Right On The Money...Essay By Charlie LeDuff

THERE'S A NEW "STYLE" IN DETROIT: CUTTING COST AND WATCHING THOSE PENNIES!


Essay: U.S. sinks or swims with Mich.
Washington should realize that if state goes under, everybody comes along for the ride.
DETROIT -- As the chief executives of the Big Three sat in Washington, D.C., taking a spanking from Congress while simultaneously holding their hats in their hands, a small but not unrelated thing happened in Michigan.
In Warren, a man searched for a soft piece of earth to bury his dog.
The man did not cry when Ford Motor Co. laid him off a handful of years ago.
He did not cry when the Chrysler plant next to his home idled two shifts and the rats flooded out from the empty factory and into his neighborhood.
He did not cry when eight houses on his block went up for foreclosure and the value of his property fell into the toilet.
He did not cry when he could no longer afford the lease on his minivan and began to take the bus.
But when his dog died last week after eating bad dog food, presumably from China, the man cried.
"Everything is broken," said the man, Frank Parker.
His brother sold mortgages last year, and this year his brother works in a factory sanding screws.
His other brother is looking for work.
In the interest of full disclosure, his other brother is this reporter.
"I watch TV and I see the auto executives getting lectured about a bailout and I'm thinking, 'Aren't we all in this boat together?' " Parker asked. "How low does it go? How much can we take?"
The world has been remade in the flash of a match: trade agreements, capital flight, mass migration.
Families like his can't catch their breath, and they need a moment to right their ship.
Part of that, Parker believes, is a loan to the auto companies to help them stave off bankruptcy.
"We're tied together," he said. He was wearing whiskers and an old knit cap. "You can't bail out one part of the boat, one piece of the economy, and not the other. We'll all drown."
Detroit and, by proxy, Michigan have become the whipping boys of an America on the down slide. And perhaps, looking at the statistics, Michigan deserves it. The problems here are spectacular. A rotten urban core with thousands of empty buildings. The unemployment capital, the crime capital, the illiteracy capital.
The scandal of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has not helped its reputation, nor have the Detroit Lions.
Detroit seems a convenient target, a caricature town where blue-collar factory workers sit in an empty room playing euchre while robbing the time clock.
But the fact is, the whole of America is being smothered under debt and incompetence, said L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland County executive.
Patterson worries that if the bailout does not go through, then Chrysler will cease to be. If that happens, he said, then his gilded suburban hamlet of Auburn Hills, site of the Chrysler corporate headquarters, will become a squalid ghetto.
"It'll become another Highland Park," he said.
Highland Park used to host Chrysler's corporate headquarters less than two decades ago. Today, Highland Park is one of the poorest, most violent places in the country.
"It's easy to lay blame on Michigan for its problems," Patterson said over a glass of white wine at a Clarkston eatery. "But Michigan is a peninsula, not an island. The problems you see here, you see nationwide."
Consider that while Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, took his television time to lecture the auto executives about their unwillingness to go along with President Bill Clinton's national health care plan more than 15 years ago, the national debt continued to spiral out of proportion.
Perhaps the best symbol of federal incompetence may be the national debt clock in Times Square, which ran out of numbers in October after the federal government's debt surpassed $10 trillion.
Wall Street, which has failed spectacularly in its own right, was given a blank check by Congress without the paddling. Citicorp was awarded more than $300 billion in guarantees. Insurance giant AIG was given a bailout of $60 billion with almost no strings attached.
A few days after that bailout was announced, executives from one of the AIG's subsidiaries went on a weeklong retreat to California. The bill: $443,000.
Thinking of moving to California? Think again. The Golden State has an unemployment rate of more than 8 percent, and this does not take into account the illegal immigrants who can no longer find work.
California is $63 billion in debt with another $66 billion coming down the pike. State revenue shortfall this year is projected to be $11.2 billion, and next year's is estimated to be $13 billion.
"It's unprecedented," said H.D. Palmer, deputy director of the California Department of Finance.
By comparison, the highest estimates of Michigan's revenue shortfall this year is under $1 billion. Put another way, California has 3 1/2 times the population of Michigan and 12 times the debt.
Matty Moroun, the billionaire industrialist from Grosse Pointe who owns the Ambassador Bridge, said Detroit's problems are simple: greedy unions, greedy management and incompetent federal governance.
"They never showed restraint," Moroun said. "If there is a cake in front of you, is that reason to take the whole cake? You've got to leave something in the cash register. The management and the unions took the whole cake. They ran it into the ground. Let me tell you something ... everybody at General Motors lost.
"They lost at Ford."
Moroun believes the automobile industry bailout, should it happen, is a Band-Aid disguising a much bigger problem.
"We don't have a national industrial policy," he said. "We've just plain given the country away and gotten nothing back in return."
There is an old saying: What's good for GM is good for America.
If that is true, then so must be its opposite.
It is estimated that if the Big Three go under, then 3 million to 4 million American jobs go with them.
Mike Carlisle is a former Detroit homicide detective. No one more than Carlisle knows the evils that idle hands are capable of. "When people don't have jobs, they commit violence," Carlisle said. "Flipping burgers won't get you to good times. You got to have real jobs, jobs were you build something."
It seems implausible that leaders in Washington, D.C., will let the auto companies fold, sending millions of Americans to the soup line. But after watching the spectacle in Washington over the past few weeks, one begins to wonder about the people we've put in charge.
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, scolded the Big Three executives for using corporate jets on their first trip to Washington. So the next time, the executives drove the 1,000 mile round-trip in fuel-efficient cars.
Their drivers, of course, split the job. Those who drove the executives to Washington flew home to Detroit, while those charged with driving the executives back flew one way to Washington to pick them up.
In the end, it would have been cheaper to fly the jets.

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