Michigan desperately needs long-term high paying jobs. Building yet another subdivision will create a few construction jobs for a few months to a year. There are already plenty of houses that are sitting on the market for increasing amounts of time. What we need are companies that are going to create well paying high skilled jobs for the long haul. Today the Michigan Supreme Court decided to screw the workers of Michigan. They ruled in favor of an Oakland County developer who wants to buy the former Ypsilanti Psychiatric Hospital site for another subdivision. The state is trying to sell the property to Toyota who want to build a new Technical Center that will create 1000 new high paying jobs. If they don’t get this property they will very likely build their tech center in Kentucky where they have their biggest North American production facility. The developer DPG-York should stop this case now and walk away from this, but they clearly care more about their own short-term gain than they do about the health of the Michigan economy. The court should have dropped this case and let the Toyota deal move forward which would have been best for Michigan.

So all the fascists on the who are all against government telling you how to run your life (after all that is the fascist’s job, not some faceless bureaucrat’s) have been whining incessantly about the “Liberal War on Christmas!” Well now they have a new target to go after. The patron saints of the right wing media at News Corp., owners of Faux News are having a Holiday Party! That’s right, not a christmas party but a holiday party!. Here is a copy of the invite courtesy of our friends at Air America Radio

I wonder how much noise Rush, and Sean and “O’Really!” will make about this one? Since I am physically incapable of watching Faux News without immediately changing the channel or turning off the TV, I will have to rely on reports from others to see if it is ever mentioned on air there.

Take a look at the top two stories on todays Detroit Free press front page.

At the same time that Delphi is demanding a 63% pay cut (along with cuts in pensions, vacation, and health benefits) they are giving their top executives a boost in severance packages if they lose their jobs. Here’s a thought if your company is on the verge of bankruptcy, why would you pay them more for helping to ruin the company. If anything they should be cutting their pay and benefits before they ask any rank and file employee to take a pay cut. Until American workers start to rebel against all this corporate thievery, America will just continue it’s decline into irrelevance. This kind of behavior is led right from the top by the likes of George Bush and his cronies.

This must be stopped. Corporate America must be truly reformed. The pay of executives needs to be capped at some reasonable multiple (say 10X) the average of all employees. Stock options if used at all must be declared as an expense and the timeline for excercising those options needs to be extended out to a minimum of 5-10 years to discourage all the short term shenanigans that executives are using to pump their stock prices. And people have to realize that if they are not employed at reasonable wages actually making real stuff, they will not be able to afford to buy stuff.

Finally, it is totally disgraceful that the likes of Bill Ford, Rick Wagoner and others are not speaking out loudly and forcefully about truely reforming the broken health care system in this country. Clearly the for profit health insurance system in this country doesn’t work. The only people who benefit are the shareholders of the for profit companies. Health care should be a basic right. The money spent on health care should be used to provide care not line the pockets of insurance executives. Executives who are whining about health care costs should be yelling the loudest for a single payer system. Clearly the free market has not worked and shows no signs of improving the health care system. I believe in market economies. I am not a communist. But I also believe that markets don’t work for everything. Competition has not lowered costs or improved outcomes for patients. America spends more on health care and has the lowest lifespan and highest infant mortality of any of the major industrialized countries. The health care system needs to be removed from the free market and run for the benefit of the people.

But as I said, unless people rise up and demand some real change America will be an irrelevant third world country in the next 5-10 years. Call your representatives and demand that they ignore the entertainment industry and their demands for more copyright, ignore the wealthy elite and their demnands for more tax cuts, ignore the religious extremists and their demands for a theocracy, and get to work on fixing health care, reducing corporate welfare, do some real reform of minimum wages and social security. The only thing trickling down is the shit and piss of the wealth elites. After all who are they really supposed to represent!