Neil Young's new "Living with War" album

If you haven't heard the beautiful sweet voice of Neil Young on his album "Living with War" yet, he is offering it free on the web at
Living with War

Let's work for bringing univeral broadband access to Benzie County

MichiganTownships.org is offering one day detailed workshops on how other Michigan communities are doing this, and all the information needed to explore options for our own community. If we could do this, just think of the business, education, and networking possibilities we would provide for ourselves, while attracting more jobs and opportunities in Benzie County.

One workshop fairly close to us is:
Tuesday, June 13 The Fetzer Center Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo (269) 387-3232
From I-94: Take Exit 74, which is U.S.-131, and head north. Take exit 36A and turn right onto Stadium Drive. Turn left onto Howard Street and right onto West Michigan Avenue. Stay in the right lane as you go around the traffic circle and merge onto Rankin Avenue (which is on your left as you approach the circle). Turn right onto Business Court and left into the large parking lot. The lot immediately to your right (Lot 72F) is the Fetzer Center parking area. Parking is free for those attending this MTA event. is available in Lot 8, and the meeting will be held on level 2.

For a complete registration form and schedule of the workshop contents look under events at:
Broadband for Benzie

Smithsonian sells our historical film rights to Showtime

Although 75% of the Smithsonians budget comes from our federal taxes ($644 million this year), the Smithsonian claims its declining revenues are placing collections and buildings at risk, and that they therefore are justified in executing a private contract with private funds to assist their budget.
Why is this a problem?
As part of the agreement, any commercial documentary films that rely substantially on the Smithsonian archives or its various experts must first be offered to Showtime for broadcast.

Showtime is given first right for any documentary film relying substantially on Smithsonian archives or experts. Documentary film makers already pay for rights to film used in their work. Now, if Showtime thinks they can make a buck on an idea, they get first go at it.

As quoted on EconomistsView and NYT.
"Ken Burns, the New Hampshire-based director of such celebrated multipart history documentaries as The Civil War and Jazz, said by cell phone from the National Mall on Wednesday that he could see "hundreds of potential problems" in this arrangement, including the danger that "independent filmmakers could now have their good ideas cherry-picked by Showtime."
But Burns, a movie-lover as well as a prolific moviemaker, does feel insulted: "Can you imagine the hue and cry if print historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough were told they couldn't do research at the Smithsonian unless they cleared their book with a certain publisher?"

Gibney, Burns and other filmmakers, as well as librarians, historians, academics and media producers, have signed a letter to Lawrence M. Small, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, calling for the Smithsonian to take three immediate actions: 1. reveal the terms of its contract with Showtime (and any other contracts that restrict use of the Smithsonian's collection); 2. annul this contract because it was brokered without an open and competitive process; and 3. conduct hearings on the issue of limiting access to the institution and its staff."
Privitization of Public Archives is not the answer.

15 New Ideas

E. J. Dionne Jr., columnist at the Washington Post, makes some good points this morning worth exploring.

He quotes Michael Tomasky in the current issue of the American Prospect. The right's message of "radical individualism" should be replaced by Democrats with politics for the "common good". Dionne adds to this the need to include, along with the idea of citizen sacrifice, that people band together if self-interest is dedicated to a common project
For "project ideas he refers us to the recent list of 15 New Ideas put forward by the Center for American Progress.
These follow....download the complete,expanded version at
15 New Ideas

Offering Opportunity for All: Build an opportunity nation where every hard-working person—regardless of background—can realize his or her dreams through education, decent work and fair pay.

• Create a Fair and Simple Tax Code
• Extend Learning Time
• Improve Teacher Quality
• Increase College Opportunity and Completion
• Reduce Debt Burdens by Fighting Abusive Lending
• Strengthen Pensions: Universal 401(k)

Promoting a Just and Secure World: Use America’s awesome strength to bring the world together, not pull it apart.

• Use Integrated Power
• Strengthen the All-Volunteer Army
• Grow the World’s Energy Future
• Invest in Global Equity

Building Strong Communities: Reawaken America’s conscience—our sense of shared and personal responsibility—to build healthy, vibrant communities.

• Provide Universal Health Coverage
• Use Health Care to Strengthen the U.S. Auto Industry
• Provide Comprehensive Worker Adjustment Assistance

Creating Open and Fair Government: Reform government so that it is of, by, and for the people: open, effective, and committed to the common good.

• Bring Government Decisionmaking into the Information Age
• Impose New Rules to Curb Abuses of Congressional Power

Gender equality as a national goal. The Swedish model

A look at the small numbers of women in congress, on boards, and other influencial bodies in the US is always shocking when seen in a photograph of members. In contrast Sweden instituted a national policy of equality between women and men, beginning in 1980. Since 1995 each county in Sweden has a regional expert on gender equality.
"The main task of these experts is to promote mainstreaming of a gender perspective into all policy fields and support efforts to achieve equality between women and men in their regions."
The general view in Sweden favors gender equality....
"Swedish gender equality policy is fundamentally concerned with the ability of each individual to achieve economic independence through gainful employment. Just as important are measures to enable both women and men to combine jobs with parenthood. It must also be possible for everybody, regardless of gender, to develop and participate in all aspects of community life according to their capabilities."
Family law is directed towards this goal....
"Among important aims of Swedish family law are to put women and men on an equal footing in marriage and to protect the financially weaker party in the event of divorce or death. The objective of certain other statutes, such as the Code of Parenthood, the Parental Leave Act and certain provisions of the National Insurance Act, is to lay the foundations of shared responsibility for the home and children. The Education Act and the Higher Education Act contain provisions on equality between women and men in schools and universities/colleges, respectively."
This is a new overall approach, not piecemeal unconnected efforts.
"The term "gender mainstreaming" is used internationally to describe this new approach, which implies a shift from special isolated measures to achieve gender equality towards broader measures affecting day-to-day political and administrative work"
The overall structure covers...
Power and influence
Education
Gender equality in working life
Occupational structure
Gender equality within the family
Parental benefits and child care
Men and gender equality
Violence against women
Trafficking in women and prostitution
Girls and young women at risk of "honour-related violence"
The remarkable record of voting that follows demonstrates the results of gender mainstreaming and contrasts greatly with our own. Problems still exist, but are recognized and worked on. Compared to the US, the Swedish women participate and influence all aspects of society. Perhaps if we start locally, with village, township and county government, we might contribute to efforts to promote equality on boards, commissions, and other decision making bodies extending to the national level.

"Women in Sweden have had the right to vote since 1921. The electoral turnout has traditionally been high, around 90 per cent. Electoral participation has seen a decline, however, in the last two elections, to roughly 80 per cent. Women tend to vote to a slightly higher degree than men.

The 2002 elections in Sweden resulted in an increase in the proportion of women in Parliament. Of the 349 members of Parliament, 45.3 per cent are women, compared to 43.6 per cent after the 1998 election and around 40 per cent after the 1994 election. The number of women in Parliament has more than tripled since 1971. That is due to a firm conviction among all political parties concerning the need to increase the number of women candidates. The largest political party, the Social Democrats, practiced a systematic alteration between women and men in their lists of constituency candidates in the 1994, 1998 and 2002 elections.

The most important political work in Parliament is done by its standing committees, and 44 per cent of the seats on these committees are held by women. Women hold a majority in several of these committees.
There are eleven male ministers and eleven female ministers in the Government (January 2004). Ten women (out of a total of 26) are State secretaries, the rank immediately below cabinet minister.
Conditions in the municipalities and county councils are similar to those in Parliament. Well over 40 per cent of municipal councillors are women. Representation on the county councils, whose responsibilities include health and medical services, is even higher.

Although Swedish women are admittedly present at virtually all levels of the decision-making hierarchy, they tend to be allotted fewer influential appointments and to do work which is not always in the public eye. In recent years, both Government and Parliament have therefore focused on the low representation of women in indirectly elected bodies. Active efforts in recent years have raised the number of women in public boards at national level from 16 per cent in 1986 to 47 per cent in 2001.

Despite Swedish women's relatively strong position in directly elected bodies, men still dominate nearly all policy-making bodies. This also goes for senior positions in employer and employee organisations as well as in political and other associations. In senior management positions in the private sector, the percentage of women is even lower. In order to stimulate an even gender distribution in the private sector, a Business Leadership Academy was formed in 1995 at the initiative of the Government and representatives of the private sector, with the aim of developing the role of men and women managers.
In recent years, the Government has focused attention on the representation of women and men on the boards of major private companies. There are very few women on the boards of these companies and serving as corporate CEO's.
In January 2002, the Government appointed a study commission on women in leading positions in the business sector. The commission was entrusted with documenting the participation of women at the top management and board level in the Swedish business sector. It was also asked to summarise the state of knowledge in the field of research on gender and organisations concerning the obstacles and structures that determine developments. According to the Commission's report "Male Dominance in Transition," submitted in March 2003, male dominance in corporate executive suites and boardrooms persists, although there has been some progress since 1994. If employee representatives are excluded, the proportion of men on the boards of companies with private forms of ownership and at least 200 employees was 98 per cent in 1993, but had declined to 92 per cent by 2002.

In the spring of 2003, the Minister for Industry and Trade initiated further efforts to present concrete proposals to speed up the process of recruiting a higher proportion of women to the boards and top managements at private companies. The Government invited private companies to roundtable discussions on these matters and invited them to make suggestions for steps to be taken.

Their suggestions and the Commission report were sent to various organisations for official comment. In late 2003 the resulting comments were published and a seminar brought together business and government representatives. Based on the official comments and the views voiced at this seminar, the Government will decide whether further action is warranted.

Sweden

Reply from Carl Levin

...see new Comment in March archives
Politics is convoluted.....but interesting

States are moving toward single-payer health insurance

Our federal government is not able to move directly into universal single-payer health care. To get to universal coverage, the states should lead the way, and they are. Massachusetts has been in the news lately, but true single payer plans are being explored in at least 18 states. Most use a "single-payer" model. These states include: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
"This approach consolidates all payers - Medicare, Medicaid, state programs and private insurers - into a single administrative structure, with the state (or federal) government handling payments....."

States Lead the Way

Thus far in 2006, at least seven states are considering universal health care systems and seven other states have commissioned studies to look at the possibility of such a system."  
Tables listing all bills, and their status, and commissioned studies appear in a table at this site:
Universal Coverage Bills

Let's get onboard in Michigan!

Follow-up on necessity of corporate regulation

Here is an excerpt from an article "explaining" why executive pay was more than 431 to 1 in 2004, up 10 times the ratio of 42-1, 25 years earlier.
Challenges of Aligning Pay and Executive Performance
Harvard Business School
Harvard article

"Q: So there's no automatic alignment between societal value creation and executive holdings of company equity?

A: Correct. There is no perfect alignment between societal value creation and stock or option incentives. Turning managers into owners is an important first step. Owners really do think about their assets differently, and work hard to find new and creative ways to maintain the value of those assets and to raise their value over time. So despite the current scandals, we need to be careful not to turn our backs on a system that has lots of virtues. Having said that, when managers have significant equity stakes, they not only have incentives to raise share value in ways that benefit society; they also have incentives to raise shareholder value in ways that don't benefit society. For example, they are more tempted to take advantage of monopoly power. They may be more tempted to pollute the environment. And they may even be tempted, as already discussed, to fool their own shareholders if the equity component of pay is not designed in the appropriate way.
So equity-based pay is a great place to start. But giving executives ownership stakes doesn't mean that you are finished. Regulators have a role. Tax authorities have a role. Boards have a role. And executives themselves have a role. In fact, all these constituencies have a role to play in providing the appropriate checks and balances, to make sure that the fuel in the rocket motivates value-creating behavior, and not value-destroying behavior."

Examples of regulatory efforts in this direction are found at:
Corporate Policy
"Executive Excess 2005, the latest report on CEO pay by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy reveals that the ratio of CEO:Worker pay among the S&P 500 was still an average 431-to-1 in 2004 (not including certain forms of stealth compensation) - ten times higher than the 42-to-1 ratio that it stood at 25 years ago.
A precedent-setting limit on CEO pay was inserted into Section 331 of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 — a bill pushed through Congress by credit card companies. The otherwise wretched piece of legislation explicitly limits executive pay, for the first time ever in federal law, to a fixed multiple of the pay that goes to average workers. Under the new provision, no company in bankruptcy can award its executives any retention bonus or severance pay that runs over ten times the average bonus or severance awarded to regular employees in the previous year."
Regulatory solutions can be done!
For other regulatory solutions, see site above.

Greed and Good by Sam Pizzigati is THE book on CEO compensation and corporate reform. (Available at the Beulah Public Library) An absorbing, compelling read.

How did corporations gain more power than the citizens who created them?

This quote written by William Kalle Lasn and excerpted from Culture Jam on
Third World Traveler
explains the history of how we got into this pickle in the first place. If we created this monster, we should be able to regulate it back to its original purpose. Not an easy task, but think of the problems we could solve...corruption, monopolies, buying politicians, all the consequenses of greed that a necessarily amoral corporation whose sole purpose is to provide profits to its shareholders, must employ in an environment where anything goes.

Here is the excerpt: (go to Third World's site for complete history)
"In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but subordinate role. The people -- not the corporations -- were in control..........The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. Corporations became the masters and keepers of business. President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned that "corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed.".........Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech......This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same powers as private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution -- that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates -- had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it "could not be supported by history, logic or reason." One of the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole idea of democratic government."

The growing deficit would be in surplus if Bush tax cuts to the wealthy had not been enacted

Contrary to the administration's theory that those tax cuts for the wealthy fuel the economy, a recent report shows they are the largest contributor to the deficit, and we would be back into surplus if they had not been enacted.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Jan 31,2005
"The new Congressional Budget Office budget projections released today show that the nation faces a fourth consecutive year of substantial budget deficits. Some seek to portray runaway domestic spending or growth in the costs of entitlement programs as the primary cause of the shift in recent years from sizeable surpluses to large deficits. Such a characterization is incorrect. In 2005, the cost of tax cuts enacted over the past four years will be over three times the cost of all domestic program increases enacted over this period.
The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005.  In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for nearly half or 48 percent of this $539 billion in increased costs. Increases in program spending make up the other 52 percent and have been primarily concentrated in defense, homeland security, and international affairs."

An excellent blog imagining what the Founding Fathers Would Say about the actions of the Bush Administration

A reader pointed out this excellent essay to be found at Glenn Greenwald's blog
What would the Founders say?
Using quotes from the Founding Fathers, his contributor asks questions such as "We are told we should trust that the President will not abuse the unchecked powers he claims to have." And answers with a quote and link to Thomas Jefferson's
" Bill for a More General Diffusion of Knowledge" (1778)
Well worth reading and remembering.
I was unable to link direct to the essay, just look to the essays in the left column and click on the essay link.

Let's discuss the SBT (single business tax)

Governor Granholm has vetoed the repeal of the SBT, unless revenues are found to replace it. I agree wholeheartedly.

It is interesting that in 2005, Michigan has been ranked in the top 5 states that are the "friendliest states for small business".
SBSC


Another Bureau of Economic Analyses, Department of Commerce and Tax Foundation calculation shows our total state local tax burden to be less than the national average in 2005.

DeVos, and the Republicans say we have one of the worst tax climates for small business, yet other studies speak of all the other elements of importance to starting a business in a given state.

On the Tax Foundation site which supports dismantling the business taxes on principle, they concede that others do not agree.....this quote is from their site

"Fisher finds support from Robert Tannenwald of the Boston Federal Reserve who argues that taxes are not as important to businesses as public expenditures. Tannenwald compares twenty-two states by measuring the after-tax rate of return to cash flow of a new facility built by a representative firm in each state. This very different approach attempts to compute the marginal effective tax rate (METR) of a hypothetical firm and yields results that make taxes appear trivial.
Tannenwald asserts that “while interjurisdictional rivalry is inducing states to cut taxes, demand is rising for state and local services such as education, health care, and law enforcement.” He concludes that business taxes exert only a small, highly uncertain effect on capital spending. States may be more likely to stimulate their economy by enhancing public services valued by business (Tannenwald 1996)."
Tax Foundation

What is needed for any state to stay fiscally healthy and attract business is an educated work force--Granholm has just signed her initiative for mandatory subjects in highschool, including math, science, the arts, social studies, and language. (It is unbelievable that only civics has been a requirement for graduation). Those high paying manufacturing jobs are not coming back, but many new jobs will be available for the states that educate their workforce and enhance
health care, law enforcement, and the pleasant living environment that are often mentioned as important for attracting business.

The fastest growth in industries nationally from 2004-2014 is projected to be
Home health care services 69.5%
Management, scientific, and technical consulting services 60.5%
Employment services 45.5%
Offices of physicians 37.0%
Colleges, universities, and professional schools, private 34.3%
Bureau of Labor Statistics

These are all non-outsourcing jobs, and require a workforce prepared for the future.

So what do you think would best improve the business climate locally and statewide? And what sorts of jobs do you see growing successfully Up North?