I don’t know what has been more infuriating this week; watching the one-sided coverage on what unfolded in Charlottesville last week or watching what passes for “leadership” in the republican party seeing who can get away from President Trump the fastest?
The sad part here is that I can easily see what happened last week spread to Michigan much sooner than people think.
{More after the fold}
(9)Nuh Uh.
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If you asked me a few years ago who should be chair of the MIGOP, or even further on, the Republican National Committee, my answer would not have been Ronna Romney McDaniel.
I am pretty sure that most who regularly visit and comment here would also share the same sentiment. Romney was seen as the continued extension of the establishment elite GOP, and viewed with suspicion by Michigan conservatives attempting to assert some more control in state politics. As far as I (and perhaps others here) might have been concerned, she represented a step backward.
I was wrong.
When then MiGOP chair McDaniel didn’t flip on the GOP nominee for president like beta manlet Calley and other feminized Michigan politicos, it was revealing, and reaffirmed her commitment to the win. She didn’t back down, and between an incredible effort by the MiGOP team Trump, Michigan was won.
(16)Nuh Uh.(1)Go Big, Or Go Home
Just as Governor Snyder signed the SB 242 – 244 ‘Good Jobs’ subsidy package yesterday, Foxconn announced that they accepted Wisconsin’s insane subsidies. The new Foxconn industrial campus will be built in the Badger State, not Michigan. The Foxconn competition, however, was the bait used to stampede the Michigan Legislature into passing the ‘Good Jobs’ package much sought by Michigan’s government and business establishments.
Wisconsin is going to lavish $ 3 billion in subsidies on Foxconn for somewhere between 3,000 and 13,000 new jobs. That works out to somewhere between $ 1 million and $ 230,769 in subsidies per job. Amortized over a 10 year period, the state of Wisconsin will be paying somewhere between $ 48.00 and $ 11.09 per labor-hour of every Foxconn worker’s wages using taxes extracted from other less fortunate Wisconsin workers. Subtract these per labor-hour subsidies from the headline wages touted for the future Foxconn workers and their ‘Good Jobs’ don’t look quite so good. Gussied up minimum wage jobs at best, wage theft at worst.
The little pig gets to feed at the trough, the hog gets taken to market and slaughtered.
(17)Nuh Uh.(1)Detroit's Decline And Bankruptcy Were Indeed Due To Its Riots - Plural!
Apologists for the 1967 Detroit rioters and the feeble responses of Mayor Cavanagh and Governor Romney to that mayhem usually start off by noting that Detroit’s population and economy peaked in the early 1950’s. The implication being that the 1967 riots were just another incident in the long running, preordained decline of Detroit. Detroit’s population did peak in the early 1950’s, but its economy continued to grow right up to the 1967 riots due to productivity increases. And Detroit’s economic decline was not preordained, it was very much the consequence of both of its two major 20th Century riots.
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) also studied the aftermath of the 1960’s riots in urban America, specifically their effects upon African-American economic well being. Two key NBER Working Papers examine the effects of the 1960’s riots on African-American income, employment, and real estate holdings. Unsurprisingly, these NBER Working Papers found the effects were decisively negative. Surprisingly, these NBER Working Papers found the adverse economic effects actually accelerated over time, with the worst hits coming well into the following decade.
The deceit in the apologists’ chronology of the decline of Detroit is their failure to mention or consider the June 1943 race riot in Detroit. The 1943 Detroit riot was unequivocally a race riot and its deaths and injuries were on a scale quite comparable to the 1967 Detroit riots. During the 1943 Detroit riots, 34 people were killed and 433 were wounded. Property destruction was then estimated at $ 2 million ($28.3 million in 2017 US dollars), but this estimate is probably quite low due to lower casualty insurance coverage rates at that time. By comparison, 43 people were killed and 1,189 were wounded during the 1967 Detroit riots. Property destruction in the 1967 riots is disputed, but was somewhere around $ 50 million ($ 366.7 million in 2017 US dollars).
The different ratios of deaths and injuries to property damage in the two 20th Century Detroit riots also reflects the fundamental difference in their basic character. The 1943 riot was most certainly a race riot whose participants targeted people, but not much property. The 1967 Detroit riots were an all out economic attack on small businesses, but 1967 rioters did not target people to any particular degree.
Prior to the 1967 Detroit riots, the 1943 Detroit race riot was tied with the 1965 Watts riot for the second worst American riot death toll during the 20th Century, and probably tied with Watts for the third worst American riot death toll of all time. The 1943 Detroit race riot had only been surpassed in death toll during the 20th Century by the 1921 Tulsa race riot at the time of the 1967 Detroit riots. The 1943 Detroit race riot has not been studied by academia or covered by the media in much detail because it exposed New Deal incompetence and reflected very poorly on the American war effort underway at the time.
The 1943 race riot certainly did affect the thinking of Detroit residents and Detroit’s economic actors well into the 1950’s. Most of them lived through those 1943 race riots and were intimately familiar with the the racial tensions it revealed, even if they were not much publicized. You need to consider the causality issue underlying the decline of Detroit’s population during the 1950’s.
Were the factors usually cited for Detroit’s population decline in the 1950’s sui generis, or a response to the 1943 riots?
(16)Nuh Uh.(0)What causes a riot in urban America?
The news media, social scientists, and political scientists are eager to offer up the usual stale left wing bromides on urban riots, but at best those bromides are based upon a lot of anecdotes rather than hard data. The plural of anecdote is not data. The disingenuousness of their bromides arises from the clash of facts with their committed leftist politics. Economists were far less political, at least 25 years ago.
A pair of economists working under the aegis of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) applied linear regression computation modeling to various community statistics from a broad range of cities to determine which underlying issues cause riots and, further, to determine their intensity. Their results are a real eye opener and run contrary to the drivel being peddled by the media and academics on this 50th anniversary of the Detroit riots.
The National Bureau of Economic Research is a private nonprofit research organization which distributes its work product to financial officials and the public around the world. NBER is best known as the official arbiter of the start and end dates of economic recessions in the United States, a not uncontroversial subject. Its economists have run the gamut from the good (Milton Friedman, Wassily Leontief), to the bad (Austan Goolsbee), to the ugly (Paul Krugman). As a fun side note, it is comforting to know that an economists’ organization as august as NBER can lose money on their financial portfolio. No crony capitalists there!
The NBER divides its research into 20 programs; one of which is ‘Labor Studies’. Denise DiPasquale and Edward L. Glaeser produced NBER Working Paper 5456, The L.A. Riot and the Economics of Urban Unrest on behalf of the NBER Labor Studies Program. This paper was written after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, but its research reaches back into the 1960’s and across the world to construct its data base.
The DiPasquale/Glaeser study has two major components: a cross-national study which covers urban rioting around the world (including the U.S.), and a cross-city study which covers urban rioting across just the U.S. They assembled data sets on a large number of cities which included dependent variables representing the frequency of riots and the intensity of riots, along with many independent variables suggested by previous studies as being responsible for the frequency and intensity of those riots – poverty, unemployment, ethnic composition, and so on.
(13)Nuh Uh.(0)A Cure Always Requires a Correct Diagnosis
All Americans alive in 1967, of all races, called Detroit’s five day long spasm of violence, arson, and looting in July 1967 a riot. Some labeled it a race riot, others just a riot. Not for long. Within a year, government and media were plying the public with a long list of racial grievances said to be responsible and an even longer list of expensive liberal programs which promised to cure them.
The Detroit riots were deceitfully recast as an insurrection, rebellion, or an uprising to drive those liberal programs, but ultimately this revisionism just glamorized base criminality, Fifty years later, billions have been doled out in Detroit through those liberal programs and Detroit is in even worse shape by every metric.
Let’s start with some definitions from Merriam-Webster:
Note that the definitions of insurrection, rebellion, and uprising all state that these events are a defiance of established government, while the definition riot does not.
Were the events in Detroit from 23 to 27 July 1967 a defiance of established government?
(14)Nuh Uh.(0)Another GOP candidate emerges in the race to defeat Stabenow
Veteran and businessman joins other GOP hopefuls in bid for US Senate nomination.
Consider me intrigued.
Thoughts?
(10)Nuh Uh.(0)As badly as we need this done, do we care why he’s doing it, or even whether he gets the credit?
“If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” (Winston Churchill, to his private secretary, Jock Colville, on June 21st, 1941, the evening before Operation Barbarossa)
Churchill was well known for being a consistent and vociferous opponent of communism, and had often spoken quite unfavorably about the Soviet Union, and particularly of Joseph Stalin (who was well-known even then as the brutal monster that honest history records). However, in seeking to stop the menace of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Churchill was willing to adopt an ad hoc “enemy of my enemy” approach, and initiated the Anglo-Soviet Agreement for joint action against Germany.
Given much of the recent hullabaloo regarding a badly-needed grassroots initiative having been likely co-opted, by a moderate opportunist apparently seeking a means to advance his political ambitions, and given that I have personally stood directly in the path of those ambitions at least twice in the past seven years, what I’m about to say is going to sound exceedingly strange, but I’m going to say it anyway.
(20)Nuh Uh.(1)What will the next over-hyped roll out of critical information be???
So Brian Calley has not yet come out and said if he was running for Governor ..US Senate ..Muffin man.
He used the build up, the excitement, the hype! ..To announce a legislative effort. The May 30 announcement at the Detroit Crony Club’s Mackinac Leadership conference brought us news that The conservative boy wonder wants to spearhead efforts for a part time legislature.
“Mackinac Island — Lt. Gov. Brian Calley is spearheading a petition drive and potential 2018 ballot proposal to make the Michigan legislature part-time and cut legislator pay, the Portland Republican announced Tuesday.”
Ballot proposal hmm?
While the idea of a part time legislature is a great idea, it is not entirely original, it does not set him apart from ‘the pack’ as Schuette beat him to the punch, and the timing is hilarious. Political opportunism on the back of good policy is a part of Calley’s past. He used RTW promises to get a hand picked supreme court nominee (who lost) and now after a decade of service in Lansing, and NOW it’s apparently time to ‘pull the trigger’ on this ‘necessary‘ reform.
Classic.
The announcement however, left open the speculation of whether Calley would be pursuing higher office. His website hints at yet another big news event, telling us to come back June 1st. Obviously, Calley has a string of announcements planned all the way to the GOP leadership conference. Keeping us in suspense will keep us engaged with (presumably) his next campaign bid!
(13)Nuh Uh.(1)Bill Schuette begins the issues ramp up for 2018.
A partial ‘wish’ list by Bill Schuette in a recent editorial is a decent start to his gubernatorial bid.
Schuette, in preparation to take on a half dozen or more GOP contenders is capably using his AG pulpit to advance certain ideals that will probably be embraced by conservatives and GOP activists across Michigan. Schuette, already enjoying a lead built on 30 or so years of campaigning for governor leaves little to question on 4(3?) key issues. In today’s editorial on the Detroit News page:
First: Financial disclosure
Michigan is one of only three states that does not require disclosure of personal financial information by elected state officials. This common sense reform would provide new information to help prevent conflicts of interest in government decision-making.
We already require financial transparency from federal officials, so it is not a stretch to include state elected officials, from the governor’s office to the state legislature. I have both sponsored financial disclosure bills as a state legislator and complied with federal disclosure requirements while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. It is not that difficult.
Personally, I don’t care how much you are worth.
But there are tells in the way your investments are made. Add to this the cronyist environment that takes taxpayer money and pipes it through political process toward certain ‘investments,’ and a sickening reality becomes clear.
(11)Nuh Uh.(0)
