by Rob Smith

On December 12, 2012 Governor Rick Snyder was quoted in the Detroit Free Press as saying that “Michigan is well-positioned for a comeback.” A few days later, for the third year, Forbes Magazine ranked Michigan 47th in Forbes’ Best States for Business and Careers list. In a piece accompanying the ranking Governor Snyder offered up a mess of excuses for why the legislative agenda of which he is so very proud isn’t working. Snyder predicted that the law will improve Michigan’s business climate. We want a comeback. We need a comeback. Folks are praying for a comeback. The lame ducks in Lansing sent, literally, dozens of bills to Snyder during the final week of the 2012 session. Included was a revised emergency manager bill that replaces a similar law rejected last month by voters. Over the past two years he has been in office, Snyder has practiced what he refers to as “positive relentless action.” Some, I’m sure, refer to it as a perpetual psychotic break with reality. Michigan became the 24th state in the U.S. to become a right-to-work state. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Snyder claimed that Big Bidness was on the phone with Michigan Economic Development Authority head Michael Finney asking about bringing their jobs to our fair state. Snyder told reporters: “The phone’s already been ringing at the MEDC since we passed that legislation. People are starting to look at Michigan. It would be premature to name particular companies and stuff, but they are getting more inquiries from people we hadn’t heard of and weren’t looking at us. I spoke with (MEDC President and CEO) Mike Finney yesterday, and he said there’s at least one major opportunity that didn’t have us on the list to say Michigan’s on the list now.”

Mike Finney, if I remember my Ann Arbor SPARK history correctly, is the same guy who stood by while Snyder put out a 2009 annual report that claimed SPARK, under his leadership, had created or retained over 12,000 jobs in Washtenaw County between 2007 and 2009. The Detroit Free Press popped that bubble in 2010 with an investigative piece that revealed $149,000,000 in MEDC funds, including money given to Ann Arbor SPARK, had created fewer than 900 actual jobs between 2007 and 2009. Ann Arbor SPARK, perhaps tired of being spanked by A2Politico, the Free Press and other investigative news sources, last reported in its 2011 Annual Report that it had created 400 jobs. SPARK reported spending over $63 million dollars in public funding, and another $35 million dollars paying for SPARK staff, between 2006-2011 to creating or retaining 10,905 jobs in Washtenaw County.

Adding up the number of “jobs” created in SPARK various annual reports is like trying to piece together slivers of the True Cross. The math is fuzzy beyond belief, and SPARK refuses to release its tax returns to the public, or its audits. According to the latest Annual Report, SPARK got 38 percent of its money from public sources, Ann Arbor’s General Fund, you, me, the local school district, as well as the folks in the county eating cat food this holiday season in order to make the rent. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I don’t have a lot of confidence that anyone from any “major opportunity” called Mike Finney right after Michigan became a right-to-work state. Mike Finney and Rick Snyder have a shared history of misleading the public in order to protect their own hides, and justify the use of public money for crony capitalism.

It has been two years since Governor Snyder was elected on the hope that he would create jobs. How’s that going for us? Unemployment in Michigan is down, so say the data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says in 2010, unemployment in our state was 11.1 percent. Today that figure is 8.9 percent. While fewer people are reporting they’re unemployed, U.S. labor experts believe it’s because hundreds of thousands of chronically under-employed and unemployed people have fled the state, or stopped looking for work. Certainly, Governor Snyder’s move to bounce the state’s poor folks from state-funded social safety net programs after 48 months, total, has contributed to driving out under-employed and unemployed Michigan residents. The legislative agenda of the Michigan GOP has been the gentrification of Michigan coupled with economic apartheid aimed at the state’s poorest residents.

According to the most recent U.S. Census, Michigan lost population. This also explains why poverty indicators in our state just won’t stop flashing red. Homelessness is up. Childhood poverty is up, since Mr. Snyder took office. Food insecurity is up, as well. In our state 20 percent of children don’t have enough to eat. The number of Michigan residents whose homes have been foreclosed on is up, as well. While unemployment is down from 14 percent in 2009 to 8.9 percent, Michigan currently has the sixth highest rate of unemployment among the states. In 2011, Michigan was number eight on the list of highest rates of unemployment among the states, at 9.3 percent. In 2010, when Mr. Snyder was elected, Michigan had the fifth highest rate of unemployment among the states at 11.7 percent. In two years, our state has gone from having the fifth highest rate of unemployment in the nation down to having the sixth highest rate of unemployment. We also went from having a civilian labor force of 4.8 million to 4.4 million.

There has been job growth in Michigan, but it’s in low-paying industries—leisure and hospitality. Right-to-work, which adversely impacts average pay rates, is sure to push down the already low average salaries and hourly rates paid to Michigan residents, and widen the pay gap between men and women—the largest in America. I want to see Michigan make a comeback and I don’t care who gets the credit. If Mr. Snyder was sitting in Lansing creating good-paying jobs, I still wouldn’t vote for him in 2014, but I would congratulate him on easing what has become chronic poverty and suffering in our state.

Saying Michigan is “poised for a comeback” is just more of the same political spin from the same nerd who signed a 2009 Ann Arbor SPARK Annual Report that claimed he’d helped create and retain a whopping 12,000 jobs in Washtenaw County in a two year period. SPARK’s latest Annual Report makes clear that the 2009 Annual Report was a fabrication, a deceit to make a bunch of rich, white, politically-connected folks on the SPARK board look important—like they were doing something positive for their community. In reality, those white folks are helping rob taxpayers blind, taking money from schools and libraries and giving it to their political friends and business associates. Michigan has turned into one huge Sherwood Forest.

Could our state and its residents have seen a different outcome had Democrat Virg Bernero been elected in 2010? That’s speculation that will take us right off track and into the La Brea Tarpit of Partisan Politics. On the other hand, looking at neighboring states, I see progress on job creation that is enviable. In 2009, Ohio’s unemployment rate was 10.9 percent. In October 2012, it was 6.9 percent. In 2009, Wisconsin’s unemployment was 8.7 percent. In October 2012, it was 6.9 percent.

What have Michigan’s GOP and its Republinerd Governor accomplished since 2010? I’m sure they’ll find something to brag about when they next run for office in 2014. The truth is, however, that our state’s elected officials in Lansing succeeded in doing little more than pushing through a “trickle-down-economics,” conservative political agenda that has been the pride of the Right since Reagan was president. However, they done little to tackle the education, economic and social woes that have hammered our state for a decade. The Michigan GOP and Mr. Snyder have exacerbated the problems, opened a wider chasm between the haves and the many have nots in Michigan. MLive writer Susan J. Demas published a December 20, 2012 opinion piece that is all at once insightful and irritating (no doubt to Dems and Indies who voted for “moderate” Rick Snyder). Demas writes: “It’s true that Rick Snyder has a perfectly pleasant, moderate demeanor. He’s not a firebrand like Herman Cain or Sarah Palin. He’s also not a clown. But he’s not a moderate in politics, and has never claimed to be. Having interviewed the former Gateway CEO extensively on the campaign trail, I never once heard him describe himself as a moderate or centrist. That was a label assigned to him by hopeful editorial boards and assorted self-styled political observers. Now as I noted in the summer of 2010, Snyder was smart enough to deploy the endorsements of former Gov. Bill Milliken and former U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz as dog whistles to independents, moderates and Democrats. See, I’m a reasonable Republican. Why, I even live in Ann Arbor (or close enough).”

Governing Magazine published a piece in 2010, during the primary election, that contradicts Demas and, I think, identifies the real reason that Michigan voters (Dems and Indies) thought Snyder would never pursue the destructive political agenda he has. Josh Goodman writes:

Ed Kilgore of 538 has a post pointing out what I think is one of the most notable questions in tomorrow’s primaries: Can a moderate win the Republican nomination for governor in Michigan?

Rick Snyder, former CEO of Gateway computers, is the candidate I’m talking about. If Snyder simply had a reputation or a history as a moderate, the story wouldn’t be all that interesting. Plenty of Republican candidates with moderate histories are running well in primaries this year — Meg Whitman in California, Karen Handel in Georgia, Bill Haslam in Tennessee — it’s just that they’re running well by campaigning as conservatives. Snyder is different.

He’s running a mostly non-ideological campaign, touting his competence, business acumen and outsider status. What’s more, he’s affirmatively associating himself with some of Michigan’s most well-known moderate Republicans — Republicans who haven’t demonstrated much loyalty to their party lately. That includes former Gov. William Milliken, who’s made a habit of criticizing Republican nominees for president, and former U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz, who supported a Democrat for his old congressional seat in 2008 over the Republican who had ousted him in a 2006 primary.

Then, Goodman hits a hole-in-one. In 2010 he wrote this: “Snyder, thanks to his personal wealth, has spent the most campaign cash. As Meg Whitman proved, money can do a great job hiding an ideological mismatch between a candidate and voters.”

Bingo.

In April 2011, A2Politico posted a piece about Ann Arbor Dems who had supported Snyder. In that piece, A2Politico reveals exactly how much Snyder spent to hide the “ideological mismatch”: “Rick Snyder ran a ‘feel good’ campaign. He shelled out over $1,000,000 to a Hollywood advertising firm that specializes in helping Republican candidates such as George W. Bush, Christine O’Donnell, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain shape campaign messages. Snyder spent millions, some might argue, misleading voters.”

These are just a few of the real “accomplishments” of Michigan’s GOP and Mr. Snyder:

• A study from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the African-American unemployment rate in Michigan in 2010 was 47 percent higher than the 15.9 percent national average of unemployment for African-Americans.
• While blacks comprise 15 percent of Michigan’s population, blacks represent 55 percent of those imprisoned in our state.
• According to research from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, half of all of Michigan’s black children live in poverty.
• In September 2012 the Michigan League for Human Services released a study that concluded Michigan has the highest rate in the Midwest for working families living in poverty.

“Michigan is well-positioned for a comeback.” These are the words of a rich white man disconnected from reality—a man who has shown he will say just about anything to further his own ambitions. Over the past two years, studies conducted by academics, well-respected nonprofits and state agencies have revealed that Michigan is tottering on the edge of a cliff. In response, our state’s GOP has rammed through a political agenda of economic apartheid that is contributing to the destruction of the lives of a generation of men, women and children.

by Livia Gershon

This summer, I was chatting with my parents, and I happened to mention that my husband and I pay pretty much no federal income taxes. My dad was shocked. What about withholdings from your paychecks, he asked. I said we get it all back in our refund.

I was kind of embarrassed to admit it. My parents are the types to buy something from every kid who comes to the door selling raffle tickets or candy bars, and they raised me to have the same attitude about taxes. Contributing is just what you do.

When I saw the clip of Romney, I remembered that conversation and thought a little more about my relationship with taxes.  For the first 10 years or so of our working lives, my husband and I paid federal income taxes on our close-to-the-American-median incomes. But when our second child was born three years ago, we suddenly found ourselves among the Wall Street Journal’s “lucky duckies.” One year, when my husband was in a training program on his way to a second career as a teacher, we actually qualified for the earned income tax credit. This year we paid $91 in federal income taxes.

Like the vast majority of the 47 percent, we pay other taxes—local and state property taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes and so on—but I do feel kind of like I’m avoiding my responsibility to pay for my government. Maybe not all of it. I could do without funding Defense or Homeland Security. But I feel bad for not contributing to VA hospitals, EPA grants for brownfield cleanups and the Title One money that helps pay for my older kid’s school.

As it turns out, the main reason I’m not paying my fair share goes back to George W. Bush, who championed expanded child tax credits in 2001 and 2003. The credits are the sort of policy that’s typical for this country. Instead of paying for services like childcare to improve families’ quality of life directly, U.S. politicians love to craft convoluted tax policy that gestures at the same goals.

A lot of the people who are with me in and on the borders of the 47 percent are here for similar reasons. They fall into enough tax deductions and credits at the moment that they end up with no obligations to the federal budget, or they’ve worked and paid taxes all their lives, and now they’re retired and collecting Social Security. My guess is that many people don’t even know that they’re in this camp, especially if they don’t do their own taxes and don’t bother to compare the deductions on their paychecks to their refund checks.

For many others, though, there’s no question of paying federal income tax because their income is far too low to even support their basic needs.

Take “Sasha,” who lives in a public housing complex near my house. She’s someone Romney might have been thinking about in that room with his million-dollar donors. She doesn’t pay income taxes because she’s been getting disability benefits since being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which I suppose Romney would say means she believes the government has a responsibility to care for her.

Before she got sick, Sasha worked for years assembling computer boards. She got caught in a round of layoffs, and after that she never managed to find consistent work.

“Dunkin Donuts here, Dunkin Donuts there,” she said. “But that’s really not a job.”

Then there’s Blackie. He’s worked for years at a big-name department store, getting 32 to 40 hours a week, but a couple of years ago, he was evicted from his apartment, and he couldn’t find another place in the area he could afford. He ended up living at the YMCA and then a temporary housing facility.

“I considered suicide very, very briefly a couple of times,” he said.

If you were a friend of Romney’s, you might wonder why Sasha and Blackie didn’t work harder to find good jobs, or go back to school to become more employable. Here on the planet Earth, of course, we’re well aware that good jobs are a rare and precious commodity, even for college graduates.

What’s interesting is why so many of the jobs that are around aren’t good ones. Dunkin Brands made profits of more than $34 million in 2011, and many of its franchise owners make good money too, so why does working at the ubiquitous New England coffee delivery systems barely count as a job at all?

The answer comes from the economic concept of decoupling, the fact that since the 1970s wages have stagnated while corporate profits have risen dramatically. The obvious answer to the question of why Sasha couldn’t get paid a living wage is that, after her old employer let her go, she didn’t have the skills to get something better than a crappy service-sector job. The even more obvious answer—so obvious that it’s easy to ignore it—is that whoever owned her Dunkin Donuts store decided not to pay her more and, instead, take more of the money she brought in.

A donut shop is a good example of the issue because it’s not selling anything with much inherent value. Coffee and sugar and flour are cheap. Dunkin’ Brands and its franchise owners make the bulk of their money on the value added by people working in warehouses and, mostly, the stores themselves. And the less they pay, the more money they make. With retail, it’s even clearer: Buy from manufacturers, sell at convenient stores. Real estate and labor contribute pretty much everything you can make a profit on.

Like I said, this is pretty obvious, but it’s almost completely ignored when we start talking about who ought to be contributing and who believes they’re entitled to something. And, by the way, Sasha and Blackie don’t sound remotely entitled. Sasha actually uses similar language to Romney’s when she talks about teaching her kids to take care of “their own responsibilities.” Of course, it makes a bit more sense coming from a mother talking about her kids than from a disconnected rich guy talking about his political enemies.

The problem for Sasha and Blackie is not that they’re not giving enough to society. It’s that the companies they work for have been taking too much from them. So if they feel, as I do, that she ought to be contributing to the federal programs that help make our country great, maybe we should all be lobbying for the closing of corporate tax loopholes and an increase to the capital gains tax. That way at least we’ll be indirectly making our contributions.

by B. Mann

It’s morning.  I think of what day it is.  God, please let it not be the 15^th.  I don’t have the money for the payroll taxes.  Oh wait… did I pay the truck? Shit!  I didn’t pay the truck.   I hope that check comes today.  It’s Wednesday and we need it for payroll.   And it’s mortgage week.  Oh God, if we don’t make payroll, then we won’t be able to pay our mortgage.  Where am I going to get the money for the mortgage? That check has got to come today.

I make my way downstairs and to my first cup of coffee, still thinking about the day ahead.  If I ask my son to not cash his paycheck from last week, I might have enough to pay the truck.  Oh wait.  The payment is due to our window supplier.  They’ll be calling if they don’t receive it and that woman is a persistent bitch.  The truck will have to wait, but I’ll still have to ask my son to not cash his paycheck. I don’t want to bounce anything. Now that our bank has been taken over by a new one, they’ve changed some of their practices. That check had better come today or we will be so screwed.

There are messages on our business line answering machine, but not the kind we need.  Instead of messages from customers needing work done on their homes, they’re messages from out of work contractors looking for jobs.  You can always tell when the economy is bad.  The customer calls stop and calls from people looking for work begin.

I pack lunches for the day and talk to my husband.  I remind him that we need to get some money in even though he’s well aware of our situation.  We used to have employees, but now there’s just my son and him to do the same amount of work that used to be done by four people.  We can’t afford to hire more people because the only work that we manage to sell these days is being sold at 1982 prices.  Unfortunately, 1982 prices cannot support the payment of 2009 materials, 2009 subcontractors, 2009 insurance and 2009 payroll taxes. We’re still in business, but sinking.  Rather than a fast drown, it’s a slow, sinking descent into financial quicksand.  Either way, we will soon be swallowed up completely.

Shit.  The kids need their field trip money. I look in my wallet.  $3.00.  I’m way short.  Maybe I can make up the difference with change from the jar that we were using to save up for vacation.  I might as well.  We’re not going to be able to take that vacation this year, either. I count out the change and put it in an envelope along with a short apology for the coins.

Everyone is finally off to work and school and I sit down at the computer to begin the work I do from home.  I’m still considering how I’m going to pay these bills, the mortgage, and the payroll taxes with no money.  Just calm down.  It will be OK.  If we can’t pay them, we can’t pay them.

I can feel the blood pulsing through the arteries on the side of my neck.  I think my blood pressure is high.  I should probably have that looked at.  Oh wait. I’m not sure the health insurance is still in force.  I paid that last premium way too late.  Beyond the grace period. That’s been happening a lot lately.  We really can’t afford our insurance; $1200 per month for health insurance is outrageous. But the pre-existing conditions…we have to keep it.  We’re trapped.

I check my email to see if there are any work assignments in there.  There aren’t. I open an email from my boss:  she’s very sorry…business has been bad…she needs to cut my hours…the first time she’s had to do anything like this in 20 years in business…one girl in the office had her hours cut by two-thirds…she hopes it’s only temporary.

I feel my heart sink and the panic rise.  We were struggling to make it before. What’s it going to be like with my hours cut?  I know I should be grateful that I still have a job, but it’s hard to find my gratitude when things are so worrisome for us financially.  With this news, I have no hope of being able to put in extra hours for some extra money to help us catch up.  We’re going to sink faster in that quicksand now.

I hear the mail truck pull up outside and I go out to get the mail.  Maybe the check came today. I sort through the mail:  bill, bill, junk mail, credit card letter.  No check.  Now what are we going to do?

I open the letter from the credit card company.  Apparently the credit card that we use to purchase materials for our business has been sold to another company.  That company has opted to close all of the accounts.  We won’t be able to use the card to purchase business materials after the end of March.  It’s the only one we have and we depend upon it for cash flow.  How are we going to get around this?  Now we’ve lost our credit.  This must be what they talk about on the news:  credit drying up for small businesses.  It feels different, though, when it actually happens to you.

One of our subcontractors calls, asking if we have any work.  He hasn’t had any work since October.  He’s willing to do whatever is needed even though he’s a painter by trade.  Another one calls asking if pleasepleaseplease can we pay him right away for that job he did last week.  But we haven’t been paid by the customer yet. He’s totally out of money and begging.  Well, if I hold off on paying the window supplier, I can pay him instead. In this business, you always take care of your subs first.  We’re all in this together.

I’ve got to pay the mortgage and we’re not going to be able to make payroll this week.  I need cash quick.  I saw in the paper that a local jeweler is buying gold. Instant cash, exactly what I need right now.

I gather up some of my jewelry into a box.  A ring from my grandmother. She gave it to me when we met for the first time when I was 19.  I hope she doesn’t find out about this.  Here’s a necklace my mom bought for me.  I can part with this bracelet; I never get a chance to wear it.  I like this piece, but it’s a heavy one that will bring more money.  Into the box it goes.  Can’t I find a few more pieces? I reluctantly choose a couple more rings, a few more earrings, another necklace.  I look at the empty spaces in my jewelry box but then quickly close the lid.  Having a home is more important than jewelry.

by Rob Smith

In an August 28, 2012 video interview, Michigan’s Republican governor told WaPo interviewer Nia-Malika Henderson that he and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney “have a lot of similarities.” Snyder urged Romney to “get a positive message out there.” Several times during the interview, Snyder talked about “job creation” and “a future for our kids.” He pitched Michigan as “the comeback state.” Michigan, he suggests, is a “great role model” for Washington, D.C., “which is a mess.”

Interestingly, Snyder told the WaPo “government doesn’t create jobs. We create an environment for jobs to flourish.” Someone needs to remind Snyder that the State of Michigan is spending tens of millions of dollars each year on 12 regional “job creation incubators,” such as Ann Arbor SPARK, which was most recently fingered for having spent $7.7 million in Michigan tax dollars in order to create only 79 jobs.

I wrote in a June 2012 post for A2Politico:

Over the past several years, Ann Arbor SPARK has siphoned millions of dollars away from the public schools through a TIF scam approved by Ann Arbor’s Mayor and City Council. First a financing authority was created (the local LDFA), then the LDFA is funded through tax-increment financing (TIF) similar to the way the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority is supported. A TIF district allows authorities like the LDFA and the DDA to skim the property taxes levied in the TIF district. The local LDFA then contracts with Ann Arbor SPARK for “business development services.”

Looks great on paper. Sounds good at a cocktail party. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. In practice, the LDFA and Ann Arbor SPARK have done little but rob taxpayers, public schools and the District library of millions of dollars. SPARK’s job creation numbers are suspect because the company has never allowed an outside audit, but rather fills out its own report and hands that over to the LDFA.

Keeping those facts in mind, in August 2011 Daily Beast ranked Michigan #1 on a Hit List of the Best States for Job Growth. The online news mag. pointed out, “With job creation shaping up to be one of the core issues of the 2012 presidential race, Newsweek/Daily Beast finds the boom states for business.” So how did DB evaluate states? “To find the 20 best states in America for job growth we considered three factors. First, a new poll and index from Gallup, which asked more than 100,000 employed people whether their companies are expanding or contracting, and provides an index score from the difference between the two; second, the change in seasonally adjusted unemployment rates, from the annual average for 2010 to the annual average to date, with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; finally, each state’s 2010 average annual income, also with BLS data. Using z-scores (a measure of each state’s performance relative to the mean), each factor was equally weighted. The first two data sets examine opinions on job creation and raw unemployment numbers, while the third takes into account how well, in general, jobs in each state tend to pay. The result is a ranking of the states where, despite the recession, job growth is actually happening.”

Using these criteria, Michigan came out on top.

In May 2011, the right-leaning Mackinaw Center presented a somewhat different view of the same job creation data. Writer James Hohman linked the job creation numbers with the job loss numbers for an interesting interpretation. He writes:

Most news stories focus on the net job gains or losses because these are good indicators of whether an economy is improving or falling. There is a substantial lag to the release of gross job figures, however, making them less important to the day’s news. The monthly net job reports tend to show a state that is fairly stagnant — rarely adding or losing more than 2 percent of jobs in any year.

But the gross job creation and loss figures show the incredible amount of turnover in Michigan. In a given year, the state can add and lose 1 million jobs in gross, leaving no net gain. This means around one out of every four jobs is created and lost in the state every single year.

The latest release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that there were 216,561 private-sector jobs created in the third quarter of 2010, a gain of 6.8 percent of total jobs, or an increase of one job for every 15 existing jobs. The state also lost 191,483 private-sector jobs, a loss of 6.0 percent of total jobs, or a loss of one job for every 17 existing jobs.

Hohman points out that most of the jobs being created in Michigan are not the result of incubators, such as SPARK, but “from expansions and contractions of existing businesses….The state’s economic development programs are targeted at select industries and specific companies. The key areas of job growth and loss, however, are deep and broad and across industries. Incentive programs that look to assist with hundreds and sometimes thousands of jobs simply cannot keep pace with an economy that turns over hundreds of thousands of jobs every quarter.”

Hohman’s analysis explains why while there is job creation in Michigan and unemployment is down from 14.2 percent to 9.4 percent, childhood poverty is still a huge problem. In January 2012, about 6 months after Daily Beast tagged Michigan the best state for job growth, the HuffPost reported that:

An annual report examining the living conditions for children across Michigan finds high poverty rates satewide, and even bleaker news for kids living in the city of Detroit. The most recent Kids Count in Michigan Data Book shows a 13 percent jump in the number of kids living in poverty in the city between 2005 and 2009. It also finds that more than 80 percent of children in Detroit Public Schools now qualify for free student lunches. Jane Zehnder-Merrell, the study’s project director at the Michigan League for Human Services, told HuffPost children in both Detroit and around the state are suffering the impacts of the long recession. ”The general situation [in Detroit] pretty much mirrors what’s happening in Michigan in terms of trends, [but] the level of economic distress in the city is much more acute than the state as a whole,” Zehnder-Merrell said.”

As of January 2012, 23.5 percent of all Michigan children lived below the official U.S. poverty threshold. The 2012 report from the Annie E. Casey foundation indicated that extreme childhood poverty in Michigan has doubled since 2005, and that Michigan’s childhood poverty rates are among the highest in the nation. In Washtenaw County, where Governor Snyder lives, the percentage of kids who qualified for a free or reduced price school lunch rose from from 10,225 in 2005 to 13,886 in 2010. Unemployed adults rose from 8,795 to 14,782 during the same period, and unemployment rose from 4.2 percent to 8.1 percent.

Basically, Snyder suggested that Mitt Romney focus on jobs and kids, kids and jobs. After all, it’s what Snyder focused on in 2010 when running for governor and won. Political pundits rarely agree on everything, but in discussing the 2012 presidential election there is consensus: if Mitt Romney takes Michigan, he will take the White House. There is one other point of agreement between political observers writing about the 2012 election and that is this: Michigan’s governor will be of little use to Romney as he tries to flip the state. Snyder, a GOP outsider, can offer little in the way of an established political base or machine. In fact, Snyder has his own worries. While he has seen improvement in his poll numbers over the last few months—voters are now almost evenly divided on him with 42 percent approving and 44 percent disapproving—he could find himself with a Democratic legislature to work with next year. Democrats lead the generic legislative ballot in the state by a 45/37 margin, numbers that could translate into them regaining control of the State House.

by Robert Paarlberg

From Whole Foods recyclable cloth bags to Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden, modern eco-foodies are full of good intentions. We want to save the planet. Help local farmers. Fight climate change — and childhood obesity, too. But though it’s certainly a good thing to be thinking about global welfare while chopping our certified organic onions, the hope that we can help others by changing our shopping and eating habits is being wildly oversold to Western consumers. Food has become an elite preoccupation in the West, ironically, just as the most effective ways to address hunger in poor countries have fallen out of fashion.

Helping the world’s poor feed themselves is no longer the rallying cry it once was. Food may be today’s cause célèbre, but in the pampered West, that means trendy causes like making food “sustainable” — in other words, organic, local, and slow. Appealing as that might sound, it is the wrong recipe for helping those who need it the most. Even our understanding of the global food problem is wrong these days, driven too much by the single issue of international prices. In April 2008, when the cost of rice for export had tripled in just six months and wheat reached its highest price in 28 years, a New York Times editorial branded this a “World Food Crisis.” World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned that high food prices would be particularly damaging in poor countries, where “there is no margin for survival.” Now that international rice prices are down 40 percent from their peak and wheat prices have fallen by more than half, we too quickly conclude that the crisis is over. Yet 850 million people in poor countries were chronically undernourished before the 2008 price spike, and the number is even larger now, thanks in part to last year’s global recession. This is the real food crisis we face.

It turns out that food prices on the world market tell us very little about global hunger. International markets for food, like most other international markets, are used most heavily by the well-to-do, who are far from hungry. The majority of truly undernourished people — 62 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization — live in either Africa or South Asia, and most are small farmers or rural landless laborers living in the countryside of Africa and South Asia. They are significantly shielded from global price fluctuations both by the trade policies of their own governments and by poor roads and infrastructure. In Africa, more than 70 percent of rural households are cut off from the closest urban markets because, for instance, they live more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest all-weather road.

Poverty — caused by the low income productivity of farmers’ labor — is the primary source of hunger in Africa, and the problem is only getting worse. The number of “food insecure” people in Africa (those consuming less than 2,100 calories a day) will increase 30 percent over the next decade without significant reforms, to 645 million, the U.S. Agriculture Department projects.

What’s so tragic about this is that we know from experience how to fix the problem. Wherever the rural poor have gained access to improved roads, modern seeds, less expensive fertilizer, electrical power, and better schools and clinics, their productivity and their income have increased. But recent efforts to deliver such essentials have been undercut by deeply misguided (if sometimes well-meaning) advocacy against agricultural modernization and foreign aid.

In Europe and the United States, a new line of thinking has emerged in elite circles that opposes bringing improved seeds and fertilizers to traditional farmers and opposes linking those farmers more closely to international markets. Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that “sustainable food” in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn’t work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.

If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we’ve developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.

Original Sins

Thirty years ago, had someone asserted in a prominent journal or newspaper that the Green Revolution was a failure, he or she would have been quickly dismissed. Today the charge is surprisingly common. Celebrity author and eco-activist Vandana Shiva claims the Green Revolution has brought nothing to India except “indebted and discontented farmers.” A 2002 meeting in Rome of 500 prominent international NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, even blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger. Let’s set the record straight.

The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India’s rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a “myth” (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly.

It’s true that the story of the Green Revolution is not everywhere a happy one. When powerful new farming technologies are introduced into deeply unjust rural social systems, the poor tend to lose out. In Latin America, where access to good agricultural land and credit has been narrowly controlled by traditional elites, the improved seeds made available by the Green Revolution increased income gaps. Absentee landlords in Central America, who previously allowed peasants to plant subsistence crops on underutilized land, pushed them off to sell or rent the land to commercial growers who could turn a profit using the new seeds. Many of the displaced rural poor became slum dwellers. Yet even in Latin America, the prevalence of hunger declined more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2005.

In Asia, the Green Revolution seeds performed just as well on small nonmechanized farms as on larger farms. Wherever small farmers had sufficient access to credit, they took up the new technology just as quickly as big farmers, which led to dramatic income gains and no increase in inequality or social friction. Even poor landless laborers gained, because more abundant crops meant more work at harvest time, increasing rural wages. In Asia, the Green Revolution was good for both agriculture and social justice.

And Africa? Africa has a relatively equitable and secure distribution of land, making it more like Asia than Latin America and increasing the chances that improvements in farm technology will help the poor. If Africa were to put greater resources into farm technology, irrigation, and rural roads, small farmers would benefit.

Organic Myths

There are other common objections to doing what is necessary to solve the real hunger crisis. Most revolve around caveats that purist critics raise regarding food systems in the United States and Western Europe. Yet such concerns, though well-intentioned, are often misinformed and counterproductive — especially when applied to the developing world.

Take industrial food systems, the current bugaboo of American food writers. Yes, they have many unappealing aspects, but without them food would be not only less abundant but also less safe. Traditional food systems lacking in reliable refrigeration and sanitary packaging are dangerous vectors for diseases. Surveys over the past several decades by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that the U.S. food supply became steadily safer over time, thanks in part to the introduction of industrial-scale technical improvements. Since 2000, the incidence of E. coli contamination in beef has fallen 45 percent. Today in the United States, most hospitalizations and fatalities from unsafe food come not from sales of contaminated products at supermarkets, but from the mishandling or improper preparation of food inside the home. Illness outbreaks from contaminated foods sold in stores still occur, but the fatalities are typically quite limited. A nationwide scare over unsafe spinach in 2006 triggered the virtual suspension of all fresh and bagged spinach sales, but only three known deaths were recorded. Incidents such as these command attention in part because they are now so rare. Food Inc. should be criticized for filling our plates with too many foods that are unhealthy, but not foods that are unsafe.

Where industrial-scale food technologies have not yet reached into the developing world, contaminated food remains a major risk. In Africa, where many foods are still purchased in open-air markets (often uninspected, unpackaged, unlabeled, unrefrigerated, unpasteurized, and unwashed), an estimated 700,000 people die every year from food- and water-borne diseases, compared with an estimated 5,000 in the United States.

Food grown organically — that is, without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizers or pesticides — is not an answer to the health and safety issues. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last year published a study of 162 scientific papers from the past 50 years on the health benefits of organically grown foods and found no nutritional advantage over conventionally grown foods. According to the Mayo Clinic, “No conclusive evidence shows that organic food is more nutritious than is conventionally grown food.”

Health professionals also reject the claim that organic food is safer to eat due to lower pesticide residues. Food and Drug Administration surveys have revealed that the highest dietary exposures to pesticide residues on foods in the United States are so trivial (less than one one-thousandth of a level that would cause toxicity) that the safety gains from buying organic are insignificant. Pesticide exposures remain a serious problem in the developing world, where farm chemical use is not as well regulated, yet even there they are more an occupational risk for unprotected farmworkers than a residue risk for food consumers.

When it comes to protecting the environment, assessments of organic farming become more complex. Excess nitrogen fertilizer use on conventional farms in the United States has polluted rivers and created a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, but halting synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use entirely (as farmers must do in the United States to get organic certification from the Agriculture Department) would cause environmental problems far worse.

Here’s why: Less than 1 percent of American cropland is under certified organic production. If the other 99 percent were to switch to organic and had to fertilize crops without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, that would require a lot more composted animal manure. To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold. And because those animals would have to be raised organically on forage crops, much of the land in the lower 48 states would need to be converted to pasture. Organic field crops also have lower yields per hectare. If Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need an additional 28 million hectares of cropland, equal to all of the remaining forest cover in France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.

Mass deforestation probably isn’t what organic advocates intend. The smart way to protect against nitrogen runoff is to reduce synthetic fertilizer applications with taxes, regulations, and cuts in farm subsidies, but not try to go all the way to zero as required by the official organic standard. Scaling up registered organic farming would be on balance harmful, not helpful, to the natural environment.

Not only is organic farming less friendly to the environment than assumed, but modern conventional farming is becoming significantly more sustainable. High-tech farming in rich countries today is far safer for the environment, per bushel of production, than it was in the 1960s, when Rachel Carson criticized the indiscriminate farm use of DDT in her environmental classic, Silent Spring. Thanks in part to Carson’s devastating critique, that era’s most damaging insecticides were banned and replaced by chemicals that could be applied in lower volume and were less persistent in the environment. Chemical use in American agriculture peaked soon thereafter, in 1973. This was a major victory for environmental advocacy.

And it was just the beginning of what has continued as a significant greening of modern farming in the United States. Soil erosion on farms dropped sharply in the 1970s with the introduction of “no-till” seed planting, an innovation that also reduced dependence on diesel fuel because fields no longer had to be plowed every spring. Farmers then began conserving water by moving to drip irrigation and by leveling their fields with lasers to minimize wasteful runoff. In the 1990s, GPS equipment was added to tractors, autosteering the machines in straighter paths and telling farmers exactly where they were in the field to within one square meter, allowing precise adjustments in chemical use. Infrared sensors were brought in to detect the greenness of the crop, telling a farmer exactly how much more (or less) nitrogen might be needed as the growing season went forward. To reduce wasteful nitrogen use, equipment was developed that can insert fertilizers into the ground at exactly the depth needed and in perfect rows, only where it will be taken up by the plant roots.

These “precision farming” techniques have significantly reduced the environmental footprint of modern agriculture relative to the quantity of food being produced. In 2008, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a review of the “environmental performance of agriculture” in the world’s 30 most advanced industrial countries — those with the most highly capitalized and science-intensive farming systems. The results showed that between 1990 and 2004, food production in these countries continued to increase (by 5 percent in volume), yet adverse environmental impacts were reduced in every category. The land area taken up by farming declined 4 percent, soil erosion from both wind and water fell, gross greenhouse gas emissions from farming declined 3 percent, and excessive nitrogen fertilizer use fell 17 percent. Biodiversity also improved, as increased numbers of crop varieties and livestock breeds came into use.

Seeding the Future

Africa faces a food crisis, but it’s not because the continent’s population is growing faster than its potential to produce food, as vintage Malthusians such as environmental advocate Lester Brown and advocacy organizations such as Population Action International would have it. Food production in Africa is vastly less than the region’s known potential, and that is why so many millions are going hungry there. African farmers still use almost no fertilizer; only 4 percent of cropland has been improved with irrigation; and most of the continent’s cropped area is not planted with seeds improved through scientific plant breeding, so cereal yields are only a fraction of what they could be. Africa is failing to keep up with population growth not because it has exhausted its potential, but instead because too little has been invested in reaching that potential.

One reason for this failure has been sharply diminished assistance from international donors. When agricultural modernization went out of fashion among elites in the developed world beginning in the 1980s, development assistance to farming in poor countries collapsed. Per capita food production in Africa was declining during the 1980s and 1990s and the number of hungry people on the continent was doubling, but the U.S. response was to withdraw development assistance and simply ship more food aid to Africa. Food aid doesn’t help farmers become more productive — and it can create long-term dependency. But in recent years, the dollar value of U.S. food aid to Africa has reached 20 times the dollar value of agricultural development assistance.

The alternative is right in front of us. Foreign assistance to support agricultural improvements has a strong record of success, when undertaken with purpose. In the 1960s, international assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and donor governments led by the United States made Asia’s original Green Revolution possible. U.S. assistance to India provided critical help in improving agricultural education, launching a successful agricultural extension service, and funding advanced degrees for Indian agricultural specialists at universities in the United States. The U.S. Agency for International Development, with the World Bank, helped finance fertilizer plants and infrastructure projects, including rural roads and irrigation. India could not have done this on its own — the country was on the brink of famine at the time and dangerously dependent on food aid. But instead of suffering a famine in 1975, as some naysayers had predicted, India that year celebrated a final and permanent end to its need for food aid.

Foreign assistance to farming has been a high-payoff investment everywhere, including Africa. The World Bank has documented average rates of return on investments in agricultural research in Africa of 35 percent a year, accompanied by significant reductions in poverty. Some research investments in African agriculture have brought rates of return estimated at 68 percent. Blind to these realities, the United States cut its assistance to agricultural research in Africa 77 percent between 1980 and 2006.

When it comes to Africa’s growing hunger, governments in rich countries face a stark choice: They can decide to support a steady new infusion of financial and technical assistance to help local governments and farmers become more productive, or they can take a “worry later” approach and be forced to address hunger problems with increasingly expensive shipments of food aid. Development skeptics and farm modernization critics keep pushing us toward this unappealing second path. It’s time for leaders with vision and political courage to push back.

This originally appeared in Foreign Policy and is used here with permission.