For more on how the recent actions of Benton Harbor Czar Joseph Harris could be motivated by the Whirlpool Corporation’s desire to turn the city-owned Jean Klock Park for children into an upscale, private, beachfront golf club, I’d encourage you to check out Electablog. Here’s a clip:
…This is where the rubber meets the pavement. If you are looking for motivations for Snyder and his Republican friends to take over Benton Harbor, watch who gets development rights of the Lake Michigan shoreline. They are already setting things up to ensure that it is not the local residents of Benton Harbor…
Once again, the Republicans of Michigan are making national headlines for their bold new policy initiatives. Today, it’s House bill 4465, sponsored by Bill Rogers of Brighton. If passed, it would, among other things, punish striking teachers by stripping them of their credentials for two years, making it impossible for them to work as educators in the state of Michigan. The following assessment of the legislation comes from the Michigan Education Association:
A proposal supposedly intended to deter teachers from illegally striking would now strip them of their ability to teach for two years – or for life – and would kick out the employee’s union for five years.
The penalties would apply even if no strike actually occurred, so long as it was determined that a strike was in the planning stages. The legislation states that neither a union member nor a union could “solicit or encourage any other person to strike” or “conspire with any other person to cause a strike.”
Yup, you read that right. You could lose your job for two years, or for life, even if you don’t actually strike… All you have to do is consider striking. Here’s more.
The House Education Committee took testimony today on House Bills 4465 and 4466. A vote could come as early next week. MEA vigorously opposes these bills that seek to further silence the voices of school employees.
The committee listened to testimony from several people, including Reps. Paul Scott, R-Grand Blanc, and Bill Rogers, R-Brighton, sponsors of the bills.
Saying striking teachers pose a “spectacle,” Scott said he backed harsh penalties because educators are “valuable.”
“I think a teacher in a child’s classroom is absolutely vital,” Scott said.
Democrats on the panel questioned why the bills single out teachers and asked why current law – which makes strikes illegal and allows penalties – is insufficient.
“We’re picking on teachers,” said Rep. Douglas Geiss, D-Taylor. “The next step is to take teachers out back and shoot them.”
Among other things, the bills would:
• Require non-tenured teachers who strike to be fired immediately.
• Suspend the teaching certificate of tenured teachers for at least two years or permanently revoke the certificate.
• Consolidate cases so that all employees alleged to have participated in a strike would be judged together; the time period for these cases would be greatly collapsed.
• The union representing the employees on strike would be decertified for five years. The state would order a new election with a different union. These penalties would apply even if no actual strike occurred, but if a union or its representative was found to “solicit or encourage any other person to strike” or to “conspire with any other person to cause a strike.”
Wayne-Westland Community Schools Superintendent Gregory Baracy testified about a work stoppage in his district in 2008. It was the last major job action in a public school in Michigan.
He disputed media reports and teacher complaints at the time about large class sizes as the reason for the teachers’ action. He criticized union members and leaders who were involved. Baracy tried to dismiss the fact that an administrative law judge found the district had violated its duty to bargain in good faith and had ordered the district to “cease and desist” from refusing to do so and from failing to provide relevant information to the union, a point mentioned by Rep. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield.
It was repeatedly noted during the hearing that teacher strikes are already illegal – and rare…
In the immortal words of Iggy Pop, I had “a real cool time” last night. My only complaint is that it wasn’t nearly loud enough.
Here, for those of you who weren’t lucky enough to score a ticket, or famous enough to get invited in, are a few short video clips that I shot. The quality isn’t great, but I hope that they at least give you some sense as to what it was like inside the Michigan Theater.
And here are a few random notes. Please take them for what they’re worth.
According to AnnArbor.com, the show was being shot by director Jim Jarmusch, who is working on a documentary of some kind about Iggy. The two, as you might recall, worked together on 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes. Hopefully, while they were here, they got footage of Iggy walking around town, talking about how he used to work at the record store where Potbelly Sandwich Works now stands.
I found myself getting kind of weepy during the acoustic song that Iggy and Wiliamson performed in memory of Ron Asheton, not because it was particularly good, but because it made me consider the fact that, one day, I might be confronting the loss of my own bandmates. As for the song that Iggy wrote for Ron, I’d like to find the lyrics. I might be completely wrong, but it sounded to me like Iggy focused a bit too much on Ron’s jealousy of him, or at least his perception that Ron was jealous.
I don’t know the circumstances surrounding the addition of James Williamson to the lineup after the band had recorded their first two albums as The Stooges. My guess is that Ron didn’t like being put on bass after years of being the band’s guitar player, but I could be wrong. As Ron and James were in a band together before The Stooges, called The Chosen Few, it’s likely they could have been friends. It might even have been Ron’s idea to move over to the bass, taking the spot vacated by Dave Alexander. I’ve just always had in my head, though, that Ron saw it as a demotion. And, if that’s the case, I don’t know if it’s weird or beautiful that Williamson played all of Ron’s guitar parts last night. I suspect it must also be kind of strange for Wiliamson, as he’s got to know, at the back of his mind, that a similar tribute probably won’t happen for him when he dies.
Iggy tripped at some point and went crashing to the ground. I think it was upon getting back up that he made a comment about having to pull up his “trousers.” I found it funny that he called his pants trousers.
Speaking of trousers coming down, one of the guys that ran up on stage when Iggy asked people to come up and dance with the band was a skinny old dude with bleached hair and leather pants. Like Iggy, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. At some point during the number, his ass literally came popping out of his pants. I captured it in one of the above videos, so, if you’re into that kind of thing, check it out.
I made a comment about Henry Rollins being the Joe Piscopo of punk rock a few days ago on this site. I’m sorry about that. As one of my former bandmates reminded me before the show, as we sat eating chicken curry fries at Ashlee’s, he still plays our music on his radio show. And, for what it’s worth, he also did a pretty good job of introducing the band last night. If you’re curious, I got some video of that as well.
I don’t think anyone mentioned Dave Alexander, the Stooge’s first bass player, who died at 27 of pulmonary edema resulting from alcoholism. I felt kind of bad for him.
At some point near the end, someone in local government came out on stage to award Iggy the key to the city. It started kind of sweet, with the guy saying that he’d met Iggy when both were students at Tappan junior high, during the future rock star’s campaign for Student Council President. Iggy kind of blushed for a moment, and made an “awww shucks” kind of face, but then got back into character, unceremoniously throwing the key to the city it off-stage, and then beginning to mock masturbate, as the guy kept talking.
All in all, it was a great show, and I’m very happy that I could be a part of it.
Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan made headlines a week or so ago with his budget proposal. People in the press, as I recall, seemed impressed. They used words like, “bold” and “serious,” and praised him for making difficult decisions in order to address the nation’s spiraling budget deficit. Once people really started digging into it, though, they began to see if for what it was – a plan to extend tax cuts for the wealthy and phase out Medicare. And, now they’re beginning to ask questions. The following video was shot during a recent town hall event held by Ryan in Wisconsin. You’ll note that the man asking the question refers to himself as a conservative.
During a town hall meeting in Milton, a constituent who described himself as a “lifelong conservative” asked Ryan about the effects of growing income inequality in our nation. The constituent noted that huge income disparities contributed to the Great Depression and the Great Recession, and thus wanted to know why the congressman was “fighting to not let the tax breaks for the wealthy expire.”
Ryan argued against “redistribut[ing]” in this manner. After the constituent noted that “there’s nothing wrong with taxing the top because it does not trickle down,” Ryan argued that “we do tax the top.” This response earned a chorus of boos from constituents:
CONSTITUENT: The middle class is disappearing right now. During this time of prosperity, the top 1 percent was taking about 10 percent of the total annual income, but yet today we are fighting to not let the tax breaks for the wealthy expire? And we’re fighting to not raise the Social Security cap from $87,000? I think we’re wrong.
RYAN: A couple things. I don’t disagree with the premise of what you’re saying. The question is what’s the best way to do this. Is it to redistribute… (Crosstalk)
CONSTITUENT: You have to lower spending. But it’s a matter of there’s nothing wrong with taxing the top because it does not trickle down.
RYAN: We do tax the top. (Audience boos). Let’s remember, most of our jobs come from successful small businesses. Two-thirds of our jobs do. You got to remember, businesses pay taxes individually. So when you raise their tax rates to 44.8 percent, which is what the president is proposing, I would just fundamentally disagree. That is going to hurt job creation.
I’m glad to see that people across America are finally waking up to what’s happening. This is an encouraging sign. I just hope it’s not too late.
Oh, speaking of taxes on the rich, I know that we’ve talked about it here many times in the past, but the evidence would show, despite what Ryan and the Republicans would have us believe, that our economy grows faster when the wealth of our nation isn’t concentrated in the hands of the few. Coming out of World War II, the top marginal tax rate was 94%, and it stayed in that general range until 1964, when it fell to 77%. Today, it’s less than half that, and the boom that we were promised hasn’t come. Here, for those of you who are interested, is a chart showing the top marginal tax rate over time.
I took tomorrow off from work. I’ve got a friend flying in from Minnesota to see the big Ron Asheton memorial concert with me, and our plan is to bum around Ann Arbor all day, visiting the bars that still exist from 20 years ago, when we lived together on Catherine Street, and talking about what an incredible influence the Stooges were on us when we were kids. [If I weren’t so terribly insecure, this is the point in the post where I’d link to a recording of me and this friend of mine covering The Stooge’s I Wann Be Your Dog in my parents’ garage when we were skinny, pimply teenagers.]
I’ve seen Iggy play solo in the past, and with the Stooges, and they were all great shows, but I expect that this will be something really special. It is, after all, as we’ve been told again and again in the press, the first time that the group has played in the Ann Arbor area since the infamous Metallic K.O. show at the Michigan Palace in Detroit, on February 9, 1974. (They did play at the DTE Energy Music Theater in 2003, which I saw, but apparently the band doesn’t count that as local to Ann Arbor and Detroit, as it was in Clarkston.)
I’m expecting a great, emotional show, in spite of Iggy’s recent American Idol appearance and the fact that the show’s going to be MC’d by the Joe Piscopo of punk, Henry Rollins. (While it’s true that I have issues with Rollins, it was cool to hear him refer to Iggy as a “good Ypsilanti, Michigan boy,” and talk so unashamedly of his love for the band in the run-up to this show.) But, I think the good will, by far, outweigh the bad. I’m especially interested in seeing Iggy perform with kids from the Neutral Zone. Here, with more on that, is quote from Iggy that ran in a recent MetroTimes interview.
…Just by serendipity, a guy has been reaching out to me by post from a teen center in Ann Arbor called the Neutral Zone. He’s been sending me letters to the effect of “What can you do with us or for us?” He mentioned that they have a music program and I saw pictures of kids playing in their music space. I’d been to Ann Arbor a few years ago to rehearse with the guys and I realized that it had grown exponentially since I was there. It had changed a little bit and there was more of the typical American troubled kid thing than had existed before — I was the first [laughs]. The Stooges were the first four troubled youths in the Ann Arbor area, or the first to open our mouths about it. I thought it’d be kind of cool to get them to throw a band together. The guy offered to put together a band with some of the people in their music program. It’s going to be the teen openers, and if they haven’t got anybody who can sing decently, I may have to sing with them too. Hopefully, there’s some little savage there who can totally rip it up, in which case I can stick to my own bit…
How cool is that?
OK, so leave a comment if you’re out and about tomorrow and see Iggy buying peanut butter somewhere, getting a massage, or something. I’d love to be able to ask him a question or two about growing up in Ypsilanti, and why he never called me that time Virgin Records had set up an interview with me. (I also need to know if he’d object to my idea of having a statue of him erected in Riverside Park.) Also feel free to leave a comment if you’d like to buy me a drink and meet my friend. Just name the bar, pick a time, and tell me what you’ll be wearing… and how much of a budget you have, of course.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mr. Osterberg, and what he looks like these days, he looks kind of like this, only a little bit bigger.
For more information on the show, and what the funds that are raised will be used for, check out the website for the Ron Asheton Foundation.
Also, if you’re so inclined, you can join the movement to see a Ron Asheton statue (probably not outfitted in a Nazi officer’s uniform) built in Ann Arbor here.
