Nor were Detroit’s leaders openly concerned about the effect the political crisis sweeping the oil-rich Middle East is having on gasoline prices and the auto industry.
No, what had them upset was the latest rant by the entertainer Glenn Beck, who holds forth on the Fox network. On Monday, Beck, compared Detroit to Hiroshima, saying that today, Hiroshima is in far better shape. Beck said Detroit’s devastation is due to what he calls “progressive policies,” combined with corrupt government and labor unions. He said these forces combined to bail out the auto industry, which he thinks should have been allowed to die. I heard about this rant, and so reluctantly, I watched it, or most of it. It was, as I expected, classic Beck: Shallow, hate-filled, and full of half-truths.
Once upon a time, there was a rule about commentary. You could spout opinions, but your facts had to be accurate. Glenn Beck has never cared about facts, and the disgrace of Fox and whoever employs him is that nobody else requires him to do so, either.
Recently, Beck delivered another commentary about our government’s decision to buy Alaska in the 1950s. He might have asked his friend Sarah Palin about that one; we actually acquired Alaska in 1867. He also says he has learned a lot from reading Adolf Hitler, and believes Woodrow Wilson was an evil force who is responsible for much of what is wrong with America today.
This is not someone anchored in the reality-based universe. But what really disappointed me was the way Detroit’s leadership handled this, which was to treat Beck as deserving of respect. Mayor Dave Bing invited him to, quote “come see and experience Detroit for himself.” The Reverend Horace Sheffield, a prominent Baptist minister in the city, said he was reaching out to the commentator, and hoped to meet with him.
Forgive me, but these actions betray fundamental ignorance of what’s going on here. There is utterly no reason to try to engage Beck in serious discussion. He is a man in his mid-40s with barely a high school education, who by his own admission spent more than a decade drunk and on drugs before sobering up and discovering he could make millions with incendiary commentary. His remarks weren’t really aimed at the city itself, but was meant to persuade people that President Obama’s policies are designed to make all of America look like the worst parts of Detroit.
Well, Detroit has a lot of problems. I don’t know if Beck has ever been there or to Hiroshima, but I’ve spent time in both places.
Yes, Detroit has more urban blight, but the causes are complex, and stem, more than anything else, from federal policies in the 1950s that encouraged suburban sprawl and prevented annexation.
Figuring out how to make things better is a topic that deserves endless discussion, but attempting to negotiate with verbal terrorists is not how to do that. Detroiters and Michiganders should attempt, with dignity, to tell their story themselves, while working to make the next chapter better than the last few have been.
Jack Lessenberry and I might disagree on politics and yet agree, on matters of taste, that Lady Gaga is silly, and that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is serious.
Sadly for both Jack and me, Lady Gaga is wildly popular, raking in millions, and the undoubtedly superior DSO is floundering.
And so it goes in the world of "popular appeal." Glenn Beck is not a serious political figure, and it would be an equal mistake by those on the right (who might make him a false hero) and those on the left (who might make him a convenient punching bag) to give him more attention than he deserves.
But he is popular. When it comes to politics, Glenn Beck is Lady Gaga.
Jack Lessenberry, for his part, could have chosen a more thoughtful philosophical opponent. As Glenn Beck was comparing Detroit to post-nuclear Hiroshima, Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal (a former journalism fellow at the University of Michigan) was writing this about Detroit and its most visible union, the UAW:
"The UAW finale has begun. It's the beginning of the end for the union, except as administrator of its membership's retiree health-care benefits (which increasingly looks like a bone thrown the union by the Big Three to give labor honchos a reason for living).
"Let us put away our Woody Guthrie records. Detroit's 'turnaround' has come not because everyone got a warm feeling and pulled together as a team. Accurately stating matters, the New York Times recently noted that the homegrown industry's 'cost structure has been reduced substantially, first through worker buyouts and plant closings and then by eliminating debt during its bankruptcy.'
"This has the virtue of getting the chronology right. The big labor concessions all came before a government-sponsored bankruptcy that reorganized GM and Chrysler in 2009. In each case, the union gave ground because it knew the one way to outrun its all-important political support in Washington would be to drive the Big Three into Chapter 11.
"Bankruptcy came to GM and Chrysler anyway in the financial crisis, followed by a taxpayer bailout. Mr. King [UAW President Steve King] knows, in the current political atmosphere, he can't go back to playing his monopoly card to extract anticompetitive terms from the Big Three."
That's Holman Jankins in the Wall Street Journal this week. Multiply this description times Michigan's largest industrial base, and then times the State of Michigan government, and then times every major governmental and commercial interest in the City of Detroit, and you end up with a better description our region than Glenn Beck's sensational and factually loose "Hiroshima."
But is it really so different?
And there's more. Governor Rick Snyder is now trying to cobble together a grand financial package
to make sound the state's budget. Right now, he is fighting for a tax package that includes increased taxes on pensions, so that he can can pay the state's obligations to unionized state workers.
It must leave some senior, high-wage UAW workers scratching their heads. Do they stand in solidarity with their public employee union-brethren? Even though they -- and their corporate employers -- are part of the taxpaying body that must pay those state workers?
A cynic might observe, that a smart UAW retiree would get out of Michigan, retire to Florida, where they make no cars, and where they don't have a state income tax. And wonder why every business that can do so, wouldn't follow.
Posted by: Anonymous | March 02, 2011 at 04:24 PM
I don't know what the UAW will morph into or evolve into, but I wouldn't hold a funeral for unions just yet. Someone once said that the truth is the opposite of what we know. That goes along with, "I know what I know; don't confuse me with the facts."
--Winwilloe
Posted by: me.yahoo.com/a/2uPoFVJstYu.nxFKjHAJKRfggqTT5M71NAmtjHxlI0t81aw- | March 03, 2011 at 06:48 AM