Dear Detroit Free Press: That Water Situation in Flint is Partly Your Doing

Dear Freep: I'll get right to it. I used to be such a fan. Remember how you used to be the blue-collar paper in Detroit and the News--that rag!--was the paper of the Republicans?  Good times.

You were the morning paper and the News--that rag!--came out in the afternoon.  We started our day with you and you never let us down.  On those mornings when we got ready to slog to our jobs or to march in the picket lines or to scan the want ads for employment opportunities, you let us know you were with us.  You were on our side.  You dogged the Big Three and kept them honest, especially during labor negotiations, but you didn't kowtow to the union leaders, either.  We trusted you.

Am I getting this right?  It's the way I remember it.  I loved your paper, from page one through the editorials and Op-Eds, through the style section, through the sports pages (I admit I rushed through those, but I've heard they were very good), through those whopping Want Ad sections (remember those?), and on to the back, where the cartoons lived.  On Sundays your paper was as heavy as a catalog.

Then Reagan came along and brought the hated trickle-down with him. Almost overnight the unions became pariahs--selfish bastards!--and Michigan jobs raced as if on luge sleds to the south and overseas. The days of the high-wage blue-collar worker were over.  Over time you lost your advertising base. Your formerly robust want-ad section dwindled down to a precious few pages, and you partnered with--it's hard to even say it--the dreaded Detroit News.

But you held on to your character, to your ethics, to your championing of the labor class.  For a while.

I repeat all this so you'll understand how hard it is for me to say what I'm about to say:

When you endorsed Rick Snyder for governor the first time, you bought into an image of him that was phony from the start.  You had to know he was not the innocuous "one tough nerd" he and his adorable kids made him out to be.  You knew he was an untested businessman with no political background ("a Republican venture capitalist and former Gateway executive", you wrote), with nothing but promises for a bright Michigan future. 

You knew his opponent, Virg Bernero, was better for us and far more qualified to get us out of the recession sweeping the entire country.  His successes as mayor of Lansing were public knowledge; his vociferous and loyal support for labor, voiced so often and so eloquently on Ed Schultz's show on MSNBC, was necessary in a climate where jobs were being sucked away by the tens of thousands every week, every day.

But you endorsed Snyder because you believed--all evidence to the contrary--he was a true independent.

Photo source: AP

When you endorsed him the second time, in 2014, you did it knowing--even admitting--you were twisting the screws.  You had already written a scathing editorial in 2012, when Snyder went against the voters and declared Michigan (Michigan!) a right-to-work state, yet your endorsement barely scratched the surface on his "failure of leadership", as you called it then:  

Snyder, the Republican incumbent, promised a pragmatic approach to the state's problems and delivered — except when he was caving to radical elements of the GOP-led Legislature or going back on his word about transparency.

You wrote this about his Democratic opponent, Mark Schauer:

 Schauer says he'll shape state government according to the progressive values the Free Press Editorial Board believes are embedded in Michigan's DNA — expansion of civil rights, protections for workers, environmental stewardship, plus investment in schools, roads and the social safety net.

Mark Schauer would have been a fine choice and just what we needed as an antidote. An honest, hard-working pragmatist, he might have been just the person to help us calm down a raging Tea Party legislature.  But we'll never know.

Now you want us to believe you're outraged by Governor Snyder's actions over the water poisoning in Flint--as if you couldn't have seen it coming.  As if you couldn't have known that your endorsement, along with other equally powerful but misguided back-slaps, would be enough to give him permission to do whatever he and his handlers wanted.

You knew in 2014 that Snyder was aligned with ALEC, the Koch brothers, and the Mackinac Center--all well known Right Wing anti-government activists. You knew of the misery Snyder's hand-picked emergency managers were causing all across our state.  And you had to know it was only a matter of time, with Snyder and the Republicans in control, before our Great Lakes state would face an environmental disaster.

Your bizarre editorial, dated October 8, 2015 and titled, "Flint Water Crisis: An Obscene Failure Of Government", only served to highlight your obscene failure in judgment.  In it, you wrote:

This newspaper twice endorsed Snyder for governor, albeit with grave reservations. But because of the relative weakness of his opponents, the leadership he displayed in resolving Detroit’s protracted financial crisis and our hope that he would use his business acumen to ensure that government better served people, he narrowly won our endorsement.

Last year, in a detailed analysis of Snyder's record, this editorial board expressed our dissatisfaction about Snyder's first term: "The governor balanced the budget at the expense of cities and school districts. His disdain for politics is inappropriate in the state's chief politician; his deficiencies as a deal-maker have sometimes resulted in terrible consequences for Michiganders."

This, we wrote, was Snyder's most profound flaw: "He has got to see people, not sums, as the bottom line of the state balance sheet."

We wrote that he rarely exhibited strong, decisive leadership, that he must "grow into a more sure-footed, principled leader." That we were fearful of what Snyder's second term could hold.

To which I call bullshit.  You endorsed a monster.  Twice. And now you're busy trying to undo a tragedy that never had to happen. You want to be heroes? It's too late. The children of Flint have already been poisoned. You can't undo that. You can't undo your endorsements. You had your chance before the elections in 2010 and 2014 and you blew it.

You blew it.

(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Crooks and Liars)

Why Junk Insurance deserves an Occupy Movement

Things are heating up in Chicago and I don't know a soul who is surprised by that.  It's Chicago and it's Emanuel Land.  Last week the Occupy Wall Street Windy City branch decided to occupy Grant Park past the posted 11 PM closing time.  The police, never ones to miss even vague radical clues, guessed correctly that these folks had other things on their minds and weren't going to be ready to leave just because a simple sign said they should.

When the clock moved past the magic hour, Mayor Rahm barked, the police moved in, and more than a hundred people were arrested in the eviction process. (Contrast that to the Good Mayor of Lansing, my hero and should-be governor, Virg Bernero, who welcomed the OWS protesters to the state capital, encouraged the crowd to keep up the good work, and provided park permits and the services necessary to make the days easier for them. Ahem and aha.)

So the climate in Chicago is apparently not good for protesters, (though I have to say it's much better than that in Oakland) but I'm hoping those same OWS crowds got wind of this week's Junk Insurance Conference, and hot-footed it over there.  (It began yesterday and runs through Friday.)

My hero, Wendell Potter, former CIGNA CEO turned whistleblower, wrote about it in HuffPo:

On Wednesday [10/26/11], the third annual Voluntary Benefits and Limited Medical Conference will open at the Marriott Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center, not far from Chicago's O'Hare airport. In just three years, this conference has grown to be a very big, three-day extravaganza. According to the conference Web site, it will "bring together all the players in the industry, from employers and benefits managers, to insurance agents, consultants, brokers, insurance companies, TPAs (third-party administrators), and enrollment firms."

All you have to do is spend a few minutes on the Web site to get an understanding of just how much money there is to be made selling inadequate coverage to naive consumers. You'll see all the big names in the insurance world among the attendees and exhibitors, including the very biggest -- Aetna, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, CIGNA, Humana and United -- as well as dozens of restaurant and fast food chains and other employers of low-wage workers.

 Yes, it's a den of thieves (no surprise -- they're "insurance" biggies), but this is pretty stunning:

One of the big for-profit insurers sponsoring this year's conference markets a limited-benefit plan only to employers with inordinately high employee turnover. Not only are the benefits very limited, the underwriting criteria almost guarantee an impressive profit margin.

Under the plan, the average age of an employer's workers cannot be higher than 40, and no more than 65 percent of employees can be female. (Insurers have long charged women more than men simply because of their internal plumbing.) To meet the insurer's additional demands, employers must have a 70 percent or higher annual employee-turnover rate (that's not a typo), which means that most employees won't even stay on the job long enough to use their benefits. Employees also get no coverage for care related to any preexisting conditions they might need during their first six months of enrollment in the plan. And get this: Employees have to pay the entire premium. The insurer doesn't even allow employers to subsidize their workers' coverage. No wonder the big box retailers and restaurant chains love this junk. They list them among the employee benefits they supposedly offer but don't have to part with a dime when a worker enrolls in one of the plans.

We have come to accept the business of "insurance", not as "assurance", as it was originally defined and administered by quasi-benevolent non-profits, but as just one more scam in the long list of scams we Americans have to watch out for.  This is our health we're talking about and we've put it in the hands of merciless privateers.

CIGNA HQ

The insurance companies, begun as non-profits and mainly run that way until the 1970s and 80s, at least pretended to understand the part about shared risks.  Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.  Sometimes people die long before they've outspent their premiums, while other people cause their insurance carriers to dig deep, like it or not.  That's the crux of the insurance biz.  One thing the carriers understand to the core:  they'll never go broke selling us insurance policies.  They'll always pull in more money than they'll put out.  If that weren't so, there wouldn't be an insurance industry.
 
But now we're at the point where the watchdogs are fed too well, where members of our own government fight hard against an equitable, non-profit health care solution, where the industry is so bloated, enough will  never be enough.  Even the big guys are not above committing fraud, but what makes the whole scam even more egregious is that they never needed to go to such lengths in order to make their fortunes.  The fortunes were theirs to be made.  The entire system works to their advantage, even when they're being good guys doing the right thing.

I haven't heard that there are any protesters over at the Marriott convention Center yet, but it's not too late.  As I said, the Conference runs through tomorrow (Friday).  But if the OWS folks happen to miss the Conference, they can always camp out in front of a few grand and glorious corporate offices.

Blue Cross-Blue Shield, Houston, TX

 
(Note that the only corporate office list I could find complete with addresses and phone numbers comes from India.  Yes, India.  I said India)

S.O.L -- Save our Labor

It's fashionable these days among the politicians, pundits and so-called experts to claim that free trade is actually good for us. They say it enables us to buy cheaper goods made with cheap foreign labor and this, in turn, raises our standard of living. With all due respect, the free traders need to ask themselves a more fundamental question: how will Americans buy those goods when they don't even have a paycheck that covers their mortgage, much less the college tuition for their children?

Virg Bernero, Mayor, Lansing, MI


Virg Bernero is my new hero. The mayor of Lansing, Michigan is taking the message of the American laborer and shoving it so tightly down the throats of the pundits, they're getting bilious just thinking about him.

When they began inviting him onto their shows last fall to talk about the prospects of a Big Three bailout, they thought they were dealing with the biggest yokel on the planet. This'll be fun! You could see it in the smirks on their faces, in their sit-back-and-laugh postures, in their questions meant to provoke rather than inform. Outside of Ron Gettelfinger, the president of UAW, (I'm elevating him to hero status, too), who the heck would be out there speaking FOR labor these days? And who in their right mind would do it on, of all places, Fox News?

Well, it turns out that Virg would--every chance he got--and once he was on a roll, nobody was going to shut him up. In November he sparred with Neil Cavuto twice in three days.

In December he did it again, caling the Auto Companies "the most patriotic companies in America". Virg says when all the other companies were shipping their jobs overseas, the American auto companies stayed in America. It's true--to a point. They have shipped some jobs overseas, just not as many. But can we talk about this? Apparently not. See how quickly he's bid a fond adieu by the interviewers.

Here he spends some quality time with some of the folks at CNN--John Roberts, Ali Velshi, Ciran Chetry and Christine Romans--all apparent experts on what this country needs to get going again.

Ali Velshi to Virg: ". . .It's the fact that things are made more cheaply in other parts of the world, which has, in a lot of cases, helped many Americans in their standard of living. They've been able to buy cheaper goods."

Virg: "I disagree vehemently. . ." (It was early in the interview. Virg hadn't gotten his steam up.)

Virg, picking up speed: "I'm tired of hearing the American worker being beat up upon, and people told you need to be more competitive; you need to be more competitive. What they're really talking about is 'cut your wages, cut your benefits, work for nothing, like some peasant somewhere else in the world'. Well, I'm sorry--I'm tired of the American standard of living brought down to the lowest common denominator. We need fair trade agreements fairly enforced."

Christine Romans, using the tired 'some people say' tactic , said: "You will hear from a lot of decision makers that manufacturing is very 20th century and this is a service economy and that we have to innovate and we have to come up with the next thing that's going to move the economy forward. How does that square with Michigan and its labor base?"

Lordy, did she really say that? Yes, Virg heard it, too, but to his credit, given the condescension dripping from her tongue, he remembered what his mother taught him about being polite to women--even silly women--and gave Ms. Romans way more nice than she deserved.

"With all due respect," Virg said, "That--what you just said--I've heard it before. I'm not saying this about you. . . "

Okay. With that out of the way, he wasted no time in getting back on track:

". . .But that is absolute bull. That has been perpetrated by Wall Street. The idea that you can be a service economy. . .What are you servicing? How can you service. . . What are you going to serve? Hamburgers? That is total, utter nonsense that Wall Street has been spewing for years. That's part of the unholy alliance. We need manufacturing in this country. Manufacturing is at the apex of the economy. When you give up manufacturing, you are giving up your future."

That interview was on February 6. I don't know where else Virg has been since then, but just the other day (February 18) he finally quit sparring and went for the jugular, totally obliterating Fox News's Greg Jarrett, who just wanted to know why the unions shouldn't go ahead and give their concession speeches already and get out of Big Business's hair.



Oh, that Virg! He has to talk fast, and he has to talk straight, because it may not be long before the air waves are closed to him forever. You can't have pro-labor people out there making too much sense.

The interesting thing about the Bernero blitz is that those talking points are nothing new. It's a conversation that has gone on in every labor family, ever since unions began surfacing in the early part of the 20th Century. During the Reagan years, when the systematic undermining of labor unions began to get serious, the conversations grew hot and heavy, but, outside of the interested few, nobody else cared.

Along with watching the government-condoned slow but sure destruction of our labor unions, most of the country sat passively still while Big Business thumbed their noses at good old American Can-Do and Know-How by moving major chunks of our formerly vibrant manufacturing base outside our borders. A precious few protested when millions of jobs were outsourced and lost to Americans on the strength of wage packages alone. For years it was okay by us (you, that is) that millions of American wage-earners took home smaller paychecks and forfeited better benefits so that the Fat Cats who owned the businesses could live the life-styles of Sultans and Kings.

This is what happened because of it:
Our economy has collapsed in ways we couldn't have even imagined a mere eight years ago, on Inaugural Day, 2000.

We're in a protracted war brought on by hubris and greed, and encouraged by stupidity.

We owe our souls to our national credit company, communist China, and we can't pay them back because we don't make anything anymore.

Health care costs are going through the roof while health care benefits are a thing of the past for many, many millions.

Our food, our water, our very air isn't safe.

We're slowly selling off our natural resources to the highest bidder because we can't afford to keep them anymore.

And hundreds of thousands of American citizens are losing their jobs every month. (That's every month.)

So this shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody, given the sorry state of our nation, but the Fat Cat glory days are over. You'll be getting no more sacrificial lambs from what's left of our puny work force. Even the workers in the south are finally waking up to the con game called "low wages and no benefits are good for me and you--especially me".

In order to build an essential, strong labor force in this country, we need labor activists to combat the still mighty hold of the greedy Kings of Commerce who would rather see our nation destroyed than give up their thrones.

People like Virg Bernero and Ron Gettelfinger and, occasionaly, Barack Obama, understand the important role labor needs to play in order to bring us back to prosperity. We need good jobs that pay well in order to get back to spending again. (People without money don't buy things. I'm just saying, because some people still don't get it.)

On the campaign trail Barack Obama said, loud and clear, "I believe we have to reverse many of the policies toward organized labor that we have seen over the past eight years, policies with which I have sharply disagreed." and "You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement."

Hold him to that. Labor doesn't have a chance if it doesn't organize. "Solidarity Forever" isn't just a song. It's a battle cry again.

Ramona