Daniel Howes' Weekly Essay

This week, Howes says the governance of Wayne State University is so screwed up that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the state's bi-partisan legislative leaders felt compelled to write the trustees a letter. The request? To "make the right decision" and establish a code of conduct or risk the Higher Learning Commission yanking the school's accreditation. It's absurd. The continuing antics, the meddling, the preening for media attention are a screaming billboard to prospective academic talent. The message is: “Don’t come here!”

Daniel Howes says Michigan State University's chaotic search for a new football coach demonstrates two things: the Spartans are willing to spend big to try and stay competitive, and the trustees are once again showing zero understanding of the difference between management and governance.

This week, Howes says Iowa's Democratic caucus debacle is an opportunity — for Michigan to become a go-first state in presidential politics. Unlike the cornfield capital of America, the home of the Motor City ticks all the boxes today's Democrats theoretically want, even need, to kick off the primary season. Most importantly: the path to the Oval Office runs straight through Michigan, arguably among the most central battleground states.

This week, Daniel Howes says Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a former state Senate minority leader, is not living up to her widely touted knack for working with the Legislature. Instead of delivering grand compromises with Republicans, the governor is adopting the unilateral tactics so popular in Washington nowadays — and her $3.5-billion debt-financed plan to repair Michigan's crumbling roads is a prime example. Bipartisan comity in our tribal age is a cruel joke.

Howes says the Silicon Valley automaker, Tesla Inc., is getting its revenge. In one day last week, the company got approval to sell its electric vehicles directly to consumers in Michigan, epicenter of the automotive establishment. And this week, the market value of Tesla topped $100 billion dollars … making it more valuable than General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. -- combined. This new reality should scare Detroit.

This week, Daniel Howes says the winding down of President Donald Trump's parallel trade wars signals that an election year is here. Despite impeachment, Trump produced tangible results likely to quicken the country’s economic metabolism in the coming months … which is precisely the point. Racking up wins that buoy the economy … fatten paychecks … and juice stock markets are critical components of Trump’s re-election arguments. Those and your 401(k) balance.

This week, Daniel Howes says the birthplace of the modern American labor movement is facing a reckoning. Thank a growing cadre of United Auto Workers leaders, including two of the past three presidents. Their scheming and embezzling, alleged and admitted, is pushing the 85-year-old union to the brink of federal oversight. And toward racketeering charges, the tool the feds have long used to fight organized crime.

This week, Daniel Howes says President Donald Trump chose Michigan to counter the House impeachment vote because the state is shaping up to be a linchpin in his 2020 re-election effort. The signs are there: NBC News is tracking voter sentiment in and around Grand Rapids; the White House is tracking the votes of the state's Democratic members of Congress; Attorney General William Barr is touting a federal anti-violent crime partnership in Detroit; and Trump is taking his message to the heart of the industrial Midwest — often.

This week, Daniel Howes says surreal juxtaposition of Democrats moving ahead with impeachment of President Donald Trump and even as reach agreement with him on a replacement for NAFTA proves there are no coincidences in politics.

This week, Daniel Howes say the new president of the United Auto Workers, Rory Gamble, has leverage to drive reform within -- and if he falters, the most likely alternative is federal oversight of the 84-year-old union.

This week, Daniel Howes says the antics coming from the boardrooms of the state’s Big Three universities will not change until the way Michigan chooses its trustees does. This is what you get when the over-riding qualification to serve on the boards is surviving the state’s Republican and Democratic nominating conventions. We’re the only state in the nation to elect trustees to its flagship schools on partisan, at-large, statewide ballots.

This week, Daniel Howes says the new name for the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot of France should be United Nations Motors. Rarely has the global auto world seen a cultural mash-up like the one announced this week: Jeep SUVs meet Citroën cars. Forget pooling technology spending and rationalizing vehicle architectures. If this transnational merger is going to work, success will ride on the shoulders of its leaders. On their ability to navigate today’s auto industry and prepare for tomorrow’s. On their humility … their creativity … and their cultural patience … in equal measure.

This week, Daniel Howes says the United Auto Workers strike against General Motors Co. netted members a healthy set of economics – on pay and bonuses, profit-sharing and continuing Cadillac health-care coverage. But it didn’t repatriate production from Mexico, didn’t reverse plant closings in three states and didn’t seriously address the threat to union jobs posed by electrification of new lineups. That’s a challenge to be confronted by someone else. What a surprise.

This week, Howes says the strange United Auto Workers strike against General Motors Co. is getting stranger in the wake of a tentative agreement. Instead of returning to work pending ratification by Friday, union leaders are keeping members on picket lines as they consider details of a new four-year agreement. And nowhere to be seen or heard from is union President Gary Jones, whose public appearance before the media likely would devolve quickly into embarrassing questions about his implication in the federal investigation into union corruption.

This week, Daniel Howes says the United Auto Workers’ fight with General Motors Co. is a battle over dollars and cents pitting radically different visions of the future. And there’s no room for Old Detroit thinking because Old Detroit is dead, or should be, buried by denial, competition and the ignominy of begging Congress and taxpayers for money to avert collapse.

This week, Daniel Howes says the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump will freeze Detroit’s automotive agenda in Washington. From trade deals with China, Canada and Mexico to fights over emissions policy, the nation’s capital is likely to be fixated on the political process – and the first casualty, just months from the arrival of an election year, will be policy-making.

This week, Daniel Howes says that as United Auto Workers members strike General Motors Co., the union’s rank-and-file and its legion of retirees can thank the leadership’s corruption scandal for opening the political floodgates to the UAW’s traditional adversaries. The tales of greed and self-dealing will be used against UAW organizers … by anti-union Republicans … by right-to-work activists … by cranky union members who feel deceived.

This week, Daniel Howes says Detroit’s top two automakers – facing a potential circus surrounding national contract talks with the United Auto Workers – are jostling for position with the public and President Donald Trump. Ford’s claim? To be “America’s auto company,” a label freighted with meaning and subtle digs at rivals rescued a decade ago by American taxpayers.

This week, Daniel Howes says the federal corruption probe into the United Auto Workers and its joint training centers is heating up just as the union is negotiating new contracts with Detroit’s automakers. That’s a whole lot of not good for a UAW that once prided itself on being America’s, quote, “clean union.” The latest evidence and more than a half dozen convictions suggests that moniker no longer may be justified.

This week, Daniel Howes says there’s growing evidence that southeast Michigan’s auto towns are cool again. Credit the politics of the day, sure. But credit also a growing sense of obligation on the part of a new generation of leaders – and a belief that automakers in the heartland can succeed in an Auto 2.0 world with roots deeply planted in places that delivered the world Auto 1.0 It’s good business.

This week, Howes says this may be a progressive moment for the Democratic Party aiming to oust President Trump from the White House, but their preferred policy preferences and reliably anti-business tone aren’t reassuring to voters in the industrial heartland. Did the Dems in Detroit this week speak to their anxieties? Not really. Did the few who bothered to mention General Motors’ looming plant closings portray the move as anything other than Donald Trump’s fault? Of course not.

This week, Howes says, the Democrats vying to replace President Donald Trump might want to get a little savvier about the real economic issues facing the electorally vital industrial Midwest. Around here, so many of the issues that matter to everyday folks can be expressed in a four-letter word: jobs. Love him or hate him, Trump turned blue real estate red because he spoke to the frustration, dislocation and plant closings driving anxieties higher in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. And 2020 is shaping up to deliver more of the same.

They’re waiting for the end at Lordstown, the giant auto plant General Motors says it no longer needs. And for the closure of the Vindicator, for the past 150 years Youngstown’s daily newspaper. They’re the latest casualties in a downward spiral gripping a politically important region trying to reinvent itself with advanced manufacturing and its home in the heart of the industrial Midwest. Their struggles are the stuff of a Springsteen song … of dated Rust Belt stereotypes … of tiresome coastal condescension trafficking in local misery.

This week, Howes says that not since the dark days of bankruptcy a decade ago are contract talks between the United Auto Workers and Detroit’s automakers likely to be as tough as the round beginning next week. It’s not because times are bad. It’s because times are good – a run of profitability and strong sales not seen since the 1960s. Yet change is coming faster than four-year contracts can manage. And that’s an ominous sign for both sides, especially union members seeking certainty.

This week, Daniel Howes says global automakers face a “profit desert” in coming years as spending for the Auto 2.0 spaces of mobility, autonomy and electrification consume vast amounts of capital. But returns on those investments are showing unmistakable signs of declining even as sales in major markets soften and break-even points rise. The trend could have profound implications for Detroit’s automakers, their place in the next-gen automotive hierarchy and future profit-sharing payouts to members of the United Auto Workers.

This week, Daniel Howes says that Not since two Detroit automakers emerged from bankruptcy a decade ago has the hometown industry faced as much uncertainty as they do now in President Donald Trump's Washington. Chaos on tariffs and trade, emissions standards and self-driving vehicle legislation, conjures an F-word that hasn’t been used much in recent years to describe the revived industry. And that word is “fragile.”

This week, Daniel Howes says the year-end closure of Marygrove College after 92 years in Detroit doesn’t mean the end of education on its Gothic campus. No, two years of planning now ensure the 53-acre site will once again educate Detroiters, as “The School @ Marygrove” enrolls 120 ninth graders this fall and the University of Michigan launches a teacher residency program patterned after U.S. medical schools. The upshot: Marygrove the place is getting a second act, even as the financial rescue of the school itself failed.

This week, Daniel Howes says parochial French politicking effectively killed Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s proposed merger with Renault SA of France. Increasing French demands to benefit French interests signaled to FCA’s leadership the likely shape of things to come as they considered the scale of the merger they proposed to execute. What did they expect from politicians controlling a 15% stake in Renault, evidently believed to be a license to call the shots and set the rules?

This week, Daniel Howes says public education in Michigan is facing a crisis every bit as threatening to its future as the bankruptcies of Detroit and two of its automakers. And remedies to fix the deepening problems may prove even more difficult. More than fixing “the damn roads” -- or cutting auto insurance rates -- reforming K-12 education is perhaps the most critical, long-term policy challenge facing Republicans and Democrats, labor and business, parents and students who may think Michigan is keeping pace. It is not.

This week, Howes says Detroit’s first new auto plant in nearly 30 years is a go, but not without the usual complaining about process and untrustworthy business people. The city’s deal with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV gives city residents first crack at the nearly 5,000 jobs to be created there – and offers yet more evidence that the Motor City is turning a real corner.

Escalating trade tensions between the United States and China may be slowing auto sales there, but they’re also exposing the vulnerabilities of Detroit’s automakers in the world’s largest auto market. The net effect could be a reassessment of their collective footprint there, especially as domestic automaker’s claim ever larger chunks of the Chinese market at the expense of foreign players.

This week, Daniel Howes says the “goods news” of General Motors Co. finding a potential buyer for its Lordstown Assembly Plant in northeast Ohio is drawing mixed reactions because the potential results could be mixed. Replacing the scale, jobs and payroll of a modern auto plant is next to impossible in an increasingly lean – and non-union – private economy. And the wrenching experience is exacerbated by the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years and economic growth running north of 3 percent.

This week, Daniel Howes says bipartisan opposition to the rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement is forcing President Donald Trump and his trade team to scramble for votes. The problem: House Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi have precisely zero motivation to give Trump a win on trade amid escalating fights over access to White House documents and witnesses.

This week, Daniel Howes says the Ilitch family’s billion-dollar investment in its District Detroit, anchored by Little Caesars Arena, is being dogged by broken promises. Critics, including a new HBO segment, say the owners of Detroit’s Tigers and Red Wings have failed to deliver the residential, retail and restaurant investments promised in exchange for an infusion of taxpayer money. That’s a problem for other current and would-be investors pursuing landmark projects in other parts of town – a problem only the Ilitches can fix.

This week, Daniel Howes says signs are growing that Ford Motor Co. is no longer the Rodney Dangerfield of the auto industry – the company that gets no respect. But investor sentiment is changing because reality is changing. The Blue Oval’s global restructuring is taking shape with cutbacks in Europe and South America, greater reliance on its partner in India, salaried workforce reductions in North America. And Ford shares? They’re performing better so far this year than their American peers, including Elon Musk’s Tesla.

This week, Daniel Howes says President Donald Trump’s whipsawing on trade and tariffs is exhausting the very people it’s intended to help. Threats to close the U.S.-Mexico border are withdrawn … only to be replaced by the promise of new tariffs on cars, trucks and SUVs built in Mexico for the U.S. market. This is what "Art of the Deal" leverage looks like. It’s a blunderbuss of scattershot intimidation whose practical effect would be to impose acute economic pain on the industrial Midwest – the very region whose voters delivered Trump to the White House.

This week, Daniel Howes says federal authorities investigating alleged corruption inside the United Auto Workers are asking some of the same questions a U.S. Senate committee asked 60-plus years ago: are staff donations to their so-called “flower funds” voluntary? And have ranking union officials who control the funds pocketed some of the cash for their own use? If they did, it would confirm one of the worst suspicions on the factory floor: namely, that union leaders are more interested in enriching themselves than enriching members they purport to represent.

This week, Daniel Howes says Detroit’s automakers are using investment decisions in a union contract year to politick President Donald Trump. The reason: General Motors Co.’s plans to close four U.S. plants as part of a restructuring moved the president to repeatedly lambaste the automaker on Twitter and in public appearances. In the forming battle for the hearts and minds of the work-a-day Midwest, Detroit's automakers are proxies personally selected by POTUS. And Michigan and Ohio are the principal battlegrounds.

This week, Daniel Howes says Gretchen Whitmer’s budget address helped answer whether Michigan business still has a friend in the governor’s office: not so much. The net effect of her business tax proposals — most of which are unlikely to survive the Republican-controlled Legislature — would be a tap on the economic brakes just as the hometown auto industry’s blistering sales and profit pace is beginning to slow. Credit Whitmer with proving yet again an enduring truth of Michigan politics: it's consistently inconsistent, swinging from one partisan worldview to the other as predictably as crumbling roadways in the freeze-thaw cycle of late-winter Michigan.

This week, Daniel Howes says Fiat Chrysler’s plans to invest $4.5 billion and create 6,500 tax-paying jobs to build a new Jeep plant in Detroit vindicates late-CEO Sergio Marchionne’s call three years ago to abandon small cars in the United States and weight the lineup more heavily to trucks and SUVs. A company controlled by Italians and run by a Briton insists that authentic Jeeps come from the industrial Midwest. It’s hard to overstate the reality and symbolism here: Detroit just landed a prize like it hasn’t in a long time.

This week, Daniel Howes says Detroit’s auto industry has lost the best friend in Washington it probably ever had. Congressman John Dingell served in the House of Representatives for 60 years, the longest tenure in American history. He died at 92, but he never forgot where he came from, who his people were, or what industry defined his corner of the country. A friend of Detroit’s automakers, their union members? You bet, and left-wing members of his own Democratic party hated him for it.

This week, Daniel Howes says a new paradigm is running the auto company half-jokingly referred to as “Generous Motors.” It’s this: Responsible stewardship of the American taxpayers’ investment 10 years on means reckoning with reality and managing for the future … not nursing nostalgia for the ol’ Motor City. This is a transition alright. And it’s a brutal one at that.

This week, Daniel Howes says Michigan missing out on Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion investment is turning out to be a good thing. The Taiwan-based contract manufacturer is reversing plans to create thousands of blue-collar manufacturing jobs near Milwaukee – a deal touted by President Donald Trump nearly two years ago at the White House and, of course, on Twitter.

This week, Howes says dysfunction in Washington is weighing on the global auto industry, complicating investment strategies, delaying jobs-creating decisions and slowing growth. Uncertainty looms, confirming the honeymoon between Detroit and the White House is over.

Detroit News Columnist Daniel Howes and Michigan Radio are partners in weekly essays examining what's hot in Michigan business and politics – and what it all means. This week, Howes says that Republican John Engler’s ouster as interim president at Michigan State University shows how partisan politics can course through university board rooms – especially when turbo-charged by the former governor’s own words. Last week, Engler told The Detroit News editorial board that victims of serial sexual abuser Larry Nassar were “enjoying” being in the spotlight, stunning for an ol’ pol exceeding the limits of his acumen.

This week, Daniel Howes says that 30 years after Detroit's auto dealers re-imagined their sleepy regional show into an international industry gathering held in the grip of Michigan winters, the show is poised to reinvent itself yet again. Is it too late? Automakers are abandoning auto shows all over the world, preferring to launch new products on their terms, at sites of their choosing, with budgets and messages they control.

This week, Howes says the new year is shaping up to the most tumultuous one for Detroit’s three automakers since two of them emerged from bankruptcy a decade ago. Expect confrontation and change as the industry’s greatest transformation since Henry Ford’s moving assembly line clashes with the industry’s paternalistic tradition and an implied obligation to “the people.”

This week, Daniel Howes says the legacy of Gov. Rick Snyder is mixed. The state is more fiscally disciplined. Its business-tax climate is one of the most competitive in the country. Its unemployment rate is plumbing historic lows. But Snyder can’t deny that educational attainment among Michigan’s public-school students is worse today than eight years ago. Or that Michigan’s roads are an embarrassment. Is he leaving office with Michigan in better shape than he found it? Yes, by some measures – but not by others, starting with the Flint Water Crisis.

This week, Daniel Howes says Republican lawmakers in Michigan and neighboring Wisconsin are using the lame-duck legislature to settle political scores and distort the will of the voters, presumably under the assumption the public’ll forget the strong-arming next time they vote. Don’t bet on it. Politics today isn’t the art of persuasion. It’s an exercise of naked power – until they don’t have all of it anymore.

This week, Daniel Howes says there is opportunity in the slow-rolling reckoning targeting auto plants. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is answering General Motors Co.’s restructuring with a move all its own: the maker of the Grand Cherokee is preparing to revive an abandoned engine plant in Detroit to boost production of the iconic Jeep.

Daniel Howes for Friday December 1, 2018 The president came to office promising to bring auto jobs home to Michigan and Ohio. And it looked like he’d be the Detroit industry’s best friend in decades. It’s not exactly working out that way. General Motors’ plan to end production at four U.S. plants next year … to imperil 3,300 hourly jobs … to cut 6,000 salaried employees elicited a fit of twitter rage from the commander in chief. With apologies to King Canute who believed he, alone, could command the oceans, the president is learning he, alone, can’t command the auto industry. On day one, Trump threatened to revoke electric-vehicle credits, even though he probably can’t. Then he threatened import tariffs on foreign-made cars, presumably including the Buick SUVs that GM makes in China and the sedans it mints in Canada. On the third day, he used Twitter again to deflect blame for GM’s decision, saying his tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum aren’t the problem. “The USA is booming,” Trump wrote, quote, “Auto companies are pouring into the U.S.” Except they aren’t. No, BMW isn’t building a second plant down South, as he reported. It’s thinking about it, in part as a hedge against presidential brow-beating. No, tariffs don’t help a Detroit auto industry greased by foreign parts and some production. They increase cost, decrease certainty and force CEOs to make hard calls. Or none at all. That’s the thing about policy, Mr. President. It has consequences. And as much as Trump wants to shirk responsibility for at least some of the headwinds buffeting the industry, he can’t. This isn't what candidate Trump envisioned when he barnstormed the industrial Midwest two years ago promising the return of auto jobs. Or when he vowed that tariffs on foreign steel, aluminum, even imported cars and trucks, would restore the Arsenal of Democracy to its former glory. Ain't working out that way. The short-term pain of tariffs is plain for all to see. The long-term gain? Not so much. GM has its own problems, legacies of its past. Too much excess plant capacity … and too many plants building traditional cars consumers don’t want. By its own admission, GM’s cash-flow generation is too meager … and its engineering staff is not optimized for the techy tasks ahead. None of that, it should be said, is Trump’s fault. It’s GM’s. After American taxpayers fronted billions of their dollars a decade ago to keep The General afloat, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that critics are howling about GM’s responsibility to its people, its communities and the country. And as this restructuring unspools next year … and the fates of those four plants is decided in talks with the United Auto Workers … the howling will continue. History can’t be erased that easily. A few years back, GM CEO Mary Barra asked me when people would start believing the new GM is for real. When it can prove its mettle to manage tough times and well as this long run of good times. That test is coming, but it hasn’t yet been passed. I’m Daniel Howes of The Detroit News. Daniel Howes is a columnist at The Detroit News. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan. http://www.michiganradio.org/post/howes-gm-drops-bomb