that success isn’t even an option for them. Today, Michigan teachers are worried that the situation will get even worse, thanks to the new requirements just enacted in an effort to get “Race to the Top” funding.

Those are legitimate worries. There’s nothing wrong with demanding that our schools provide a decent education. But as the Advancement Project’s report concludes, every student must be given a full and equal opportunity to receive a high-quality education.

If we don’t do that, it is pretty clear that the real losers won’t just be the millions of kids who fail, but our entire society as well.

Essay: Worst of All... - 1.22.10

It’s been a momentous week both politically and judicially. But Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks the most significant news this week may have come from a new study about our nation’s children.

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If you think of yourself as a progressive, this has been a terrible week. Progressive, by the way, is what liberals have been calling themselves ever since “liberal” became a four-letter-word.

We celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, and then things went swiftly downhill. The next day, Republican Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate, effectively ending any chance significant health care reform would be passed anytime soon.

Then yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no limits can be placed on corporate campaign donations, something expected to vastly increase the power of corporations and lobbyists to affect elections. The ruling apparently applies to unions, too, but most of those are so relatively poor and weak these days that it is hardly a balanced equation.

Actually, I doubt how significant this will be. Most corporations long ago figured out roundabout ways to spend their money to help candidates they support.

I doubt that many will really want to be more overt about it. Nobody wants to be tortured with an old campaign ad years from now that says the equivalent of “Ford Motor Co. supports Richard Nixon.“

Still, this is bound to make political campaigns even more ridiculously expensive. But, to put another spin on it, we might think of this as the “full employment ruling for political ad consultants.“ And who can be against anything these days that might create jobs?

Personally, I wasn’t happy with either outcome. But they weren‘t the most horrifying news of the week. That came in the form of a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which intensively studied two thousand young people who were from 8 to 18.

These kids, who were assumed to be a typical microcosm of our entire population of young people, spend, on average, more than fifty hours a week talking on their cell phones, playing video games, downloading music, and otherwise staring at little glass screens.

Kids seventh grade and older spent an average of an hour and a half a day sending text messages. That’s pretty much equivalent to the time I have spent sending them in my entire life.

The survey found that kids are spending vastly more time with virtually every form of media than just five years ago. Every form of media, that is, except one. Reading. The amount of time they spend reading magazines dropped from 14 minutes a day to nine.

The amount of time they spent on newspapers dropped to a mere three minutes a day.

Three minutes for newspapers; ninety minutes for text messages.Interestingly, any socio-economic digital divide seems to have vanished - and that may not be a good thing.

Poorer, black and Hispanic kids spend even more time with media - about thirteen hours a day. And the more time kids of any background spent using media, the least likely they were to do well in school. Heavy media users were also most likely to get in trouble.

The solution is clearly to have adults in the family who are willing to take on the role of giving these kids a life.

They need to see things for real, not on a screen; to have real-life experiences; to read widely and randomly, to experience life.

When I was a child, I had to read dog stories and play backyard baseball instead of World of Warcraft. Maybe I am a hopeless conservative, but I am absolutely convinced I was better off.

Essay: You Never Can Tell - 1.21.10

The tremendous upset in the Massachusetts special senate election this week sent shock waves throughout the Democratic Party. But, Michigan Radio’s political analyst Jack Lessenberry says all may not be what it seems...

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There’s no denying that what Republicans are calling the “Massachusetts Miracle” has sent shock waves through the political establishment in Michigan. A month ago, nobody expected the Republicans to have any chance of winning Teddy Kennedy’s old seat in the U.S. Senate. No Republican has held that seat since John F. Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge, fifty-eight years ago,

Yet a previously unknown state senator named Scott Brown pulled it off, and that is bound to invigorate Republicans everywhere, especially perhaps in Michigan. In Oakland County, for example, Paul Welday has been running a mostly unnoticed campaign for Congress against freshman Democrat Gary Peters.

Peters defeated longtime incumbent Joe Knollenberg two years ago, and Mr. Welday hasn’t been seen as a heavyweight contender. In fact, the night Peters was elected to Congress, Welday lost badly in a race for the state legislature. My guess was that the GOP was content to run Mr. Welday this time as a more or less sacrificial lamb, and make a more serious effort after redistricting changes all the political boundaries in the state for 2012.

But the Massachusetts miracle may have changed that. Hours after the result was known, Welday was telling supporters that he was now “convinced that we will have our Massachusetts moment right here in Michigan,” in November.

Well, he may be right, though he is still an underdog. And I would guess that he and other Republican contenders may now find it easier to raise money for this fall’s elections.

However - it is dangerous to assume that any political trend is going to continue, or that what happened in one election in one state is going to happen everywhere.

Let me give you a couple examples. Two years after Ronald Reagan was elected, his Republicans took a drubbing in the 1982 midterm elections, especially in Michigan and Ohio. Democrats won the governor’s race in both states for the first time in twenty years. U.S. Senator Donald Riegle won re-election by crushing a well-funded Republican Congressman. “Say good-bye to Reaganomics,” a top Democrat told me. Two years later, President Reagan was reelected by a landslide.

Fast forward to twelve years, to the mother of all stunning GOP election victories: Bill Clinton’s first midterm elections. Outraged over another failed health care plan, voters handed both houses of Congress to the GOP for the first time in forty years.

The next time he held a press conference, President Clinton was actually asked if he was “still relevant.” He was seen a one-term president. Three months later, I interviewed former President Gerald Ford. He had spent most of his career in Congress, working up to Minority Leader and dreaming of becoming Speaker of the House.

But his Republicans never came close to taking back control. Now, Newt Gingrich was in the job he wanted. What did Gerry Ford think? “Well, it remains to be seen,” he told me.

If he did a good job, Republicans might build a permanent majority, he said. If not “we could blow it and be right back where we were.” President Ford was no fool. Soon, Gingrich was being perceived as arrogant. A year later, President Clinton was reelected easily. In politics, there are no final victories and no final defeats.

There are only people who learn from their mistakes, and those who don’t. Over the next few months, we’ll get a better idea of which Michigan politicians fit into each category.

Essay: Fighting the Carp - 1.20.10

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court refused to close a barrier blocking Asian carp from the Great Lakes. The news came as researchers said they found Asian Carp DNA for the first time in Lake Michigan. But, Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry thinks all may not be lost…

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Yesterday was a grim day if you care about stopping the migration of giant Asian carp into the Great Lakes.

First, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to issue a preliminary injunction closing two navigation locks in Illinois that separate carp-infested waters from Lake Michigan. Within hours, word came that even if the court had complied, it might have been a case of closing the aquatic barn door after the fish had swum through it.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that new tests reveal that the carp are probably already in Lake Michigan. Asian carp DNA was found in water samples near the Chicago shoreline.

It would be easy enough to look at those two developments and reach the conclusion that the lakes are doomed, as is the hugely profitable sport and commercial fishing industry they support.

That’s because Asian carp are the equivalent of aquatic crabgrass, sucking up most of the available nutrition from the water wherever they manage to establish a breeding population.

They are large - up to a hundred pounds - ugly, and eat up to one-fifth their body weight in plankton every day. That means they starve out most native species of fish. They also intimidate swimmers, water skiers and boaters, since one variety likes to jump out of the water and into people, sometimes causing serious injuries.

We should have seen this coming. In fact, we did. Asian carp escaped from fish farms into the Mississippi River in the 1980s and have been migrating north for years, but nobody did much about it. Not until the last few weeks, any way, when first the governor, then Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox sounded the alarm.

However, all may not be lost. Governor Jennifer Granholm did exactly the right thing when she learned that the Supreme Court wouldn’t close the locks. She immediately joined other Great Lakes governors in calling for a White House summit. President Obama opposed closing the locks, evidently on the grounds that it would have been too costly to the economy. But he should be taking the lead in helping his fellow Great Lakes residents craft a solution.

In a way, the Supreme Court ruling might have been a blessing in disguise. Closing the locks would have been a temporary solution at best, and might have lulled us into dangerous complacency.

Now, everyone is going to have to scramble to figure out how to meet this menace. The good news is that even if a few carp are in Lake Michigan, that doesn’t mean they have an established breeding population. Not yet, anyway. Some years ago, some fool put a few Asian carp into Lake Erie, but they died out.

To breed, the fish need to be able to find each other. Yesterday, the deputy regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service estimated it would take several hundred fish to reach a critical mass.

There still may be time to stop that from happening. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to use nets and electricity to fight the carp in the areas where they found their DNA.

There are other measures that can be taken, if everyone is willing to work together. The philosopher Edmund Burke said the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

That’s exactly why the carp have been winning, up to now. Let’s hope that enough of us are finally willing to take on these fish.

Essay: Day After MLK - 1.19.10

Martin Luther King Day was yesterday. But, Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry suggests that today is the day we think about what Martin Luther King Junior’s message really was…

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We aren’t supposed to have to think about Martin Luther King Jr. today. After all, yesterday was MLK day, right? We got the day off, and maybe if you were trying to be a really good citizen, you took the kids to the Museum of African American History in Detroit, or some celebration of the day in Grand Rapids or Flint.

Or maybe not. You just had a much-needed day off, if you were a public employee, and tried to get caught up on stuff. Don’t worry -- I am not trying to make you feel bad. I never met Martin Luther King, but I have talked to many people who did.

My guess is that he would have privately hated yesterday. Sure, he would have been pleased that there was a federal holiday to commemorate the struggles African-Americans went through. But he would have instantly recognized that we are doing this in part instead of thinking about the problems that remain.

By setting aside a day for King, we are able to once more ghettoize our feelings about race, walling them off into this one day. The day, by the way, is supposed to be MLK’s birthday, but most of the time doesn’t fall on the actual day.

When Congress was establishing the holiday, they decided to put it on the closest Monday to his birth, which was really January 15. The most important thing, of course, was to have another three-day-weekend. You have to keep your priorities straight.

Following the assassination, America made Martin Luther King Jr. into a plaster saint.

He could then be held out as the “good” civil rights leader, all about nonviolence and peaceful protest, and be contrasted with those “bad” civil rights leaders like Malcolm X.

The radical parts of MLK’s legacy were forgotten, such as his bitter denunciation of American policy in Vietnam, and he was reduced to some safely sanitized quotations from the “I Have a Dream” speech. He would have hated that.

That was not who Martin Luther King Jr. was. He was militant and shrewd. He was also a flawed, flesh-and-blood human being, and he knew it. By the way, here’s my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “Nothing pains some people more than having to think, Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions.” Those words are especially relevant for Michigan today.

For some years, the folks at the Martin Luther King center in Atlanta made a point of working on the holiday. Now, there is a growing drive to turn it into a day of service, under the slogan, “a day on, not a day off.” I hope that catches on.

Few remember this today, but MLK was in Grosse Pointe three weeks before he died, speaking to a hostile crowd in a high school gym. They called him a traitor. He told them: “However much we dislike it, the destinies of black and white America are tied together. Whether we like it or not, culturally and otherwise, every white person is a little bit black and every black is a little bit white.”

That meant, he said, no separate paths to power and fulfillment; either we figure that out, or we all “perish together as fools.” King’s holiday was yesterday. Starting today, we should try to live his message every day of the year.

Essay: Bridge Wars - 1.18.10

Billions of dollars worth of trade travels across the Ambassador Bridge each year… Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry takes a look at the future of the bridge.

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Many of us have been paying more attention to homeland security concerns ever since the failed attempt to blow up an airplane over Detroit on Christmas Day.

But it’s become increasingly clear that our biggest potential terrorist target is nowhere near any of our airports, but involves two nations and straddles the Detroit River. I am talking about the eighty-year-old Ambassador Bridge. Billions in trade move across it every year, including heavy machine and auto parts.

There is really no backup system. If something were to happen to the Ambassador, the cost to our already battered economy would be devastating. The Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron is too far away to be an economically viable alternative. Besides, it is often backed up now with its normal flow of people and commerce.

Most of the vital material that comes over the Ambassador can’t be taken through the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. What’s more, there is virtually no security protecting the bridge; boats and barges move under it constantly, and gasoline tankers park under its approaches.

Not surprisingly, major efforts are now underway to construct a second bridge. A bi-national group calling itself the Detroit River International Crossing Project, DRIC for short, has a site picked out about a mile south of the Ambassador. The bridge would be funded by private investors, but owned and inspected by both nations.

That project has the blessing of most governments and many top business officials in both countries. But Manuel Moroun, the owner of the Ambassador Bridge, has been fighting it savagely.

Moroun, who everyone calls Matty, is a billionaire trucking magnate who has made a lot of money from the Ambassador, and wants to keep his monopoly thriving. He wants to twin his bridge, building a second span right next to the first.

Almost nobody thinks that‘s a good idea. The government of Canada has refused to give him the necessary permits, but he keeps on preparing to build anyway. And he is doing everything he can to try to torpedo the effort to build a second bridge downriver.

Last week, for example, it was learned that he had suddenly bought forty-two acres of land which include some of the territory needed to build the DRIC bridge. Now, government could, of course, later force him to sell that land under eminent domain.

But it adds one more complication to an already complex process. Moroun’s next move was both fascinating and insidious. Michigan is so broke right now that the state risks losing up to $1.6 billion dollars in federal highway funds, because the legislature can’t come up with the legally required twenty percent in matching funds.

So the Ambassador Bridge company dangled this deal. It has $400 million in toll credits earned for improving the bridge.

Moroun offered to give those to the state so it could get the rest of the badly needed road repair funds. There was, of course, one big string, namely, that Michigan could not use any of the money to help any entity that might compete with the Ambassador Bridge.

There’s also another problem, which is that it isn’t at all clear that those credits could be used instead of cash.

These machinations are fascinating, but get us nowhere nearer the goal of having a safe and secure way to ensure the flow of vital international trade. Even with everything else we’re facing, it’s time to get moving, and get the job done.