Word: michiganisms
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...aren't you really a model capitalist? You raise money. You hire people. You create a product and sell it to the public, bearing the risk and gaining the rewards that goes along with it. Capitalism would have never let me be a filmmaker, living in Flint, Michigan with a high school education. I was going to have to make that happen myself. My last movie, I gave it away for free on the Internet: Slacker Uprising. If I were a capitalist I would not give my employees health insurance with no deductible, which I do, including dental, and paid...
...there were rumors of parties with strippers at Detroit's official mayoral residence - leaders of the region's business community began drafting potential candidates, with Bing's name at the top of the list. This time, out of civic pride, he assented. Doug Rothwell, CEO of Business Leaders for Michigan, says his peers see Bing as "someone who brings instant credibility back to Detroit. Right now that's really important. There needs to be adult supervision...
...Young isn't the only politician to blame. In 1956, when I was 8 years old, my Congressman was John D. Dingell. There are people in southeastern Michigan who are still represented by Dingell, the longest-serving member in the history of the House of Representatives. "The working men and women of Michigan and their families have always been Congressman Dingell's top priority," his website declares, and I suppose he thinks he has served them well - by resisting, in succession, tougher safety regulations, more-stringent mileage standards, relaxed trade restrictions and virtually any other measure that might have forced...
...ably satisfying the wishes of the auto industry - by encouraging southeastern Michigan's reliance on this single, lumbering mastodon - Dingell has in fact played a signal role in destroying Detroit. He was hardly alone; if you wanted to get elected in southeastern Michigan, you had to support the party line dictated by the Big Four - GM, Ford, Chrysler and their co-conspirator the United Auto Workers. Anything that might limit the industry's income was bad for the auto industry, and anything bad for the auto industry was deemed dangerous to Detroit...
...Most crucially, the entire region has to realize that defining itself solely by the misperceived needs of a single industry has left all of southeastern Michigan dazed and bleeding. And yet the conditions for resetting that economic model couldn't be more favorable. The collapse of the UAW's prohibitive wage scale, coupled with the vast unemployment, is turning what was once the nation's most expensive labor market into one of the cheapest. For the first time since Henry Ford offered $5 a day to the men who assembled the Model T back in 1914, Detroit is open...