The things in my head go 'round and 'round

MLW and The Princess were just out in the kitchen making cookies. The sound of them talking is balm to my soul. Just talking about nothing in particular. That sound is the absolute sound of home.

It takes me back to my home as I was growing up. The sound of people who love one another talking in the kitchen while making meals, or cookies, whatever. Talking about life, sharing with one another.

As much as this season gets to me, moments like this are what keep me sane.

Namaste.

This from the Detriot Free Press:

With aid approved, state readies for a cultural shift

BY JOHN GALLAGHER • FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER December 22, 2008

Having avoided a chaotic bankruptcy, the Detroit Three and, by extension, the broader Michigan community must now carry out deep new cuts in the economic fiber of the state.

“There’s going to be fewer factories, fewer salaried and hourly workers, lower compensation, fewer brands, fewer models, fewer dealers,” Dana Johnson, senior economist with Dallas-based Comerica Inc., said of the near-term outlook. “Everything is going to continue to be rapidly downsized, just not in as chaotic a process if they had not gotten the financing.”

Given the importance of the auto industry to Michigan, the restructuring inevitably will bleed over into a broader cultural shift in how Michiganders see themselves and their economic life, said Doug Rothwell, president of the corporate leadership group Detroit Renaissance.

“The culture is the thing we’ve got to deal with the most, and that’s the toughest to deal with,” Rothwell said. He cited attitudes toward education, race and geographic boundaries among things that influence Michigan’s economic outlook — “all the stuff that’s tied us up in knots for years.”

“That’s the stuff we’ve got to work through and get through if we’re going to be competitive in the future,” he said.

Certainly employees of the Detroit Three felt the anxiety as much as the relief Friday at avoiding Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Bryan Mahlmeister, a marketing research manager for General Motors Corp., said Friday that he and his fellow workers have lots of questions about how the restructuring will take place.

“You just can’t make all these changes and cuts to all these programs and get rid of brands without eliminating more people,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of angst in the first quarter just to see how things go.”

More declines predicted

Indeed, economist Johnson forecasts a further decline in Michigan’s labor force in 2009 as the auto restructuring and national recession bite deep. He projects a loss of another 30,000 jobs in the automotive industry next year and 60,000 nonautomotive jobs — “another year of recession.”

The relief felt over the federal auto loans, therefore, must be tempered by the unpleasant reality of what those loans mean. “There was never a happy outcome,” Johnson said. “There was just a less-bad outcome.”

Broadly speaking, Michigan’s economic and cultural life has been defined for decades by a beneficence bestowed by GM, Ford Motor Co., Chrysler and their suppliers. That corporate largesse included everything from company-wide shutdowns during the Christmas holidays to superlative blue-collar wages and benefits and bountiful support to local charities.

That culture legacy has been under strain for years as Detroit Three market shares contracted year by year.

Though more diversified than a generation ago, Michigan’s auto legacy still weighs on the labor market. The state has seen eight consecutive years of job loss and over the past year has led or been near the top among states in unemployment, which hit 9.6% last month.

Visible cracks in metro Detroit’s self-image showed up in decreased giving to the annual United Way campaign, the dwindling of automotive payrolls, and, as recently as last week, the canceling of the 2009 Grand Prix auto races on Belle Isle for insufficient sponsorships.

Though wounded, the Detroit Three continue to influence all aspects of local life and will for decades to come.

At Andiamo restaurant in the Renaissance Center, Mike Nowinski, the operating partner, said he had been watching CNN daily in hopes the auto companies would get the federal money needed to survive.

“GM is our lifeblood here and also for the country, I think. If this bridge did not come through, this country would be in big trouble,” he said Friday, shortly after President George W. Bush announced the federal loans.

A new definition

Inevitably, though, Detroit and Michigan may come to define themselves less by three giant corporations and more by middle-market firms, as most other states do, Rothwell said.

After all, nonautomotive firms like software giant Compuware Corp., mortgage company Quicken Loans, and the pizza-sports-entertainment empire Ilitch Holdings have emerged as new corporate leaders in recent years.

“Clearly the corporate culture and the makeup and structure of the corporate community is changing before our eyes right now,” Rothwell said.

And many efforts are afoot to add well-paying research jobs to the state economy, even as Michigan strives to remain the nation’s automotive brain center not only for the domestic automakers but also for companies such as Toyota and Nissan, which have technical centers there. For example, the University of Michigan announced last week it would buy the facilities Pfizer has vacated in Ann Arbor and would work to add 2,000 research jobs over the next decade.

But just how much Detroit and Michigan must change remains a subject of sharp debate. Johnson scoffed at the notion that Michigan needs to model itself after, say, Alabama, a mostly nonunion, low-tax, lower-wage state distrustful of government.

“Some adjustments in attitudes required? Yeah,” Johnson said. “But a wholesale remaking of the business culture in Michigan? I don’t think so.”

Rothwell, too, suggested a different model than Alabama for Michigan to emulate: North Carolina. The mid-Atlantic state has lost a lot of its previous industry but has built a progressive reputation as a haven for high technology.

“It’s a reasonable, attainable goal for Michigan,” Rothwell said. “It’s probably going to take us a decade or more to get there. We probably started late on this path. But nevertheless, there are a lot of initiatives in place that are moving us in that direction.”

Johnson agreed.

“I think Michigan will figure out a way to do what Pittsburgh did, what New England did,” he said. “Both of those areas lost key industries earlier on than Michigan. But they found a way to come back, and Michigan will, too.”

Friday morning came with the Bush Administration throwing a $17.4 billion lifeline to GM and Chrysler.  Ford Motor Company has been restructuring and said that it didn’t need immediate help.

Thank you, President Bush.  Thank you because 2.5 to 3 million folks in Michigan were holding their breath all week.  I could hear the exhale, and following inhale all the way here in Pennsylvania on Friday.

This infusion of cash is not going to stop all of the bleeding.  There will be suppliers who will close because they don’t have the cash reserves to keep going until GM and Chrysler pay their bills.  But for the majority of folks out there, they can see some light at the end of the tunnel.

And hopefully it isn’t another train coming at them.  Both Management and the UAW have to look at what has been given them and make some hard decisions.  Who should get paid what is the first one that needs to be made.  I read somewhere, and I can’t cite it right now but I will later, that Japanese execs make 4-5 times more than their lowest paid employee.  Not here in the US, of course, but in Japan.  US execs make over 100 times their lowest paid employees.  Stop and think about that for a minute.

Everyone likes to have money, and live in a nice house, and do the things that they want to do, when they want to do them.  I know that I do.  But if your company is cash strapped, wouldn’t it be prudent to give in on some salary and benefits rather than not have a job?  Don’t cite the $70-$100 hourly wages being made by UAW members.  It doesn’t happen.  But the point is that both sides of the bargaining table are going to have to pony up to keep Detroit alive.

The UAW always says that Management is the problem, taking all of the cream and leaving them with crumbs.  Management says that the bargaining unit wants blood from a turnip.  Blah, blah, blah.  Both sides need to figure out whether they want to be employed or on the dole.  And they need to figure it out soon, as there is a glut of cars in the market.  New cars that haven’t been sold because very few people who CAN get loans are going to buy from a company going out of business.  And folks like me, who own foreign vehicles , aren’t going to head back to Detroit rolling iron if they can’t make reliable vehicles that don’t last.

Yeah, I drive a toyota as compared to MLW’s Chevy.  Her engine blew at 82,000 miles.  My engine has 256,000 miles on it with only having to replace an EGR valve.  Her heater core had to be replaced at 90,000 miles, all I have had to do to my vehicle is to recharge the AC every couple of years.  Given that kind of performance, what vehicle would you buy?

So.  GM, Chrysler, and the UAW have an opportunity here.  Hopefully they can get beyond themselves and not screw it up.

Namaste.

Pennsylvania finally got a little bit of snow today.  Around 4 inches where we live.

It started as big fluffy flakes.  I was leaving the grocery store after doing my shopping, and saw this big flake fall in front of me.  And then another one as I was unloading the groceries into the bed of the truck.

By the time I got home it was coming down pretty good.  I took Cerebus out into the park behind our house so that she could romp, and I could listen.  Cerebus in not your typical LabraDane.  She doesn’t like water.  If it is raining, she will run up your back to get back inside.  But give her some snow, and watch out.  She gets all playful and wants to romp.

And I just wanted to listen the sound of snow falling.

Rain makes a different sounds when it falls, depending on the amount of rain falling.

Snow makes the same sound no matter how much is coming down.  And it isn’t only the muffling of sound that it causes.  It has its own unique sound that it makes when it falls.

And that is the best that I can explain it.  You have to experience it on your own.   You have to stand in the middle of a snow storm, and listen to the sound that snow makes as it falls.

Namaste.

That is an astounding amount of people.

2.5 million people without a job in the stated of Michigan. That is 20% of the estimated 10,000,000 population of that state.

20% of the population unemployed.

So who would be impacted if that happens? No work, no money to spend on gas. Gas stations close. No work, no money to spend on consumer goods. Appliance stores, clothing stores, toy stores, jewelry stores all closed. No work, no money to send your kids to college. Can’t get a student loan without a job. Can’t buy a car, or a house without a job.

Economic apocolypse.

Would the last person out of the state please turn out the lights?

namaste.

GM to temporarily close some plants to slash output

Last Update: 12/12 2:35 pm

NEW YORK (AP) – General Motors Corp. said Friday it will temporarily close 20 factories across North America – including its truck assembly plant in Fort Wayne, Ind. – and make sweeping cuts to its vehicle production as it tries to adjust to dramatically weaker automobile demand.

GM said it will cut 250,000 vehicles from its production schedule for the first quarter of 2009, which includes a cut of 60,000 vehicles announced last week. Normal production would be around 750,000 cars and trucks for the quarter, spokesman Tony Sapienza said.

Many plants will be shut down for the whole month of January, he said, and all told, the factories will be closed for 30 percent of the quarter.

“We’re adjusting pretty dramatically,” spokesman Chris Lee said.

The Fort Wayne plant assembles Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra light-duty trucks.

GM’s Indiana operations also include a casting plant in Bedford and metal stamping plants in Marion and Indianapolis. The automaker said it was still assessing those operations.

The move affects most of GM’s plants in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. During the shutdowns, employees will be temporarily laid off and can apply to receive a portion of their normal pay from the company. They can also apply for state unemployment benefits, Lee said.

GM and nearly all automakers who sell in the U.S. are mired in the worst sales slump in 26 years. GM reported its sales in the U.S. plunged 41 percent in November and are down 22 percent for the first 11 months of the year compared with the same period last year.

Cash-strapped GM is seeking government loans to stay in operation beyond the end of the year. The White House said Friday it may tap into its $700 billion Wall Street bailout fund to help GM and Chrysler stay in business after the Senate blocked a measure to provide $14 billion in immediate loans.

The measure failed in dramatic fashion late Thursday after Senate Republicans balked at passing the bill without more wage and benefit concessions from autoworkers.

Lee said Friday’s production cuts are unrelated to the rescue’s failure and had already been planned.

The entire auto industry has been making massive production cuts recently as it adjusts to the reality of lower automobile demand. Earlier Friday, Honda Motor Co. said it was cutting production in North America by 119,000 vehicles for its fiscal year ending March 31.

That brings Honda’s expected production for its fiscal year to 1.3 million units, a spokesman said.

Auto demand in the U.S., and increasingly around the world, has been hobbled due to the declining economy and the credit squeeze, which has made it more difficult and more costly for some buyers to obtain financing. Industrywide vehicle sales crumbled 37 percent in November, with every major automaker posting giant sales declines.

Lee said GM’s production cuts will be achieved by adding “down weeks” to the schedules at the affected plants. During down weeks, which can be staggered during a given period of time or can come several at once, the plant will not produce anything and employees will be temporary laid off.

“We look at it on a plant-by-plant basis and make decisions regarding their production schedule in terms of market demand, so it’s not a blanket … we look at it plant by plant and make those decisions,” Lee said.

—

AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed to this report.

Another interesting take on what the collapse of the Big 3 Automakers is going to mean to everyone in Michigan, and the nation.

From Mlive.com

Want a gripping reality show? Check out Michigan
Posted by Jo Mathis | The Ann Arbor News December 12, 2008 22:08PM

The news Friday that the $14 billion bailout for the Big Three died in the Senate left me, like most Michiganders, numb.

After tossing $700 billion – just like that – at the fancy folks and criminals on Wall Street, the shortsighted, anti-union, stubborn fat cats in Washington had the nerve to balk at a $14 billion loan to automakers?

Really?

The struggle for survival of the Big Three automakers reminds me of grounding teenagers for a series of grievances. Mistakes were made. You know they need to suffer the consequences. But if you ground them, everybody in the house suffers, too. So because they’re showing promise and progress and a whole lot of people will benefit from their success, of course you send them a lifeline.

So now what? We wait for the Bush administration to take a chunk of Wall Street’s $700 billion and send it our way. And we keep on keeping on.

Back in January, The News printed a letter to the editor from a Whitmore Lake woman who wrote:

Six months ago my life was great, but it was all taken away in an instant when I lost my job last August. By October, I was moving out of the house I was trying to buy on land contract and since November I have been living in my aunt’s basement with my husband and two children.

I remember sitting at work reading about all these “people” who lost their jobs and feeling sorry for them. Now I am one of those “people.” …

I saved a copy of that letter because it was a reminder to not get smug or complacent about anything, including my job. And that was months before the stock market meltdown, when fears of Big Three bankruptcies were real but still remote and before the latest rounds of massive layoffs.

We journalists are experiencing many of the same problems we’ve written about for years: Buyouts. Layoffs. Cutbacks. Downturns.

My friend Sarah just lost her reporting job during a round of layoffs at The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and is staying with me for a few days to get her mind off things.

She’s 38 and talented and has no spouse she can depend on financially until she finds something else. She’s also stuck with a house in a city with a dearth of both jobs and home buyers.

“I’m worried that my life is going to become the same as a nursing home patient: Wake up. Eat. Watch TV. Go to bed,” she said, smiling on the outside, desperate on the inside.

We admit we’ve both had fleeting moments when we wished we were senior citizens comfortably retired and living peacefully on a pension.

Even Sarah’s mother is counting the days until she’s 65 and eligible for Medicare.
When did old age become the holy grail?

It’s further proof that everything’s spinning out of control and the world has gone mad.

And this is why I’m proposing that Hollywood dump its reality shows based in Atlanta and Beverly Hills and on deserted islands and move crews into the state of Michigan right away. Tomorrow.

They want drama and angst? We got ‘em en masse.

Wouldn’t you like to see an insider look at Borders? How about a reality show about Hillary Swank making a movie here? The Zingerman’s staff is a funky, friendly, colorful bunch. I sniff a reality show with the word pastrami in it.

What the heck. The Ann Arbor News newsroom has its share of characters and might make interesting reality show fodder right about now, too. You think I won’t act out a scripted fight with a copy editor or photographer if the price is right (and the lighting’s good)? Think again.

This is survival, baby.

And reality bites.

The much bally-hooed bailout of the Big 3 Automakers has brought attention of the parts of detroit that have been in the background. Its abandoned houses, and factories.

This was written in The Michigan Messenger:

Big Three bailout spotlight reveals Detroit’s decay
By Minehaha Forman 12/12/08 1:12 PM

Now that the Big Three car companies that made Detroit the “Motor City” are reduced to begging for federal life support, a national spotlight is on Detroit’s decaying infrastructure.

On Sunday, Bloomberg.com reported that “General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., and Chrysler LLC are fighting for their lives. Large stretches of Detroit are already dead.”

The article highlighted areas of Detroit that are brimming with natural growth, a mix of urban and rural living. City lots are being recycled back to farms and vacant lots without cultivation are becoming stretches of prairie.

Similar coverage of Detroit’s return to a rural habitat was posted in Michigan Messenger earlier this year.

Both highlighted Detroit’s >urban farming and natural overgrowth in urban decay.

Adding to the more recent national attention was Time.com, which recently published a photo essay, shot in March 2008, of Detroit’s gutted old factories and train station. The photos offer a glimpse of a haunting, abandoned block.

“On many occasions,” said photographer Sean Hemmerle, “I had the feeling I was working in a post-Apocalyptic environment.”

Everyone knows the automotive industry was born in Detroit. Now national news organizations are realizing that it is—and has been for some time—dying here.

Hemmerle said he came to Detroit to take photos of “derelict” buildings as part of a project exploring “how far America has fallen”. He didn’t have to look hard. Leave the immediate downtown area and you’ll see signs of industrial decay. Tall office buildings, factories and historical homes stand slashed and gaping black holes rimmed with sharp broken glass mark the windows. On my street, on the East side of the city close to Eastern Market that was once an industrial community thriving on auto plant employment, there are multiple abandoned buildings, full of rust and still water or ice.

When I first moved from the suburbs to the inner city, I looked at the ruins in shock. I couldn’t believe a First World industrial country could have vast parts of a major city looking that neglected. But after living in Detroit for more than a year, I have come to the point where I often overlook the broken glass, the gutted factories and the piles of ruin and charcoal where there were once houses and factories. Detroiters have been forced to accept the gruesome neglect of city infrastructure or move. Many consider moving out of Detroit as a sign of success.

While some argue that the auto industry will fail without a bailout, a look at Detroit’s corroding infrastructure will tell you the damage cannot be undone by a mere $14 billion.

This was written by Mitch Albom in The Detroit Free Press:

Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing
A few parting words for the senators who squashed the auto rescue

By MITCH ALBOM • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • December 13, 2008

Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.

We have grease on our hands.

You have blood.

Kill the car, kill the country. History will show that when America was on its knees, you lawmakers wanted to cut off its feet. How does this happen in America?

Suddenly, the worker is the problem? Suddenly, unless union members, overnight, drastically slash their wages with a hard deadline, you pull the plug on an industry?

Suddenly, Detroit is the symbol of economic dysfunction? Are you kidding? Have you looked in the mirror lately, Washington?

In a world where banks hemorrhaged trillions in a high-priced gamble called credit derivative swaps that you failed to regulate, how on earth do we need to be punished? In a bailout era where you shoveled billions, with no demands, to banks and financial firms — who created the problem in the first place — why do need to be schooled on how to run a business?

Who is more dysfunctional in business than you? Who blows more money? Who fashions and molds its work based on favors and pork and traded compromises?

At least in the auto industry, if folks don’t like what you make, they don’t have to buy it. In government, even your worst mistakes, we have to live with.

And now Detroit should die with this?
In bed with the foreign automakers

Kill the car, kill the country. Sen. Richard Shelby, Sen. Bob Corker, your names will not be forgotten. It’s amazing how you pretend to speak for America when you are only watching out for your political party, which would love to cripple unions, and your states, which house foreign auto plants.

Corker, you’ve got Nissan there and Volkswagen coming. Shelby, you’ve got Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota. Oh, don’t kid yourself. They didn’t come because you earned their business, a subject on which you enjoy lecturing the Detroit Big Three. No, they came because you threw billions in state tax breaks to lure them.

And now — this is rich — you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?

They cut their salaries.

Or they resign in shame.

When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over the failure of his policies?
Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?

Who are you people?
More money for the lords of Wall Street

There ought to be a law — against the selfishness and hypocrisy our government has demonstrated. The speed with which wheelbarrows of money were dumped at the feet of Wall Street versus the slow noose hung on the auto companies is reprehensible. Some of those same banks we bailed out are now saying they won’t extend credit to auto dealers. Wasn’t that why we gave them the money? To loosen credit?

Where’s your tight grip on those funds, senators? Or do you just enjoy having your hands around blue-collared throats?

No matter what the president does, history will not forget this: At our nation’s most uncertain hour, you stood ready to plunge tens of thousands of families into oblivion. Push them onto public payrolls, unemployment, no health insurance. And you were willing to put our nation’s security at risk — by squashing the American manufacturing we most rely on in times of war.

And why? So you could stand on some phony principle? Crush a union? Play to your base? How is our nation better off today now that you kept $14 billion in the treasury? Are you going to balance the budget with that?

Don’t make us laugh.

Kill the car, kill the country. You tried to slam a stake into the chest of this business, and you don’t even realize how close to the nation’s heart you’re coming. Shame on your pettiness. Shame on your hypocrisy. This is how we behave two weeks before Christmas? Honestly. What has become of this country?

Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. Catch “The Mitch Albom Show” 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760).

Especially Sunday mornings when I don’t have to work. I get to sleep in, which means that I still wake up around 6am and eventually get up around 7.

There is just something about not having to get out of bed when the alarm goes off. It just makes life that much sweeter.

Then a cup of fresh ground, fresh brewed coffee. Boot up the computer, check my sites, and write a couple of posts myself.

Life is good.

And I don’t know why Sunday is so different from any other morning.

It just is.

And I love it.

namaste.