Michigan Reality Check.

I talked to my brother in Michigan today. He’s lived in Grand Rapids for thirty five years or so. Here’s the reality of the state that bases the auto industry. As I’ve said before, Michigan was a good place to grow up. The economy was humming and it was hoppin’ and poppin’. My brother told me that Muskegan, a city on Lake Michigan a little southwest of Grand Rapids, has an unemployment rate at twenty-two to twenty-five percent, and that up where my mother lives it’s near fifty. These are depression levels already and the auto industry hasn’t totally collapsed yet.

But if it’s up to a cabal of southern senators the American auto industry will collapse. These most vocal senators against making loans to the auto industry, who are ubiquitous in the media, every one of them has a foreign car plant in their state. Even in my own state of Georgia, where both of my Republican senators were filibustering against the auto companies, KIA is moving in. They even gave the governor a KIA to drive. It is obvious these senators are acting as agents for foreign corporations in an economic war against the remaining three American automakers. If the American companies go under, it is these foreign companies which stand to gain. These senators are economic traitors to the United States of America and to the American working people.

I called both of my senators 800 numbers Friday and chewed out the person on the other end of the line. I couldn’t believe the line of garbage they were trying to hand me. Then I saw this memo that was circulated among Republicans. This whole thing is about busting the UAW. It’s a union busting exercise. They want to take down the union. This confirms that the line they were giving me over the phone was utter garbage – a pack of lies. Not only do they not represent my interests as a working person, they have so little respect that they will literally bullshit me over the phone.

Every one of the states got these companies to build a plant in their respective states by giving all kinds of concessions, tax breaks, and most of all, assurance of help in keeping the unions out. They say Alabama shelled out what amounted to two hundred thousand dollars per job to get the Mercedes plant. On top of that, the state bought twenty five hundred of the first vehicles to roll off the line – the whole state fleet. That’s Shelby’s state. The loan would amount to five thousand dollars per job.

Never forget that it is so-called conservative, supply side, low tax, Republican, Reaganomic economics that has brought us to the brink of depression – and as I wrote in the opening paragraph, a very real depression already in Michigan. What is this type of economics? It is an economic system whereby wealth is transferred from the poor to the already wealthy. It is a system where the top one-tenth of one percent get as much as the entire bottom half, and it’s not enough!

Oh yeah, my brother told me that his wife, president of the Michigan Diabetic Association who has even testified before Congress, lost her job of some twenty years at the hospital in a cost cutting move. It's starting to get ugly out there.

This is good: 7 Myths About Detroit Automakers

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