Enron, a derivatives trading firm, filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on December 2, 2001. The media has framed the scandal as a simple morality play pitting good against evil, with the Texas firm’s top management and the Bush administration competing for the latter role. Naturally, neoconservatives blame the Clinton administration for the entire...
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Economic Liberty and American Manufacturing
William Jefferson Clinton mentioned the domestic auto and steel industries a mere seven times in the first two years of his presidency, according to the subject index of his presidential papers. After noting that the auto industry accounted for nearly six percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) in May 1993, President Clinton waited another...
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Uncle Sam Still Wants You
“The draft or draft registration destroys the very values that our society is committed to defending,” Ronald Reagan wrote U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield in May 1980. Although few remember it today, Republican Richard Nixon ended conscription in 1973, and Reagan campaigned against registration, pledging to Hatfield and others that he would end it if elected...
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Sleepwalking in America
For the third time in our generation, independent voters could be the balance of power in this year’s presidential election. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George G. Wallace, standardbearer of the American Independent Party, received 13 percent of the popular vote, a sum greater than the difference between Hubert H. Humphrey and the victor, Richard M....
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They Are Coming, Father Abraham
Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush says that immigration “is not a problem to be solved. It is the sign of a successful nation. New Americans are to be welcomed as neighbors and not to be feared as strangers.” In 1996, the Republican platform advocated an end to granting automatic citizenship to children born to...
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Staying on the Ground
Donald Trump’s campaign for the Reform Party presidential nomination may never get off the ground, and anyone who has ever visited Trump’s stomping grounds in Atlantic City should not be surprised. The Trump Taj Mahal casino sits alongside the Atlantic City boardwalk, a gaudy reminder of the excesses of its owner. The “Taj,” which ranked...
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Plymouth, R.I.P.
If anyone ever doubted that DaimlerChrysler is now a German-controlled corporation, the recent demise of the Plymouth brand provides incontrovertible proof Plymouth, sold only in the United States, was the inexpensive core brand of Detroit’s Chrysler Corporation, America’s third-largest automaker in the post-World War II era. Introduced on the eve of the Great Depression in...
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Downsizing Detroit Motown’s Lament
Detroiters have a deeply ironic way of looking at their beloved city. The irony is evident in a once-popular T-shirt that showed a muscular tough gripping a ferocious dog around the neck while holding a loaded gun to the animal’s head. “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the T-shirt read. The T-shirt is a commentary on...
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Birthplace of GM
Flint, Michigan, is the birthplace of both General Motors and the United Auto Workers union (UAW), which makes the recent demise of Buick City, its last automobile assembly plant, more than a little ironic. In June, GM closed Buick City, idling 2,200 hourly workers at a plant that once employed 28,000 building Buick LeSabres and...
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Downriver Blues
The paint is peeling on the exterior wall of the United Steelworkers Hall in Southgate, Michigan, a symbolic reminder of the dangerous times faced by America’s 700,000 steelworkers. Workforce downsizing; the emergence of mini-mills to complement the old integrated, hot- and cold-roll production process; and price deflation and multilateral trade agreements like NAITA have combined...
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Bush’s Red Tory
Only Americans would take seriously the idea that a foreign politician who presided over the demise of a once-dominant political party should serve as the model for a major U.S. presidential candidate. If a German proposed that the ruling Social Democratic Party should follow former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, or an Italian suggested that the...
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Funding Public Schools
The most telling moment in The Agenda, Bob Woodward’s book on the Clinton presidency, occurs when the President-elect first realizes that Wall Street’s bond markets wield more power than he does as Commander in Chief of the lone remaining superpower. “You mean to tell me,” Bill Clinton screamed at his aides, his face turning red...
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None of the Above
I am running against myself in the November 5 general election. For the second time in my brief legislative tenure, I am providing constituents with “None of the Above” (NOTA) adhesive ballot stickers. Michigan election law docs not provide a NOTA option, but it does allow write-in campaigns using stickers. So I have produced NOTA...
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Mr. Manning Goes to Ottawa
Imagine a political party that favors the withdrawal of troops from Bosnia and formal debate over whether to remain in NATO, yet in the next breath opposes government-imposed privileges for homosexuals and other politically correct groups, among them Sikhs demanding to wear turbans to work. This party not only supports cutting corporate welfare and abolishing...
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The Morrison Cult
Jim Morrison would have been 50 years old last December 8, and as the world press reported, the rock star’s final resting place, the Gothic Cimetière Père Lachaise in northern Paris—where Balzac, Chopin, and Oscar Wilde are also buried—has become a cult attraction for a new generation of young Americans. American novelist Douglas Coupland describes...
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Inheriting a Deficit
Neoconservative Republican Governor John Engler of Michigan inherited a $1.1 billion budget deficit from his predecessor, moderate Democrat James Blanchard, when he took office last January 1, 1991. Engler eked out a narrow 17,595-vote victory over Blanchard by promising relief from Michigan’s burdensome property tax structure, fourth highest in the United States, to Reagan Democrats...