Democrats and Phantom Voter Discrimination

By William Sullivan

Eric Holder looked Texas dead in the eye, and has drawn the proverbial line in the sand. He is demanding a federal court order which will require Texas to submit to federal "preclearance" for any potential changes to voting laws, despite the Supreme Court's ruling last month which deemed any such requirements by the federal government unconstitutional.
Texas, Holder insists, is still racist place (seemingly evidenced by nothing more than a predominantly Republican makeup), and if left to its own devices, minorities will suffer disenfranchisement today, just as they did in 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed.
While there is the obvious problem that this is a move to circumvent the Supreme Court decision, there is a more fundamental problem with this assumption. Not only is voter discrimination in Texas not a problem that warrants federal oversight today, as the Court correctly surmises, but voter discrimination in Texas wasn't a significant problem that warranted federal correction in 1965. Don't take my word for it. Take it from the horse's mouth. The most influential backer of the Voting Rights Act said precisely this, way back then.
Lyndon Baines Johnson's relationship with civil rights prior to 1960 was markedly different than the man Democrats remember as the bold challenger of discriminatory social conventions like segregation. When Harry Truman pushed for civil rights in 1947 and '48, for example, LBJ was one of his biggest opponents. Yet as the tide of public opinion turned against the historically held Democrat touchstone of segregation in the following years, LBJ eventually saw the writing on the wall.
So when Eisenhower offered his dedication to civil rights legislation in 1957, LBJ found himself conflicted, caught between his devotion to segregation and his ambition to become president. In the end, he remained loyal to both in that year, outwardly supporting the '57 civil rights bill while colluding with other Democrats like Richard Russell of Georgia in amending the bill "so as to minimize its impact," which ultimately watered it down enough that the bill evaporated in a heated legislative process.
But by the time LBJ had become president, he recognized that efforts to desegregate the South were gaining popularity with unstoppable steam, so he seized the opportunity to outwardly champion civil rights. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which journalist Ronald Kessler recalls LBJ saying would ensure that "those niggers voting Democrat for the next 200 years," LBJ continued his courtship of the minority vote by embracing calls for voter's rights legislation.
Certainly, by this point LBJ saw the political value in such a thing. The problem, as he saw it, was proving that it happened in any significant way.
On May 13, 1965, in a phone call with Carl Sanders, Democrat governor of Georgia, LBJ addresses the difficulty in doing that:

Now, you can say they can't discriminate, but I've got to prove that it discriminates, and I can't prove it in Texas. There's more Nigras voting there than there are white folks, a higher percentage of them. And more of them [paying] poll taxes now than white folks. Now I can't show that with a literacy test, that they're being discriminated against, 'cause they haven't got any. They got no test at all, just by God, anybody that can get up and pay a dollar and six bits can vote. And so let me do this the right way.

Just two months prior, he said roughly the same thing to his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, only here, in his closer political circle, the "right way" becomes more apparent. From a recorded call on March 25, 1965:

Katzenbach: Now Mr. President, I said the reason for the low voter turnout in Texas is the poll tax, I hope that's right.
LBJ: Yes, I think so, I think that's right... I have said that, and have said it's disgraceful... Now, I have forgotten, but it seems to me he [JFK] had a third of the population [in Massachusetts], and almost as many votes... and the reason is that we [Texas] got a poll tax. It's not one that keeps a nigger from voting, he doesn't have a literacy test or anything like that, he just forgets to pay this dollar seventy-five cents.
[...]
And anything that you can, say about the Mexicans. Say it's not just Alabama and Mississippi, necessarily, but there are other places. Now I'm just wondering how you're going to get to the bad counties of the Mexicans in Texas, or the Negroes where they, they [cuts off]
Katzenbach: I think we can do that under the existing legislation... See the thing is that we've been concentrating on Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana. Now, if we have 110 lawyers and they get free from that, I think we can do pretty well. We won't have the same problems with the judges [in Texas], and I think we can do a pretty good job.

In short, LBJ had for two years been calling publically for a repeal of the poll tax in the name of "fairness, decency, and equality." Yet behind the curtain, he obviously recognized that poll taxes may have been an issue reflective in overall voter turnout, but in Texas, with which he was most familiar, a poll tax was certainly not an issue of discrimination, no matter how much he wanted it to be for political purposes. Furthermore, there were no literacy tests given in Texas in 1965, and the percentage of black voter turnout, as LBJ lamented, was higher than white turnout. That is why Katzenbach suggested that the 110 lawyers they hired to construct a case supporting the discriminatory practices in Alabama be sent to Texas -- to make sure that some evidence of discrimination is found in Texas, too, despite the apparent lack of such evidence. It was about creating the appearance of voter discrimination, not about tackling the reality of voter discrimination.
The focus on voter's rights has been an issue more about political optics than ethical necessity for Democrats then, and for Democrats now. Democrats know that if they incessantly repeat the lie that voter ID laws are racist, millions of ardent Democrats and independents will never delve past that preposterous assumption. They will just maintain that the Republicans pushing for such laws are racist, and the Democrats fighting them are not. This is nothing more than a continuation of the lie that began in the 1960s.
Democrats were for the creation of a big paternalistic government in FDR's day, in LBJ's day, and today. Nothing has changed about that, despite the stupidly pervasive "party switch" myth, whereby Republicans became Democrats after the 1960s and vice versa. Utter nonsense. The underlying motivation that defines Democrats has never changed, dating back to at least Woodrow Wilson. The only difference is that in the 60s, that motivation to create a big paternalistic government was cleverly marketed as uniquely beneficial to minorities, and thereby gained generations of loyal voters -- in spite of the overwhelming evidence that a paternalistic government providing welfare and entitlements has proven uniquely destructive to the black community, for example.Consider the words of Ms. Frances Rice, chairman of the National Black Republican Association:

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More than $7 trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

The truth is clear. Civil rights, for Democrats, has never been about the ethical underpinnings of the issues. It has always been about controlling the vote and expanding federal authority.
Today, too, the facts belie the Democrats' claim. Voter ID laws have been enacted in states like Georgia and Indiana, and minority voter participation has increased, handily proving that ID laws, at the very least, are a nonfactor. This is a deceptive rallying point for Democrats, and nothing more.
I would say that Holder and the Obama administration should be ashamed of their response to the Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act. But given the Democrat's pedigree, it's obvious that such dishonesty is engrained in their political DNA. To them, this kind of malicious race-baiting is as natural as breathing.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/democrats_and_phantom_voter_discrimination.html#ixzz2adhIgOlM
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The College Degree Scam

By Carole Hornsby Haynes
For years we've heard the propaganda line that everyone needs to go to college -- that a degree will improve your status and standard of living.
It has become politically incorrect to even suggest that a higher education degree might not be right for every young American. So it's not surprising that those without a college degree often feel inferior and marginalized.
Has a college degree become the litmus test for whether a person is well educated and successful? These highly successfully individuals would likely disagree with that premise.
Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, Barry Diller, Ted Turner, Ralph Lauren, Governor Jan Brewer, Governor Scott Walker, Governor Gary Herbert, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, William Safire, Larry King, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Woody Allen, Karl Rove, and 33 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
What do they all have in common? Not one received a college degree!
A college degree has long been considered the golden ticket to a more fulfilling life both financially and intellectually. Now the bloom seems to be off the rose. Students are graduating, armed with a politically-driven pseudo education, to find themselves jobless or underemployed, debt ridden, and perhaps living again with parents.
Political leaders, college presidents, and prominent foundations argue that the U.S. must increase the proportionate number of adults with college degrees if it is to remain competitive in the global economy. But this premise is incompatible with the cold facts.
In 2009 President Obama said he wants the nation to reclaim its position as the world's leader in the proportion of college degrees by 2020. In his January 2010 State of the Union address Obama stated, "In this economy, a high school diploma no longer guarantees a good job."
Given that nearly 54 percent of all college graduates in 2010-2011 were either unemployed or woefully underemployed, it would have been more accurate to say that a college degree no longer guarantees a good job.... or any job for that matter!
A January 2013 study by the Center for College Affordability presents empirical evidence that colleges and universities are churning out graduates faster than the labor markets are creating jobs requiring college degrees.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates that only 20 percent of U.S. jobs require a bachelor's degree or more. About another 10 percent require some post-high school instruction, including an associate's degree. Against this need, the United States is already producing a workforce with about 30 percent holding a bachelor's degree and another 10 percent with an associate's degree.
The BLS breakdown for 2010 shows: 3.1 percent of jobs required a professional degree (law, medicine) or a Ph.D.; 1.4 percent, a master's degree; 15.5 percent, a bachelor's degree; 5.6 percent, an associate's degree; and 5.2 percent, some schooling beyond high school, including some college. The grand total: 30.8 percent. Projecting ahead to 2020, the BLS concluded that there will be a slight increase in these jobs but they will still represent only 31.6 percent of the total.
The BLS Monthly Labor Review for January 2012 states, "Overall employment is projected to increase about 14 percent during the 2010-2020 decade... occupations that typically need post secondary education for entry are projected to grow faster than average, but occupations that typically need a high school diploma or less will continue to represent more than half of all jobs."
Since our society has swallowed the "college degree for everyone" propaganda completely -- hook, line, and sinker -- we now have the unintended consequence of credential inflation.
No longer is a college degree as prized as it once was. Today it is the new high school diploma -- the gateway for getting even the lowest-level jobs. High school graduates are being told they are unqualified for jobs they once were able to get, such as security officers, cargo agents, clerks, and claims adjusters.
Degree inflation hits women workers the hardest. About 96 percent of administrative positions, including secretaries, receptionists, paralegals, and clerks have traditionally been held by women. These jobs, which offered women one of the best paths to a middle-class income without a college diploma, now require a college degree.
Credential inflation is relegating the poor, who have the most difficulty in paying for an education and often struggle with academic work, to a shrinking number of jobs that don't require advanced studies.
With an increase in the number of bachelor's degrees comes a decline in their value. This will have adverse effects on the future of colleges because many students may decide to opt out of higher education altogether.
The good news is that there are an increasing number of alternatives to the traditional college. With more online education and independent certification of competencies, people will be evaluated on the basis of their actual knowledge and skills and not on their paper credentials. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban encourages students to take online courses. He says, "I want the best and brightest, not a piece of paper."
U.S. education policy is incredibly flawed when students are pushed into college degrees that do not fit their requirements and needs, degrees that many will never get, and debt that they cannot repay. Not only will the students be the losers but also the taxpayers who will get saddled with a student loan bailout and a U.S. economy that does not have a workforce educated to meet the nation's needs.
It's time for a policy change at all levels.

The GOP: Rabbits or Tigers?

By Jeffrey Lord 

Reagan, Thatcher and the real battle behind defunding Obamacare.

“We had rabbits when we needed tigers.” — Ronald Reagan writing in his diary of congressional Republicans
Well.
There they go again.
The GOP Establishment is terrified at the idea of defunding Obamacare.
Except, of course, that the opposition within the GOP Establishment and among some conservative pundits to defunding Obamacare — as Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio propose — has nothing whatsoever to do with Obamacare.
Zero.
As Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would both recognize instantly.
Leading to the obvious. The problem within the GOP is just as Reagan described decades ago: too many rabbits, not enough tigers.
First: Reagan and Thatcher. We’ll get to the critics after that.
Reagan, right from the very beginning of his active political career in 1964 all the way through his two terms in the White House, saw the party’s problem as the timid, barnacle-encrusted GOP Establishment. An Establishment he called the “fraternal order” Republicans, as he told the New York Times in December of 1976 when the GOP was reeling from what Reagan saw as yet another unnecessary GOP presidential loss by faint-hearted party moderates, this one to Jimmy Carter by Gerald Ford.
“With some of our friends we don’t need enemies,” Reagan frostily noted in his diary in 1984 after another frustrating presidential encounter with faint-hearted GOP moderates on the subject of budget cuts.

I’m afraid I blew my top at one point. It seemed to me they [GOP Establishment congressmen and senators] are willing to let the Dems. run with the ball because they don’t think we can stop them. I told them before we do that, it’s time for us to agree on our position & then let me take it to the people (TV) & smoke them out. The way we’re going we’re not exerting any leadership.

These were the Republicans and their media supporters who preferred, as he said in an earlier speech, “pale pastels” over “bold colors.” Reagan saw the GOP Establishment, one Reagan biographer later wrote, as being “victims of the political equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages come to sympathize with their captors.”
The “captors” being Establishment liberalism.
Tellingly, over in Great Britain’s Conservative Party, Reagan’s political soulmate Margaret Thatcher was dealing with the exact same problem. Thatcher and her allies summoned a term of art from the elite British public school system that described boys seen by their peers as “feeble” or “timid” — “the wets.”
Here’s Thatcher on the problem. Speaking of one of the leading “wets” of her own Tory government, the Secretary of State for Employment Jim Prior, Thatcher wrote in her memoirs The Downing Street Years, bold print for emphasis:

There was, of course, a more profound and general divide between us. For all his virtues, Jim Prior was an example of a political type that had dominated and, in my view, damaged the post-war Tory Party. I call such figures the “false squire.” They have all the outward show of a John Bull — ruddy face, white hair, bluff manner — but inwardly they are political calculators who see the task of Conservatives as one of retreating gracefully before the Left’s inevitable advance. Retreat as a tactic is sometimes necessary; retreat as a settled policy eats at the soul. In order to justify the series of defeats that his philosophy entails, the false quire has to persuade rank-and-file Conservatives and indeed himself that advance is impossible. His whole political life would, after all, be a gigantic mistake if a policy of positive Tory reform turned out to be both practical and popular. Hence the passionate and obstinate resistance mounted by the “wets” to the (Thatcher) fiscal, economic and trade union reforms of the early 1980’s. These reforms had either to fail or be stopped. For if they succeeded, a whole generation of Tory leaders had despaired unnecessarily. …..I had to stake out a more determined approach.

Let’s take a look at one liberal tactic and see how the game is played in America — and how Reagan dealt with that game.
First, recall this clip from Sean Hannity’s February 19, 2013 Fox TV show. In the course of a debate with ex-Obama economic aide Austan Goolsbee, Hannity plays a tape of President Obama from 2011 in which Obama says of Republicans:

And then you got their plan, which is let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water.

It is a quote Hannity cites often as an illustration of how liberals play the game of smearing Republicans and conservatives.
Now let’s go back to a diary entry for February 3, 1987, in which President Reagan writes of his veto of a $20 billion Clean Water Bill that he said was “loaded with waste and lard.” Reagan was under heavy attack from Democrats for the veto. The Democrat who was the chairman of the powerful House Public Works and Transportation Committee — out of which the Clean Water bill had emerged — took to the House floor and attacked Reagan in this fashion:

Should we follow President Reagan’s recommendations, we’ll return to the dark days when our oceans, rivers, streams were choked with poison.

Sound familiar?
Which is to say, 24 years before President Obama was running around America accusing Republicans  of wanting “dirtier air, dirtier water,” this exact stunt was being played with Ronald Reagan and House Republicans.
The key point? Reagan never wavered in 1987 — but House Republicans, fearing for re-election, ran for the hills.
Wrote President Reagan in disgust:

A meeting with Repub. Cong. Leadership. I pitched a plan that they stand together so that even with the Dem’s out voting us we can point out to the people how different the Dems & Repubs are. I don’t think they got the message. In the House today only 26 Republicans supported my Veto of the Clean Water bill.

In short, what is now an almost $17 trillion deficit took yet another lurch forward back there in February of 1987 because Congressional Republicans, fearful over re-election prospects, were simply too “wet” — too weak, timid, and feeble in Thatcher’s phrase — to stand and boldly draw a line in the sand that made a Reaganesque difference between themselves and liberals.
Out of that Stockholm syndrome necessity of “retreating gracefully before the Left’s inevitable advance” (as Thatcher termed it) the Republicans in the Congress of 1987 did exactly what Senator Cruz accuses some today of doing: behaving as “the Surrender Caucus.”
And the irony? Having joined Democrats to override Reagan’s veto on the notion they could gain House seats in 1988? Come election day, having sold out their principles yet again — and doubtless egged on by rabbit-minded consultants — the GOP lost two seats in 1988.
This Establishment GOP behavior has been run and rerun repeatedly over the decades. Confronted with some issue X out there — the environment, immigration, the budget, the size and role of government and just about anything else, the classic GOP Establishment response is to run like — Reagan’s word — a “rabbit.” Which is precisely what is going on right this minute with the reaction to Senator Lee’s proposal to defund Obamacare.
“The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program,” Reagan liked to joke by way of making his decidedly serious point about the actual way Washington really worked.
The notion of deliberately allowing Obamacare to kick in for “the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth” — and make no mistake, once in place, this is no piker of a $20 billion Clean Water bill loaded with “waste and lard” — is yet another example of finding only rabbits in the GOP when tigers are needed.
Those who are shrinking from defunding Obamacare are Thatcher’s “false squires.” They are Reagan’s “rabbits” for whom retreat since the very dawn of the Progressive era has been not about tactics — as the objections to defunding ObamaCare are presented — but about retreat as, Thatcher’s sentiments again, a settled, soul-eating policy.
Viewed through the eyes and actions of Reagan and Thatcher, the reasoning behind the GOP Establishment panic over defunding ObamaCare comes clear. It’s the 1987 Clean Water bill reaction all over again.
“The dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” said North Carolina GOP Senator Richard Burr of Lee’s proposal to defund Obamacare, channeling the ghost of Gerald Ford.
Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a member of Speaker John Boehner’s leadership team, dismissed the proposal as a “temper tantrum” and likened it to “blackmail”:

Seems to me there’s appropriate ways to deal with the law, but shutting down the government to get your way over an unrelated piece of legislation is political equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum. It’s just not helpful. And it is the sort of thing that creates a backlash and could cost the Republicans the majority in the House, which is after all the last line of defense against the president. And it could materially undercut the ability of the Republicans in the Senate to have the majority in 2014 which they have a decent chance to do.

And Karl Rove.
But of course, Karl Rove.
Said Rove to Sean Hannity about the Lee defunding proposal:

You know what? I’m suspect about it because it gives the president the bully pulpit and a gigantic stick on which to beat us, because all he has to do is say, “Look, this law was passed, it’s on the books. I’m going to veto your continuing resolution that doesn’t fund Obamacare, and it’s on you for shutting down the government.”

Then Rove took to The O’Reilly Factor last night, going on about discretionary spending, funding bills, and how defunding Obamacare was a “political loser.” Yada, yada, yada. Said Rove, in language that spelled “rabbit” to Reagan and “wet” to Thatcher, “being conservative doesn’t mean you do something that blows up in your face.”
This is rabbit lore. This is exactly how the government winds up expanding when Republicans are running the government. This is precisely why both Reagan and Thatcher had such disdain for the conservative rabbits in their respective conservative political parties.
Adding fuel to this fire, Erick Erickson over at Red State has learned of this Rove business:

Karl Rove’s Crossroads group commissioned a poll by North Star Opinion Research. The poll found most Americans do not want the GOP to block “health care reform.” That’s right, Crossroads repeatedly called Obamacare “the healthcare reform law” and was shocked to find people oppose stopping reform. Go figure.
But that poll has been circulated to Republican leaders and they have soiled themselves over it. That is why Mitch McConnell will not support Mike Lee’s strategy to draw a line in the sand against funding Obamacare. That is why John Cornyn withdrew his name from Mike Lee’s letter. That is why Richard Burr of North Carolina calls defunding Obamacare “stupid.”

Run, rabbits! Run!
Whether over here at Bloomberg (“The Disastrous Plan to Defund ObamaCare” by Ramesh Ponnuru) or over there at the New York Times (“Going for Bolingbroke” by Ross Douthat) or even on Fox (here where the normally astute Charles Krauthammer derails and calls the effort “really dumb”), the idea of actually doing something about Obamacare as opposed to repeatedly holding fruitless “repeal” votes in the House has struck terror in the hearts of Establishmentarian Republicans and conservatives.
What Messrs. Burr, Cole, and Rove and all the rest (that all the rest is suspected to include Speaker Boehner and Senate GOP Leader McConnell) are exhibiting is the core problem at the root of the decline of the Republican Party. A decline Reagan — and Thatcher in Britain, tigers both — spent a career fighting, not coincidentally winding up winning elections and ratings as a great American president and British prime minister respectively.
The problem at the heart of the GOP — in Congress and elsewhere — is that once again the GOP has, as Reagan once observed, far more “rabbits” than “tigers.”
This latest bout of intellectual rot decidedly did not take hold, as Thomas B. Edsall wrote in the New York Times, with the rise of talk radio or the release in 1992 of Rush Limbaugh’s bestselling book The Way Things Ought to Be. That is an absolutely absurd premise.
This decline — and it is no accident — tracks exactly with the end of the Reagan presidency and the return/rise of the moderate wing of the Republican Party that coincided with the 1988 election of Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush. Bush, who campaigned for the GOP nomination as Reagan’s heir, was decidedly, upon election, anything but. He immediately set about a restoration of the Establishment wing of the party that had been defeated by Reagan. Four years later, in 1992, the Establishment Bush (one of the most decent of men, a sterling human being, and genuine war hero but politically speaking a hopeless Establishment moderate) lost the White House with a humiliating 37% of the vote. Yet the GOP Establishment has been in the saddle ever since, with the momentous if brief exception of the 1994 Newt Gingrich-led congressional version of the Reagan Revolution.  
President Bush 43, again a thoroughly decent man who was nothing if not the personification of courage in the wake of 9/11, similarly bought into the Stockholm syndrome that is GOP Establishment Republicanism — the so-called “compassionate conservatism” that almost lost him the White House in 2000 and barely enabled his re-election in 2004. And the other losing GOP nominees — Dole, McCain, and Romney — were similarly moderate Establishment leaders and good men yet were utterly incapable of energizing the conservative base.
Today, Texas Senator Ted Cruz calls the American version of the wets — or as Reagan called them the “rabbits” or “fraternal order” or “pale pastel” Republicans — “the Surrender Caucus.”
Reagan in particular would surely have gotten a chuckle out of Cruz’s further note to Hannity on the latter’s radio show that the liberal media likes their Republicans “timid and house trained.” Reagan would have thoroughly agreed.
One need only take a look at the recent Thomas Edsall column in the New York Times to see the Republican rabbit psychology at work. Edsall, now a professor of journalism at Columbia University, was a longtime reporter for the Washington Post. The column was titled “Has the GOP Gone Off the Deep End?”
Perhaps it should have recycled the title of the old John Updike novel Rabbit, Run. Or another — Rabbitt Redux.
Why?
Because, of course, nothing has changed in all these decades.
Nothing.
The column is filled with decades-old Establishment GOP bromides about conservatives.
It leads with the tale of an aide to ex-New York GOP Governor George Pataki who tweeted that if the GOP House defeated the Senate immigration bill “I’ve decided to leave my political home of 32 years #sad.”
Sad? How about laughable. Not that this ex-Pataki lieutenant would have a clue, but Reagan himself was asked in that December, 1976 article about the idea that another New York Republican would leave the GOP if Reagan succeeded in his stated goal of, as the Times reported it, saving the party from “extinction” by “acting quickly to assert the party’s ideological identity.” That Republican was New York’s senior United States Senator — Jacob Javits. Said Reagan about the possibility of Javits leaving the Republican Party:

Senator Javits might have some problems staying within the party. Again, however, we are not ushering anyone out of the party. We are simply saying, “What does our party stand for?” If the great majority agrees with the philosophy, and some say it’s a philosophy they can’t go along with, that’s a decision for every individual to make. A political party is not a fraternal order.

As events turned out, New York Republicans rejected Javits in the state’s 1980 Senate primary in favor of the more conservative Alfonse D’Amato. Javits ran in the fall with the Liberal Party nomination — and lost. By the time Reagan was sworn in as president in January of 1981, D’Amato was sitting in the Javits Senate seat.
The rest of the Edsall article beyond the party-leaving Pataki aide?
There’s nothing that hasn’t been said by angry Establishment Republicans of conservatives — not to mention Reagan himself — for decades.
Conservatives are rigid. They can’t win. (This is always an amusing charge considering the absolutely miserable winning record of Establishment presidential candidates.) They have an “orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement,” says Jeb Bush. A GOP House and Senate staffer named Mike Lofgren is quoted from back in September 2011 (notably on a liberal website) as saying the GOP is becoming like “an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.”
My favorite in this list of nonsense? John Feehery, a former GOP House staffer turned lobbysist, drags out that old chestnut that was used by Gerald Ford against Reagan — the charge that Reagan was the candidate of “government by nostalgia.” Says Edsall of Feehery on Tea Party House members:

These members of the House are what Feehery describes as “nostalgia” Republicans who define conservatism as “the ability to fight progress.”

Progress, you see? Moving Left to the GOP is always “progress.”
All this fuss by GOP Establishment types about defunding Obamacare?
The GOP has been there and done that.
Over at Breitbart, Matthew Boyle takes note that:

Polling data obtained exclusively by Breitbart News shows that self-identified conservative and GOP likely voters want their representatives in Congress replaced if they vote in favor of funding Obamacare, even if they had voted against the law in the past.

Surprise, surprise.
Mark Levin has challenged the Establishment wisdom per Karl Rove that if Obamacare is just left alone it will “collapse on its own.” “When has a law ever collapsed?” Levin asks — making the same point as Reagan. Laws — government programs — don’t collapse. They are in fact the closest thing to eternal life on earth.
Don’t defund Obamacare?
This isn’t even about defunding Obamaxare.
As Ronald Reagan knew all those years ago, what the argument over defunding ObamaCare is really about is another much more serious problem entirely.
That real problem?
The GOP Establishment has more rabbits than tigers.

Regionalism: Obama's Quiet Anti-Suburban Revolution

By  Stanley Kurtz 

 

The consensus response to President Obama’s Knox College speech on the economy is that the administration has been reduced to pushing a menu of stale and timid policies that, in any case, won’t be enacted. But what if the administration isn’t actually out of ideas? What if Obama’s boldest policy initiative is merely something he’d rather not discuss? And what if that initiative is being enacted right now?
A year ago, I published Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. There I described the president’s second-term plan to press a transformative “regionalist” agenda on the country. Early but unmistakable signs indicate that Obama’s regionalist push is well underway. Yet the president doesn’t discuss his regionalist moves and the press does not report them.
The most obvious new element of the president’s regionalist policy initiative is the July 19 publication of a Department of Housing and Urban Development regulation broadening the obligation of recipients of federal aid to “affirmatively further fair housing.” The apparent purpose of this rule change is to force suburban neighborhoods with no record of housing discrimination to build more public housing targeted to ethnic and racial minorities. Several administration critics noticed the change and challenged it, while the mainstream press has simply declined to cover the story.
Yet even critics have missed the real thrust of HUD’s revolutionary rule change. That’s understandable, since the Obama administration is at pains to downplay the regionalist philosophy behind its new directive. The truth is, HUD’s new rule is about a great deal more than forcing racial and ethnic diversity on the suburbs. (Regionalism, by the way, is actually highly controversial among minority groups. There are many ways in which both middle-class minorities in suburbs, and less well-off minorities in cities, can be hurt by regionalist policies–another reason those plans are seldom discussed.)
The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced “economic integration.” The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in “stack and pack” high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse. To understand how HUD’s new rule will help enact this vision, we need to turn to a less-well-known example of the Obama administration’s regionalist interventionism.
In the face of heated public protest, on July 18, two local agencies in metropolitan San Francisco approved “Plan Bay Area,” a region-wide blueprint designed to control development in the nine-county, 101-town region around San Francisco for the next 30 years. The creation of a region-wide development plan–although it flies in the face of America’s core democratic commitment to local control–is mandated by California’s SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008. The ostensible purpose of this law is to combat global warming through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. That is supposedly why California’s legislature empowered regional planning commissions to override local governments and press development away from suburbs into densely-packed urban areas. In fact, the reduction of greenhouse gases (which Plan Bay Area does little to secure) largely serves as a pretext for undercutting the political and economic independence of California suburbs.
Essentially, Plan Bay Area attempts to block the development of any new suburbs, forcing all population growth over the next three decades into the existing “urban footprint” of the region. The plan presses 70-80 percent of all new housing and 66 percent of all business expansion into 150 or so “priority development areas” (PDAs), select neighborhoods near subway stations and other public transportation facilities. This scheme will turn up to a quarter of the region’s existing neighborhoods–many now dotted with San Francisco’s famously picturesque, Victorian-style single-family homes–into mini-Manhattans jammed with high-rises and tiny apartments. The densest PDAs will be many times denser than Manhattan. (See the powerful ten-minute audio-visual assault on Plan Bay Area at the 45-55 minute mark of this debate.)
In effect, by preventing the development of new suburbs, and reducing traditional single-family home development in existing suburbs, Plan Bay Area will squeeze 30 years worth of in-migrating population into a few small urban enclaves, and force most new businesses into the same tight quarters. The result will be a steep increase in the Bay Area’s already out-of-control housing prices. This will hit the poor and middle class the hardest. While some poor and minority families will receive tiny subsidized apartments in the high-rise PDAs, many others will find themselves displaced by the new development, or priced out of the local housing market altogether.
A regional plan that blocks traditional suburban development, densifies cities, and urbanizes suburbs on this scale is virtually unprecedented. That’s why the Obama administration awarded the agencies behind Plan Bay Area its second-highest “Sustainable Communities Grant” in 2012. Indeed, the terms of the administration’s grant reinforce the pressure for density. The official rationale behind the federal award is “encouraging connections” between jobs, housing, and transportation.
That sounds like a directive to locate new residents–poor and minorities included–in existing prosperous communities. In fact, HUD’s new emphasis on “connecting” jobs housing and transportation does more. In practice, bland bureaucratic language about blending jobs, housing, and transportation pressures localities to create Manhattan-style “priority development areas.” The San Francisco case reveals the administration’s broader intentions. Soon HUD and other agencies will begin to press localities directly, rather than through the medium of California’s new regionalist scheme. Replicating Plan Bay Area nationwide is the Obama administration’s goal.
The Enactment of Plan Bay Area was wildly controversial among those who managed to learn about it, yet went largely unnoticed in the region as a whole. One of the chief complaints of the plan’s opponents was the relative lack of publicity accorded a decision with such transformative implications. Critics called for a public vote, and complained that the bureaucrats in charge hadn’t been elected.
Another theme of critics was that “the fix” seemed to be in from the start. Input was largely ignored, opponents claimed, and public forums offered only the illusion of consultation. Although it’s gone largely unreported, that accusation is far truer than even the opponents of Plan Bay Area realize.
Here’s where the Obama administration comes in. Not only does acceptance of the administration’s $5 million grant make it next-to-impossible to de-densify Plan Bay Area, but the grant itself helps to fund “grassroots” supporters of the plan–leftist groups dedicated to radicalizing the scheme still further.
The administration’s “sustainable communities” grants generally require recipients to “partner” with local leftist community organizations. Opponents of Plan Bay Area often outnumber supporters at public meetings. Yet such supporters as are present–groups like TransForm, the Greenbelt Alliance, Marin Grassroots, and East Bay Housing Organization–are funded (or slated to be funded)with the help of the same federal grant that backs up the bureaucrats in charge.
Press accounts of the Plan Bay Area controversy generally say nothing about the financial interest that “non-profit” “grassroots” organizations have in passage of the plan, or about pressures on the bureaucrats in charge to maintain their government-mandated “partnerships” with these community organizations. So when opponents of Plan Bay Area complain about officials simply going through the motions of public consultation, they’re right. The deck is stacked, the fix is in. By way of the federal grant, many of the “grassroots” groups that support Plan Bay Area are actually partners of the decision makers (the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments). The Obama administration’s role in all this, while generally unnoticed, is substantial.
If you complain that the regional bureaucracy behind Plan Bay Area undercuts democracy and local control, you’ll be told that local governments retain full authority over land-use within their jurisdictions. In reality, Plan Bay Area subverts that control, and the Obama administration plays a role here as well. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (one of the two agencies in charge of Plan Bay Area) doles out state and federal transportation assistance. Now that Plan Bay Area has been formally approved, MTC can withhold billions of dollars in federal aid from suburban jurisdictions that refuse to densify, leaving local bridges and highways in disrepair. One of the core goals of the Obama administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative is to use federal transportation aid as a stick to force regionalist planning on unwilling suburbs.
Recalcitrant suburbs can also be brought to heel by lawsuits claiming violations of federal fair housing law. California’s SB375 facilitates such suits by placing the burden of proof on local jurisdictions accused of housing discrimination. Such legal claims are often brought by leftist community organizations of the type currently funded through the Obama administration’s grant.
When criticism of Plan Bay Area reached a crescendo in suburban Marin County–the center of public opposition to the plan–the bureaucrats pared back their demands for densification in a few resistant municipalities. Obama’s HUD responded by charging that failure to assign more multifamily housing to suburban jurisdictions could violate federal fair housing law. So what looks like a softening of Plan Bay Area’s demands on a few suburban municipalities may ultimately be reversed. By publicly declaring suburban non-cooperation with Plan Bay Area a potential violation of federal housing law, and by funding organizations that could sue to bring resistant suburbs into compliance, the Obama administration is serving as a key enforcer of this controversial scheme.
All of which returns us to HUD’s controversial new regulation expanding the obligation of recipients of federal aid to “affirmatively further fair housing.” When HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced that rule change, he acknowledged that it wasn’t really focused on preventing “outright discrimination and access to the housing itself.” The Obama administration is using traditional anti-discrimination language as a cover for a re-engineering the way we live. The real goal is to Manhattanize America, and force us out of our cars.
The Plan Bay Area precedent makes it clear that HUD will use data on access to housing, jobs, and transportation to press densification on both urban and suburban jurisdictions. With the new HUD rule in place, municipalities will be under heavy pressure to allow multifamily developments in areas previously zoned for single-family housing. The new counting scheme, which measures access to housing, jobs, and transportation, will simultaneously create pressures to push businesses into the newly densified areas, and to locate those centers near transportation hubs. In effect, HUD’s new rule gives the federal government a tool to press ultra-dense Plan Bay Area-style “priority development areas” on regions across the country.
HUD’s new rule also allows the creation of regional housing consortia. Although the choice to join such regional housing partnerships would technically be voluntary, the administration will be able to use the same combination of legal threats and funding leverage we’ve seen in San Francisco to pressure municipalities to join the consortia.
Over the next few years, select Regional Planning Grants funded under the Obama administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative will be issuing regional development plans guided by the same philosophy that informs Plan Bay Area. So even in states without California-style regionalist legislation in place, a federally-funded structure with the potential to override local control, block suburban development, and force densification will be created. The Obama administration’s goal is to use legal and financial carrots and sticks to press Plan Bay Area clones on regions across the country through its federally-funded Regional Planning Grant program. The new HUD rule will be folded into this broader strategy. (I lay out the structure, philosophy, and history of that strategy in Spreading the Wealth.)
When Secretary Donovan announced the sweeping new HUD rule, he said: “Make no mistake: this is a big deal.” He’s right. Yet the mainstream press has ignored the change, as well as the broader story behind it. Recognizing the politically explosive nature of its regionalist plans, the Obama administration does little to connect the dots for the public at large. Above all, the president himself avoids this issue, although it’s deeply embedded in his administration’s policies.
Obama isn’t actually out of bold ideas. They’re simply too controversial for him to discuss. The time has come for a national debate on the Obama administration’s regionalist policies.

The Consultants Who Brought Us President Romney & The GOP Senate Majority Oppose Obamacare Defunding

By: Erick Erickson  |  July 25th, 2013

Polling suggests Republicans drawing a line in the sand over Obamacare funding in the continuing resolution would be unpopular with the American public. Instead of trying to find a way to convince the American public this is the right thing to do, the Republican consultant class wants to run rapidly away from the idea.
They have convinced Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner that the GOP must not allow the Democrats to shut down the government by the GOP refusing to fund Obamacare.
It is important to note that the same Republican consultants who oppose a strategy of refusing to defund Obamacare are the very same Republican consultants who worked for years to sell the American public President Romney and worked tireless for the present Senate Republican Majority.
Oh . . . wait.
Perhaps instead of sticking polling up the rear end of Republicans and controlling them the same way Kevin Clash controlled Elmo, we should instead detach the strings and let conservatism go forth selling principle to the American public.
Perhaps instead of listening to the same GOP consultants who spent a billion dollars for the status quo in 2012 convinced that Mitt Romney was the best we could do, we should instead start ignoring them.
It cannot be emphasized enough. The American public is weary of another partisan fight over Obamacare. They are. But the American public is also weary of Obamacare and does not like the law. What we know for sure is that the American public loves a winner.
These Republican consultants do not know how to win. Perhaps we should set our minds to winning this fight instead of listening to the consultants who told us steel tariffs in Pennsylvania, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, the General Motors bailout, and President Romney were the way to build a Republican Majority.
It’s worth noting that were these Republican consultants helping with colonial strategy, there would never have been a revolution. The American Revolution was not originally popular. It took convincing to make the case over time and even then it remained unpopular among the upper middle class of the Middle Colonies for quite some time. Thank God these pukes weren’t around then.

Schadenfreude, Michigan, and Mitt's Big Fumble

By C. Edmund Wright

In all honesty, I am having a hard time not feeling a touch of schadenfreude as the abject disaster of the once great city of Detroit becomes obvious. I'm not defending that response -- and I do have other emotions as well -- I'm just being honest. You probably feel it too. After all, we both know that people in the Motor City, and the state of Michigan in fact, have brought this doom on themselves with their very liberal ballot habits of the past 60 years. Conservatives have warned them about it for at least several decades, to no avail. Hell, even a casual viewing of Gran Torino or the show Hardcore Pawn tells the story's inevitable end. This is a colossal "we told you so" moment -- and something Biblical about reaping and sowing comes to mind.
On the other hand, with the failure of the liberal mecca of Detroit imminent, and the reasons for it obvious to anyone not named Melissa Harris Perry -- or is it Melissa Perry Harris -- this financial holocaust was an amazing slam-dunk election issue for Mitt Romney and the Republicans in 2012. So what did Mitt and company do to take advantage of this real life and undeniable object lesson in applied Obamanomics and other leftist governing fantasies? Nothing.
(Memo to Obama lo-fo's who just got offended: I know Detroit's problems started well before Obama was out of his choom days, but everything he has always stood for, and is still out pitching today on the campaign trail, has been the law in the city for decades. Thus, applied Obamanomics indeed.)
Actually, what the Republican campaign did was worse than nothing. Mitt and his campaign agreed with Obama publicly on his handling of the automaker bailouts. Romney knows better, with his deep background in business in general, and Detroit auto making specifically. Moreover, Paul Ryan, who also knows better, agreed with Joe Biden on national TV in the VP debate that poor ole Joe and Obama had "inherited" a mess from Bush and the Republicans. Ryan even let Joe "Bite Me" get away with taking credit for saving Detroit! Check the videotape in case you've forgotten.
Yes, in typical establishment fashion, the official GOP campaign shied away from the big and confrontational philosophical arguments about liberal versus conservative economic realities -- and instead ran to smooch up to the voters of Michigan in a careful and focus-group-tested way so as not to offend. In other words, in an absurd attempt to try and save Michigan electorally, and to make soccer moms in southern Ohio comfy, a strong message that would have resonated across the other 49 states was jettisoned in favor of "don't rock the boat" messaging.
Talk show hosts, internet and cable commentators, and many Tea Party figures have been warning the GOP establishment about this for decades too. Thus, the missed Detroit opportunity in the 2012 campaign is likewise a gigantic "we told you so" moment, and even a casual perusal of the elections of 2010, 2002, 1994, 1984 and 1980 proves it. Again, reaping and sowing comes to mind.
So, what now?
Well, with this message still out there for all to see, and with Obama bussing around the Midwest urging Republicans to bring even more Detroit-style liberalism to the entire nation, this gargantuan teachable opportunity is still available. Even Obama and the Democrats know it, which is why there is no appetite to talk about bailing out the city of Detroit in the White House. They really don't want to put this issue on a tee for Republicans.
Of course, they shouldn't worry about that particular possibility.
No, the Republicans seem determined to let this crisis go to waste. John McCain is out muttering about how wonderful Obama's inflammatory and infantile race speech was. That is, when he's not telling a private institution known as the NFL how they should televise their product. (Even the Detroit Lions, I suppose.) Mitch McConnell is trashing his primary opponent's business career while going squishy on defunding ObamaCare.  Meanwhile, in the House, John Boehner is going for full-blown eunuch status for his speakership, pretending that things just happen in the House and he has no control over them. Of course, all the while, they are joining the likes of Peter King and Lindsey Graham and Eric Cantor in crafting some kind of disastrous immigration bill that will attract the likes of Chuck Schumer and Maxine Waters. For some reason, they think this is the pressing issue of our day, and that they have the solution. They are wrong on both counts. And Bob Dole, whose Viagra is apparently not helping fire the synapses of his brain, is urging that process along from retirement.
Astonishing.
Dammit, Detroit's lesson is out there. It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room. It's the undeniable object lesson. It would be so easy to finally penetrate at least a portion of low information skulls, not to mention southern Ohio mini-vans, with this tutorial. Nowhere has full-fledged liberalism been on display for so long as in Detroit. Nowhere has a city fallen so spectacularly from such dizzying heights, and for such obvious and traceable reasons.
Detroit is why we are right, and they are wrong, in the real world. Detroit is Obama, Bernanke, Jack Lew, MSNBC, Tim Geithner, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Al Sharpton, et al, in the economic flesh. Detroit is the unavoidable endgame of liberal Democrat control. It couldn't happen here, in Detroit, and yet it did. This is all true, and all obvious, but it's up to the opposition party to point this out.
They don't.
Detroit can happen everywhere. If the Republicans don't tell this story, and put it in proper electoral and philosophical context, it will absolutely happen here. In fact, it already is. There's a survey out this week showing that in 11 states, there are more welfare recipients than employed adults. This was not the case in all of Michigan, but it has been true for Detroit for a long time.
Meanwhile, many other cities, and various entire states, including mammoth California, are on the road to Motown at varying speeds. And in every case, Detroit-style liberals are in charge and generally have been for decades. This message is there for the taking. Like the AT&T commercial, it's simple.
The majority of the low-information voters, inculcated with a liberal anti-free market education, will not get it. That's not important, since we only need a few of them to get it, and a few more to stay home, and we can defeat the liberal Democrats. The problem is, too many low-information Republicans, including most of the consultant class, doesn't understand why we must do this, let alone how to do it.
We may all be Detroit now. Go Lions!

How Detroit Almost Killed My Business

By Don Wilkie

Of all the depressing facts about the once great City of Detroit, this to me is the most upsetting:  In 1950, there were about 296,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit.  Today, there are less than 27,000 (Hat tip Zero Hedge Blog).
Government -- federal, state, and local -- made this happen. I know this from experience. Government corrupted the Detroit work force. That corruption drove away my company too.

Until 1984, I was a business owner in the city, employing about 20.  I moved my business 60 miles away.  I didn't want to leave, but I was, in effect, forced to. 

Many think that crime spurred the exodus of business out of Detroit.  Not in my case.  To combat crime we would build a stronger "fort." We called it "fort building" because if my neighbor put heavy wire screen on his windows, the thieves would break into my shop.  If I bricked up my windows in response, my neighbor might be broken into.  This escalated to the point where many businesses eventually put fencing topped with barbed wire around their buildings.  Still, although "fort building" was expensive, it was far cheaper than moving.

Detroit's abysmal educational system did not drive me away either. As it happens, my particular business did not require highly educated people. So I could hire high school graduates not literate enough to fill out an application form.

As for taxes, true, Detroit's were the highest in the state, but real estate costs were half of those in the suburbs.  Besides, there were hundreds of suppliers of parts and services for all types of industrial purposes within a short drive.

What really killed Detroit and what drove me away was the government deciding it knew how the market should operate better than the market did.  The market operates on a simple concept, "An honest day's pay for an honest day's work."  If an employee doesn't think he is being paid enough, he can leave.  If an employer is unhappy with an employee's performance he can fire him. 

Well-meaning government programs such as Unemployment Insurance, Workman's Compensation and Wrongful Discharge (i.e. age discrimination, sex discrimination, racial discrimination etc.), that were meant to help and protect employees turned this market concept on its head.  In Detroit, hiring someone became the worst thing an employer could do, and being fired became one of the best days in an employee's life.  Allow me to explain.

As mentioned earlier, when I left Detroit I had 20 employees.  But, 10 years earlier I had 5 employees.  As the business grew I had to hire more people.  As it turned out, to get one good employee, I had to hire about 8.  So to get an additional 15 people, I had to hire over ten years approximately 120 people.  This is when doing business in Detroit really started to get expensive.

When an employee left my employ, whether by quitting or being fired, they immediately went to the Unemployment Office where they were given unemployment payments.  Employers such as me went to great lengths to make sure that if someone was fired it was for a good documentable reason, in an effort to avoid having to pay for unemployment.  In practice, that didn't matter too much.  The likelihood that the State would grant benefits was extremely high, maybe 80%.  If you protested you had to appear before a state "referee," who was, unsurprisingly, very biased in favor of the claimant. 

In the financial reports I was mandated to send to the State, it was all too obvious I had not paid nearly enough to cover the costs of the benefits the State paid out.  In its wisdom, the State then hit me with a surcharge to cover the costs of the benefits paid to people who the State should never have allowed to get benefits in the first place.  My unemployment costs soared.

But as bad as unemployment costs got, they were nothing compared to Workman's Compensation.  Here is the way the game was played:  If you were on unemployment it was understood that you were "ready, willing and able" to work. If you were on Workman's Compensation it meant you were injured and could not work.  So, an employee always went for Unemployment benefits first and when they ran out, suddenly discovered that he was injured, usually with a bad back.  In Detroit, an employer almost never won a Comp case. 

After a period of time, my insurance company put me in what was called the "Assigned Risk" pool.  What that meant in practice was that my Workman's Compensation insurance costs doubled overnight.  Every new employee hired became a huge financial burden not in terms of wages but in terms of Unemployment and Workman's Comp costs.

But perhaps the scariest thing that could happen to an employer was being summoned in front of the Civil Rights Commission, to face charges of "Wrongful Discharge." Here you had to prove a negative, that you did not violate someone's rights.  This happened to me three times.  If the Commission determined you were guilty, which were two out of three for me, the remedy was to pay all of an employee's wages from the time he was separated from your employ to the time of the Commission's finding.  Since the system moved very slowly, an employer could be faced with paying as much as two years' salary.

This was enough to get me and hundreds like me out of Detroit.  I could build a stronger "fort," but I couldn't beat the system.  That, however, wasn't the end of what our government did to Detroit.

The final nail in the coffin came from the Environmental Protection Agency.  It happened sometime in the late 1980's.  This was when by EPA decree, almost everyone associated with manufacturing in the City of Detroit, became a criminal.  People who had worked honestly for years to pay for their building and property woke up one morning to find that because of the EPA, their property was worthless, or worse.  Is it any wonder there are so many abandoned factories?

In Detroit, government distorted the marketplace by replacing truth and honesty with a preconceived social agenda.  Because of this, things only got worse and Detroit is now bankrupt.  Detroit is but the first to fall...there will be more.

Detroit: Empire of Rust

The UAW’s stranglehold turned one of America’s most prosperous cities into a wasteland.
 

By  Matt Patterson 

 

On Detroit’s east side, the abandoned Packard automaking facility looms tomb-like over 40 acres of once-prime real estate, its hollow buildings ringed with mounds of glass and littered with broken beams and broken dreams. The complex once housed busy workers assembling the cars that connected America, and it once hummed and hissed with the sounds of muscle meeting machinery.
But those sounds are long gone, replaced by the wind through the shattered windows; the scurrying of half-starved rats, picking their way through the rubble; the whispering of spray cans as graffiti artists paint the walls with their kisses of bright red and blue; the crackle of the flames that warm the hands of the homeless.
The complex was abandoned by Packard as long ago as the mid 1950s. And though other companies have found intermittent uses for it in the intervening years, it has remained for the most part a symbol of the decline of a once-great metropolis and its once-great industry, as Detroit the city has now followed GM the company into ignominious insolvency. This is the story of how a city came to depend too much on one industry, and how one union took over the industry and therefore the town, killing both in the process.
THE BOOM TIMES
As World War II raged throughout Europe and Asia, factories and plants in America’s heartland became Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy,” churning out the planes, tanks, and guns that eventually drove the Axis powers to submission. At the height of the war, American plants spat out an astonishing eleven planes per hour.
When the fighting stopped, American manufacturers found themselves in a singular and unprecedented position. The industrial capacity of much of the world lay in ruins; the world needed rebuilding; and American factories and workers were uniquely positioned to supply that demand.
And so America prospered. And the cities that housed America’s industry especially prospered. In fact, as Steve Schifferes wrote for the BBC in 2007, “in the 1950s the Detroit area had the highest median income, and highest rate of home ownership, of any major U.S. city.”
But already in these boom times there were hints of the decay that lurked decades down the road. The force that would help propel Detroit into prosperity would also, in the longer term, prove the instrument of its demise. That force was the United Auto Workers union.
The UAW had, like other labor organizations, observed a wartime truce with captains of industry at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt. But it lost no time in agitating as soon as the guns fell silent: In November 1945, a mere three months after V-J Day, the union led a 113-day strike against General Motors known as the Great Postwar Strike, demanding and securing significant wage increases.
The industry could afford these higher labor costs in the decade following the war. Factories were bursting; Eisenhower would soon expand the nation’s highway system as never before, helping to create America’s insatiable car culture. According to Pulitzer-nominated historian James Stuart Olson, “there were 25.8 million registered cars in 1945. . . . By 1955 the number of registered automobiles exceeded 52 million.”
Americans became car addicts and Detroit our dealer. In addition to the Big Three that Americans are familiar with today, back then a variety of smaller automakers existed to fill America’s growing appetite for the road, including Bobbi-Kar, the Keller Motor Corporation, and Packard.
The Packard company was founded in Warren, Ohio, in 1899 by brothers James and William Packard. In 1903, the growing company relocated to Detroit into facilities designed by legendary industrial architect Albert Kahn. By the 1920s, Packard had used its Detroit plant — widely known as the most advanced of its kind — to dominate the luxury-car market in the United States. The 3.5-million-square-foot Packard complex employed an estimated 36,000 to 40,000 workers at the height of its production in the 1940s, or roughly 2 percent of the city’s entire population.
REUTHER’S ARMY
Riding the explosion of automobiles’ popularity was the United Auto Workers. Formed in 1935 by disgruntled members of the American Federation of Labor, with the help of legendary labor leader Walter Reuther, the UAW successfully organized General Motors in 1937 after its infamous 44-day sit-down strike. GM had little choice but to recognize the UAW — by the end of January that year more than 125,000 workers had shut down 50 GM plants. (Crippling a company that employed thousands of people at the height of the Great Depression, when over 14 percent of Americans couldn’t find work, is surely a triumph of avarice over ethics.)
After the fall of GM, the UAW marched to Chrysler, where it staged a similarly spectacular coup; in March of that same year, 17,000 workers went on strike at Chrysler’s nine Detroit plants. And just like GM, Chrysler capitulated, agreeing to recognize the UAW and agreeing to a host of other demands, including a general wage increase and seniority rights. Ford held out the longest, but inevitably waved the white flag in 1941.
It had taken the UAW a mere four years to seize and occupy the major players of the American auto industry.
After the war, automakers competed for the dollars and loyalty of the returning GIs who were starting their families. In 1949 General Motors and Ford engaged in a price war, each wanting to get as many Americans as possible into the habit of buying its brand. Smaller companies like Packard, which had been in decline since the end of the war, found it hard to compete, especially given the higher costs and decreased flexibility that unionization inflicted on them. Unlike the giants, these small manufacturers operated on a razor-thin profit margin and had less capacity to absorb the demands that labor leaders made upon them. As James Arthur Ward relates in his book The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company, on June 17, 1948, the UAW led a strike, closing Packard’s Detroit plant for half a day. But this wasn’t enough for the union leaders: They also organized a walkout at the Bendix brake plant, cutting off Packard’s supply and forcing it to shut down for an entire week. Later that same year, guards at the UAW-organized Briggs Manufacturing plant also went on strike, once again cutting off Packard’s access to necessary parts, leaving the company no choice but to shut down for two entire weeks.
In other words, at a crucial time in the company’s history, when returning GIs were driving up demand and its larger competitors were slashing prices, Packard was sabotaged on multiple fronts by the UAW.
And the blows kept coming. Though Packard’s financial situation continued to deteriorate, the UAW led 8,000 workers on strike in August 1950, demanding higher wages and pensions. The strike lasted two weeks, and Packard had no choice but to make concessions — concessions that cost the company an additional $9 million per year, at a time when it could ill afford such expenditures.
In a desperate attempt to remain financially viable, Packard merged with Studebaker Corporation in 1954. Even though the new Packard-Studebaker became the fourth-largest auto company in the nation, this wasn’t enough to save the new entity. In 1956, it shut down its Detroit plant. Packard was gone for good, and the union had unwittingly killed it.
AN OPEN WOUND
So what has become of Packard’s vast mini-metropolis since the company abandoned it over half a century ago?
Did another company swoop in and snap up valued real estate, utilizing its productive capacity in order to boost its own (and the city’s) fortunes? Did the city purchase the land and turn it into a center for culture and public gathering, the way Athens did in 1999 when it converted its old gas factory into a performance and exhibition space?
No. Sadly. (How ironic that the Greek capital could serve as an example to the capital of the American auto industry.)
Instead, a variety of occupants have leased and used some parts of the plant, creating for the city a tangle of legal disputes over ownership rights and property taxes. But most of the complex has sat unoccupied and decaying, its hollow halls proving irresistible to the people and pathologies that thrive at civilization’s edge. As the president of the Detroit Fire Fighters Association, Dan McNamara, recently put it, the abandoned facility is “open to all kinds of people just doing illegal activities.” Especially arson.
Deputy Fire Commissioner Edsel Jenkins estimates that the abandoned Packard plant is the target of arsonists so often that it costs Detroit about $1 million each year to put the fires out. During the first nine months of 2012, firefighters were sent to the plant 59 times.
One ex-commissioner refused to allow his men to fight a fire from the inside, so unsound had the structure become. Jenkins questions the wisdom of sending men there at all: “When the firefighters respond to that scene, they’re just pouring water on a structure that has no useful purpose today. And with the budget constraints today, we have a lot less fire apparatus on the streets. So when these engine companies, truck companies, the rescue squads, chiefs, respond to the Packard Plant, they’re taking protection away from the other businesses, civilians and visitors in this city who could actually use our services.”
It’s not only firefighters who are at risk — the homeless, drug dealers, graffiti artists, and hordes of roaming and listless youth are omnipresent in this structural nightmare. As McNamara put, anyone who goes in to “[play] around, chipping something out of a wall or off a column or a truss, . . . they’re going to drop that building on top of their heads.” He concludes: “[The plant is] a threat. It’s an immediate, an imminent threat to public safety.”
And it’s not only the crumbling walls that menace the public. Predators are attracted to this habitat of helplessness, like lions to a Serengeti watering hole. Photographers and tourists (some come to chronicle the elaborate and dazzling graffiti, others are just curious) have been routinely and brutally beaten, found their cars stolen, and even been robbed at gunpoint while exploring one of America’s most notorious modern ruins. One victim who was jumped while admiring this uncurated gallery in 2012 said, “I am lucky to be here and haven’t stopped thinking about what could have happened.”
And then there is the refuse. The plant looks like trash, so citizens of Detroit treat it like trash, routinely using the grounds as a convenient landfill. Suffice to say, the results — used mattresses, burnt-out cars, discarded food and medicines — comprise a real and present danger to public health.
FORECLOSING THE FUTURE
After allowing the vast complex to stand rotting in its midst for half a century, in May 2013 the county finally took possession of the rubble. It will be put on auction in September; the county is asking for an opening bid of $975,000, the sum total of back property taxes owed. In other words, the city puts no value on the land itself — the taxman just wants his due.
And no wonder. The city has been for decades in a fiscal, demographic, and social death spiral. Thanks in large part to pension obligations driven by its unionized public workforce, by 2013 the city was carrying billions in debt. Unfortunately, the tax base needed to fund these huge obligations has been eroding for decades — from 1950 to 2012, the population fell from 1.85 million to a mere 700,000. By 2010, the decline was so marked that Mayor (and former NBA great) Dave Bing proposed the unthinkable — the bulldozing of nearly one-fourth of the city. As Business Insider reported at the time: “Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a rapidly dwindling tax base, Detroit finds itself having to make some really hard choices. . . . The true unemployment rate for those still living in Detroit is estimated to be somewhere around 45 to 50 percent, and poverty and desperation have become entrenched everywhere. In many areas of the city, only one or two houses remain occupied on an entire city block. . . . And yes, it is true that there are actually some houses in Detroit that you can buy for just one dollar. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots.”
The mayor claimed the city had no choice but to let its abandoned properties go. “There is just too much land and too many expenses for us to continue to manage the city as we have in the past,” he said. “If we don’t [bulldoze], this whole city is going to go down.” (The mayor’s attitude was eerily reminiscent of the famous alleged quotation from an unnamed U.S. officer in the village of Ben Tre during the Vietnam War, who claimed American forces had to “destroy the town to save it.”)
Not coincidentally, the long and torturous decades of Detroit’s decline coincided with the entrenchment of UAW power. A 2008 report by James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation found that the average UAW worker at the Big Three earned $75 an hour, including wages and benefits, “$25 to $30 an hour more than American workers at [non-unionized] Japanese auto plants.” Union contracts also allowed “surplus workers” — in other words, workers who were no longer needed — to collect nearly full salary while they remained idle.
In the light of this Mad Hatter math, the 2009 bankruptcy of General Motors was all but inevitable.
EATEN ALIVE FROM BOTH ENDS
Can the UAW really be blamed for the sorry fate of Packard — and Detroit?
Yes, to a large extent. It’s not certain that Packard would have survived had the union not been such a financial and logistical burden. But there is no question that the UAW made it more, not less, difficult for Packard to weather the Sturm und Drang of the business cycle.
In the Eighties and Nineties, when foreign-owned companies like Toyota were entering the U.S. market in large numbers, UAW contracts bound and gagged the Big Three with costs and obligations that fatally restricted their ability to innovate and compete, just as the UAW had done to Packard against the Big Three in the Fifties.
This absence of flexibility has proven disastrous for the workers that the UAW claims to champion: As we wrote for Forbes, since the turn of the 21st century, “the Detroit-based auto companies have shed 200,000 jobs — three-fifths of [their] hourly workforce.”
And the dying industry has dragged its home city into the grave along with it. On Thursday, July 18, Detroit — suffocating under more than $18 billion in debt — filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, making it the largest city in U.S. history to go bust. The Motor City had at last run out of gas.
True, the causes of Detroit’s decline have been many and varied. Corruption and bad management played a role, for sure. But between the UAW’s crippling its prime and vital industry, and its unionized public-sector workforce demanding larger and larger shares of the public purse, the Motor City has been eaten alive from both ends by . . . what? How to characterize this thing that has consumed one of our great cities?
After World War II, the Japanese people struggled to come to terms with the fact that two of their cities had been erased from the map. Japanese filmmakers channeled the nightmares of all Nippon with their films featuring giant monsters wakened by nuclear explosions, monsters like Godzilla, that then proceeded to lay waste to their cities.
At the time when Japan lay in ruins and its people were imagining monsters to explain their supine and smoldering existence, Detroit was a shining and bursting example of America’s industrial might.
Now Detroit lies broke and broken. But no imaginary monsters or foreign bombs are needed to explain its demise. Only three letters are needed:
UAW.