What Granholm Should Say, But Likely Won't

Daniel Howes lays out a very cogent, disarmingly fair and hard to dismiss outline for what Michigan’s Governor should really say tonight in her State of the State address.

Given that she can’t run again (ok, at least not for that office), and has done very little to right a sinking ship in the last seven years (movie tax incentives aside), she could do much to get religion on restructuring state government and taxes—albeit late—as her tenure comes to a close.

Read Dan’s recommendations here. I wonder what Chris Bzdok, Traverse City's Mayor Pro Tem, would add to his prescriptions.

We can do it for movies . . . why not batteries? Or business in general?

Here in the D, there's been a serious uptick in movie making over the last year or so. Why? The State has been serious and aggressive about soliciting movie makers to come here, and moreover, adding serious tax incentives to make Detroit and Michigan a more attractive place to shoot films. The new Clint Eastwood movie that looks awesome (anyone who pulls an M1 Garand instead of a shotty out for home protection is not to be fussed with in my book, great gun) and was shot in and around Detroit because of it.

Is anyone else thinking that, "Hell, if we can get movies made here through tax incentives, how about doing the same--if not more--for advanced battery research and production." Or if full employment, and higher paying employment, is a goal of state gov't, how about incentivizing the whole state somehow? I'm told Michigan's business climate is one of the worst in the county. Let's change that.

I'd vote for L. Brooks Patterson. Would you?

Panic in Detroit: Not Just a Bowie Tune

There’s no way around it. At this point, I’m pretty worried about our future.

As a PR guy who’s been try to help engineer consensus on different companies in the automotive industry for 12 years, it’s been amazing to watch the trajectory of the car companies and suppliers during this time. The last three years have been water dropping on a rock, slowly eroding my confidence in this town’s ability to compete. Circumstances, as they say, allayed their forces against us. But lest we not forget decades of horrible judgment, both of which got us here today.

And then über-industry watcher D. Howes drops this bomb in today's Detroit News.

That Detroit is going down is done; the question is what will it look like on the other side? Will Southeast Michigan look like one enormous sprawl of Canton/Akron, Ohio . . . a broad swath of decrepitude with homes priced as they were in the early 1970s with wages and salaries that match?

Even as GM and Ford continue to grow overseas—in many cases profitably—there’s only so many jobs in Detroit to be had going forward for essentially holding stewardship of the brands, sales/marketing and finances. GM has said that different regions will take ownership of developing global platforms, and North America/Detroit will retain fewer of those (B-cars will come from Korea; large rear drive cars from Australia, et al.). Design jobs, too, will be (are) widely dispersed as GM rightfully has said that designers in local markets should skin these platforms to tailor shapes to local tastes. Most people don't know that the auto industry until very recently was in great shape . . . just not in North America.

Detroit will be still smaller (remember, fifty years ago Detroit proper was 2 million people; today it’s less than half that size). Many of its best and brightest leave to escape the crime and “schools” the city has to offer (don’t believe a white guy from Lake Orion now living in Livonia, read this from my colleague Jacqueline Harrington on what it’s really like to live in Detroit . . . less than hopeful. Yes, she's African-American.)

We can keep working hard, and hope. On our hopes, here are a few of mine:

· The Joseph Goebbels-lookalike/rodent-faced/car industry-hating Henry Waxman goes three rounds of bare-knuckle boxing with local champion John Dingell. Waxman gets waxed by the senior Dingell on C-SPAN. It makes Sports Center. A sweet bronze statue goes up in Palace to honor the event.

· Detroit becomes the lithium-ion capital of the world.

· Gas prices stay under $2/gallon for five more years (I’m betting this won’t happen, get in now, buy me a beer in five years).

· The Japanese continue to mostly build excellent cars with forgettable or downright weird styling that turn people off; as cars become more commoditized and uniformly reliable, styling is what sells and Detroit gets its mojo back.

· The Germans continue to build overpriced cars that aren’t very reliable (I’ve had several; great to drive, terrible to own).

· Detroit comes back . . . property taxes drop . . . businesses move back in to the city . . . suburban people begin buying up the big mansions and turning many of the great downtown neighborhoods back into highly desirable places to live. There remains pockets of slums, but they grow smaller.

Feel free to add yours. If Obama showed us anything, it’s that sometimes big hopes can become bigger realities. While the lights are still on, keep hope alive.

Will GM Buy Chrysler?

GM absorbs Chrysler? Desperate times call for desperate measures, and with the Cerberus gang looking to make some money from their acquisition of Chrysler from Daimler a year ago, Cerberus certainly has an incentive to cut their losses.

But what about GM? The Detroit News’ Daniel Howes does a good job of going into why this might not be a crazy as it sounds in the story above.

My brother and I were talking yesterday about this, and asked if it was true that Chrysler's Auburn Hills HQ was designed in the 1990s so that it could turned into a should Chrysler vacate the premises. I assured him that it could . . . but Oakland County would be devastated by such a loss, so what retailers would sign leases there, especially with Somerset five minutes away?http://www.thesomersetcollection.com/