What an odd paradox. During a time when the entire world is watching to see whether General Motors will file for Chapter 11 restructuring, leaving an even deeper hole left by bad business decisions and poor product design ... Governor Jennifer Granholm gives Michigan and the US an exact opposite message.
Michigan, the state that has been cursed with the nickname "Rustbelt" ... is also the state that's going to completely turn this huge industry completely on its ear.
The Governor, no stranger to green power talk, is attempting to give the fatalists and doubters something to think about, rather than brood over the difficult changes occuring at one failed company. In fact, she doesn't even mention GM by name but rather groups the 3 remaining so-called "US Automakers" in their usual ensemble: Michigan's Big 3. I personally don't like such fawning over any one of these companies because it belies who really is responsible for the renaissance of the auto industry. There isn't a word about Toyota or Honda, the two companies without whose hybrid technology forcing the clunky old Detroit companies into a corner - we would still be begging for someone to get this Hummer off our chests.
But the Governor's positive tone, and almost Meriwether Lewis like seizing of this pioneering moment does make it easy to relax the face a little and wonder more about the future, than pity the past. Her declaration of war on fossil fuels and energy dependance appears this morning, following a flurry of Facebook announcements, direct emails and texts, in the Huffington Post:
Out with the old gas guzzlers of the past. Out with the old thinking of the past. Out with the old politics of the past. Out with the old rust belt.
May was the first month of the New: new technology, new ideas, and a new era of cooperation that will purposefully drive Michigan and America into the new clean-energy future.
Michigan's Big Three automakers, the UAW, Michigan's world class engineers -- they are working together to reduce more greenhouse gas emissions than ever before in this country's history. It's not Silicon Valley. It's not Route 128. It's Motown that is making a more significant impact on global climate change than any other place in America.
Fitting, isn't it? The Huffington Post. It was Arianna Huffington who made the rounds on talk shows and the radio circuit years ago heralding the death of the SUV and everyone laughed, jeered, called her the crazy lady with the Lisa Douglas accent. Now she has a powerful news website that the GOP licks their chops hoping to just appear in if not duplicate one day. And it's the place where Governor Granholm does her Green Oped. Jennifer Granholm, the person who those same conservative boors blamed for every failure in Michigan, completely dismissing the fact that, like Barack Obama, she inherited all of it from a Reagan table-scraps-economy republican. In fact how Ms. Granholm fares now will be instructive for how Obama may proceed in the future amid the revisionist history that is all but certain to occur, and to some degree already has.
The Michigan Governor, who I happen to know casually and adore as a fixture in our state, is clearly creating a legacy for herself as her term draws to a close. I had hopes for her as a possible choice for SCOTUS. But honestly, there are some things that must be done that only certain people have the talent, and voice, and face to do. This might be one of them, and Ms. Granholms work just isn't done here until Michigan is known as not only the state that created the Middle Class, but saved it from corporate and conservative greed when it was at the brink.
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