Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Back to Our Farms - 11.26.10

For the first time in more than a century, someone from Michigan will chair the Senate Agriculture Committee. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about that.

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The men who founded Michigan State University in 1855 would, no doubt, be pleased that one of their graduates is becoming chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2011.

What became Michigan State was originally known as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, back when farming was not only our main business, it was just about our only business.

Of course, the founders would be shocked to learn that the new committee chairman will be a woman, and that she had earned two degrees in social work, not farming, at MSU.

Nor did she even grow up on a farm. Debbie Stabenow’s father was a small-town Oldsmobile dealer. But while Oldsmobile has gone extinct in the course of our lifetime, farming hasn’t.

And Senator Stabenow will now be in a position to have a significant impact on the second biggest sector of Michigan’s economy. Farming is receiving renewed attention these days.

For a century, many of us city dwellers took farming for granted. Yes, there was corn, and those cows out there making milk someplace between Lansing and Grand Rapids. They grew cherries up in Traverse City, and grandpa had chickens.

But manufacturing was where it was at. These days, however, manufacturing isn’t what it used to be. Neither are oil prices, and interest in ethanol has caused the growth of even more corn. Plus, there is huge new interest in urban farming. Detroit has lost well over half its peak population; there’s a lot of vacant land, and the people remaining need more fruits and vegetables.

The Senate Agriculture Committee also is responsible for forestry and nutrition issues. Both are vitally important to Michigan. Some crops are more important to us than others; besides cherries, we are big in blueberries, cranberries cucumbers, and flowers.

Dairy products are our biggest agricultural commodity of all.

We once had what amounted to a laissez-faire policy for agricultural products, back when those first students were chopping down trees to built their own dorms in East Lansing before the Civil War.

But that ended long ago. Today, like it or not, the name of the game in agriculture is subsidies. Senator Stabenow will be in a key position to influence who gets what when she shepherds a new farm bill through her committee next year.

She intends to be an activist chair. Her aides say she wants this bill crafted to protect our established farm sectors while developing innovative ways to help new concepts like urban farming in Detroit, and farming with the aid of wind power.

In a way, it is surprising that Stabenow will chair a major Senate committee while still only in her second term. But there’s been a lot of turnover in recent years. The senator isn’t going to have a lot of time to learn on the job, either: She needs to make a splash.

Two years from now, she’ll face what everyone expects will be a tough re-election battle. Even if she wins, she is likely to be wielding the gavel for only a couple years.

The Republicans are thought likely to recapture the senate in two years, even if President Obama wins re-election.

The new senate agriculture chairman has a vested interest in bringing us home the bacon -- and in doing it soon.

Essay: Thanksgiving Day - 11.25.10

It may be Thanksgiving Day, but there’s one place in our state where the turkeys are eating, not being eaten. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry explains.

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Several years ago, a big red steer escaped from a slaughterhouse and went running down Jefferson Avenue in Detroit.

He led police on a chase O.J. Simpson could only envy.

In the end, they knocked him out with a tranquilizer dart. I remembered vaguely that there had been protests from people who thought he deserved to live. One day I asked a friend who was passionate about animal rights if she knew what happened to him.

Yes, she said. We took him out to Sasha Farm. That was the first I ever heard of the place. It was, she told me, the Midwest‘s largest farm sanctuary, in the country near Manchester, west of Ann Arbor. So I went out there. It looked like a well-managed Garden of Eden. Jefferson -- well, what else were they going to name him -- was there, uninterested in the media, or at least, me. There were other cattle, and hogs and chickens and a whole host of dogs that had been saved from Hurricane Katrina. There was Boris, a wild boar who had been found newborn by a hunter, as well as a legion of potbellied pigs bought as cute “fad“ pets and later discarded.

There was a magnificent racehorse who barely escaped becoming dog food. And there were a few animals who still showed signs of a life of torture. Chickens without beaks, for example.

They cut them off in factory farms so they won‘t peck each other. They do it without anesthesia. Then there was Samson, a magnificent red chow. Officially Dorothy Davies and her husband, Monte Jackson, run Sasha Farm, but it was clear that Samson really watched over the whole place. That’s when they told me that he had been rescued from what they called a vivisection lab.

Dorothy and Monte are vegans now. Not everyone who supports Sasha is a vegan or even a vegetarian. But spending time there gives you a different perspective. Whatever else you say about primitive man, they had to meet the meat they ate.

We mostly never do. You may still want to eat turkey, but after you meet the birds at Sasha Farm, you are unlikely to think of them in quite the same way. The turkeys looked happy when I went back to see them this summer. Happy, healthy, and well-adjusted.

Dorothy and Monte have been saving animals since soon after they moved here thirty years ago. Samson died in his sleep a few years back, and they buried him on a hillside.

Today, a couple Katrina dogs who stand guard over the place. The rescued turkeys at Sasha Farm today will be celebrating Thanksgiving by eating instead of being eaten.

In fact, Dorothy and Monte intend for all their creatures to have a nice day today, no matter now many legs they have.

Regardless of what‘s on your plate, here‘s hoping you do too. By the way, if you have any desire to see what Sasha Farm is all about, they are offering a guided tour at two p.m. Saturday.

That just might be a whole lot better for the kids than another couple hours at the mall. For details, go to www.sashafarm.org.

And tell them Jack at Michigan Radio sent you.

Essay: Sometimes On Sunday - 11.12.10

The legislature has approved a bill allowing the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sunday mornings. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about its effects on society.

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Well, the outgoing state legislature never did fix the recurring budget problem. They never found a way to save the Michigan Promise Scholarship. They did try to save the state fair.

But the governor killed it anyway. However, as the last days of most of their term-limited careers are trickling away, our lawmakers finally accomplished something. They made it possible to buy liquor on Sunday morning and in the afternoon on Christmas Day.

And you’d have to be Ebenezer Scrooge to say Bah, Humbug to that. Actually, I wasn’t sure at first that this was a good idea.

That’s not because I think I have any right to decree when any grownup should drink. However, I like to think of myself as having a healthy spirit of self-preservation, both of my own dear carcass and that of society as a whole.

And I had this dreadful image of some poor loser whose sweetheart left him just before the holidays. So, on Christmas afternoon, he goes into a bar, drinks himself blind, leaves, and runs over little Susie walking to grandma’s house. Or, to make it personal, smashes into little old me, sent out to buy another pint of egg nog.

Something like that really happened to an editor I knew, who was killed by a drunk in broad daylight on New Year’s Eve.

However, upon mature reflection, I think that the bill is essentially a good idea. Serious alcohol abusers are generally going to find a way to get alcohol, whether or not the bars are open.

Naturally, it would be nice if we could find a way to make sure that bartenders are extra vigilant for problem drinkers, especially on holidays and Sunday mornings. But I suspect this law’s main beneficiary will be grocery stores, and occasional shoppers like me.

My alcohol consumption is limited to wine, and not very much of that. But once or twice I’ve needed to pick up some beer for the relatives, and forgot and put it in my grocery store shopping cart on a Sunday morning. The result was that the cashier triumphantly announced that this was against the law, signaling to everyone in line that I was clearly just a few days away from some alley on Skid Row.

My guess is that I am not the only person this has happened to. The idea that it is immoral to buy liquor at 11:59 a.m. and just fine to buy it a minute later is sort of nuts, and I’m glad that’s ending.

This will also help state revenues, at least a little bit. Establishments will have to pay the state a hundred and sixty dollars a year to sell alcohol on Sunday mornings, and thousands surely will.

However, having passed this bill, it would be nice if our lame duck lawmakers next adopted a sane policy for taxing alcohol. For example, the beer tax has been the same since 1966.

A rational modest increase on each bottle could do wonders to help fund education. Powerful lobbyists won‘t like that idea, of course. But if our lawmakers ever find the necessary courage, I happily drink to that. Maybe even on Sunday morning.

Essay: The Youngest Victims - 9.29.10

As Michigan lawmakers struggled to balance the budget and make cuts in social services, new statistics on child poverty were released yesterday. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks they are terrifying.

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If you pick up any newspaper today, you undoubtedly will be able to find out whether Lindsay Lohan is in or out of jail.

You can learn that the Detroit Tigers can’t make the playoffs, that the Lions are still horrible, and that the Pistons are expected to be bad. But you‘ll have a harder time finding this far more significant and devastating piece of news: The number of children in poverty in Michigan skyrocketed last year, from 19 percent to 22 percent.

That rate was higher still for very young children and for children in single parent homes. In fact, a majority of Michigan single mothers themselves slipped below the federal poverty level.

What is so terrible about this is that, unlike in the movies, poverty is rarely a temporary thing. According to the Michigan League for Human Services, “Kids who are born in poverty tend to stay in poverty. New research shows that one-half of children born in poverty will spend at least half their childhood,” deeply poor.

Jane Zehnder-Merrill, a senior associate at the non-profit organization, added: “This does not bode well for the coming years.”

No kidding. It’s well known that what happens to children in the first five years is vitally important to their success in school and later in life. Last year there were 160,000 babies in Michigan under that age of five, living in deep poverty. That’s scary and a scandal.

The reasons for this are not hard to find. Michigan hasn’t been in a recession, like the rest of the nation. It has been in a one-state depression. Those aren’t my words; they are the words of Dana Johnson, the chief economist for Comerica Bank, which used to be here before it moved its headquarters to Texas.

Yesterday the U.S. Census Bureau provided ample confirmation of that. They released data from a survey conducted last year. The figures were devastating. Michigan median household income fell by more than twenty-one percent over the last decade. Nearly a third of that came in the year ending in 2009.

That was three times as bad as the national average, and far worse than any other state. In Metropolitan Detroit, the situation was even worse. Household income fell by a third in the city itself. Things weren‘t much better in the suburbs, especially manufacturing-heavy Macomb County. What happened, demographer Kurt Metzger told me, is that the bubble has burst.

For years, Michigan was the place for high-paying low-skilled or unskilled labor, thanks to the auto industry. That’s over now.

If we have any hope for a better future, it is in our children, and a better-educated workforce. That’s why these child poverty statistics are so frightening. And that’s why it is hard to understand when our lawmakers cut aid to education, and aid to poor children.

They‘d rather do that, it seems, than ask those of us who are relatively affluent to pay more. Right now, the budget is stalled because the Republicans in the senate don’t want to fund workers who provide child care to low-income families receiving state aid. Sharon Parks, who heads the Michigan League for Human Services, noted yesterday that “the situation will only get worse without a strong effort to meet the needs of struggling families.”

Evidently that’s an effort we’re just not willing to make.

Essay: Budget Solution - 6.11.10

Far fewer teachers seem to be retiring than the legislature expected, which is bad news for the bottom line. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks the solution is beer.

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Here’s something that evidently is a big surprise to the legislature, but will be no surprise at all to anyone who knows anything about teachers. Far fewer of them are applying for the retirement package than the state’s accountants had expected.

Less than a month ago, the legislature finally squeezed through a teacher retirement incentive package designed to help both school districts and the state get their costs under control.

Eligible teachers who applied to retire by this week’s deadline would get a slightly sweetened pension. Those who elected to stay would get less when they did retire, and to add injury to insult, teachers who don’t retire will lose three percent of their pay next year.

State bean counters had predicted about half of Michigan’s eligible teachers would accept the deal, which would mean about twenty-eight thousand would retire at the end of this month.

But guess what. It looks like the number choosing to retire is barely half what they expected. As of yesterday, the state had only received some fourteen thousand applications.

Today’s the deadline for those to be put in the mail. The final total may be a thousand or two higher, but won’t come close to what was predicted. This may have shocked the legislature.

But it comes as no shock to anyone who knows anything about teachers. They tend to be dedicated professionals who care very much about their careers, which they see as far more than just a job.

They feel that what they do -- educating the next generation -- is important in itself, not just a stepping stone. Plus -- many of the teachers eligible to retire under this package are in their early or mid-50s. That is when most professionals are at their best.

Many still have children at home or in college, don’t need a loss of income, and just aren’t ready to retire. So they aren’t leaving.

This will actually be good for our kids, since an experienced teacher is frequently better than a brand new one, but means less savings for school districts. According to the House Fiscal Agency, fewer retirements mean about $110 million dollars less in savings than they thought they’d have next year.

Well, I have a solution. Raise the tax on beer, and give the money to the schools. That’s right, raise the tax on beer.

They haven’t touched the beer tax since they lowered it in 1966 -- to less than two cents a bottle -- and it has stayed there ever since, Actually, when you consider inflation, it is far less than it was.

No other product in Michigan has maintained the same tax rate for forty-four years. Had the beer tax been indexed to inflation, a bottle of beer would now cost a dime more, and the state would have an additional $275 million dollars a year.

Beer is not a necessity, by the way.

Nobody is forced to consume beer. Those who do probably would barely notice an extra dime per bottle. Research from other states shows no sign that raising the beer tax hurts jobs or consumption. Except perhaps among illegal underage drinkers. The Michigan Legislature could make a historic decision and declare that our children’s future is more important than really cheap beer.

If you agree, you just might want to let your leaders know.

Essay: One Person's Meat - 3.23.10

There was a firestorm of reaction last week to the governor's decision to proclaim "meatout day." Senior Political analyst Jack Lessenberry is wondering why all the fuss.

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I have to think that there must be times when even the most dedicated politician has to wish they were an anonymous shoe salesman in Bay City. And for Governor Jennifer Granholm, last week may have been one of those times. First, there was the fiasco over the convicted felon who scammed the state's economic growth authority into granting him $9 million in tax credits for an apparently phantom business he promised to bring to Flint.

Then there was the enormous reaction to the governor proclaiming last Saturday "Michigan Meatout Day." She encouraged every resident of the state to give up meat for a day and, quote, "explore a wholesome diet of vegetables, fresh fruits, and grains."

The moment she signed that proclamation, the meat industry and its spokesmen descended on her like a mob of avenging angels.

In one of the more moderate comments, the Michigan Farm Bureau called this an "insensitive slap in the face" to the state's livestock farmers.

The hunters' lobbying group, Michigan United Conservation Clubs, proclaimed Saturday -- and every other day following -- "Michigan Meat Eaters Day." Both houses of the legislature, which normally can't agree on the color of grass, voted to denounce Governor Granholm for this.

And even Jerry Schneble, the man who started this all by asking the governor to proclaim "meatout day," wasn't satisfied.

He wrote the Detroit Free Press an e-mail to defend himself against the charge that he was a "food elitist," and then sniffed that he was disappointed that the governor didn't add a clause to the meatout proclamation that "touted Michigan's fine produce -- apples, asparagus, beans, blueberries" et cetera, et cetera.

The governor stood firm and didn't back down. Now, I have often been a critic of Governor Granholm's, but in this case, I think her critics need to get a grip. The governor isn't a vegan or even a vegetarian. She didn't attack carnivores. She merely suggested not eating meat for a day, presumably because she believed that would be a healthy thing to do. In fact, there are legions of doctors who for years have been telling their patients to go easy on the meat, especially red meat.

Governors issue proclamations all the time proclaiming "cherry week" or "secretaries' day," without much reaction at all except from the group that is being honored. My guess is the governor thought this would be like that too. But instead, people went ballistic.

Exactly why is hard to understand. Maybe with the economy the way it is, everybody freaks out at any perceived threat to their livelihood. Maybe it is because vegetarianism and veganism seem to be gaining popularity, especially among the young.

For years, a fellow named Gary Yourofsky has been going around Michigan proclaiming that it is immoral to "eat anything that ever had a face, a mother, or a bowel movement." That could make the pork producers a bit jittery.

Still, my guess is that the meat lobby ended up benefiting from the fuss over "Meatout Day." And I would be willing to flatly predict that we'll live a long time before we see another governor do this again.

Now if only we could get people this riled up over threats to their children's education.